Page 4966 – Christianity Today (2024)

1642: Born December 25 in Woolsthorpe, north of London

1655: Attends Grantham Grammar School

1661: Enters Trinity College, Cambridge

1665: January—graduates Bachelor of Arts; August moves back home because of the plague

1666: Develops binomial theorem; invents the calculus; postulates a gravitational force holding the moon in its orbit; and proves that white light is a mixture of light of all colors

1667: Returns to Cambridge; elected fellow of Trinity College

1669: Elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics

1672: Elected fellow of the Royal Society

1684: Edmund Halley’s visit leads to writing of the Principia

1687: Publication of Principia Mathematica

1689: Elected Member of Parliament

1693: Experiences mental breakdown

1696: Moves to London as Warden of the Mint

1700: Appointed Master of the Mint

1703: Elected president of the Royal Society

1704: Publication of Opticks

1705: Knighted by the Queen

1727: Dies March 20; buried in Westminster Abbey

Charles E. Hummel is author of The Galileo Connection and Genesis: God’s Creative Call (both InterVarsity).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue with God

“Catherine of Siena moved in remarkably wide circles for a woman of fourteenth century Italy, ” writes Dr. Suzanne Noffke (see Catherine of Sienna). “She was a mystic whose plunge into God plunged her deep into the affairs of society, Church, and the souls of all who came under her influence. ” Catherine wrote her most important work, The Dialogue, from 1377 to 1378, about two years before her death at age 33. In it, Catherine directs questions and prayers to God, and then reflects on God’s response. The book was one of the first books printed in Italy, Germany, Spain, and England.

A soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God’s honor and the salvation of souls.… Now this soul’s will was to know and follow truth more courageously. So she addressed four petitions to the most high and eternal Father, holding up her desire for herself first of all—for she knew that she could be of no service to her neighbors in teaching or example or prayer without first doing herself the service of attaining and possessing virtue.

Her first petition, therefore, was for herself. The second was for the reform of holy Church. The third was for the whole world in general, and in particular for the peace of Christians who are rebelling against holy Church with great disrespect and persecution. In her fourth petition she asked divine providence to supply in general and in particular for a certain case which had arisen. [It is not known what situation Catherine refers to here.] …

[In this section Catherine writes what she perceives to be God’s message to her.] You will find humility in the knowledge of yourself when you see that even your own existence comes not from yourself but from Me, for I loved you before you came into being. And in my unspeakable love for you I willed to create you anew in grace. So I washed you and made you a new creation in the blood that my only begotten Son poured out with such burning love.…

It is your duty to love your neighbor as your own self (Mk. 12:33). In love you ought to help them spiritually with prayer and counsel, and assist them spiritually and materially in their need —at least with your good will if you have nothing else. If you do not love me, you do not love your neighbors, nor will you help those you do not love.… Every help you give them ought to come from the affection you bear them for love of me.…

I tell you, moreoever, when you return good for evil you not only prove your own virtue, but often you send out coals ablaze with charity that will melt hatred and bitterness from the heart and mind of the wrathful, even turning their hatred to benevolence. Such is the power of charity and perfect patience in one who takes up the burden of the sins of the wicked and bears with their anger (Rom. 12:17–21).

The Curious Life of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe is the earliest known autobiography in English, yet it was lost for centuries until rediscovered in 1934. Margery was born in England in about 1373, and she lived a full and turbulent life for sixty-odd years. She was married and bore fourteen children, but her heart was in the pursuit of holiness, which in her day involved religious pilgrimages. She traveled by herself to the Holy Land, Assisi, Rome and many other places. She was criticized for her active life (“Woman, give up this life that you lead, and go and spin, and card wool, as other women do”) as well as for her frequent sobbing or shrieking during prayer. Her life reveals the simple and devout faith of a medieval Christian.

There once came a vicar to this creature [Margery], asking her to pray for him and discover whether he would please God more by leaving his cure of souls … or by keeping it, because he thought he was of no use to his parishioners. The creature being in her prayers and having this matter in mind, Christ said to her spirit, “Tell the vicar to … be diligent in preaching and teaching to them in person, and sometimes to procure others to teach them my laws and my commandments, so that there is no fault on his part, and if they don’t do any better, his reward shall be none the less for it.”

And so she gave her message as she was commanded, and the vicar still kept his cure.…

A good man who was a great friend to this creature, and very helpful to the poor, was seriously ill for many weeks on end. And people were very sorry on his account, for it was not thought he would ever live, his pain was so amazing in all his joints and all over his body. Our Lord Jesus said to her spirit, “Daughter, don’t be afraid for this man—he will live and get on very well. ”

And so he lived for many years afterwards in good health and prosperity.…

These are written to show the homely intimacy and goodness of our merciful Lord Christ Jesus, and not to commend this creature.

Julian of Norwich: Christ Who Lives in Me

One person that Margery Kempe visited was Julian, a Christian woman in Norwich, England. Julian (c. 1342–after 1413) was an anchoress, meaning she spent her life in prayer, perpetually enclosed in a small room. In her case, the room was attached to the outside walls of St. Julian’s Church in Norwich. In May 1373 Julian fell sick and was near death; she recovered, however, and received sixteen visions. These are described in her book Showings, or The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love.

This revelation was made to a simple, unlettered creature, living in this mortal flesh, the year of our Lord one thousand, three hundred and seventy-three, on the thirteenth day of May.… Our Lord opened my spiritual eyes, and showed me my soul in the midst of my heart. I saw my soul as wide as if it were a kingdom.… In the midst of this city sits our Lord Jesus, true God and true man, a handsome person and tall, honourable, the greatest lord. And I saw him splendidly clad in honours. He sits erect there in the soul, in peace and rest, and he rules and he guards heaven and earth and everything that is.…

The place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there.… And when I had this with great attention, our Lord very humbly revealed words to me, without voice and without opening of lips, as he had done before, and said very seriously: Know it well, it was no hallucination which you saw today, but accept and believe it and hold firmly to it, and you will not be overcome.…

And these words: You will not be overcome, were said very insistently and strongly, for certainty and strength against every tribulation which may come. He did not say: You will not be assailed, you will not be belaboured, you will not be disquieted, but he said: You will not be overcome. God wants us to pay attention to his words, and always to be strong in our certainty, in well-being and in woe, for he loves us and delights in us, and so he wishes us to love him and delight in him and trust greatly in him, and all will be well.

And soon afterwards all was hidden, and I saw no more.

How Did Hildegard Receive Her Visions?

Today, the name Hildegard of Bingen is little known, but in Hildegard’s day, few Christians were more influential. Hildegard (1098–1179) was founder and first abbess of the Benedictine community of Bingen, Germany. She was also a visionary and prophet who called the church to reform. She advised the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, traveled, preached, and wrote extensively. Hildegard’s best-known work, The Scivias, was published in 1151 after ten years of work. The book consists of twenty-six visions, somewhat similar to those described in the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, or Revelation. Reprinted here is Hildegard’s description of how these visions came to her, followed by her first vision.

It happened that, in the eleven hundred and forty-first year of the Incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, when I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch. And immediately I knew the meaning of the exposition of the Scriptures, namely the Psalter, the Gospel and the other … volumes of both the Old and the New Testaments, though I did not have the interpretation of the words of their texts or the division of the syllables or the knowledge of cases or tenses.

But I had sensed in myself wonderfully the power and mystery of secret and admirable visions from my childhood—that is, from the age of 5—up to that time, as I do now. This, however, I showed to no one except a few religious persons who were living in the same manner as I; but meanwhile, until the time when God by His grace wished it to be manifested, I concealed it in quiet silence. But the visions I saw I did not perceive in dreams, or sleep, or delirium, or by the eyes of the body, or by the ears of the outer self, or in hidden places; but I received them while awake and seeing with a pure mind and the eyes and ears of the inner self, in open places, as God willed it. How this might be is hard for mortal flesh to understand.

I saw a great mountain of iron, and enthroned on it One of such great glory that it blinded my sight. On each side of him there extended a soft shadow, like a wing of wondrous breadth and length. Before him, at the foot of the mountain, stood an image full of eyes on all sides, in which, because of those eyes, I could discern no human form. In front of this image stood another, a child wearing a tunic of subdued color but white shoes, upon whose head such glory descended from the One enthroned upon that mountain that I could not look at its face.

