Mechthild von Magdeburg, Gender, and the "Unlearned Tongue"

This essay interrogates the relationship between gender and the use of the vernacular in the medieval German religious writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210-1282). Scholars of German vernacular religious literature began early in this century to postulate a close, perhaps even causal relationship between women, reading, and the beginnings of vernacular literacy, noting that women figured prominently in the process by which vernacular literature came to be written down and circulated. ¹ This line of thinking has often led to the assumption that vernacular writing was generally intended for a female audience, especially when written by women in a religious context. Correspondingly, early historians of mysticism understood the emergence of vernacular mystical texts as directly stemming from the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, who were required to care for the unlearned semireligious women in their midst. According to these historians, this requirement to instruct the unlearned led to the transposition of scholastic thought into German. ² More recently, however, wanting to legitimize vernacular mystical literature as distinct from scholastic writings, scholars have turned to the relationship between the emergence of a new kind of mysticism in the thirteenth century and the emergence of the vernacular as the language best suited for its expression, a historical "moment" in which women figured both as innovators (e.g., Mechthild and Hadewijch) and as audiences (Dominican nuns, tertiaries, and beguines). ³ Nevertheless, as Susanne Bürkle notes in a recent book, even these studies rest on the premise that semireligious women needing guidance and the production of their writings (categorized as "Frauenmystik") generated the transition from Latin to the vernacular in mystical writing. An overemphasized association, therefore, still persists between vernacular religious literature and a female audience. ⁴

The problem with this association is that it posits a simple dichotomy equating Latin with men and the masculine and the vernacular with women and the feminine. In the volume of his history of mysticism devoted to "Frauenmystik," for example, Kurt Ruh identifies as the first reason for the transition to the vernacular that "the religiosae mulieres were in large majority without higher education and mastered only their mother tongue. They spoke German, Dutch, English, French, Italian, and if they were to be spoken to, it had to be in these idioms." ⁵ It is precisely this kind of statement that tends to construct the Latin/male and vernacular/female dichotomy. However, as the case of Mechthild's Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead) will demonstrate, ⁶ the relationship between this vernacular text and its supposedly male-dominated, masculine-coded Latinate culture cannot be so simply reduced. This is not to deny the importance of gender to a discussion of vernacularity. On the contrary, I wish to reveal the complexity of this relationship in a specific context in the hope of contributing to a more nuanced history of the way particular historical and literary categories have become gendered over time.

Sent by God to "all religious people, both the bad and the good," Mechthild's book claims a wide and general audience. Endowed by God with the "power and the voice of all creatures," her soul claims to represent that audience in her dealings with the divinity. ⁷ However, rather than have her revelations recorded in Latin, the sacred and universal language of the Church, Mechthild writes them down in her native language, the "unlearned tongue" of Middle Low German, the dialect spoken in northern Germany (from the lower Rhein to Prussia). ⁸ In the first part of this essay, I will argue that Mechthild's use of the Low German vernacular represents an attempt to negotiate the cultural pressures of official and clerical Latin as well as the language of the court, Middle High German. Yet she nevertheless (and paradoxically) invokes courtly language in The Flowing Light. The revelations and visions concerning the...