Crystalline Wombs And Pregnant Hearts (PDF) 2007

# History in the Comic Mode ## Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person **Edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger** **2007, Columbia University Press, New York** ## The Matter of Person **[222]** - Luxurious objects from the East played no role in reconciling Christianity with Isla...

# History in the Comic Mode ## Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person **Edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger** **2007, Columbia University Press, New York** ## The Matter of Person **[222]** - Luxurious objects from the East played no role in reconciling Christianity with Islam. - Jacques de Vitry and his contemporaries maintained great contempt for the avarice and luxurious lifestyles of Muslims, Oriental Christians, and Westerners who assimilated in the Middle East. - However, they desired and consumed the treasures of the East, many of which came their way through Muslim intermediaries. - In Jacques’ system of values, desire and consumption of luxurious goods were acceptable if they were turned to religious ends. - However, his secular contemporaries were not always so religious in their reasons for bringing home Oriental goods. - They probably had more material reasons: the greater Marie’s prestige, the greater the profits from pilgrims to her place of burial. - Marie of Oignies shared her informal religious life in a hut just outside the priory with other women who did not benefit from the presence of her relics or the generous gifts lavished upon the priory. - The women were rare and extremely modest, their community only lasted as long as it did because they passed their huts and personal possessions on from one woman to another. - By the middle of the 13th century the Church at large had grown relatively intolerant of informal women’s communities and the proximity of women’s communities to men. - The women of Oignies were forced to move further away from the priory in 1250. - They disappeared altogether in the first decades of the 14th century. - Marie had come to be valued as a saintly relic, but not as role model for other women to follow. ## Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts **[224]** - Many splendid objects have survived from medieval convents. - One of the most enchanting is a small sculpture of the Virgin Mary and St. Elizabeth from the Swiss Dominican foundation of St. Katharinenthal. - It was made during the first decade of the 14th century by the workshop of Henry of Constance. - It is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. - The **Visitation Group** is one of the many late medieval devotional images that reflect and sanctify women’s domestic and biological experience. - Citing Jeffrey Hamburger’s now-seminal study of monastic visual practices, Bynum linked the sculpture to a vision experienced by the 13th-century mystic Gertrude of Helfta: “the immaculate womb of the glorious virgin, as transparent as the purest crystal, through which her internal organs, penetrated and filled with divinity, shone brightly, just as gold, wrapped in silk of various colors, shines through a crystal. Indeed, one saw the little blossoming boy, the only Son of the highest Father, nurse avidly in delight at the heart of His virgin mother. ### The bodies of the Visitation Group – crystals, not anatomical details **[225]** - The crystals on the Visitation figures assert themselves radically as fragments and are set exceedingly high on the chests. - They are framed from below by the figures’ interlocked right hands, pressing forward between the viewer and the bodies’ interiors suggesting, but ultimately refusing to show what lies beneath. - They surprise and delight as references to human anatomy but are incongruous and strange.. - They are emblematic of the **comic mode**. ## The Comic Mode **[226]** - These “gleaming fragments” expand the range of meanings the Visitation Group may have held for the women of Katharinenthal. - They may have evoked empathy with characters of sacred history. - They may have held relevance to the nuns, making it into a mirror and model of their own spiritual exercises. - They are incongruous and strange but are a reflection of the “comic mode.” - The obverse of the question concerns the object's material and formal qualities. Namely, how the distinctive medium and eccentric positioning of the “wombs” may have imbued the biblical episode with particular relevance to the nuns, making it into a mirror and model of their own spiritual exercises. - From the outset it must be acknowledged that the stones we see today, affixed to metal clasps with solid backings, may not be original to the sculpture. - However, given the predilection for crystal embellishments in devotional and liturgical objects at this time, and the frequency with which Christian writers likened the bodies of the blessed to precious stones, there is no reason to doubt that these figures always bore a similar stone or glass piece. - Each crystal nestles in a smoothly carved cavity more than one-half inch deep, within the torso. - Although no traces of figural painting survive on the cavities, the presence of pinholes and tiny metal pegs suggests that these once formed some kind of miniature exhibition space, whose erstwhile contents must remain a mystery. - The stones provided direct visual access to the bodies' interiors, which could not be seen, or they were displayed in settings that obscured them. - They would have called attention to the viewing process itself, the ability or inability of optical rays to meet