But from the One who sat enthroned upon that mountain many living sparks sprang forth, which flew very sweetly around the images. Also, I perceived in this mountain many little windows, in which appeared human heads, some of subdued colors and some white.

And behold, He Who was enthroned upon that mountain cried out in a strong, loud voice saying, “O human, who are fragile dust of the earth and ashes of ashes! Cry out and speak of the origin of pure salvation until those people are instructed, who, though they see the inmost contents of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them or preach them, because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice.… ”

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

The story of Heloise and Abelard sheds light on medieval society and the church in a way that few other stories do. Their drama captures not only deep emotion, but also the spirit of the times.

The first scene opens with Abelard, one of the most celebrated teachers and philosophers of the medieval world, pursuing his innocent teenage pupil. From there it chronicles a relationship pierced intermittently with lust, intrigue, and violence—all filtered through the curtain of the medieval church. In the words of Henry Adams, “The twelfth century, with all its sparkle, would be dull without Abelard and Heloise.”

The Cast

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a brilliant young man who, by age 21 (before Heloise was even born), had gained such a reputation for scholarship and debate that he was able to set up his own school. In the years that followed, his teaching career expanded, as did his writing—but always in the midst of controversy.

His book Sic et Non (Yes and No) created an uproar. Here Abelard demonstrated his basic philosophical method: “The first key to wisdom is the constant and frequent questioning.… For by doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth.” Churchmen of the traditionalist mode were not ready for such skepticism.

But for all the criticism—and acclaim—that accompanied his brilliant career, Abelard is probably most remembered for his relationship with Heloise. Heloise was the niece of Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame. She was probably only 14 or 15 (some scholars have suggested Heloise was 17 or older), more than twenty years younger than Abelard, when she first met him at her uncle’s home in Paris.

Act I, Scene 1—Seduction

Abelard was not a gentleman. Indeed, he admits in his autobiography that when he heard about the bright young Heloise, he began setting the snare to seduce her: “I … decided she was the one to bring to my bed, confident that I should have an easy success; for at that time I had youth and exceptional good looks as well as my great reputation to recommend me. … Knowing the girl’s knowledge and love of letters, I thought she would be all the more ready to consent.”

Abelard made arrangements with Fulbert, uncle and guardian of Heloise, to move into the home and serve as her tutor. As he had anticipated, she esteemed him as a scholar and teacher, and he quickly took advantage of her age and position. By his own testimony, there was “more kissing than teaching.”

Abelard was careful to maintain his stature as a teacher: “To avert suspicion I sometimes struck her, but these blows were prompted by love and tender feeling rather than anger and irritation.” The cover worked well, and Abelard realized what he set out to achieve: “Our desires left no stage of love making untried.”

How did Heloise feel about this relationship? No doubt she was confused and overwhelmed by the attention paid her by such a prestigious scholar. Did she welcome his advances? She must have had mixed emotions, as do most youngsters in such instances. Some historians have argued that she was willingly seduced, but in a letter written years later, Abelard reminded her of his abusive behavior: “Even when you were unwilling, resisted to the utmost of your power and tried to dissuade, as yours was the weaker nature, I often forced you to consent with threats and blows.”

Act I, Scene 2—Revenge

Scene 2 opens with Fulbert furious when he discovers Abelard’s duplicity. Soon after, Heloise realizes she is pregnant.

Abelard apologizes to Fulbert, but the ring of sincerity is absent: “I protested that I had done nothing unusual in the eyes of anyone who had known the power of love, and recalled how since the beginning of the human race women had brought the noblest men to ruin.” But he quickly sensed that his “apology” was not enough to appease his accuser: “To conciliate him further, I offered him satisfaction in the form he could never have hoped for: I would marry the girl I had wronged. All I stipulated was that the marriage should be kept secret so as not to damage my reputation.”

Fulbert agreed outwardly to a secret marriage, but uncontrolled anger seethed within. Heloise was sent to live with in-laws until her son was born. Then Abelard placed his young wife in the convent near Paris where she had been educated as a small girl. His sister would raise their son, a drudgery he insisted was not suited to him: “Who intent upon sacred and philosophical reflection could endure the squalling … and constant dirt of little children?”

But if he thought he had resolved his problem, he was wrong. What happened next is best described in his own words: “At this news her uncle and his friends and relatives imagined that I had tricked them, and had found an easy way of ridding myself of Heloise by making her a nun. Wild with indignation they plotted against me, and one night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodging, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.”

Act II, Scene 1—Tormented Love

Act I ends with the reader almost convinced that the despicable Abelard got what he deserved. Act II opens with Abelard in agreement.

His physical pain is over, and he is convinced that as deplorable as his castration was, it was, in disguise, a blessing to set him free to serve God fully. Never again would he lust for a woman. He entered the monastery of St. Denis to devote himself to the monastic life.

For Heloise, however, her nightmare had only begun. To Abelard she wrote: “Of all wretched women I am the most wretched, and amongst the unhappy I am unhappiest.” At this point the reader senses the emotional damage she had suffered. Indeed, for all the light this story sheds on medieval society, it has a modern ring. Heloise loved too much.

She blamed herself for what had happened and confessed to Abelard, “It is the general lot of women to bring total ruin on great men.” She had objected to marrying Abelard, fearing the marriage would be discovered and that Abelard’s reputation as a cleric would be scarred. In fact, she went so far as to offer herself to be his lifelong mistress. “God is my witness,” she wrote to Abelard, “that if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his empress but your whor*.”

Heloise loathed the prospect of becoming a nun, but to please Abelard, she did just that. “I can expect no reward for this from God,” she lamented, “for it is certain that I have done nothing as yet for love of him.… I would have had no hesitation, God knows, in following you or going ahead at your bidding to the flames of hell.”

She pleaded for his attention and painfully acknowledged that “I have been so neglected and forgotten by you.” Her insecurity spilled over when she finally admitted he never really loved her: “It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love. So when the end came to what you desired, any show of feeling you used to make went with it. This is not merely my own opinion, beloved, it is everyone’s.… I wish I could think of some explanation which would excuse you and somehow cover up the way you hold me cheap.”

Act II, Scene 2—Repentance

Abelard readily acknowledged to Heloise, his “dearly beloved sister in Christ,” that he never really loved her. “My love, which involved us both in sin, let us not call it love but concupiscence. In you I cloyed a wretched appetite, which was all I really loved.”

But that was past. Abelard came to terms with his station in life. Indeed, he embraced it and desperately sought to bring Heloise to that same frame of mind. “It may relieve the bitterness of your grief if I prove that this came upon us justly.… My beloved, see how with the dragnets of his mercy the Lord has fished us up from the depth of his dangerous sea.… Consider the magnanimous design of God’s mercy for us … whereby he made use of evil itself and mercifully set aside our impiety, so that by a wholly justified wound in a single part of my body he might heal two souls.”

Abelard sympathized with her struggles, but he implored her not to be angry with God: “I beg you then, sister, do not be aggrieved, do not vex the Father who corrects us in fatherly wise.” He likewise pleaded with her not to focus on himself but rather to “have compassion on Him who suffered willingly for your redemption, and look with remorse on Him who was crucified for you.”

Act III—Twist of Fate

In the final act, Abelard is confronted with the ultimate punishment for a medieval theologian—the charge of heresy. A man who has accepted God’s judgment and turned his life around is accused by fellow clerics.

In 1121, Abelard was charged by the Council of Soissons with promoting Sabellianism (a heretical concept of the Trinity), and his book on the subject was ordered burned without opportunity to defend it.

Abelard did not forget Heloise. After she and her nuns were forced to leave their convent due to religious rivalry, Abelard donated land for a new convent, the Paraclete. He established Heloise as the abbess and helped formulate the rule by which they lived in community.

But Abelard’s problems with the church continued, not so much because he was a heretic, but because he challenged his students to think, and he was convinced that faith and reason are compatible. In 1141, at the urging of Bernard of Clairvaux, his writings were condemned at the Council of Sens. This was the ultimate rejection. He was determined to appeal to the pope, but he died before he reached Rome. Heloise arranged for his burial in a plot at her convent, where she could watch over his grave.

Heloise outlived Abelard by more than twenty years and gained a reputation as one of the greatest abbesses of medieval monasticism. During her lifetime, the Paraclete became one of the most famous convents in France, with six well-established daughter houses. In a letter to her, Peter the Venerable, who himself ruled over more than two thousand Cluniac houses in Europe, enthusiastically praised her ministry: “You have surpassed all women in carrying out your purpose, and have gone further than almost every man.”

