Purgatory, Punishment, and the Discourse of Holy Widowhood in the High and Later Middle Ages

Purgatory, Punishment, and the Discourse of Holy Widowhood in the High and Later Middle Ages

Medieval Christian widows occupied a blessed but liminal position. Their chastity and devotion to God defined their state and invested them with intercessory and prophetic powers. Their spiritual mettle was proved as they escaped the carnality of marriage and aspired toward (but could not reach) the perfect, intact chastity of virgins—much as purgatory came to represent a liminal space between salvation and damnation for the souls elected to be saved but not yet prepared to enter paradise. From the twelfth century onward, ideas about the pious widow or matron became intertwined with the evolving concept of purgatory. Scholars such as Jacques Le Goff have argued for the "birth" of purgatory in the twelfth century, locating this nascence in the context of the broader trend toward theological sophistication in what scholars have long called the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Beyond the world of the theologians, purgatorial theology had wide-ranging implications for pastoral care. Concern for the fate of souls of purgatory enhanced the sanctity and intercessory potential of the new brand of lay saint—particularly female saints—that flourished in the urban movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and invigorated mendicant and beguine expressions of piety. This article explores some of the implications of this scholarship in the hagiographical context of the pious matron. For the widowed saint, the discourse that defined her eschatological and social roles drew together many of the significant concerns of the age, including marriage and domestic life but also the public role of women.

I will argue that the introduction of purgatory to a religious audience beyond the schools of philosophy added a new element to the medieval conception of the holy matron's spiritual responsibility toward her husband and other loved ones: a sort of "spiritual housekeeping" beyond the grave. Throughout the early Middle Ages, concern for the fate of departed souls was a long-standing assumption of what widows would do, and their piety and concern for family members' salvation was a central theme in medieval hagiography.¹ A new emphasis on spousal intercession in hagiographical and pastoral genres, however, arising within the social and religious context of sacramental marriage and new considerations about its meaning, generated novel forms of purgatorial piety for widows. Couched within several other developments, including dynastic piety, the understanding of marriage as a sacrament, and the emerging role of women in popular piety, and particularly matrons, prescriptive sources articulated a model for the widow's spirituality that focused her concerns on the perils of purgatory and the torment of souls therein. Such an attitude about the efficacy of widowed piety had its practical uses in pastoral circles but also revealed tensions in the discourse about the powers and limits of female spirituality in the High Middle Ages.

The Figure of the Widow and the Gift of Prophecy

The early church fathers had identified holy widowhood as a clearly defined status and characterized the chaste widow as a distinctive figure marked by sexual purity, good deeds, and holy intentions. Shaped in large part by the writings of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, these images drew heavily on Paul's declaration in 1 Corinthians 7:9 that the unmarried and widows would do best to remain chaste but that it was "better to marry than to be aflame with passion" and his description of the true or "real" widow (vere vidua in the Latin of the Vulgate) in the first epistle to Timothy (5:5). Patristic authors ascribed to the widow a specific place in salvation: whereas married women received a thirtyfold blessing in heaven, widows received a sixtyfold blessing, and virgins, representing the highest calling for women, reaped a hundredfold of the blessings of heaven.² Paul's...