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Christian Holy Women and the Exercise of Religious

Authority in the Medieval West
John Coakley*
New Brunswick Theological Seminary

Abstract

The essay reviews scholarship on female mystics and other holy women in late Medieval Europe
(11001400), as a collective case study in how religious authority has been negotiated in the history of Christianity. Recent scholars view the firm exclusion of women from institutional leadership by male clerics in this period as an essential condition of the rise of such women to
importance as persons with charismatic authority, i.e., in Max Webers terminology, an authority
rooted in personal gifts and attributes. Some scholars have viewed charismatic women as essentially
subversive of, or resistant to, the powers of clerics. Others see them in more positive terms as
staking out their own complementary authority. Scholars have also considered the attitude of clerics toward such women, which was often characterized by acute awareness of the ways in which
the womens charismatic powers compensated for the inadequacies of clerical authority. Very
recent scholars have further nuanced these insights by asking how the dynamics of the interplay of
institutional and charismatic authority may or may not be evident in local situations.

These days many people who otherwise know little about the Middle Ages or the history
of Western Christianity have heard of one or two medieval holy women, such as Hildegard of Bingen or perhaps Julian of Norwich; people who have even a casual acquaintance with those fields will likely recognize as well the name of Catherine of Siena and
perhaps Bridget of Sweden. A remarkable body of writings by and about these and many
other women whose reputations were based on their claims to direct knowledge of things
divine has in fact survived from Europe in the period from about 1100 to the end of the
Middle Ages. In recent years scholars, generally reflecting feminist sensibilities and the
concerns of gender studies, have examined those sources in a very productive way, with
the result that these women now would seem to have a secure place in the legacy of
medieval Christianity.
In this essay, I will review some of the scholarship on these late medieval women. The
question that I bring to it, however, is a question that does not derive precisely from the
fields that have done the most to encourage this scholarship, that is, womens studies,
gender studies, and of course medieval studies per se. It derives, rather, from the broad
study of the history of Christianity as a religious tradition that spans two millennia and all
continents. It is the question of how religious authority i.e., the recognized ability to
speak and act in the name of God (Chapman 2005) has been negotiated within that
Christian tradition.
The question of authority has been central to history of Christianity. Most obviously it
applies to the controversies that produced the Christian polities, such as episcopacy, and
the norms of belief, such as scriptural canon and creeds. It is a question that goes to the
heart of the history of Christian institutions. But authority also can emerge outside
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institutional structures, in the Weberian sense of deriving from the personal attributes and
gifts of certain individuals (Weber 1978, pp. 24154; Eisenstadt 1968, pp. xixxxii), such
as saints and prophets. The relationship between the authority of such persons and that of
institutions is itself an important long-term theme in Christian history (von Campenhausen 1969; Congar 1962). The theme has particular importance in the West in the period
in question here, that is, the high and later Middle Ages. In the wake of the Gregorian
Reform, which strongly asserted the institutional authority of clerics, persons of such
charismatic, i.e., non-institutional, authority stand in particularly sharp relief against the
background of the clerical world (Vauchez 1984, 1999, pp. 2219). Among these charismatics, the most prominent overall were women, the very ones who have so interested
scholars women whose sex alone excluded them from the exercise of institutional
leadership. It is true that the exclusion of women from such institutional office was not
absolute; abbesses of convents constitute an important exception (see for example Griffiths
2007 to be discussed below; and Winston-Allen 2004, pp. 97169). But as Gary Macy
has recently shown, it was in the period in question, specifically the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries that canon lawyers and theologians narrowed their understanding of
offices such that some that formerly had included women, such as the office of deacon,
were now open only to men (Macy 2008). Given the extent of womens exclusion from
institutional office, as well as the abundance of the sources and now the abundance of
studies about the women of non-institutional authority in this period, those women present a well-documented case in the workings of a distinctly charismatic authority in Christian tradition. This is a case that well illustrates the intimate relationship between that
charismatic authority and the very institutional authority from which it tended to be so
clearly distinguished.