Whether Heloise ever came to terms with her tormented love and fully submitted to God will never be known. Her surviving letters give no indication of that. So it was that Abelard, whose heart was right with God, died a condemned man, while the dejected Heloise was celebrated for her faithful ministry.

Legend tells us that when Heloise died, Abelard’s grave was opened so she could be buried with him, and as they lowered her body, he opened his arms to draw her into his bosom. It is a touching climax, but not one that fits. For Heloise and Abelard, life was real. There was no place for sentimental legends.

Dr. Ruth A. Tucker is visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. She is author of eight books, including Daughters of the Church (with Walter Liefeld; Zondervan, 1987) and Stories of Faith (Zondervan, 1990).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Hrotsvit von Gandersheim

Christianity’s first known playwright

Hrotsvit lived in the tenth century (932–1002) as a canoness of the Imperial Saxon Abbey of Gandersheim (Germany). She can best be described by a catalogue of pioneering achievements: she is the first known dramatist of Christianity; the first Saxon poet; the first female Transalpine [north of the Alps] historian; and the author of the only extant Latin epics written by a woman.

According to her own testimony she objected to the great popularity of [Roman author] Terence’s plays, which depicted lascivious pagan women frolicking in the pleasures of the flesh. She wanted to compose dramas substituting the heroines of Christianity: beautiful, chaste virgins, firmly resisting the insidious advances of pagan men. To show “frail Christian virgins” triumph with Christ’s aid was her stated dramatic intent.

Hrotsvit is a polished stylist who doesn’t lack a sense of humor, either. In one of her plays, Dulcitius, the protagonist is a pagan would-be executioner of three Christian virgins. He imprisons them close to the pantry so as to visit and seduce them secretly at night. As he enters the pantry, however, he is miraculously deluded and mistakes the dirty pots and pans for the girls. The scene is related by the girls, who peeping through the keyhole observe the foolish Dulcitius romancing kitchen utensils.

Hrotsvit’s works were rediscovered centuries later by a German scholar, who in 1501 made her texts available for posterity.

Julian of Norwich

Writer of solitary devotion to God

Julian of Norwich is perhaps the most famous female exegete of the nature of the Trinity—particularly of Christ’s mediating role between God and humankind.

Julian was born c. 1343 and probably grew up in Norwich, England. At some point she chose to live the life of an anchoress, a woman who lives by herself in an enclosed room in order to devote herself to prayer. Her cell was attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich.

In May 1373, when she was 30, Julian became sick and lay near death. Christ granted her a series of visions, and she recovered miraculously. She set out to record and to interpret her visions and to inspire her readers to a belief in divine love and compassion.

Julian’s tone in her Revelations of Divine Love is consistently optimistic: God is good; God is merciful; all will turn out well in the end. Her work also affirms the value of man, created as he is in the image of a benevolent God. Julian celebrates Christ’s mother-like qualities: the nurturing, loving, and protective aspects of his divinity. In deed, this has become the hallmark of Julian’s mysticism.

Julian was a mystic, not a theologian, so she emphasizes the importance of devotion and faith, rather than reason, as a way to achieve unity with God.

Hildegard of Bingen

Prophet to kings and emperors

Hildegard (1098–1179) has been considered by some the most prominent Christian woman of her era. She was founder and first abbess of the Benedictine community of Bingen, Germany, but her achievements move well beyond that. In the words of Barbara Newman: “Although she did not begin to write until age 43, Hildegard wrote a massive trilogy that combines Christian doctrine and ethics with cosmology; a compendious encyclopedia of medicine and natural science; a correspondence comprising several hundred letters to people in every stratum of society; two saints’ lives; several occasional writings; and, not least, a body of exquisite music that includes seventy liturgical songs and the first known morality play.” This is especially astounding considering that as far as Hildegard knew, no woman had ever written before.

Like many leaders of her day, Hildegard received various visions; these received the approval of the pope. Twenty-six of her visions—and her interpretation of these—form her most significant religious work, Scivias, which took ten years to complete.

Hildegard wrote to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa as well as to kings and clerics. She also, at age 60, began preaching tours on which she called for reform of the church.

The daughter house of Hildegard’s community continues today in Eibingen, Germany.

Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden

Voice for church, reform

One of the most erudite female saints of the medieval church, Bridget is considered perhaps the finest Scandinavian writer of her time.

She was married at age 13. The couple had eight children and experienced a religious conversion while on a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostela to celebrate their anniversary. Bridget’s husband entered a monastery, and she moved to a residence attached to it.

Here she experienced the first of her several visions of Christ and conceived of founding a new religious order dedicated to contemplating the passion of Christ and compassion of Mary. Christ himself dictated the rule of the order to her in a vision.

Bridget’s Revelations were quite popular in the Middle Ages. They consist of direct speeches by Christ, Mary, and John the Baptist, and striking visions of the torments of Christ and of sinful souls in hell.

She traveled to Rome and later to the Holy Land. In Rome she became an important supporter of the church and called for the pope’s return to Rome [from Avignon, site of the church’s “exile”]. Bridget called for church reform and chastised the pope for church corruption. “In thy curia arrogant pride rules,” she wrote Gregory XI, “insatiable cupidity and execrable luxury.” Yet Bridget designated the pope as supreme, and she was canonized shortly after her death in 1373.

Clare of Assisi

Famous colleague of St. Francis

Clare of Assisi was born as a member of the nobility in the Italian town of Assisi in 1194. At age 18, Clare became attracted to the ideals preached by her contemporary and compatriot Francis. Following his example, she renounced all worldly possessions.

Several years later she founded an order for women known as the Poor Ladies of Assisi (later called Clarisses or Poor Clares). Unlike the Franciscans, who were allowed to travel and to preach, Clare’s followers were required to practice their reformist evangelical ideals within the traditional monastic setting. Yet they lived lives of extreme poverty, more austere than any undertaken by women before. In 1228, Clare won from the pope the right to maintain this original vision of extreme poverty. Her order quickly spread throughout Europe; in Spain alone forty-seven convents were founded in the thirteenth century.

Clare composed the rule for her new order. She also wrote several exhortatory letters and her Testament, or collection of autobiographical reflections.

Margery Kempe

Colorful, controversial pilgrim

Accused by her contemporaries of fraud or heresy, and often ridiculed by later scholars as hysterical or even crazy, Margery Kempe was born in Lyon, England, c. 1373, and died after 1438. She was an illiterate laywoman turned religious enthusiast who dictated her spiritual autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe. It is the earliest known autobiography in English.

In her Book, Margery emerges as an intense, honest, devoted human being. Her conversion from religious apathy came when she was at the brink of death. Her subsequent religious odyssey took her to Rome, Jerusalem, Compostela [in Spain], just to mention a few places of pilgrimage.

Margery’s frequent fits of crying and shrieking while contemplating Christ’s sufferings, and her practice of admonishing people to return to the path of virtue, created difficulties for her. Her co-travelers almost threw her overboard, and they quickly abandoned her upon landing in the Holy Land.

Margery’s message is the exhortation to a simple, direct relationship with Christ based on unconditional faith and fervent love. She repeatedly downplays the importance of externals (such as fasting and the wearing of hair shirts), which, as Christ teaches her, are nothing compared to fervent love and devotion.

Other Leading Christian Women

Lioba (c. 700–782). At the request of Boniface, the “apostle to the Germans,” she traveled to Germany to head the convent of Tauberkirschofsheim. Her letters to Boniface survive, as does some of her devotional poetry. Her vita records that she was so devoted to the Scriptures she had younger nuns read them to her while she slept; if they skipped a word, she would awaken and reprimand them.

Anna Comnena (c. 1083– c. 1150), daughter of Emperor Alexius I of Byzantium, composed a history of her father’s reign. Called the Alexiad, the epic remains the chief primary source for our knowledge of the period.

Frau Ava (1100s), having lost her husband and eldest son in a crusade, retired to a life of prayer, probably near a monastery in Melk, Austria. She composed a poetic version of the New Testament.

Elizabeth of Thuringia (or Hungary) (1207–1231) was the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary. She was betrothed at age 4, and married at 14, to Ludwig, Count of Thuringen, who died six years later. Elizabeth devoted herself to the poor and the sick. According to one legend, Elizabeth was distributing bread to the poor, contrary to the direct orders of her husband’s brother, Heinrich Raspe, who feared her charitable acts would deplete the state treasury. When he confronted her, however, the loaves were miraculously turned into roses. In Marburg she established a hospital for the poor.

Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207– c.1280) is one of Germany’s most outspoken and famous visionaries. Her criticism of corrupt clergy earned her much hostility. While ailing and almost blind, she composed her main mystical work, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, a collection of visions, parables, reflections, and advice clothed in courtly images: Christ is emperor, king, knight, or lord; he bestows rich gifts and lovely garments on the deserving souls gathered at his court. She is an original thinker and ardent advocate of a personal, uncompromising, intense devotion to the service of God.

Hadewijch (writings c. 1221–1240) is probably the best known of the Dutch mystics. She was a beguine, part of a revival movement in which women chose lives of charity and prayer without belonging to an established religious order. Beguines often had reformist ideas; as a beguine, Hadewijch was subject to some criticism. In her letters, she encourages people to help the needy and to devote themselves to an ardent love of God. Her mystical writings center around the idea of minne, or love, which is the human soul’s longing for the Divine.

Gertrud “the Great” (1256–1302) spent her life in the Cistercian monastery of Helfta, Germany, a famous center of mysticism in the thirteenth century. Venerated by the people, Gertrud was viewed with some suspicion by the church hierarchy. Her visionary text, the Messenger of Divine Kindness, celebrates an intensely personal union with God.

Dr. Katharina M. Wilson is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia and editor of Medieval Women Writers (Georgia, 1984).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

All this blessed teaching of our Lord was shown to me in three parts, that is, by bodily vision and by words formed in my understanding and by spiritual vision. But 1 may not and cannot show the spiritual visions to you as plainly and fully as I should wish; but I trust in our Lord God Almighty that he will, out of his goodness and for love of you, make you accept it more spiritually and more sweetly than I can or may tell it to you. Julian of Norwich

Mysticism has been called “the science of the love of God,” and “the life which aims at union with God.” Mystics may be found in every religious tradition, sometimes as central participants but often on the periphery of accepted practice, for they map out new experiences of the divine.

There is no identifiable mystical type (although scholars at times have tried to identify one). Mystics may be women or men, educated or uneducated, from wealthy or deprived backgrounds. Mystical experiences may be primarily visual or auditory, or so abstract as to elude any verbal formulation. The mystical path may be based either upon developing love or on the growth of the intellect. Mystical experiences can occur spontaneously, unexpectedly, at any time and place; yet many religions endorse ascetic practices and modes of prayer that encourage the development of mystical experience in some people. All traditions seem to agree that mysticism is a speciai gift, not fully under the control of the recipient.

Why Mysticism Flourished

During some historical periods, mysticism seems more prevalent and more authoritative, and mystics are more needed by their communities. Valerie Marie Lagorio, in her essay, “The Medieval Continental Women Mystics,” quotes Evelyn Underhill in support of the idea that mysticism not only seems to intensify in certain periods, but is itself richly creative: “The great periods of mystical activity tend to correspond with the great periods of artistic, material, and intellectual civilization.… It is always as if [the mystics] were humanity’s finest flower; the product at which each great creative period of the race had aimed.”

One such period was the High Middle Ages in Europe (1100–1450), a time of great social change as the feudal system gave way to capitalism, cities, and a new middle class. We think of the Middle Ages as the age of faith, and so it was, but it was also an age of crisis. In such a context, mysticism was not a retreat from the negative aspects of reality, but a creative marshaling of energy in order to transform reality and one’s perception of it.

Mystics were the teachers of the age, inspired leaders who synthesized Christian tradition and proposed new models for the Christian community. We know some of the men—Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas—but we are not as familiar with the women, although they were actually more numerous. Hildegard of Bingen, Clare of Assisi, Beatrijs of Nazareth, Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich, and other women mystics drew on their experience of the divine to provide spiritual guidance for others. Such women became highly respected leaders of the faithful. Their role as prophets and healers was the one exception to women’s presumed inferiority in medieval society.

What Female Mystics Experienced

Medieval mysticism was primarily visual and affective; the mystic saw and felt truth, saw God or Christ or the saints, and was flooded with love for what she saw. So powerful was this love that she felt compelled to share it with others.

Indeed, perhaps the only voice women heard that told them to do something was God’s voice in visions. But God’s voice was the only one that was really necessary, for with divine permission and guidance, anything was possible. As Dame Julian of Norwich said in her Showings: “ … God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher … for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail. But I know very well that what I am saying I have received by the revelation of him who is the sovereign teacher … because I am a woman, ought I therefore to believe that I should not tell you of the goodness of God, when I saw at that same time that it is his will that it be known?”

We should not think of medieval women mystics primarily as hermits withdrawn into a private world of prayer and meditation. These active women had completed a lengthy apprenticeship in the religious life, and they were capable of being spiritually responsible for large numbers of people.

Although medieval women mystics came from different classes, in different parts of Europe, and experienced spiritual awakenings at different ages, many of them did not become great teachers until they reached middle age. As children they were marked by precocious piety, and their rebellion often took the form of asceticism. From adolescence through their thirties they often lived withdrawn or secluded lives; if they were married, they were absorbed in family responsibilities and childbearing. All this changed, however, around their fortieth year, when they had the freedom to be visible as active leaders and effectively offer spiritual advice to others.

Why Women Were Leaders

Unlike other periods of mystical revival, medieval mysticism was largely female. No one knows exactly why, but we can speculate on some of the factors involved.

Medieval men with religious vocations and leadership ability had a number of choices—they could be active or contemplative, priests, friars, monks, or hermits. Women who felt called to a religious life had one main option—to join a convent or a community of pious lay women. Thus, the primary approved form of religious life available to women was contemplative and enclosed. Medieval society believed women must be protected from violence and from their own sexuality, and women were thought to be “naturally” passive, meditative, and receptive.

Some aspects of convent life probably encouraged the development of mystical and leadership abilities. Until the fourteenth century, a religious community was the only place in which a woman would find a library, other scholars, and the opportunity to read and write. It was also the only place a woman had any privacy. The vow of celibacy exempted women from pregnancy and childbirth, and thus granted them much longer lives than those of married women. Convents also provided opportunities for leadership and teaching, whether in keeping accounts, tending the sick, or instructing children.

In late medieval Europe, women outnumbered men for the first time. Women found creative responses to this situation, and new religious movements of women began. The beguines in northern Europe, and Franciscan or Dominican tertiaries in southern Europe, lived in groups, supported themselves by manual labor, and devoted their lives to serving others and growing spiritually. Many famous medieval mystical writers belonged to these informal communities—Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena.

Finally, the spiritual practices recommended to medieval women (and possibly invented by them) encouraged the kind of growth and mental concentration that often led to visions and mystical experiences. We know that women’s practice of asceticism was more austere than men’s. Further, men in religious communities had a more intellectual education; the kind of meditation taught to women was visual and creative, not intellectual or abstract.

Four Great Mystics

The lives of the great women mystics are highly individualized, although there are some common themes in their writings.

The Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) began her religious life at age 7 or 8, when she joined her aunt Jutta, who was a recluse. Later their retreat was opened and turned into a convent, where Hildegard made her profession as a nun at age 14. Although she was unable to write German, and diffident about the correctness of her Latin, her dictated writings exhibit wide learning. While she claimed that all her knowledge came from a mystical source, she was familiar with the Scriptures, natural science, classical Latin literature, and neo-Platonic philosophy. She was taken seriously as a prophet by everyone, from Bernard of Clairvaux and the pope down to the humblest laborers. She began the Scivias, her major visionary and autobiographical work, when she was 42, but she had been having visions since she was 5. She insisted she saw her vision in spiritual and psychological wholeness, when she was fully conscious and aware of her surroundings. She distinguished between two grades of spiritual vision, her ecstatic awareness of “the Living Light” in which she could see nothing and, as Underhill writes, a “more diffused radiance which she calls the Shade of the Living Light, and within which her great allegorical visions were seen.”

Hadewijch of Antwerp was a Flemish beguine of the first part of the thirteenth century. We know almost nothing of her external life, but we have three books by her: Poems in Stanzas and Poems in Couplets; letters on the spiritual life known as Letters to a Young Beguine; and a book of visions. A brilliant poet who wrote in Dutch, she knew the latest poetry in Latin, Old French, and Provençal as well. As a mystic she believed that the soul, created by God in his own image, longs to be one with divine love again, “to become God with God,” as she put it.

Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1212–1282), the most famous of the German beguines and author of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, decided at 22 to devote her life to God. She went to Magdeburg, where she knew no one, to become a beguine. In 1270 she came to the convent of Helfta, perhaps advised to make such a retreat because of her outspoken criticism of corruption in the church. There are seven books of her autobiographical Flowing Light, written at different stages of her life, and utilizing all the poetic and narrative resources of her time—lyric poetry, dialogue, courtly allegory, even homely folk wisdom. The first page of The Flowing Light announces the danger to which Mechthild is exposed because she is a mystic: “I have been put on my guard about this book, and certain people have warned me that, unless I have it buried, it will be burnt. Yet,” she continues, “I in my weakness have written it, because I dared not hide the gift that is in it.”

The Franciscan mystic Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) joined the Third Order for worldly prestige, but when her mother, her husband, and her children died suddenly, her attachment to St. Francis and his order became more profound. She underwent a powerful conversion experience in 1285, and in 1291, when she was 43, she had a vision of God’s love for her as she was walking on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Francis of Assisi. Since she was illiterate, she dictated her experiences. The Book of the Experience of the Truly Faithful was read immediately and widely copied and circulated.

Message from the Mystics

We too are living in a time of rapid and unpredictable social and economic change. We can certainly take as a model the balance of isolation and community, of reflection and action, that we find in these medieval women. We can use their emphasis on the spiritual life as a progressive climb—sometimes a steep and arduous one. In the writings of these women, God always teaches through love and always stresses the self-worth of the human. We need that love badly, and we need to extend it to others.

Dr. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (Oxford, 1986).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Catherine of Siena was born in 1347. That year, according to writer Charles L. Mee, Jr., “in all likelihood, a flea riding on the hide of a black rat entered the Italian port of Messina.… The flea had a gut full of the bacillus Yersinia pestis.” With that rat, flea, and bacillus, came the most feared plague on record. In just three years, 1348 to 1350, the Black Death killed more than one-third of the entire population between Iceland and India. Remarkably, the young Catherine survived the onslaught.

Symptoms of the Black Death

What was this plague like, this unseen killer which so changed the fourteenth-century world?

“The first symptoms of bubonic plague often appear within several days,” writes Mee in Smithsonian (February 1990). They include “headache and a general feeling of weakness, followed by aches and chills in the upper leg and groin, a white coating on the tongue, rapid pulse, slurred speech confusion, fatigue, apathy, and a staggering gait. A blackish pustule usually will form at the point of the flea bite. By the third day, the lymph nodes begin to swell … The heart begins to flutter rapidly as it tries to pump blood through swollen, suffocating tissues. Subcutaneous hemorrhaging occurs, causing purplish blotches on the skin. The victim’s nervous system begins to collapse, causing dreadul pain and bizarre neurological disorders.… By the fourth or fifth day, wild anxiety and terror overtake the sufferer—and then a sense of resignation, as the skin blackens and the rictus of death settles on the body.”

Society Unraveling

“It is hard to grasp the strain that the plague put on the physical and spiritual fabric of society,” Mee concludes. “People went to bed perfectly healthy and were found dead in the morning. Priests and doctors who came to minister to the sick, so the wild stories ran, would contract the plague with a single touch and die sooner than the person they had come to help.”

People barred themselves in their houses or fled to the country. A fourteenth-century writer, Jean le Bel, wrote that “one caught it from another, which is why few people dared to help or visit the sick.”

Yet when another wave of the plague struck Catherine’s hometown of Siena in 1374, she determined to stay. Following the example of the early Franciscans and Dominicans, she and her followers stayed to nurse the ill and bury the dead. Respected nineteenth-century historian Philip Schaff wrote that during the plague Catherine “was indefatigable by day and night, healed those of whom the physicians despaired, and she even raised the dead.”

Such courageous service was nothing new to Catherine. When she began her ministry, writes Caroline Marshall, “she performed the most distressing nursing chores among those incurably ill of cancer and leprosy. Her patients were in pain and often abusive. She believed that these experiences helped her to share in the suffering of the crucified Christ and were, therefore, a great help along her path to the mystical union with God, which was her ultimate goal.”

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

A middle-level peasant probably lived in a three-bay house, the commonest type, [with three areas separate but open to each other].… Dwellings commonly still lodged animals as well as human beings, but the [barn] was more often partitioned off and sometimes positioned at right angles to the living quarters.…

Interiors were lighted by a few windows, shuttered but unglazed, and by doors, often open during the daytime, through which children and animals wandered freely. Floors were of beaten earth covered with straw or rushes. In the center, a fire of wood or of peat … burned on a raised stone hearth, vented through a hole in the roof. Some hearths were crowned by hoods or funnels to channel the smoke to the makeshift chimney, which might be capped by a barrel with its ends knocked out. The atmosphere of the house was perpetually smoky from the fire burning all day as water, milk, or porridge simmered in pots on a trivet or in footed brass or iron kettles. At night a fire-cover, a large round ceramic lid with holes, could be put over the blaze.

Trials of Domestic Life

A thirteenth-century writer, contrasting the joys of a nun’s life with the trials of marriage, pictured the domestic crisis of a wife who hears her child scream and hastens into the house to find “the cat at the bacon and the dog at the hide. Her cake is burning on the [hearth] stone, and her calf is licking up the milk. The pot is boiling over into the fire, and the churl her husband is scolding. ”

Medieval sermons, too, yield a glimpse of peasant interiors: the hall “black with smoke,” the cat sitting by the fire and often singeing her fur, the floor strewn with green rushes and sweet flowers at Easter, or straw in winter. They picture the housewife at her cleaning: “She takes a broom and drives all the dirt of the house together; and, lest the dust rise … she casts it with great violence out of the door.” But the work is never done: “For, on Saturday afternoon, the servants shall sweep the house and cast all the dung and the filth behind the door in a heap. But what then? Come the capons and the hens and scrape it around and make it as ill as it was before.” We see the woman doing laundry, soaking the clothes in lye (homemade with ashes and water), beating and scrubbing them, and hanging them up to dry. The dog, driven out of the kitchen with a basinful of hot water, fights over a bone, lies stretched in the sun with flies settling on him, or eagerly watches people eating until they throw him a morsel, “whereupon he turns his back.”

Around the Dinner Table

The family ate seated on benches or stools at a trestle table, disassembled at night. Chairs were rarities. A cupboard or hutch held wooden and earthenware bowls, jugs, and wooden spoons. Hams, bags, and baskets hung from the rafters, away from rats and mice. Clothing, bedding, towels, and table linen were stored in chests. A well-to-do peasant might own silver spoons, brass pots, and pewter dishes.

When they bathed, which was not often, medieval villagers used a barrel with the top removed. To lighten the task of carrying and heating water, a family probably bathed serially in the same water.

At night, the family slept on straw pallets, either on the floor of the hall or in a loft at one end, gained by a ladder. Husband and wife shared a bed, sometimes with the baby, who alternatively might sleep in a cradle by the fire.

What They Ate—And Didn’t

The thirteenth-century villager’s aim was not exactly self-sufficiency, but self-supply of the main necessities of life. These were bread, pottage or porridge, and ale.… In spring and summer a variety of vegetables was available: cabbage, lettuce, leeks, spinach, and parsley.… Nuts, berries, and roots were gathered in the woods.… Except for poisonous or very bitter plants, “anything that grew went into the pot, even primrose and strawberry leaves.” The pinch came in the winter and early spring, when the grain supply ran low and wild supplements were not available.

Stronger or weaker, more flavorful or blander, the pottage kettle supplied many village families with their chief sustenance. If possible, every meal including breakfast was washed down with weak ale, home-brewed or purchased from a neighbor, but water often had to serve.

The most serious shortage was protein.… Besides the shortage of protein, medieval diets were often lacking in lipids, calcium, and vitamins A, C, and D.… It was a hungry world, made hungrier by intermittent crop failures.…

What Peasants Wore

[Peasant men wore] a short tunic, belted at the waist, and either short stockings that ended just below the knee or long hose fastened at the waist to a cloth belt. A hood or cloth cap, thick gloves or mittens, and leather shoes with heavy wooden soles completed the costume.

The women wore long loose gowns belted at the waist, sometimes sleeveless tunics with a sleeved undergarment.… Underclothing, when it was worn, was usually of linen, outer garmeets were woolen.