and pass through certain physical obstructions. - The familiar trope of the Virgin's womb as a glass that remained intact while admitting light, allowed each act of looking at and through these stones to recall the moment of Christ's conception. ### Crystalline features **[226]** - In medieval natural-philosophical exegesis, precious stones possessed many features that made them appropriate symbols for all manner of virtues. - Rock crystals, believed to originate as water slowly frozen into permanent ice, embodied the very paradoxes often ascribed to the glorified bodies of the blessed. - They were a favorite metaphor of purity, especially that of the Virgin Mary. - The promise of crystalline rivers in the Heavenly Jerusalem reinforced commentators' beliefs that these stones, despite their firmness, retained a close connection to their liquid origins, to which they might always return. - The prescription of crystal-based remedies to sufferers of chronic thirst or stomach ailments, as well as to women who had difficulties nursing, underlies this idea. - The drinking of crystal-steeped water or honey was thought to stimulate the flow of liquids within dry breasts. - This underlying conception of the human body as a vessel subject to continual replenishment was doubtless encouraged by the long-standing use of figural sculptures as receptacles for holy objects. - These included reliquaries that encased shreds of flesh and bone to anthropomorphic tabernacles that housed liturgical paraphernalia. - Mary's body offered image-makers a special opportunity to depict this aspect of the human form. - The shrine-Madonnas that contained figures of the Trinity provided room for artists to demonstrate the connection between interior life and external appearances. - In most later medieval depictions of this scene, the wombs, in the form of tiny mandorlas, were transplanted to the surface of the women’s clothing, just over their swelling abdomens. - Less frequently, as in the Katharinenthal figures, they appeared at chest-level. - The association of crystals with lactation gave this high placement special significance. - The stones call attention not only to the women’s role as vessels bearing something within themselves, but also to their power to nurture beings outside themselves. - In the Visitation Group, each crystal thus elides the successive views of the maternal body offered by the shrine-Madonnas: the introverted body that shelters and the extroverted body that feeds. ### The hearts of the Visitation Group **[227**] - The crystals’ evocation of both wombs and breasts was enriched by the ancient association of the chest area with the heart, itself conceived as a person’s vital centre and dwelling place of the soul. - The literary trope of a favored friend or idea being “inscribed on the heart” was often pictured as an image of the beloved subject affixed in a roundel to the centre of a larger figure’s chest. - In this respect, the high placement of the Visitation figures’ crystal-wombs elevates their pregnancy both literally and figuratively. - In contrast to ordinary mothers, these women bear their progeny in their hearts. - This conflation of organs, also present in Gertrude’s vision, departed from contemporary understandings of pregnancy. - Whereas Gertrude beheld the baby nursing pure blood directly from his mother’s heart, ordinary children were thought to be nourished by a low substance, menstrual blood, both in utero and, transformed into milk through the filters of their mothers’ breasts, post partum. - The conceptual conflation of hearts and wombs meant that conventual people, though vowed to celibacy, were not prevented from experiencing in their bodies the fullness of new life. - Physical pregnancy offered a model through which many monastics, both male and female, conceived of union with God. - In light of the growing attention to Christ’s childhood in the 13th and 14th centuries, it is understandable that experiences described as “spiritual pregnancy” were also widespread in those years. - Many conventual women and their male advisors enjoyed all the swelling and sweetness involved in physically containing the divine—but with none of the mess and pain that married women endured. - So pervasive was such imagery that the Flemish beguine Hadewijch could use the stages of fetal development as an extended metaphor for the nurturing of Love in a devout person's soul. - For most writers, both secular and religious, such conception took place upon the entrance of a beloved into the lover’s heart. ### The hearts of the Visitation Group and the importance of touch **[228]** - This idea found expression in the devotional pictures made by a nun of St. Walburga in Eichstätt, in which the heart of the crucified Christ and that of the loving subject appear as enclosures both containing and revealing the embrace of person and God. - Such images correspond beautifully with other religious women’s understandings of their bodies’ capacity to hold the divine. - The sister-book of Katharinenthal, which chronicles the extraordinary virtues of the convent’s inhabitants from its establishment in 1242 until around 1422, describes Anne von Ramschwag being “lifted up in a divine light” during one Christmas Mass. - It seemed to her that her body split open so that she could look into herself. - She saw two beautiful babies embracing each other sweetly and lovingly. - She recognized that one child was our Lord and the other her soul. - She and God were united, and her body closed together again. - Although this splitting may more readily recall sculpted shrine-Madonnas