The assertion of clerical celibacy that began in the late-eleventh century sought to
establish the world of clerics as space free of female presence in the centuries that followed. This is itself a striking development in the culture of the time, with strong implications for women. It has been the subject of some important studies. Joanne McNamara
has suggested in a provocative essay that this exclusion of women from the male preserve
of institutional leadership grew out of a masculinity crisis posed by clerics perceived
need to assert their manhood in a new and unfamiliar urban social order that placed them
in a dominant position as a class. (McNamara 1994). Along similar lines, Dyan Elliott has
interpreted clerics exclusion of women as a way of maintaining a personal and cultic purity that was associated closely with the purity of the Virgin, to whom they were devoted
and with that of the sacrament of the altar, for which they were responsible. It was, she
says, specifically clerics fear of womens pollution of that purity that found sinister
expression, in the lurid construction of the priests wife as devils mistress, and later in
the literal accusations of witchcraft that became especially notorious in the fifteenth century, when actual women were now perceived as concubines of the devil and willing
participants in his unholy black mass (Elliott 1999, p. 160). In her more recent study
Proving Woman, Elliott has placed the repression in a slightly different context, namely
that of what she calls the inquisitorial culture of the late Middle Ages, which is evident
in a wide spectrum of proof-seeking practices, from the Inquisition itself, to canonization
procedures, to the forum of sacramental penance. She suggests that even when clerics
might have wished to champion certain holy women, their relentless rational scrutiny of
charismatic behaviors served finally to bring all women under negative judgment (Elliott
2004).
For most recent scholars, this repressive situation provides the necessary context for an
understanding of the remarkable charismatic powers that came to be attributed to many
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women in this period. The confluence of repression and charisma is seen as no accident;
rather, the one in some way implies the other. But scholars differ in assessing exactly how
it does so how, that is, charisma was related to exclusion, and consequently its significance both for the women as well as for the clerics.
For many scholars, the logic of charisma was at heart a logic of subversion: womens
revelations, supernatural powers and in general their claim of a direct experience of the
divine were acts of resistance to the powers of men, a self-assertion over against a patriarchal repression. I will not attempt to cite all the studies that take this approach, but will
give two examples. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing expression of such a view is Grace
Jantzens study Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Jantzen 1995). Jantzen argues that
charismatic women were pushing at the male-defined boundaries, challenging their definitions and preconceptions. In this respect it is indeed true to speak of a womens spirituality as an alternative to the normative tradition, a spirituality that more specifically
challenged an authority based on the intellects or rationality of the scholastic elites
(Jantzen 1995, pp. 1589). For Jantzen this was a clear and strong enough challenge to
cause womens continued adherence to the church of their time (though she does not
doubt it) to appear ironic; thus she writes that Julian of Norwich, for example, was still
deeply entangled with Holy Church in ways which strike a modern feminist as ambiguous to say the least (Jantzen 1995, p. 180). Another scholar who has framed womens
charismatic powers as subversive or, as she puts it, transgressive, is Elizabeth Petroff
(Petroff 1994), for whom those acts of self-assertion are a matter of rejecting a stance of
tacit obedience to ecclesiastical authority and thus of shattering the stereotype of the
good nun and the good wife (Petroff 1994, p. 157). When clerics interpreted these
women to a broader audience through hagiography, Petroff sees them as in effect defusing the power of such transgressions by transposing them into a supernatural realm, as for
instance when Catherine of Sienas hagiographer Raymond of Capua interpreted her
extreme fasting as a divine miracle. The men thus deprived them of the power to express
their own subjectivity by presenting them not as genuine actors but rather as bearers of
anothers message, the means by which God works miracles (Petroff 1994, p. 177). Men,
that is, co-opted the womens charisma. The work of Rudolph Bell on womens fasting
(Bell 1985) and that of Karma Lochrie on Margery Kempe (Lochrie 1991) both of
them rich studies in their own right which I will not attempt to summarize are other
works in which womens charisma is framed as subversive or transgressive.
