Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Janina Ramírez

In biblical terms, language is a reminder of our earthly constraints.83 After the flood, a unified humanity all speaking the same language came together to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven. But God was angered by this challenge, so he made it impossible for each to understand the other, meaning the Tower of Babel was left incomplete. Theologically, language represents a flawed tool which limits humanity in its search for the divine. Hildegard may have been striving to create a new divine language that reached the inherent holiness in all things, even snot and urine. Hildegard constantly searched for new ways to express the inexpressible.

She started receiving visions while in a trance-like state the year after Hildegard released her book Scivias. These were recorded by her brother, an influential member of the German church.85 Elizabeth knew Hildegard personally and the influence of the older nun is undeniable, both in terms of speaking of her visions and promoting them through writing.86 However, the women differed in their approach to physical suffering. Elizabeth practised self-mortification and fasting, which drove her to depression and recurrent illness.

One of the dangers of writing about truly exceptional individuals like Hildegard is that their extensive body of work can appear an anomaly – the output of a lone genius who existed outside of society. Hildegard wrote so much and had so many valuable things to say in her own right that she takes centre stage in discussions of medieval women. But there are a cast of important, influential and exceptional women around her, and without acknowledging their contributions, it is impossible to truly understand how this one twelfth-century woman could have achieved what she did.

Herrad of Landsberg.

The only recorded work of Herrad herself has not escaped unharmed. Known as The Garden of Delights, it took 30 years to complete, ran to 648 pages with over 300 illustrations, and was a form of encyclopaedia designed to educate and entertain the nuns at her abbey. In it Herrad displayed a wide knowledge of science, philosophy, theology and history.89

The remarkable illustrations bring to life an ambitious and vibrant twelfth-century female religious community, depicting Islamic rulers, Byzantine courts and Indian nobility. While several scribes worked on the huge book, Herrad supervised the whole project and may have been responsible for the illustrations herself.90 The book also contained self-penned hymns and a vast array of scientific information, displaying a similar range of knowledge to Hildegard.

Unfortunately, while Hildegard’s reputation was preserved through her completed works collated in the Reisencodex, her voice was manipulated and edited just forty years after her death by Gebeno of Eberbach.94 This writer’s monastery was very close to Hildegard’s in Rupertsberg, and here he wrote his own bestseller – Mirror of Future Times. In long passages he cited Hildegard throughout the work as a prophet, but he removed any context for her words. She is reduced to a chastising, furious sibyl, predicting the apocalypse and providing dire warnings to men of power.

She broke the gender barriers, but the encouragement from the men around her suggests we should not only be reviewing our understanding of how women thought and felt in the twelfth century; we should also be turning our attention to the way we view the men of this time. While Hildegard was a woman writing largely for women, throughout her life, from a childhood displaying unusual behaviour, through a middle life plagued with illness, to her role in later years as influential abbess and founder, she was regularly supported by men. Her writings, and their distinctive style, which must have seemed so unusual to male readers trained in theology and the liberal arts, were copied, admired, requested and widely circulated. She did not exist in a vacuum.

I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon and stars. And I awaken all to life with every wind of the air, as with invisible life that sustains everything. For the air lives in greenness and fecundity. The waters flow as though they are alive. The sun also lives in its own light, and when the moon has waned it is rekindled by the light of the sun and thus lives again; and the stars shine out in their own light as though they are alive.

Rather than God the Father as a dominating, intimidating male presence, Hildegard makes the divine feminine a living, omnipresent energy subsumed within the natural world.

This is the story of a secular construction. We now know that the crusade against the Albigenses was launched for political reasons: heresy, widely invented in the Middle Ages, was a pretext used by the pope and the king of France to attack the powerful county of Toulouse.

Studies of medieval Languedoc and the group of heretics based here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries range from highly detailed archival research to far-fetched conspiracy theories centred on the holy grail and the bloodline of Christ. It’s a quagmire of supposition; the use and abuse of historical facts for the benefit of twenty-first century individuals, communities, organisations and institutions. Landowners, tour guides and businesses across the region line their pockets with the money of enthusiastic tourists, desperate to gaze up to where a couple of Cathars scaled the cliffs of Montségur, ostensibly carrying with them the holy grail, or walk the streets of Béziers where tens of thousands died.

High-visibility vests were chosen as the symbol of the protestors as they were readily available and associated with working-class industries. The yellow vests are a movement concerned with economic justice, opposing urban elites and the wealth of the establishment.

Carry from now on and forever two yellow crosses on all their clothes except their shirts and one arm [of the cross] shall be two palms long while the other transversal arm shall be a palm and a half long and each shall be three digits wide with one to be worn in front on the chest and the other between the shoulders.

‘To people here, the crusade against the Cathars looks rather like a colonial war. It’s something still present and alive in local history.’

The fortress at Montségur is described as the ‘head and heart’ by those within, and the ‘Synagogue of Satan’ by those on the outside.