rather than the Visitation Group, it is nonetheless associated with the latter figures from whose torsos light spills. - Anne’s contemporaries looked into their hearts or souls through chests turned temporarily, transparent. - A formative incident in the life of the German Dominican Henry Suso exemplifies this phenomenon. - Suso looked inside and saw his heart as clear as a crystal, where eternal wisdom sat quietly with a pleasing appearance. - Nearby Suso, who was longing for heaven, was sitting and pressed to God's side, embraced by his arms, and pressed to his divine heart. ### The heart of Henry Suso **[229]** - The resulting image evokes something like a series of nested dolls, where Suso peers into his own heart to find his soul pressed against the heart of God. - In the corresponding illustration, the frontally seated author pulls aside his garment to reveal a small embracing couple. - They are seated just above the dark area between Suso's spread knees and circumscribed against his chest by the edges of his open cloak. - They are both encased within the heart and contained in, or emerging from, a kind of womb - The text stresses that only by peering through his own suddenly transparent, though still intact, flesh could Suso behold his soul embraced by Wisdom. - The chest is the locus of a person’s spiritual core. - Suso’s well-known diagram of the soul’s journey from its origins in the Trinity to its ultimate destination, reunion with the Godhead, highlights this. - A roundel in the center of each human figure’s chest indicates the linkage between person and divine. - God the Father, who bears the human soul before and after its incarnation, displays on his torso a bust-length image of the person. - The journey culminates in a shiny roundel that reflected the reader’s visage back to her or his own eyes, transforming the page into a counterpart of God’s body. - Such images enable one to imagine nuns seeing in the gleaming chests of their Visitation figures not only miraculously pregnant wombs, but also grace-filled hearts or souls. - These reflect back on each other as they touch. ### The hearts of the Visitation Group and the role of precious stones **[229]** - The conflation of glorified hearts with precious stones appears in the famous episode in which Suso carved the initials IHS into his chest with a stylus. - Suso’s concern with its materiality is striking. - He informs us that, although the bloody wounds eventually healed, the scars remained “as thick as a flattened blade of grass and as long as a section of the little finger,” and “as often as his heart beat, the name moved.” - While dozing, Suso sensed “some kind of light flood[ing] out of his heart”; upon inspection, he discovered “a golden cross into which many precious jewels had been skilfully inlaid.” - Not wishing to call attention to his state, Suso covered his chest with a blanket. - The light flooding forth glowed so brilliantly that nothing could diminish its powerful beauty. ### The heart of Henry Suso as a window to the divine **[230]** - He presents his glorified heart here as solid, sculptural matter that, once re-formed through his own devotional exertions, transforms his chest into a window or conduit for divine light. - He was hardly alone; when examined after death, the hearts of many saintly women likewise revealed themselves to resemble—if not to actually be—artfully shaped stones. - Like these, and the heart of the Virgin Mary, which one thirteenth-century poet compared to “a pure altar embellished with gold and precious stones”, Christ’s heart was also imagined to possess the attributes of finely crafted metalwork. - Contemplating the gifts God had lavished upon her, Gertrude of Helfta once admonished the Lord for “not having sealed this pact in the customary way, by clasping hands.” - Rather than offering his right hand for the expected dextrarum iunctio, Christ surprised Gertrude by opening with both hands the wound of his deified heart. - He commanded Gertrude to stretch forth her right hand and then, contracting the aperture of the wound in which her right hand was enclosed, he said, "See, I promise to keep intact the gifts which I have given you.” - After these words of sweetest love, Gertrude withdrew her hand and there appeared on it seven circles of gold, like seven rings. ### The image of Christ’s heart **[230]** - Christ showed Gertrude, issuing from his left side as though from the innermost depths of his blessed heart, a stream of flowing water as pure as a crystal and as solid. - It proceeded to cover his adorable chest like a jewel, and was transparent, coloured in hues of gold and rose, alternating in various ways. - Christ explained that the streams represented the “sanctifying” power of Gertrude’s illness. - He elucidated the other elements with reference to their visual and material properties: “Just as the gold and rose colours gleam through the purity of the crystal and are enhanced by it, so will your intentions be pleasing, seen through the cooperation of the gold of my divinity and the perfecting power of the patience of the rose of my humanity.” - Christ’s crystalline breast assumes the characteristics of the Virgin’s womb as Gertrude had beheld it in her vision of the nursing child. - The marvelous transparency of the solid body that draws the gaze in and the presence within the body of gleaming gold that radiates light back out, points to concerns beyond, though certainly including, the interest in biological experience. - They concern materiality, vision, and the relation between the outer body and the soul brimming over