There are, however, other strands of research on charismatic women which, though
not necessarily denying a subversive or transgressive dimension to their writings or actions
that would stand over against the powers of clerics, have placed other aspects of womens
relation to power in the foreground. Here the two most influential scholars have been
Barbara Newman and Caroline Walker Bynum. Newman, in her collection of essays
From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (Newman 1995), writes that much discussion of these
women by feminists to whom, to be sure, we owe the womens visibility as been
too inclined to focus on what she calls the subversion question, that is, the question of
how the womens actions served to challenge or undermine the structures of patriarchy.
She regards the question as not wrong in itself, but not finally adequate to the material
at hand. (Newman 1995, pp. 2456) She suggests a model to understand womens religious roles at the time that she calls the womanChrist model, an experiment of praxis,
diversely and sporadically theorized: the possibility that women, qua women, could practice some form of the imitation of Christ with specifically feminine inflections and
thereby attain a particularly exalted status in the realm of the spirit (Newman 1995,
p. 3). The model consists, that is, of a set of behaviors which variously may or may not
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850 John Coakley

be best understood as expressions of reaction to their exclusion from other roles. For
example in discussing thirteenth-century womens informal charismatic powers in contacting souls in purgatory and acting on their behalf, Newman sees this activity as indeed
partly explicable in terms of the womens marginality, their lack of authorization to
serve others in more formal ways (Newman 1995, p. 134). But when, for instance, she
portrays Heloise, in her letters to Abelard, as a mystic manque, she presents her not as
someone reacting to clerical powers but rather as the first in a long series of religious
women who expressed their love in the language of passion and absolute self-surrender
(Newman 1995, p. 9). This, Newman argues, was a distinctively female discourse in its
own right, similar to the discourse to be found in the remarkable syntheses of mystical
and courtly love in the works of the Beguine writers Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild
of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete.
Newmans work has thus widened the scope of interpretation of medieval charismatic
women. But it has been Caroline Walker Bynum who has most influentially theorized
the contributions of women in ways that challenge or complicate a model based principally on notions of subversion or transgression. Bynum has perceived that though charismatic womens actions may indeed have implicitly challenged male authority, womens
texts for the most part do not show them experiencing themselves doing so; they seem to
have imagined themselves, and acted, in ways that did not rival but rather paralleled or
complemented the authority of clerics. For instance in her early essay on the visionary
thirteenth-century nuns of Helfta, noting that indeed women were more excluded than
they had been a hundred yeas before from exercising clerical authority, Bynum argues
that the Helfta nuns Gertrude the Great, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Mechthild of
Magdeburg found through direct authorization by a real yet approachable God a substitute for clerical status (Bynum 1982, p. 185). Thus, for example, Gertrude had visions
of deceased persons who in life had followed her teaching and advice and now occupied
places close to Christ in heaven, and she heard Christ making her a promise analogous to
his promise to confirm St Peters binding and loosing; similarly Mechthild of Hackeborns revelations refer to her as preacher and apostle (Bynum 1982, pp. 2056, 225).
The exclusion of women from the space of clerical authority, for Bynum, had the
potential effect of allowing them to imagine and act from a space of their own.
There is also something more, and more controversial, to Bynums view of the roots
and expression of womens charismatic powers. In her study Holy Feast and Holy Fast
(Bynum 1987), and her subsequent essay collection Fragmentation and Redemption (Bynum
1991), she challenges what she sees as a prevailing negative view of womens extreme
behaviors of self-denial the standard interpretation of asceticism as world-rejection or
as practical dualism and accordingly the standard picture of medieval women as
constrained on every side by a misogyny they internalized as self-hatred or masochism
(Bynum 1987, p. 6). She argues instead the case for such asceticism with its embrace
of bodily suffering as something profoundly anti-dualistic, and world-affirming, and points
out the ways in which late medieval culture gendered the incarnation female, through
the association of images of motherhood, enfleshment, suffering, lactation, and Eucharist,
and thus associated women profoundly and distinctively with the humanity of Christ. It
is this position that has attracted criticism on the grounds that such a view risks justifying
the repression of women and by implication other repressive practices of the clerical
elites, e.g., against Jews and heretics (Aers 1996; Biddick 1993; Wiethaus 1991). In the
context of her larger argument, at any rate Bynums earlier notion of womens charismatic activities as opening an alternate space of authority is now restated in a way that
gives it an added dimension. For she now sees that space as specifically womens space;
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their charismatic alternative to the mens authority of office is rooted in an experience of

the divine that is distinctively female, though, to be sure, in a culturally conditioned and
not essentialist way. Womens specifically gender-based closeness to God, in Bynums
analysis, accorded them an authority of their own that was distinct from clerics authority
of office or worldly power (Bynum 1991, p. 137).
