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Women religious virtuosae from the middle ages: a case pattern and analytic model of types
Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Barbara R. Walters
VIRTUOSAE IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY: A COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL APPROACH
Comparative historical analysis of virtuosae exemplars using sociological methods (Skocpol 1984; Hall 1999) offers a promising direction. Bynum (1982) proposed a method approximate to the comparative historical method in her comparison of historically accurate and detailed case studies. However, as a historian, Bynum selected closely related cases, exemplars from the nuns of Helfta. Likewise McGinn (1998) focused exclusively on mystics from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Here five cases have been selected to represent the range of variation within and outside the fold of the ecclesia. The narratives presented for each case focus on distinctive features and patterns believed to be significant in the constitution of a prototype. The exemplars include: Juliana of Mont Cornillon (c.1193-1258), the unknown author and congregation for the "Mosan Poems" (mid-thirteenth century), Hadewijch of Brabant (first half of the thirteenth century), Gertrude of Helfta (1256-1303), and Margaret Porette (last quarter o f the thirteenth century). They will first be described in narratives that capture a pattern, and then analyzed to show the overlapping and distinctive elements of each type.
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Juliana of Mont Cornillon
The principal source of information about Juliana is her vita (Delville 1999; Newman 1988), which was initially written in vernacular French, most likely by her friend Eve, and then translated into Latin between 1261 and 1264. Juliana was born in 1193 at Retinne, a small village near Liege, the second daughter of wealthy but not aristocratic parents. At the age of five she and her sister Agnes were orphaned and placed by relatives in a newly founded Augustinian monastery. The monastery functioned as a leprosarium and Juliana served there as a canoness until ousted during a conflict with townspeople.
Juliana was reputed by all who knew her to be of prodigious intellect and capacious memory. She mastered French and Latin at an early age and by late adolescence had read Saint Augustine as well as memorizing at least the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and twenty sermons by Saint Bernard. Juliana was intensely devoted to the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus during the Eucharist, a consistent theme in the vitae of thirteenth-century Liege women (Roisin 1947). The official Church recognizes Juliana for her leadership role in the movement to establish the Feast of Corpus Christi, first celebrated in Liege in 1246; she was canonized in the nineteenth century. The vita reports this as the outcome of recurring visions and the outcome of her long-term ascetic fasting, contemplation and direct dialogue with Jesus. Juliana believed herself to be God's instrument.
Juliana was extremely well connected with the local church hierarchy and especially with the Dominicans, who initiated celebration of the new feast in Liege and worked to spread its celebration and indulgence throughout Germany and the surrounding environs. In Liege she overlapped with a number of important theologians including Hugh of Saint Cher and Jacques Panteleon, who later became Pope Urban IV. She was also closely connected to the Cistercians who buried her in a section of their cemetery at Villers reserved for saints. During most of her adult life she suffered persecution, not from religious authorities but from the townspeople, who sought control of the monastery whose wealth had been enhanced by her dowry.
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