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Jan. 14th, 2008 11:22 amIt's really extremely difficult to read more than a little of the mystic Elsbeth von Oye, I find. Not so much because the language is difficult, but because all this stuff about self-crucifixion, belts with nails on, God instructing her to keep torturing herself so that he can feed from her inner marrow and above all the bits about the maggots actually makes me feel ever so slightly physically sick.
I'm also having difficulty - at least partly because I find the underlying theological assumptions so questionable and repellent - not emulating the attitude of an early C 20th scholar and just stamping it as 'pathological' and turning, with relief, to something less icky. Not every male scholastic labling of a female text as 'sick' is necessarily the reslut of sexism as such, though it may well result in a failure to find a meaningful way to read the text.
Sometimes one wonders if such a way exists. I certainly don't think that, looking at it with a modern Christian hat one (whatever that may look like!) rather than a mortar-board, that E v. O is one of the mediaeval mystics who modern believers will get much from. And even from a more academic point of view, it's difficult not just to view it as a train wreck...
One thing which I do very much admire about many mediaeval female religious writers is the ability to find meaning in their suffering, to use it as a means of imitatio Christi and as a way to God; but it becomes very problematic for me when it's self inflicted (rather than as a result of illness or problems arising from the active service of others). Of course, looked at historically, women were very circumscribed in how they could serve God, and they became more limited into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Elsbeth probably didn't even have the option of a more active life, even had she wanted it, in the same way that (say) Elisabeth of Thuringia did. So perhaps these are texts of 'sickness' in a different sense to that which one is inclined to think - the 'sickness' is primarily in the church of the time and its unholy structures, and less so in the women, or only secondarily so. I have sometimes wondered if the female religious writers who were so obsessed with the Sacrament of the Altar weren't 'really' experiencing something that a modern liberal would identify with a call to the priesthood rather than to the nunnery (here endeth the a-historical reflections which doubtless interest nobody bar me - and certainly wouldn't please my supervisor!)
I'm also having difficulty - at least partly because I find the underlying theological assumptions so questionable and repellent - not emulating the attitude of an early C 20th scholar and just stamping it as 'pathological' and turning, with relief, to something less icky. Not every male scholastic labling of a female text as 'sick' is necessarily the reslut of sexism as such, though it may well result in a failure to find a meaningful way to read the text.
Sometimes one wonders if such a way exists. I certainly don't think that, looking at it with a modern Christian hat one (whatever that may look like!) rather than a mortar-board, that E v. O is one of the mediaeval mystics who modern believers will get much from. And even from a more academic point of view, it's difficult not just to view it as a train wreck...
One thing which I do very much admire about many mediaeval female religious writers is the ability to find meaning in their suffering, to use it as a means of imitatio Christi and as a way to God; but it becomes very problematic for me when it's self inflicted (rather than as a result of illness or problems arising from the active service of others). Of course, looked at historically, women were very circumscribed in how they could serve God, and they became more limited into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Elsbeth probably didn't even have the option of a more active life, even had she wanted it, in the same way that (say) Elisabeth of Thuringia did. So perhaps these are texts of 'sickness' in a different sense to that which one is inclined to think - the 'sickness' is primarily in the church of the time and its unholy structures, and less so in the women, or only secondarily so. I have sometimes wondered if the female religious writers who were so obsessed with the Sacrament of the Altar weren't 'really' experiencing something that a modern liberal would identify with a call to the priesthood rather than to the nunnery (here endeth the a-historical reflections which doubtless interest nobody bar me - and certainly wouldn't please my supervisor!)