The scholarship on charismatic women has paid attention not just to the womens
own lives and writings but also to the ways in which men, particularly clerics, perceived
these women. This has been, at the very least, unavoidable. For the hagiographies of the
women were mostly written by clerics, with the notable exception of the hagiographical
collections of the south-German Dominican convents in the fourteenth century (Jaron
Lewis 1996), and in many (significantly not all) cases clerics also had a major role in
recording the texts ostensibly authored by women (Coakley 2009; forthcoming). Consequently several scholars have worked to identify the effects of the mens efforts, both to
clarify the contexts in which the women acted and spoke and, to the extent possible, to
recover some sense of the womens own self-perception in those contexts. Anne Clark
has been a pioneer in such research. In her monograph on the visionary Elisabeth of
Schonau (Clark 1992) she devotes a chapter to an analysis the editorial activity of Elisabeths brother and literary collaborator Ekbert, who was the one who actually recorded
her visions and shaped them into narratives. Ekbert thus stood as a filter on Elisabeths
experiences and ideas, and has to be examined in his own right because it is only when
the limits of his contributions to the finished literary product have been determined that
one can confidently say anything about Elisabeth herself (Clark 1992, p. 50; cf. Clark
1999). With similar intent Amy Hollywood has compared the mystical treatise Seven
Manners of Loving by the thirteenth-century Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth with the
vita of Beatrice by an anonymous male hagiographer who based it partially on his own
reading of the treatise, to suggest a tendency on the mans part to somatize the womans
experiences in a way foreign to the womans own writing; he translated her self-avowed
inner experiences into external manifestations of her body, such as weeping and bodily
injury, which suggest that the embodied quality widely attributed to the female spirituality of the period (e.g., Bynum 1991, pp. 181238) may be in a part a function of the
perceptions of a male audience (Hollywood 1995, 1999, 2002). And Catherine Mooney,
in assembling the essays in her volume Gendered Voices (Mooney 1999), asked her contributors to distinguish the voices and points of view of the [female] saints, on one hand,
from those of their [male] interpreters, on the other. In her introduction to the volume,
Mooney summarizes what the essays suggest to be the leading tendencies of these interpreters. They include not only the somatizing impulse identified by Hollywood but also
an inclination to make the women less active and assertive and more otherworldly than
the women saw themselves to be, and to call more specific attention to their gender, by
making more use of bridal language in accounting for their mysticism and choosing
more exclusively female examples to compare them with (Mooney 1999, pp. 115).
Such research as that of Mooney and her collaborators does not only serve to identify
what can be filtered from the sources to allow a better perception of women as subjects.
It also points to the concerns of clerics in their own right not, that is, just for their
potential to aid our recovery of a sense of the women as historical actors. Several scholars
have seen a strong emotional investment on the part of clerics who were the disciples or
collaborators of charismatic women, or in some cases their confessors (a role that before
the fifteenth century, however, was less well-defined than is sometimes supposed). Thus
Petroff observes, from her reading of the hagiographies of Christina of Markyate, Mary of
Oignies and Margery Kempe, that the women seem to present men with a compelling
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852 John Coakley

image of living faith and that the men are drawn to their prophesying and teaching and
refreshing new viewpoints (Petroff 1994, pp. 13940). Similarly Brian Patrick McGuire,
discussing several thirteenth-century hagiographical texts including the vita of Mary of
Oignies by James of Vitry and that of Lutgard of Aywie`res by Thomas of Cantimpre,
argues that though there may indeed have been exploitation of the women by the clerical men, still on the whole the sources show us genuine and mutually beneficial friendships. (McGuire 1989).