A poor peasant’s garb … might resemble that of the poor man in Langland’s fourteenth-century allegory, Piers Plowman, whose … hair stuck through the holes in his hood and whose toes stuck through those in his heavy shoes, whose hose hung loose, whose rough mittens had worn-out fingers covered with mud, and who was himself “all smeared with mud as he followed the plow,” while beside him walked his wife carrying the goad, in a tunic tucked up to her knees, wrapped in a winnowing sheet to keep out the cold, her bare feet bleeding from the icy furrows.

The Wedding Day

Peasant couples usually spoke their vows at the church door, the most public place in the village. Here the priest inquired whether there were any impediments, meaning kinship in a degree forbidden by the church. The bridegroom named the dower [dowry] which he would provide for his wife, giving her as a token a ring and a small sum of money to be distributed to the poor. The ring, according to a fourteenth-century preacher, must be “put and set by the husband upon the fourth finger of the woman, to show that a true love and cordial affection be between them, because, as doctors say, there is a vein coming from the heart of a woman to the fourth finger, and therefore the ring is put on the same finger, so that she should keep unity and love with him, and he with her. ”

Vows were then exchanged, and the bridal party might proceed into the church, where a nuptial Mass was celebrated.… The ceremony was usually followed by a feast, a “bride ale,” in a private house or a tavern …

Birth and Baptism

In the village as in castle and city, babies were born at home, their birth attended by midwives. Men were excluded from the lying-in chamber. Literary evidence suggests that the woman in labor assumed a sitting or crouching position. Childbirth was dangerous for both mother and child. The newborn infant was immediately prepared for baptism, lest it die in a state of original sin. If a priest could not be located in time, someone else must perform the ceremony, a contingency for which water must be kept ready. If the baptizer did not know the formula in Latin, he must say it in English or French: “I christen thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.” …

Under normal circ*mstances the child was washed and sometimes (though not universally) swaddled, the godparents were summoned, and godmother or midwife carried the baby to the church, where the font was kept ever ready. The mother was not present, and in fact was not permitted to enter the church until several weeks later, when she had undergone the ritual of “churching,” purification after childbirth.

Preliminary baptismal rites were performed, as in marriage, at the church door. The priest blessed the child, put salt in its mouth to symbolize wisdom and exorcise demons, read a Bible text, and ascertained the child’s name and the godparents’ qualifications. The party then moved into the church to the baptismal font. The child was immersed, the godmother dried it and dressed it in a christening garment, and the priest anointed it with holy oil. The ceremony was completed at the altar with the godparents making the profession of faith for the child.

The christening party then repaired to the parents’ house for feasting.…

Rearing Children

Unlike the lady of the castle or many city women, the peasant mother normally nursed her own children. Only if the mother had no milk, or if she died, was a wet nurse employed. The evidence of the coroners’ rolls indicates that during the first year of life, infants were frequently left alone in the house while their parents worked in the fields, looked after the animals, or did other chores. Older children were more likely to be left with a sitter, usually a neighbor or a young girl.…

A fourteenth-century sermon pictures a mother and her child: “In winter, when the child’s hands are cold, the mother takes him a straw or a rush and bids him warm it, not for love of the straw, to warm it, but to warm the child’s hands [by pressing them together].” When the child falls ill, “the mother for her sick child takes a candle, and makes a vow in prayers.”

Small children played; older ones did chores. In their teens, both boys and girls moved into the adult work world, the girls in and around the house, the boys in the fields.

Sickness and Death

The Middle Ages produced the world’s first hospitals and medical schools, but these important advances hardly affected life in the village. Doctors practiced in city and in court. Villagers were left to their own medical devices. Even the barbers who combined shaving with bloodletting (a principal form of therapy) and toothpulling (the sole form of dentistry) were rarely seen in villages.…

Life was short. Even if a peasant survived infancy and childhood to reach the age of 20, he could not expect to live much beyond 45, when old age (senectus) began.…

When death was imminent, the priest was sent for, and arrived wearing surplice and stole, carrying the blessed sacrament, preceded by a server carrying a lantern and ringing a hand bell.…

Village funerals were usually starkly simple. The body, sewed in a shroud, was carried into the church on a bier, draped with a black pall. Mass was said, and occasionally a funeral sermon was delivered. One in John Myrc’s collection, Festiall, ends: “Good men, as ye all see, here is a mirror to us all: a corpse brought to the church. God have mercy on him, and bring him into his bliss that shall last for ever.… Wherefore each man and woman that is wise, make him ready thereto; for we all shall die, and we know not how soon.”

A villager was buried in a plain wooden casket or none at all, in the churchyard, called the “cemetery,” from coemeterium (dormitory), the sleeping place of the Christian dead. Here men and women could slumber peacefully, their toil finished, until the day of resurrection.

Frances and Joseph Gies are the authors of many hooks on the Middle Ages including Life in a Medieval Village (Harper & Row 1990) from which this article is excerpted by permission.

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

The first autobiography in the English language was written by a Christian woman, Margery Kempe, who lived in the early 1400s.

In the early Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for an abbess (the female head of a religious community) to rule “double” communities of both men and women. One who did so was Hilda of Whitby (614–680), whose abbey became famous for its learning and libraries. Five future bishops were trained in her community, and kings and rulers sought her advice.

Many women joined the Crusades. They began to be required to gain their husbands’ consent before leaving.

Christian women often corresponded with—and gave advice to—the most prominent leaders of their day. Heloise (better known for her relationship with famous philosopher Peter Abelard) maintained a significant exchange with Peter the Venerable, the influential abbot of Cluny. The two discussed theology and spirituality at length. Anselm, later Archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109), corresponded with Queen Matilda on matters of religion.

Of all the recognized saints between 500 and 1200, about 15 percent were women.

Some Anglo-Saxon queens appointed bishops. Queen Emma of Normandy, one of the most powerful people in England in the early eleventh century, clearly did so. So did Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor, the English king who built Westminster Abbey.

Brigid of Ireland was said to have been consecrated a bishop. Brigid, who was born in the late 400s, founded the first nunnery in Ireland and served as an abbess. According to one account, Bishop Mel conferred the episcopal order upon the abbess, even though she had requested only the order of repentance; “and hence Brigid’s successor is always entitled to have episcopal orders and the honour due a bishop.”

Boniface, the great missionary known as “the apostle to the Germans,” specifically requested that women be sent to aid him in converting the pagan Saxons. One of the approximately thirty women who went was Lioba, who became so widely respected that she was invited by Charlemagne’s queen to visit the royal court.

Hrotsvit, a German Christian woman who lived in the tenth century, wrote verse, history, and, in fact, the only dramas composed in all of Europe from the fourth to the eleventh centuries. (Hrotsvit is a pen name she assumed—it means “loud voice!”)

The first English book known to be written by a woman was written by a Christian, the influential writer and visionary Julian of Norwich.

Joan of Arc’s father ordered her brothers to drown her as a young girl. Only their failure to do so allowed her to grow up, and at age 17 save France from military destruction. Mark Twain, after twelve years of research on Joan’s life, concluded that her life was “the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One.”

Almost all European Christians, from the mid-thirteenth century on, believed there had been a woman pope. Pope “Joan,” disguised as a man and known as Pope John, was said to have begun her reign in 855 (other versions said 1100). Her alleged reign—for almost three years—ended when she gave birth while riding in procession. The story was so widely held that a bust of Pope Joan was placed in Siena cathedral in about 1400, and John Hus spoke of her while on trial shortly before his death. Not until the mid-1500s was the story repudiated.

The Waldensians, a group beginning in the twelfth century that has been described as “Protestants before the Reformation,” were charged with allowing women to preach.

In the later Middle Ages, some Christian women chose lives of prayer and solitary confinement in their pursuit of holiness. These anchoresses, as they were known, often lived in a small room attached to a church. Windows allowed them to look into the sanctuary, to view the services there, and to look out into the village, to be able to buy food and necessary supplies.

The first known morality play, an important form of drama in the late medieval period, was written by a woman Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century German abbess.

Holy women so valued their virginity that in some extreme cases they cut or disfigured themselves so they would not be molested by marauding invaders of their monasteries. One who did so was Ebba the Younger, abbess of a remote monastery in Scotland during the wave of Danish invasions in the late ninth century.

Fara, a saint in the late 600s, founded a joint community of men and women in the north of France, where she ruled as abbess and assumed priestly and episcopal powers, hearing confessions and excommunicating members. Abbesses continued to hold considerable authority; as late as the thirteenth century, certain abbesses had to be halted from hearing confessions of their nuns.