Along with his wife, brother-in-law, and sister, Raymond has created a safe haven for those escaping the Albigensian Crusade; a military campaign originated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc.

but the majority of those inside will not pick up arms and fight. They are self-professed pacifists. The soldiers outside are frustrated. In previous crusades, they have been used to slaughtering all in their path, but things are different at Montségur. As those within defend rather than attack, the crusaders must bide their time. Efforts to cut off the village’s food and water supply have not succeeded – local support for the inhabitants is strong and somehow resources are still being smuggled in and out via the sheer cliff face.

Among them is a woman named Esclarmonde, a name that means ‘Light of the World’ in her native tongue of Occitan.

This is a ritual; this is what she has prepared her starving, emaciated body for. It is her ‘endura’, her voluntary suicide, her chance to leave behind her sinful body and be received into the divine.11 While her flesh will become ashes scattered in the wind, she and the many Cathar women that have gone before her leave behind echoes of their voices.

certain women aligned themselves with a movement that challenged the papacy and the most powerful families of Europe. They rebelled against Christian knights who had turned away from Arabs in the Holy Land and redirected their fury on their own.

This understanding of blanket religious control has led to a received version of the Middle Ages in which everyone adhered fully to Christian beliefs; a time when independent thought was stifled by the all-pervading church, and a period characterised by an atmosphere of fear, superstition and general ignorance.

This division between thinking ‘oxen’ and simple ‘she-asses’ has its roots in the Bible – and the connection between ignorance and femininity has its roots in misogyny. Simple people are led like dumb animals by the church in this demeaning generalisation. Certain theologians like William may well have felt that the general population was far less intelligent than he. But is that any different today in terms of academic snobbery? The truth is far more complex.

The church’ itself has always been a living organism, transforming year by year in response to new challenges and developments. From the time of Constantine’s Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and even before, there has been flux and change on matters central to the very tenets of Christian belief. Was Jesus human or divine? Is the bread really transformed into his body during communion? Is the pope the head of the church? All these issues were debated extensively throughout the medieval period, with those determined orthodox considered on the right side of history, and those that challenged these assumptions condemned as heretics.

An image reinforced and passed down since the Protestant Reformation is of a medieval church intent on inquisition, torturing and burning. Just think of Monty Python’s ‘Spanish Inquisition’. This much-circulated idea was popularised from the eighteenth century onwards – it provided a dramatic contrast to the ideas of reason and apparent ‘tolerance’ of the modern age. It is, of course, a false impression. Religious atrocities, genocide and colonial oppression in the face of opposing beliefs have never abated.

Rather than see all heretics as somehow bound together in their resistance to the church, and papal responses as coordinated and consistent, each instance should be examined in terms of the local, regional and national impacts of those groups labelled heretical.

From what can be determined, Cathars believed the sacraments the church administered were useless, its clergy corrupt, and its wealth and power ill-gotten.15 Cathars performed an extreme form of asceticism, not eating meat, avoiding physical

and sexual temptations, and rejecting worldly pleasures. But it was their dualist suggestion of a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ God that undermined the very foundations of Christian belief. Much ink has been spilt discussing whether the beliefs held by Cathars were influenced by those of Bulgarian heretics known as the Bogomils.16 They too held dualist beliefs, but as with so many issues in the study of heretics, it remains a subject of debate. Cathars didn’t even use this term for themselves, referring instead to ‘good men’ and ‘good women’.

A feeling of anti-clericalism was bubbling away across Europe. The clergy still married, the church gathered taxes ruthlessly and the papacy was indescribably rich. And so in Languedoc by the 1160s Cathars had organised into a coherent structure and were holding councils, electing bishops and spreading their influence internationally. The papacy’s first solution was diplomacy. But no matter how much they negotiated, their advances were rejected.

While both rejected the wealth of the papacy and embraced poverty, the Waldensians also rejected pilgrimage as ‘just a way of spending money’ and said that relics were no different from any other bones. They did allow their followers to eat meat, but more extreme Waldensians are reported to have suggested the priesthood was depraved, declared the papacy the anti-Christ, and rejected transubstantiation – the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ. The

They are referred to as ‘sandaliati’ in inquisition reports, suggesting that the sandals they chose to wear indicated their connection to a heretical group.26 These micro-communications are often lost to historians and archaeologists looking back on a particular time, but would have been as clear to people then as a goth wearing thick eyeliner or a punk styling their hair today.

It was Innocent III himself who granted Francis the right to found an order that rejected personal property, embraced poverty and encouraged preaching in the streets. Francis adopted the tunic worn by peasants as his order’s habit and went about barefoot. In their rejection of papal excess and desire to live in poverty like Jesus, the Franciscans were very similar to the Waldensians. But Francis seems to have proved he was devoted to the church and clergy in a way Peter Waldo couldn’t.

Cathar beliefs deal with that critical question that young people of faith still grapple with today: ‘If there is a good and kind God, then why do bad things happen?’ The Catholic Church developed concepts of free will, self-determination and the devil to answer these questions, endorsing the idea of a singularly loving and benevolent God. But in dualist thought there are two gods: one that is perfect, pure, ideal and responsible for all things spiritual. Then there is another that is fallible, creates life on earth and is responsible for the material world.27

In Cathar beliefs, humans were, by nature, imperfect – fallen angels whose soul and spirit had been given physical form in frail bodies. They believed a person would continue to be reborn in flawed flesh until they could embrace the ascetic practices of abstaining from meat, rejecting sinful acts and receiving the consolamentum before death. Cathars strove for this moment of consolamentum when their souls would be reunited with their angelic form.