This evident emotional connection that clerics established with women can also constitute a point of access to the broader theological issues at stake, specifically issues about
the relationship between institutional and charismatic authority. I have argued this is my
own work. In an essay on the figure of the friar as confidant of female saints in Dominican hagiography (Coakley 1991a), another essay on how mendicant hagiographers used
their reflections on female saints as means to reflect on issues in their own spirituality,
specifically concerning their own priestly authority (Coakley 1991b), and a third on the
differences between mendicant hagiographers treatment of male and female saints respectively (Coakley 1994), I have documented the strong fascination that Dominican and
Franciscan friars displayed toward their female subjects. In many cases, this fascination
corresponded to a self-perceived deprivation in the friars themselves. For they show evidence of believing that the women possessed an immediate experience of the divine
which they themselves lacked, but which by contact with the women they could experience vicariously. They also believed that they could benefit from the womens experience
both as persons and priests, through the womens powers of mediation as well as through
their intuitions about the souls to whom the men ministered. For example the
thirteenth-century Dominican Peter of Dacia who wrote extensively, and with a sophisticated theological vocabulary, about the salutary effects produced in him by the very presence of an obscure and uneducated Beguine of his acquaintance, Christine of Stommeln,
who inhabited what seemed to him almost a different universe from his own (Coakley
1991a, pp. 2833; Coakley 1991b, pp.4523; cf. Coakley 2006, pp. 89110). Or again:
the anonymous Franciscan scribe who recorded the revelations of the thirteenth-century
penitent Angela of Foligno portrayed himself as strongly convinced of the genuineness
and importance of her experiences even as he protested the meagerness of his ability to
convey them (Coakley 1991b, pp. 978; cf. Coakley 2006, pp. 11129). In all of this
there appeared to be an intersection between the friars related experiences, which were
told in highly personal terms, and their interest in the nature of their own ecclesiastical
authority, specifically its limits and its relation to the possibility of immediate communication by God to believers.
Later, in Women, Men, and Spiritual Power (Coakley 2006), I considered the relationships between clerics and holy women in a more sustained way and with more specific
focus on the long-term issue of the relationship between institutional and charismatic
powers as expressed by clerics in their construction of biographical narrative. The study
focuses on the textualization of ideas of sanctity rather than treating texts as transparent
expressions of actual relationships as I had tended to do in my earlier work; Ursula Peters
stimulating if radical critique of the latter sort of reading (Peters 1988) helped me establish
this focus (Coakley 2006, pp. 1512). In reading texts for their imagination of relationships, moreover, I considered them as, in genre, something akin to what Barbara Newman has called imaginative theology, i.e., texts that think with images, as a mode of
theological discourse distinct from scholastic reason or monastic meditation (Newman
2003). The book examines a series of nine literary cases in the period from 1150 to
1400 in which a clerical writer who had been a close associate of the woman he wrote
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about included himself and his relationship with her as part of the subject-matter of his
writing The earliest of the cases is that of Ekbert of Schonaus compilation of his sisters
revelations in the late-twelfth century; the latest, that of the writings of the secular cleric
John Marienwerder about the Prussian recluse Dorothy of Montau, at the turn of the
fifteenth century. When considered in sequence, the texts suggest the emergence (at the
turn of the thirteenth century) and decline (at the end of the century following) of a
two-sphere conception of the relation between institutional and charismatic authority
that construes them as discrete, complementary, and interactive in a variety of possible
ways. The heyday of such thinking, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, appears as
an extended moment in Christian history in the West when at least some holy women
and clerics were able to share a common sense of mission with a confidence that would
eventually diminish at the time of the great Western schism.
