The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700

Introduction

Introduction From Corpse to Corpus In 1716, the English Carmelite nuns of Antwerp, needing a larger crypt for burials, hired laborers, who took down “an entire side of the vault,inwhich elevenor twelve religious hadbeenburied.”One of these was Margaret Wake (in religion Mother Mary Margaret of the Angels), who “had been buried thirty-eight years and two months” and for whom the community “had a great veneration.” The nuns thus ordered the workmen “not to disorder the bones, when they came to that grave, till some of the religious had viewed them.” In the presence of three or four nuns, Mary Margaret of the Angels’s coffin was opened, and “the Community was much surprised to find the body perfectly entire, fleshy, and formed.”1 Thomas Hunter, the Jesuit author of the account of these events,providesadetaileddescription,declaringthatthebody“appears of a brownish complexion, but full of flesh, which like a liveing body yieldstoanyimpressionmadeuponit,andrisesagainofitselfwhenitis pressed: ye joints flexible, you find a little moisture when you touch ye flesh . . . and this very frequently breaths out an odoriferous balsamick 1 sent...[which]hassometimesfilledyewholeroome.”2 Thenunscalled in various medical men and clerics, who arrived at the opinion that the body was indeed miraculously preserved and thus “the body of a saint.”3 The prioress in 1716 was Mary Birbeck (in religion Mary Frances of St. Theresa), and the discovery inspired her to inaugurate a systematic program of writing the lives of the Antwerp nuns from the house’s foundation in 1619 onwards.4 In the account of Mary Frances of St. Theresa’s own life, we are told: It pleased his divine goodness to discover in her time [as Prioress] the hidden treasure of the incorrupt body of our Venerable Mother Mary Margarett of the Angels [Margaret Wake] in the year 1716, and allso the remainder of that of Sister Anne of St Bartholme the year 1718, as it is related in what is said of her. She also procured ye writing the lifes of Mother Mary Xaveria and Mother Mary Margarett, the first by Reverend Father Thomas Hunter, the 2d by the Reverend Father Percy Plowden . . . she took pains her self to transcribe all the memoires for this, as she allso did when they were finished by the aforesaid authours.5 That the prioress would react to the discovery of a nun’s miraculously preserved corpse by producing a corpus of writings consisting of nuns’ spiritual biographies befits the corporeally focused piety characteristic of the Antwerp Carmelites. In this monastic community, “spiritual and somatic experience” frequently “converged.”6 For instance, in a characteristic incident Catherine Burton (in religion the aforementioned MotherMaryXaveria)recountshaving“ourBlessedSavior...realypresent in my breast in ye Blessed Sacrament.”7 Mary Xaveria’s Eucharistic experience not only unites the nun with Christ but also joins her with numerous medieval holy women who had such mystical experiences at communion, prompting us to consider the significance of past holy lives for these nuns. The production of a collection of life writings is a particularly apt response to the miraculous discovery of 1716, since the Antwerp Carmelites frequently turned to the vitae of earlier holy women to authorize their own lives. St. Teresa, 2 The Embodied Word an important figure for the Antwerp Carmelites, formed a key link in a chain of relationships through which the past underwrote, and was animated in, the present. Not only was she the order’s founder, but she also herself “drew on the earlier example of Catherine of Siena.”8 The roles of texts, and especially life writings, in shaping the Carmelite nuns’ lives transcended those of authorizing particular forms of spiritualitybyprovidingexamplesofrecognizedfemaleholiness,oreven ofenablingimitatio.Textualaccountsofpastholylivesplayedquiteliterally formative roles in the nuns’ own lives. Mary Birbeck’s “Life,” written as part of the ongoing program she began, elucidates a specifically textual dimension of the Carmelites’ understanding of identity. It indicatesthatinheryouthshehad “yetneverathoughtofbecomingreligious on the contrary seemed on occasions quite averss to it.” She was inspired to become a nun, however, by reading the life of St. Teresa of Avila: She thought it allmost impossible for her to save her soul if engaged in the world and, being allways a great lover of reading and looking into all books she met with, was once in ye chamber of a priest, tumbling over his little liberary and he, perceiving it, chid her for disordering his books, but bid her chuse any one and he...