with grace. ### The sister-book of Katharinenthal **[231]** - The Katharinenthal sister-book furnishes ample evidence that extraordinary writers such as Gertrude and Suso were not exceptional in their fascination with bodies that were at once solid, transparent, and radiant. - Like many conventual women of the time, the sisters of Katharinenthal often revealed states of spiritual grace by turning transparent before the eyes of their friends. - A large sculpture of Christ embracing St. John in the nuns’ choir, produced in the same decade and by the same masters as the Visitation, was especially effective in sparking this and other marvelous corporeal displays. - While praying before this image, Anne von Ramschwag was observed to become “as clear as a crystal,” and “a glow of light emerged from within her.” - When Mechthild von Eschenz left the choir during Mass to proceed to the kitchen at the prioress’s request, she became “as clear as a crystal, so that [a companion] saw straight through her.” - When asked “what she was thinking as she left the choir,” Mechthild explained, “I was thinking that obedience is better than doing whatever I should like to do.” - Transparency is connected with the preeminent monastic quality, obedience. - It is important to note the continued solidity of the respective bodies in these visions. - The person does not turn invisible. - She becomes transparent despite her material presence. - Berta von Herten thematizes this paradox while also demonstrating the fluidity of visual images within the nuns’ imaginations. - Troubled by a desire to leave Katharinenthal and dwell with a local recluse called Guta, Berta beheld the Lord “sitting high up in the refectory, his face glowing like the sun, and waving to her with his hand.” - When she approached him and flung herself at his feet, Christ “took her up and lay her head upon his lap, and treated her all sweetly and lovingly.” - Suddenly Berta noticed that the refectory wall had changed “as if to glass,” and she saw a person peering into it from outside “as if her heart would break, so gladly would she pass through the wall to meet our Lord.” - Identifying this person as Guta, Christ assured Berta that her own situation within the convent, subject to rules of obedience and the suppression of individual desires, allowed her intimate access to him that a recluse could never enjoy. ### The importance of the gaze and touch **[232]** - Although depictions of Christ and St. John clearly provided a starting point for this vision, the account proceeded to use the experience of looking through a crystalline surface to probe notions of interiority and exclusion, yearning and satisfaction. - Cradled in Christ’s arms while watching Guta look on, Berta assumes the role of the souls enjoying God’s company in the spacious hearts of the Eichstätt drawings or embraced by Divine Wisdom in Suso’s lap. - They look out of the picture at us, who watch them from outside, confirming the dynamic role ascribed to vision in contemporary texts and pictures. - However, Guta’s gaze is problematic. - Berta's experience of Union, first in Christ’s gestural language inviting her to join him, then in his tender manipulations of her body, is physical. - Guta’s strictly visual contact places her in a site of desire that is always unfulfilled, like the grids used by 15th-century painters to define illusionistic spaces. - The wall of glass admits sight but isolates the viewer from the object of her gaze. - This is a loss, for the goal of the soul’s desire is to efface that distance and become part of the picture, to find oneself embraced by God within the crystalline enclosure. - The relegation of the gaze to secondary status in this account. Touch is of greater importance than sight. - It demonstrates how pictorial motifs (in this case, the embrace of two figures) could conjoin with the physical medium (the tangible but transparent object) to shape and guide imaginative devotions. - This merging recurs “in one ‘good person’s’ vision of Adelhait Pfefferhartin. - She was curious about Adelhait’s spiritual status and prayed to Mary and “the beloved Saint John, thinking about the loving repose he took on the sweet heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, that she come to learn in what degree of nobility this blessed sister stood before God." - She began her meditation by envisioning Christ’s embrace of his Beloved, before whose sculptural depiction Adelhait was once seen to levitate—the seer’s mind swiftly moved to another image, as she beheld this sister enveloped in as clear a light, exploding out of her in streams of vivid radiance. - Inside and outside, this sister was so vividly illuminated and gleaming that [the seer] had never seen anything resembling her in clarity and beauty, and she marveled greatly. - Then it was said to her: “You should know that [Adelheit] is a thousand times more beautiful and clearer before God than you could ever perceive.” ### The image of Adelhait **[234]** - It is important to note that, despite the continuity posited here between interior virtue and exterior illumination, this body does not admit ocular penetration or reveal anything hidden beneath its surfaces. - It is an exuberant body, thrusting the evidence of its virtues outward toward beholders and rendering them visible through the body’s materiality rather than through any internal motifs. - Such a body was also pictured twice in the sisters’ magnificent illuminated gradual of 1312. - It is a conflation of the Virgin Mary, the Apocalyptic Woman, and the triumphal Ecclesia, this aristocratic female figure