By way of conclusion, I call attention to two recent studies that usefully complicate
the picture of informal or charismatic authority of women that has emerged from the
scholarship discussed here. One of these is Fiona Griffiths study of the late-twelfthcentury manuscript called The Garden of Delights, which was produced under the direction
of the abbess Herrad of Hohenbourg for the education of her nuns. Although the texts
in the manuscript are by a variety of male theologians who were contemporaries or nearcontemporaries of Herrad, Griffiths argues that the work is no mere anthology but a skillfully fashioned exposition of Christian doctrine suited to the situation of her monastery,
and of which Herrad should be considered the effective author. The authority that Herrad claimed for this work unlike many of the female visionaries who have dominated
recent discussions of medieval womens writing was not a charismatic or informal
authority but rather, in effect anyway, the same authority as a master of the schools
would have claimed. Indeed, the case of Herrad serves as a reminder that the exclusion
of women from institutional office, which the scholars discussed so far have strongly
emphasized, was in fact far from absolute. Herrad was, as Griffiths asserts, an active participant in the very textual culture that is often deemed responsible for relegating women
to positions of marginality and inferiority. Moreover, she is not the only woman who
could be described as such in this period; Griffiths calls her study only a first step toward
an intellectual history of medieval women (Griffiths 2007, pp. 13, 16). None of this
diminishes the importance of the charismatic holy women of this period, but it reminds
us that female and visionary are far from synonymous.
The other recent book I have in mind complicates the picture in a slightly different
way. This is Anneke Mulder-Bakkers study of local anchoresses (women, usually over
40 years of age, who were enclosed in cells attached to churches), who were a common
fixture in towns of northern France and the southern Low Countries in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. These are women whose authority could indeed be called
charismatic, for typically they received visions and claimed prophetic knowledge
(Mulder-Bakker 2005, p. 43). But considering them in the context of the culture of the
local parish churches to which they were (literally) connected, Mulder-Bakker perceives
the line between what I have been calling charismatic and institutional authorities as
blurred, so that the priests authority and the holy womans authority may appear as not
so different in kind after all. For in the setting of the local parish, unlike that of the
schools that produced much of the formal theological writing at the time, the communication of Christian faith was likely to occur not just through priests but also, and perhaps
especially, through the words and examples of esteemed older women like the anchoresses. Accustomed as we are to the ordained priesthood of the modern age and the key
powers ascribed to it, we tend to think that the medieval priest must also have wielded
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854 John Coakley

genuine power while the pious woman possessed charismatic authority at most. But how
much more genuine, in the sense of compelling, she asks, was priestly authority in reality? The effectiveness of both depended on persuasive power. And on this point the
anchoresses had a distinct advantage over the clergy with its many failings. She also suggests that the anchoresss cell itself bestowed on her a kind of de facto office, i.e., as a
sign of authority beyond her personal gifts (Mulder-Bakker 2005, pp. 77, 47). What
Mulder-Bakker challenges finally is perhaps not the distinction itself between institutional
and charismatic authority but rather our assumptions about the nature and extent of its
significance.
Precisely how institutional and charismatic authority interacted in the lives and contexts
of medieval holy women remains, indeed, a matter of lively discussion among scholars
such as those discussed here. Still it is clear that the work of these scholars has had much
to contribute to what has always been a fundamental question for historians of Christianity, namely the question of how, over long time and space, religious authority has been
defined and recognized. A picture emerges here of such authority as a product of negotiation, among parties whose decisive strengths can include not only the possession, but
also the lack, of official power an ironic twist for which, indeed, Christianity has always
a vocabulary in St Pauls assertion of strength in weakness (2 Cor. 12.3) The picture is,
moreover, one in which women appear fully involved as historical actors, and dynamics
involving gender appear as a major factor in the shaping of ideas and events.
Short Biography
John W. Coakley is a historian of Christianity with wide interests. Much of his research
has been about medieval spirituality in the West as it concerns relations between men
and women. In addition to several articles on that subject, he has published a book,
Women, Men, and Spiritual Power (New York, 2006), about the negotiation of authority
by female mystics and the clerics who associated with them. He has also pursued interests
in the history of ecumenism and in world Christianity: he has edited Concord Makes
Strength: Essays in Reformed Ecumenism (Grand Rapids, 2002), co-edited Readings in World
Christian History, Beginnings to 1453 (Maryknoll, 2004), and serves on the editorial board
of the Journal of World Christianity. He has been an associate fellow of the Rutgers Center
for Historical Analysis and has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Humanities. His BA is from Wesleyan, and he holds M.Div. and ThD degrees from
Harvard. He is presently the Feakes Professor of Church History at New Brunswick
Theological Seminary.
Note
* Correspondence address: John Coakley, 17 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA. E-mail: jcoakley@
nbts.edu.

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