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

Chapter One

Chapter One TheIncarnationalandtheInternational St. Birgitta of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Aemilia Lanyer Bodies, Books, and Borders In the miraculous events that transpired at the Antwerp Carmel in 1716, and in the texts produced as a result, we see the operations of incarnational piety, epistemology, textuality, and politics bringing into focus some problems with such binary categories as medieval and early modern, domestic and foreign. This chapter adds Catholic and Protestant to that list of problematic binaries as I examine the spiritual, philosophical , and historical meanings of incarnational paradigms in English religious cultures. I turn first in this chapter to a set of influential women from the beginning of the period under consideration in this book, women whose devotional practices, texts, and sociopolitical engagements are profoundly infused with the incarnational: St. Birgitta of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich. In the final section of this chapter, I examine the workings of incarnational paradigms 19 in the seventeenth-century Protestant poet Aemilia Lanyer’s SalveDeus Rex Judaeorum. Lanyer’s work dramatizes complex relationships between the medieval and the early modern as well as the Catholic and the Protestant, not to mention the domestic and the foreign, given her halfEnglish , half-Italian heritage. Reading these medieval and early modern women’s texts in conversation with each other reveals that across both temporal and confessional divides, incarnational paradigms shape the ways in which women conceive of relationships among gendered selves, God, and human others . Indeed, it is through incarnational paradigms that such relationshipsaresociallyformed ,historicallycategorized,andtextuallymediated. Thesesharedqualitiesdemonstratethatthe“otherness”ofmedievalCatholicismandearlymodernProtestantismisonlypartialandprovisional , not absolute. I have no desire to embrace an extreme revisionist position and claim that nothing really changed at the Reformation, and I have even less desire to embrace an essentialist position concerning the unchanging nature of woman or of female religious experience. However, thelandscapeofEnglishreligiouscultureslooksratherdifferentwhenit is viewed through a gendered lens, and in this chapter I outline the contours of a new map of that landscape, a map to which subsequent chapters will add considerable detail. St. Birgitta of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich initially suggest themselves for joint consideration because they are closely contemporary holy women who produced substantial bodies of written work, much of it grounded in experiences of divine revelation. St. Birgitta’s textual output includes not only the vast corpus of her Revelations but also a monastic rule and the lessons for the daily offices of the Brigittine nuns. St. Catherine is equally famous for her learned Dialogue and for her hundreds of letters addressed to popes, kings, nuns, and common people. Julian of Norwich produced both a Short Text and a Long Text of her Showings. All three of these women, therefore, had to extensively negotiate the complex processes involved in transforming embodied experiences of God, and especially of the incarnate Christ, into texts. Throughout these negotiations, their lives and texts illustrate the richly interpenetrating natures of words and bodies both divine and 20 The Embodied Word human. Furthermore, these figures and their texts played influential rolesinEnglishreligiousculturesnotonlyintheholywomen’sowntime but also well into the early modern period. In connecting St. Birgitta, St. Catherine, and Julian of Norwich, my aimisnottoprovetheinfluenceofonepersonortextuponanotherperson or text. I do, however, want to sketch some connections among figures , places, and channels of textual transmission linking these three holy women, because such connections help establish the international complexity of English religious and textual cultures. They also illuminate the far-reaching scope of the political spheres both ecclesiastical and secular in which medieval and early modern female spiritualities are so intimately imbricated.1 St. Birgitta and St. Catherine have important links to each other in Italy,whereBirgittaspentmuchofherlifefollowingherwidowhoodand theinaugurationofhervisionarycareer,aswellasinEngland.AfterBirgitta ’s death in Rome in 1373, Pope Gregory XI sent her confessor Alphonso of Jaén to Catherine of Siena. Members of Catherine’s famiglia were subsequently involved in translating Birgitta’s Revelations into SieneseItalian.2 Bothsaintswerepassionatelycommittedtothecauseof the Roman papacy; St. Catherine was in fact envisioned as a successor to St. Birgitta in supporting this cause.3 The two saints appear together in a fresco,paintedin1368,inSantaMariaNovella’sSpanishChapelinRome, an image designed to proclaim support for the Roman papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.4 BothSt.Catherine’sandSt.Birgitta’sinvolvementsinecclesiastical politics intersect with embroilments in secular conflicts. St. Catherine actively participated in contentious Italian civic affairs, matters never too far removed from papal politics, and English people too engaged in thisstrife,astheexampleofthemercenaryJohnHawkwood—arecipient...