stands on a human-faced moon, with a large yellow roundel inscribed with the ray-emitting face of the sun on her chest. - On fol. 158av, the beginning of the sequence in honor of John the Evangelist, she occupies a middle zone between a Christ-John group above and a series of Apocalyptic visions below. - On fol. 258v, she moves from an eschatological future to a dialogical present. - She occupies the large initial A of “Ave Maria” in the sequence for the feast of the Annunciation, becoming the subject and recipient of the vocalized text. - Two model viewers accompany her: a standing St. John who fixes his eyes on the roundel upon her chest, and a tiny nun who kneels at her feet with uplifted gaze. - Only the Woman faces outward, soliciting and anchoring beholders’ attention. - She occupies an otherworldly realm that viewers, like the recluse Guta, may gaze at with longing, yet a realm that, as the presence of the donor and St. John demonstrates, is nonetheless accessible. - The Woman’s frontal gaze and extraction from any narrative context made her an active participant in the dialogue initiated by the nuns’ song. - The vellum thus became a kind of mirror for the sisters. - Looking at the golden initial as they sang the Virgin’s praises, they beheld a figure—elegant and beautiful, with light exploding from her chest—who embodied and made permanent the fleeting visions they had of themselves and one another in states of grace. ### The similarities between the Visitation Group and the gradual **[235]** - This kind of relationship is what the Katharinenthal Visitation Group portrays. - One remarkable, though often overlooked, facet of this sculpture is the strong physical resemblance between the women. - In contrast to most depictions of the scene, no sign of age or status distinguishes one from the other. - Both wear luxurious garments, display youthful faces and bodies, and exhibit glistening heart-wombs. - The sliver of space between the women is bridged only by two slender forearms. - Their mirrorlike disposition accentuates this figural composition and the kind of relationship it engenders. - It differs meaningfully from that of the sculpted Christ-John Group, where John's passive body melts into a larger, more stable form. - The partnership between the women in the Visitation Group neither entailed nor allowed such relinquishment of individual identity. - Just as the heroines of the Katharinenthal sister-book retained their own names and social roles even as they were extolled as exemplars, so Mary and Elizabeth preserve their bodily integrity and stand, hands clasped, on equal ground. - With hearts fecund and gleaming, the figures beam their grace-filled states toward one another, effacing physical difference as they touch. - The Katharinenthal sculpture thus depicts the kind of reflective likeness that the Woman in the gradual invites—a dialogical relationship between one exuberant figure and a companion (in the manuscript, the viewer herself), which leads to the assumption in the latter of the qualities of the former. - The sisters of Katharinenthal could not, of course, emulate Mary and Elizabeth in the physical aspects of their pregnancy. - However, they could—and, as their visions affirm, did—reproduce in themselves the effects of that pregnancy, bearing in their hearts the spiritual grace that allowed them to shine as clearly as if they were made of crystal. - Whereas the sculpted figures’ heart-wombs evoked such biological experiences, their mirrorlike arrangement and physical identicality made them enact what the sister-book repeatedly enjoined its readers to do: to teach one another by example and take one another as models—in the book’s own terms, as Bilder (pictures). ### The Visions of Gertrude and Mechthild **[236]** - If Gertrude’s vision of the solitary Virgin with the transparent womb illuminates the biological interest at the heart of each Visitation figure, the meditation by Gertrude’s companion Mechthild of Magdeburg on the meeting of the loving soul with the Bridegroom evokes most aptly this state of reflective union. - "“There”—in the heavenly mansion, where person and God become one—eye gleams into eye, and there spirit flows into spirit, and there hand grasps hand, and there mouth speaks to mouth, and there heart greets heart. - "There"—in the heavenly mansion, where person and God become one—eye gleams into eye, and there spirit flows into spirit, and there hand grasps hand, and there mouth speaks to mouth, and there heart greets heart. **[358]** # Notes * * * * * * * * * * * * ## Notes **[358]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. * * * * * * * * * * * * ## Notes **[359]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. * * * ## Notes **[360]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. ## Notes **[362]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. ## Notes **[363]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. ## Notes **[364]** 1. 2. 3. ## Notes **[365]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. ## Notes **[366]** 1. 2. 3. ## Notes **[367]** 1. 2. 3. ## Notes **[368]** 1. 2. 3. # Notes **[369]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. # Notes **[370]** 1. 2. 3. 4. # Notes **[371]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. # Notes **[372]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. # Notes **[373]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. # Notes **[374]** 1. 2. 3. # Notes **[375]** 1. 2. # Notes **[376]** 1. 2. # Notes **[377]** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. # Notes **[378]** 1. 2. 3. 4.