Anna Comnena, daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexius I, wrote the most detailed history of the church of her time.

Women made extensive pilgrimages—often with small retinues—to the Holy Land. One such pilgrim was Margery Kempe, who traveled (without her husband) first in England and then to Rome and Jerusalem.

Women played a role in helping to end the “Babylonian Captivity” of the church, the nearly-70-year period in which the papacy was exiled at Avignon, France, in the shadow of French royal power. Birgitta (or Bridget) of Sweden strongly urged Pope Clement VI to return the papal see to Rome. Later, Catherine of Siena spent three months in Avignon and successfully persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (the twelfth-century queen of England and France, and generous supporter of Fontrevault Abbey) wore the color of mourning—white—to her wedding. She thus set a precedent for brides in all centuries since.

Jeannette L. Angell is a doctoral candidate in history and liturgics at the School of Theology, Boston University.

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Catherine of Siena lived her remarkable Christian life during the chaos and violence of the fourteenth century. While the medieval order was dying, she labored for peace, reform, and the renewal of the human spirit.

Following Christ’s instruction, Catherine believed it was her duty to reform the church, to evangelize, and to comfort the sick, poor, and condemned. She was an activist in an age when a woman’s religious vocation was supposed to be confined and apart from the world. Warmed by divine love from her intimate experience of God, Catherine proclaimed a personal faith in Jesus Christ that touches contemporary Christians with its conviction and immediacy.

Youthful Devotion

She was born Caterina di Icopo di Benincasa in the spring of 1347. Her home in Tuscany was torn by civil and ecclesiastical conflict. The great Italian city-states, including Catherine’s own Siena, were making an uneasy transition from feudal society and economy to early modern republicanism and commercial capitalism. Catherine and her generation of Italians endured frequent wars and threats of invasion.

Catherine’s birth into a middle-class wool dyer’s family caused scarcely a ripple; she was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. While still a small girl, about 7, Catherine was touched by the extraordinary movement of the Holy Spirit in her community and saw a vision of Jesus with Peter, Paul, and John the evangelist. She announced her determination to live some sort of special religious life. Alarmed, her father Jacobo and mother Lupa tried to divert her into the customary preparation for marriage and children. In spite of coercion and punishment, during which she was forced to act as a maid in her parents’ house, she remained steadfast. At age 15 she even cut off her hair to thwart pressures to marry.

Choosing the “Third Way”

The early death of Catherine’s sister Bonaventura, a model young wife, appeared to seal Catherine’s determination to enter a religious vocation where life might seem more than a brief, transitory experience. The great question was, What kind of religious life?

Catherine did not want to be an ordinary nun, either active or contemplative. And the exotic life of the perpetually enclosed anchorite (see “Terms of the Religious Life”) did not appeal to her. Her childhood experiences of religion predicted a mystical approach to the faith. At the same moment, Catherine was an active person, in body as well as mind. Christian service, traditionally offered by religious women to the poor and sick, attracted her.

Her cousin and first confessor, Tommaso della Fonte, was a Dominican priest, and he encouraged her to think in terms of the great mendicant reform orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic. Committed to preaching and service, these begging orders represented the last popular internal reform in the church prior to the Protestant Reformation. In 1363, Catherine joined the Third Order of the Dominicans. Thus, she chose a “third way,” the life of the religious lay woman.

The Third Order provided a satisfying way for lay people to participate in the formal religious life. Catherine could live at home and direct her own activities. She was younger (age 16) than her fellows and rather bossy, but from the first she became an influence and formed her own famiglia, those men and women who found her especially appealing and devout.

Her spiritual family included many old friends, and new people, of whom Bartolomeo Dominici was most important. He joined Catherine in 1368 as her second confessor. Young and brilliant, Bartolomeo encouraged his charge to expand her horizons. During this period, Catherine learned to read. Precisely what she read can only be deduced from her later writings. However, it is clear she read the Bible, especially the Gospels. Her favorite apostolic sources were John and Paul. Of the church fathers, she became familiar with Gregory the Great and Augustine. Her language also reveals that she became deeply familiar with the popular preachers of the day.

Calling for Conversion

From 1370 to 1374, Catherine continued serving the poor of Siena. However, she became increasingly interested in evangelism; the conversion of all sorts of sinners preoccupied her. Catherine did not have a sense of the profound conditions of class and status that defined the people of her time. In a kind, pedantic, scolding way she entreated all people to repent and be saved.

At this moment, Neri di Landoccio Pagliaresi, a Tuscan poet of some fame, joined her spiritual family. He became her secretary and greatly expedited her correspondence. She had not as yet learned to write. To Neri she dictated the letters that carried her ministry throughout Italy.

From these early letters we can discern the great themes of Catherine’s ministry. She wrote to everyone, pleading for personal conversion and public reform. Sermons and advice were directed evenly at family and friends, princes, nuns, warlords, the pope, and quite ordinary sinners whom she did not know but about whom she had heard. The core of her thought was not original, but she provocatively synthesized theological ideas in a fresh and lively rhetoric.

Catherine’s Theology

At the heart of Catherine’s teaching was the image of Christ the redeemer—ablaze with fiery charity, eager sacrifice, and unqualified forgiveness. In Christ’s sacrifice, life was engrafted into death so that we who were dead acquired life. And it was not the cross or nails that held Christ to the tree; those were not strong enough to hold the God-Man. No, it was love that held him there.

Catherine’s theology included these motifs: truth, virtue, and love are primary manifestations of God; love for God and love for neighbor are indivisible; the church is the one indispensable vehicle for continuing Christ’s life in the world.

Catherine became so popular that she was encouraged to attend the general chapter of the Dominicans that met in Florence in 1374. While there, she met a young priest, Raymond of Capua, who was appointed by the head of the Dominican Order as her third confessor. In Raymond, Catherine found her most sympathetic friend and her chief biographer.

Should Women Take on Missions?

Her return to Siena was darkened by a visitation of the Black Death, which had first struck the city in the year of her birth. Catherine and her followers stayed in town to care for the sick and the dead. (See “The Black Death.”)

When the crisis abated, she began to consider the larger topics of public reform. Doubtlessly, she had heard these discussed in Florence. She contemplated the whole of Italy as an arena for her ministry.

At first, Catherine was hurt by criticism that while she, a woman, might do good, even evangelize, at home under the protection of her relatives and followers, it was shameful for her to contemplate distant missions. Typically, she turned inward to prayer and contemplation. Finally, she was able to report that God had answered her entreaties as follows: “Does it not depend on My will where I shall pour out my grace? With me there is no longer male or female, lower and upper classes, but all are equal in My sight.”

With Raymond and two other comrades, Tommaso and Bartolomeo, she set out for Pisa to preach a crusade. It was natural for Catherine to cherish the crusading principle, the most romantic cause of her age. As the times grew more violent, the crusades also offered hope for an instant solution to the problem of an oversupply of fighting men in Europe. In a letter to the most infamous mercenary of the day, John Hawkwood, she argued that he might be transposed into a hero, a soldier of the faith, if he would quit Italy and turn his weapons on the infidel. Like the greatest of medieval reformers, Francis of Assisi, Catherine dreamed of the liberation of the Holy Land and its restoration to Christian hands.

Spiritual “Betrothal” to Christ

In all her public works, Catherine was sustained by intense mystical experiences. During prayer, she often collapsed in rapture. Indeed, in her letters, and probably in her sermons, Catherine was transported into ecstasy. During one such instance, she envisioned her own spiritual espousal or betrothal to Christ. This was a familiar image for medieval people. It represented to Catherine the union with the Godhead that all mystics sought to achieve through intense and loving contemplation. To modern Christians such imagery may seem inappropriate, but late medieval faith often expressed union with God in terms from the most intimate human union.

Mystical experience always led Catherine back into the world to serve. As she wrote of herself: “ … she addressed petitions to the most high and eternal Father, holding up her desire for herself first of all—for she knew she could be of no service to her neighbors in teaching or example or prayer, without first doing herself the service of attaining virtue.” With virtue, actions were done for God’s sake alone. “The important thing is not to love Me for your own sake, or your neighbor for your own sake, but to love Me for Myself, yourself for Myself, your neighbor for Myself.”

Freeing a Captive Church

In common with most reformers of her day, Catherine believed that the so-called Babylonian Captivity of the papacy was the great ecclesiastical tragedy of the times and the direct source of much clerical corruption. In the early fourteenth century, the papacy had removed to Avignon, divorcing itself from the special sanctity of its Roman roots. Popes became captive to the French monarchy.