The body is prepared through fasting and abstinence, and is purified until the final prayers are said alongside the laying on of hands. Both men and women could perform the consolamentum and it was essentially a last rites exercise, designed to purge the human body of sin and suffering. This ritual suggests that Catharism did not focus on individuals, since angels didn’t possess distinct natures or genders but were part of the divine essence of the benevolent ‘god’. Issues of wealth, background, disability, and of course gender therefore did not concern them.

Because all human flesh was weak and prone to evil, Cathars rejected the idea that Jesus was divine. Why would God put himself in a human vessel? They also reportedly rejected the symbol of the cross. The deposition against one Peter Garcia of Bourguet-Nau says he was overheard making heretical comments during the Good Friday procession. He suggests that instead of uttering ‘Behold the wood of the cross’, the faithful should instead just say ‘Behold, Wood!’33

At the very beginning of the Book of Genesis there are two passages which have long been seen

as incongruous. The first chapter of the creation account stresses that man and woman were created simultaneously, as equals with the same rights to control all the fish, birds and animals. Yet the second chapter describes how Eve was made from Adam’s rib, as his partner who must serve him.36 They may have been written at different times and with different intentions, but the two creation stories at the very opening of the Bible contradict one another. The Genesis account continues, however, along the more divisive line: when God punishes Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the woman receives a harsh punishment: women would forever experience great pain in childbirth and would be ruled over by their husbands. And so the seeds of misogyny were sown at the very heart of Christianity.

They argued that everything in it was ‘true if it was understood...

And if an individual Cathar, whether male or female, embraced the position of ‘perfecti’ or ‘perfectae’ they would receive additional theological training, and had freedom to read and interpret the Bible.

Liberated from the literal instructions on the subservience of women promoted by the church, women could be considered equals of men. Both men and women had to control their flesh and avoid temptation. Both were similarly flawed from conception. Both could lead others in consolamentum. Within the Cathar church women could teach, preach and save.37 They shared power.

One female perfect is quoted as saying she had ‘greater power to liberate than Holy Mary’ and that ‘the Holy Virgin Mary and Holy Agnes did not have greater merits than any just consoled sinful woman’. The focus on the Holy Spirit, rather than Jesus, was also fundamental to the role of women within Catharism. Unlike Jesus, who was born into a male body, the Holy Spirit visited everyone equally and was not human in form.

It’s also arguable that a system of belief which took physical suffering and the fallibility of the flesh as its basis would have appealed to women, beset as they are from birth with the challenges of menstruation, pregnancy and the mortal dangers of childbirth. Catharism saw the workings of the womb and the process of procreation as simply perpetuating human beings’ sinful time on earth. To be free from this responsibility, free from the prospect of being married off and sexually subservient to male partners, and to have some agency over their bodies and lives would have been tempting.

Women also had equal rights to land ownership in Languedoc and could be found at the head of powerful families across the region, so through their links with Catharism, certain individuals were able to enjoy influence they might not otherwise have gained.40

As we turn to the sources in search of individual women, the words of one Cathar scholar seem relevant:

They were the silent sex in this age of human history and, to find out about them, one has to peer through the eyes of men, themselves not always capable of seeing the truth.

The issue of who records history here is a pressing one. Cathar women were written about by contemporaries who despised and misunderstood them, so sometimes the very least we can determine with any certainty is their names. As inquisition records paint those they interrogate as deviant and sinful, Cathar women are most commonly referenced as ‘concubines’ to their partners, for example: ‘William Raymond of Roqua and Arnauda, his concubine.’42 As far as the church was concerned, if a woman was not wed through the sacrament of marriage and nevertheless cohabited with a man, she was automatically classed as a concubine.

partnerships. Those referred to as ‘concubines’ by the church would have been recognised as wives by the community.

Conversely, many Cathar women were also singled out for their virginity in testimonies. It seems that by entering into marriage and consummating it, a woman was seen to have left behind her heretical ways. Tying herself to an orthodox man showed she was prepared to enter the Catholic Church, but remaining single and chaste could be a sign she was guilty of heresy.

In an account of a girl from Rhiems, the abbot of Coggeshall described how a canon in the company of the archbishop saw a young woman walking in a vineyard. He went straight to her and accosted her directly. The girl, under no illusion of what the man wanted, replied: ‘If I were to lose my virginity, my body would be corrupted on the instant and I should be damned irredeemably for all eternity.’ Saving herself from rape, the girl had instead condemned herself as a heretic. Her desire to remain a virgin signalled her Cathar beliefs, so she and her female mentor were burned at the stake.44 This questionable moral behaviour by a member of the clergy, supported by the Archbishop of Rhiems, also signals the truth behind the challenges made against the church by ‘good Christians’. Some clerics really were behaving in the ways ‘heretics’ repeatedly decried.