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6 The Alibi of Female Authority Docere autem mulieri non permitto, neque dominari in virum. [But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.] r Tim. 2:r2 I preche not, syr, I come in no pulpytt. Margery Kempe, The Book ofMa'l]ery Kempe IF DISCUSSIONS OF MANY ASPECTS OF preaching-authority, performance, style, even language-express their concerns about the preacher's humanness through images of fictional or hypothetical women, how did actual women ever manage to address the church? Strikingly, the debate about women's claim to authoritative speech formulates itself in many cases around highly specific notions of place. This can be seen in the reception of the passage from Timothy noted above. "A woman should not presume to teach," says Gratian's Decretum, and the Gloss by Huguccio adds, "publicly, namely in the church, by ascending the pulpit and making a sermon to the people."1 The extremely careful definition of place and activity suggests the author's desire to prevent women's access to a situation that could allow their speech to be regarded as preaching. His specificity on this topic reflects the continuing challenges to the definition and control of preaching in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and indicates an anxiety about containing women's disruptive speech.2 The prevalence, as well as the effect, of formulations such as Huguccio's is attested by Margery Kempe's crafty defense against the charge of heresy: if preaching is to be defined by location, she will make sure to place herself elsewhere. The fact that Margery was in trouble to begin with, despite her avoidance of pulpits, shows that the problem is more metaphorical than physical. It is not, or not exclusively, a woman's actual location in a cleri- 122 Chapter 6 cal space that is at issue, but rather her ability to take up the position of a cleric-in effect, to speak like a preacher. Like her contemporary Julian ofNorwich, Margery lived in the peculiarly fraught religious and political milieu of late medieval England.3 But the difficulties she faced in moving out of a supposedly feminine private space and into a public, "masculine" world echo those of any medieval woman who attempted to bring together these supposedly dichotomous realms.4 In spite ofall the prohibitions against such activity, there were certain women who did manage to instruct the church publicly, by rewriting the lines drawn to exclude them. Hildegard ofBingen (1098-1179), Birgitta ofSweden (1302/3-73), and Catherine ofSiena (c. 1347-80) offer three different but not entirely dissimilar examples. Each approached the interaction of individual experience and institutional authority in ways that both made use ofand challenged the exclusion from a public voice foisted upon her by clerical tradition. In doing so, these three women escaped their fixed location within an accepted framework of appropriate female activity and speech. Their strategies anticipate, to some degree, modern feminist treatments of the relationship between experience and authority, and particularly the question ofwho has a right to speak. Interestingly, like the discourse that Margery exploited, these modern discussions often frame themselves in terms ofplace. Diana Fuss's observation that place and self-positioning are central to modern debates over authority and experience alerts us to the appearance ofsimilar themes in the medieval texts.5 Luce Irigaray, for example, has said that even when women mimic the "place of [their] exploitation by discourse" they are not reduced to that place but rather "remain elsewhere."6 Irigaray's approach to mysticism and the speech it produces, it has been argued, is one that can serve simply to reassert women's place "beyond the pale."7 I would agree with Fuss, however, that it marks instead "the simultaneous displacement and redeployment of essentialism"--quite an accurate characterization of the strategies of Hildegard, Birgitta, and Catherine, who highlighted their own presumed weakness and femininity precisely as a way to evade the constraints of those characteristics.8 Irigaray's concept is adopted here not to assert that women are elsewhere, but to contend that these particular women were able to make creative use of their exclusion from clerical tradition, whose very insistence on its own boundaries, as Margery Kempe realized, enabled women to give themselves an alibi, in Latin, literally an "elsewhere," from which to speak. In doing so, paradoxically , they created a place for themselves within that tradition.9 [18.116.36.192] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 14:05...

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