In 1376 Catherine attempted to mediate a quarrel between Pope Gregory XI and the city of Florence, which he had placed under interdict. In a series of letters, Catherine boldly instructed the pope on the underlying problems of the church and charged him to return to Rome and deal with them: “Respond to the Holy Spirit who is calling you! I tell you: Come! Come! Come! Don’t wait for time, because time isn’t waiting for you.”

One year later, after Catherine had visited with him in Avignon, Gregory XI finally entered Rome. It was the great moment of her public life. She continued to act for the pope among the people of Tuscany and almost lost her life when, in Florence, she was attacked by an anti-papal mob.

Her Last Effort

During this difficult and dangerous time, Catherine learned to write. She began to describe her mystical experiences in The Dialogue, which she referred to simply as “my book.” Even as her public work failed and her health began to collapse, Catherine’s spiritual life intensified. She dictated to secretaries most of this great summary of her Christian life. Its essence lay in the simplicity of Catherine’s theology:

“A soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God’s honor and the salvation of souls. She has for some time exercised herself in virtue and has become accustomed to dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge in order to know better God’s goodness toward her, since upon knowledge follows love. And loving, she seeks to pursue truth and clothe herself in it.”

In 1378 Gregory XI died and was replaced by Urban VI, a difficult and rather cruel man. A rival pope soon appeared. It was the beginning of the Great Schism, and Catherine moved to Rome to assist Pope Urban. In spite of acute disappointment, she was able to complete The Dialogue.

Her public reforms had failed. The papacy was in worse condition than it had ever been. Nevertheless, Catherine’s last effort, The Dialogue remained as a tribute to the grace and power of her experience of God.

Catherine died in Rome on April 29, 1380 leaving the world in greater disorder and pain than she had found it. She left also a record of her splendid personal achievement, a life in Christ, detailed in letters and The Dialogue.

In years to come she would be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, and in 1970 she was made one of two women which that church recognizes as Doctors of Theology. For Christians everywhere, Catherine of Siena provides a special and moving insight into the life of faith.

Caroline T. Marshall is Professor of History at James Madison University in Harrisonburg Virginia, and a contributor to The History of Christianity (Lion, 1977).

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

I was dreaming of palm trees, sandy beaches, and snorkeling in the Caribbean when the jangling telephone transported me back to the more sober environment of northern New Jersey. I grabbed the phone and glanced at the clock; it was 4:25 A.M.

The voice of the frantic young man at the other end of the line quivered with desperation: “Pastor, I must see you this morning. I can’t tell you about it over the phone, but believe me, it’s important!”

This was the beginning of a not-so-unusual Monday morning after an exhausting weekend of public ministry.

Counseling is one of the most labor-intensive tasks of pastoral ministry. Four or five sessions can easily represent a full day of ministry for the average pastor. And often the circle of those involved expands: one person’s problem can become my family’s problem, or even the congregation’s problem.

It’s easy, in the midst of a counseling crisis, for pastors to feel as if they are sitting in a small boat paddling against an overpowering current inexorably drawing them to the waterfall called Sunday morning. As we furiously paddle, we think of the sermon we must prepare. It can be an altogether frightening, frazzling, and frustrating experience.

There is, however, a way to slow the current. Here are several tips that help me do just that, ideas I’ve picked up from professional counselors and graduates of the Academy of Formidable Impacts, otherwise known as the School of Hard Knocks.

Set firm limits

I begin by establishing the maximum number of counseling appointments I can handle during a week. A few one-hour sessions easily mushroom into six hours when we consider the follow-up and consultation such work often requires.

So I’ve learned to limit myself to a maximum of four one-hour sessions per week (three scheduled appointments, with one of those hours reserved for emergencies). My secretary places all others requesting counseling on a waiting list (usually I can see them in two or three weeks) or refers them to our counseling center. Attempts to counsel more inevitably cause a decline in both the quality of my counseling and the performance of my other duties.

Most weeks contain at least one emergency that takes up the hour set aside for this. The challenge is to differentiate between the genuine emergency and the spur-of-the-moment drop-in. Because our church is located alongside a four-lane highway, we get our share of both. For instance, a young man recently appeared at our office door and seemed on the verge of an emotional breakdown. This was clearly an emergency. He received my undivided attention for nearly an hour as we secured help for him.

Limiting appointments also means I have to communicate firm limits to counselees. Our secretary tells people the beginning and ending time of their appointments. I am also careful during the session to keep an eye on the clock. I find it is easy to insert into one of my questions or comments the simple statement, “Since we have about ten minutes left in our session . . .”

This policy not only protects my time, it aids the counseling process. It’s amazing how quickly people can “unload” when they are aware they must do so within fifty minutes. Time limits are beneficial to both parties.

I find I must also plan carefully the hours at which I’m available to counsel. My schedule is like my clothes hamper: as the week progresses, the more packed it becomes. And during the latter part of the week, the sermon requires my concentration.

Consequently, the church secretary places all my counseling appointments either on Monday afternoon or Tuesday evenings between 6:45 and 8:30 p.m. That means people may have to rearrange their schedules in order to make an appointment. But I’ve noticed that people routinely do just that in order to benefit from most other professional services. I’ve decided I can ask the same level of flexibility from my counselees.

Recognize the extent of your capabilities

No one would expect paramedics to perform complex brain surgery. They’ve been trained only to treat life-threatening trauma and various other emergencies. Pastoral counselors, like paramedics, have limits. Our training is usually not extensive enough for us to perform long-term or in-depth therapy. Both pastoral counselors and potential counselees must recognize this limitation.

I’ve tried, then, to cultivate relationships with competent and credentialed counselors to whom I can refer people. I have a general rule of maintaining no more than one or two long-term counseling relationships, and I refer to other counselors the clients who seem to need in-depth treatment.

Interestingly, many pastors are reluctant to refer clients to professionals; they feel they’ve somehow failed as pastors if they cannot meet the needs of their congregants. Yet the same pastors wouldn’t hesitate to refer a client with a fractured leg to a local hospital. I’m not bashful to refer a person with a fractured emotional life to a competent professional counselor.

Pastors also are sometimes reluctant to refer clients to a professional counselor who charges. I’ve overcome “fee phobia” by remembering that it is in the best interests of long-term clients to pay for professional services. They tend to work harder, keep more appointments, and show more rapid progress when they have to pay for counseling.

So at our church, we offer two kinds of counseling: (1) pastoral counseling, for which we charge no fee, and (2) professional counseling for which we charge on a sliding-scale rate, based on the client’s financial circ*mstances.

Develop a resource file

I vividly recall my first experience with a suicidal individual. Dave sat in my office, convinced his only viable option was to take his own life. My mind raced as I tried to think of what to do. Fortunately we were able to secure immediate help. Since then, we’ve formulated a plan to deal with such emergencies.

The potentially suicidal or homicidal person needs immediate hospitalization, and sometimes the police need to be brought in. So, I want to have at hand information necessary to deal with such people. The safety of counselees and those near them is paramount in such crisis situations.

Thus, my resource file contains names of private counselors, state agencies, mental health units of local hospitals, and the local police. And I make it a point to establish rapport with resource persons by telephone before I need to use their services.

I’ve also found it helpful to keep handy the phone numbers and addresses of organizations, like Alcoholics Anonymous, that specialize in helping people involved in substance abuse. I also know how to contact agencies that specialize in protecting abused children or spouses. Part of my resource file also includes information regarding local and federal child-protection statutes. Some states consider counselors criminally negligent if they fail to report even a suspected case of child abuse.

Remember the young man who phoned me early on a Monday morning? His emergency had been brewing for months, but he was able to wait until Tuesday evening for an appointment. I later referred him to a professional counselor, to whom he pays a reasonable fee. Thanks to his recent stay in the hospital to treat his chronic depression, he is now improving.

What made this possible? I’m not a professional counselor, nor did I give unlimited time to this young man. No, I was able to help this man and remain an effective pastor of my church because I set limits, recognized my capabilities, and knew where to turn for expertise.

So, besides helping troubled people who seek my counsel, my Sunday morning waterfall now seems more like a ride through mere rapids.

–Armin B. Sommer

Grace Baptist Church on the Mount

Stanhope, New Jersey

Leadership Spring 1991 p. 132-3

Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.