Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages

by Dyan Elliott

Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy's most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women's claims to be in direct communication with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages female mystics were frequently mistrusted, derided, and in danger of their lives. The witch hunts were just around the corner.


While studies of sanctity and heresy tend to be undertaken separately, Proving Woman brings these two avenues of inquiry together by associating the downward trajectory of holy women with medieval society's progressive reliance on the inquisitional procedure. Inquisition was soon used for resolving most questions of proof. It was employed for distinguishing saints and heretics; it underwrote the new emphasis on confession in both sacramental and judicial spheres; and it heralded the reintroduction of torture as a mechanism for extracting proof through confession.


As women were progressively subjected to this screening, they became ensnared in the interlocking web of proofs. No aspect of female spirituality remained untouched. Since inquisition determined the need for tangible proofs, it even may have fostered the kind of excruciating illnesses and extraordinary bodily changes associated with female spirituality. In turn, the physical suffering of holy women became tacit support for all kinds of earthly suffering, even validating temporal mechanisms of justice in their most aggressive forms. The widespread adoption of inquisitional mechanisms for assessing female spirituality eventuated in a growing confusion between the saintly and heretical and the ultimate criminalization of female religious expression.

Genres: History, Religion, Medieval History, Nonfiction, Christianity, Medieval, Gender

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2004

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just cynical right now do to the amount of reading I'm doing to prep for my MA exams, but I found this book ok at best. I felt like I could have gotten all I needed out of this book just by reading his introduction and conclusion without having to read the 250 or so pages in between. It was slow and dragged even more than the average text like this. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have to read it.

[Denise Kettering · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book centers around the notion of inquisition and its importance in the way that it shaped and informed understandings of women in the medieval period. Dyan Elliott discusses how women were the primary tools to help enable the transition from a confessional to an inquisitional culture. Although the book is very illuminating and I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Elisabeth of Hungary, at times the connections that she makes could be done so more clearly and at times her main point gets obscured by other things. The introduction and conclusion really point to the main ideas and conclusions of the book, but at times in the main part of the text, the reader has to dig a bit to hang on to those points. The introductory chapter focuses on the way that confession came to be proof of orthodoxy. In the first content section, she outlines how the Beguines and Elisabeth of Hungary became exemplars of the sacrament of confession through obedience to their confessors. In the second part, she focuses on the ways that sanctity, heresy, and inquisition were three interrelated ideas and how they played into the development of the inquisitional mindset. the final section focuses on the Jean Gerson's defense of Joan of Arc.

[Ella]

Read for Michaelmas Term Primary Tutorial: Medieval Female Mystics

[Celeste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elliott traces the changes in construction and meaning of female mysticism and sanctity from Lateran IV in the early thirteenth century to the trial of Joan of Arc in the mid fifteenth century. She argues that as the Catholic Church attempted to promote the sacraments of confession (made mandatory with Lateran IV) and Eucharist, female sanctity became the embodiment of sacramental orthodoxy constructed against a multitude of anti-sacramental heresies. However, the rise of the status of the confessor and inquisitor--and the gradual conflation of the two roles--created a judicial model of spirituality that ultimately turned church thinking against female mystics. This is a poor summary of a complex and engaging book. My only complaint is that in demonstrating the centrality of female sanctity for the construction of orthodoxy, Elliott fails to mention how female mystics differ in this regard from male mystics. While she does describe female mysticism as highly somatic and embodied, she does not describe the male mystic experience. I certainly don't want to be seen as crying "but what about men!" in this feminist history, but since I am personally unfamiliar with the various forms of sanctity and mysticism (including that of the male) in the middle ages, I am left wondering why she sees female saints as the instrument of orthodoxy rather than saintliness more generally.

[Burrow_mistress]

Picked this up on Amazon because it references Inquisitor Kalteisen. It should be an interesting read.

[Roland Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opens up a whole new world of medieval spirituality. See my full review here: http://andthewordsbecamebooks.wordpre...