Download PDF | Jessica Barr - Intimate Reading_ Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae-University of Michigan Press (2020).
261 Pages
Introduction
In her Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, Julian of Norwich repeatedly reminds the reader that Julian’s revelations are not hers alone: “And this lerning and this trewe comforthe, it es generalle to alle mine evencristen”; “Alle that I saye of myselfe, I meene in the persone of alle mine evencristene, for I am lernede in the gastelye shewinge of oure lorde that he meenes so. . . . [F]or it is comon and generale, as we ar alle one” (Everything that I say about myself I mean to apply to all my fellow Christians, for I am taught that this is what our Lord intends in this spiritual revelation . . . for it is common and general, just as we are all one).1 Te desire that initially drove her visions was for a “feeling” of Christ’s passion—an individual, felt experience of his sufering. Tis yearning leads to both a bodily sight of his death and a vastly deepened understanding of salvation. In her writing, however, the individual falls away—“this sight was shewed in generalle and nathinge in specialle”2 —and she wishes to share with her readers the intimate understanding that she has acquired. To do so, she says, she must understand her visions as belonging to her readers.
That broader audience is to share her revelations in the deeply personal way that she experienced them. Julian’s writings thus become mediators of an equally intimate vision of divine truth. For her writing to achieve its aim, readers must see themselves as sharing in precisely her experiences, not by identifying with Julian, but by regarding the text as the vehicle for an immediate experience of God.3 Tis efort—to create a text that will mediate an immediate experience of the divine—is at the heart of much later medieval visionary and mystical writ ing. Medieval Christian mysticism is driven by a desire for unio divina, the description and evocation of which are at the core of mystical, visionary, and hagiographic literature. Tis desirable union is intimacy. As intimacy with God, it is variously dissolution of the self, profound inner knowing of divine things, or absolute love and assurance. For this desire to end with the mystic or saint is not enough, as the production and reproduction of this literature attests. Again and again, visionaries are told that they must communicate their experiences, and hagiographers document even the most seemingly bizarre phenomena out of the declared conviction that it will help to convert others. Revelation is not complete until it is shared.4 Julian’s example reveals the importance of imparting the visionary experience to her readers and the role of her audience in fulflling her revelations. It also highlights another challenge of mystical writing: the negotiation of materiality. Material things—in this case, Julian’s body and her physical book—are central to both Julian’s experience and the transmission of her revelations; she receives her visions through a bodily experience, and her actual text is vital to their communication to a wider audience.
For her revelations to be fulflled, however, her readers must see the visions as essentially their own. Julian’s hope that readers will see themselves as fundamentally “her,” receiving her visions and “seeing” them for themselves, is the hope that the material text itself will be, in a sense, transcended, ofering readers a shared experience—not just shared knowledge—of God. Mystical literature thus rests on a tension between the materiality of text, reader, and mystic and the desired absorption of the reader into an experience that is, at its core, immaterial. In many such texts, readers are guided to see themselves as sharing in the experience of the mystic via contact with the text; through reading, the reader’s material body will ideally dissolve into imagined contact with the body of the mystic or even with God. At stake in mystical and visionary writing, then, is the attempt not simply to communicate but actually to create an experience, and mystical writing’s efort to produce experience in its readers is the subject of this study. Driving my project here are two fundamental questions: how does mystical literature afect its readers, and how is the actual reading of a text that describes an individual’s experience of God rendered capable of triggering a mimetic spiritual response in its readers, who probably have not undergone the actual visions or communion with God that its subjects—mystics, saints, and visionaries—have experienced?
Though I say “rendered capable,” we can only explore how these texts and reading itself are presented as capable of producing experience. Actual medieval readers’ responses are largely inaccessible. To explore herein how such texts sought to produce an experience of God, I look at how reading and textuality are represented within the texts and at how readers are rhetorically invoked in medieval vitae and vision literature. Intimate reading is the term I use to name and theorize the strategies by which this form of textually mediated, shared experience of the immaterial divine is formulated, and this study explores the various ways in which medieval visionary and hagiographic literature encourages intimate reading practices in its readers. Intimate reading generates and afrms in the reader a deep desire for a shared experience with the textual subject; “intimacy” is the blurred boundary between the reader and this subject, and this blurring brings the reader empathetically and experientially into the text.
Intimacy may include identifcation with the subject of the text, but it is not limited to identifcation; it may drive the reader to seek within the text a sudden revelation of God’s presence, or it may dissolve the obstacles to such revelation put up by the reader’s rational mind. Intimacy may be afective, but it is also intellective, calling for the reader’s sustained engagement. Conjuring a hermeneutics of empathy with its subject,5 one in which understanding is “afective, imitative, progressive, and assimilative,”6 these writers strive to elicit in their readers the desire for and the means to achieve intimacy with their divine subject—which is most ofen God but may also be the holy person whose life they chronicle. “Intimacy” refers to the evocation of desire and its fulfllment through the text, as readers read themselves into the experience at its heart, the experience of the divine. My framework for exploring intimacy resonates with Nancy Bradley Warren’s use of the concept of “incarnational textualities” to refer to devotional writing, where “porous boundaries obtain between embodied writers and readers and the textual corpus.”7
In devotional reading, Warren argues, the “boundaries between selves and others both past and present are permeable.”8 Te intersubjective relationships made possible by devotional texts’ permeability is included within my articulation of intimacy, as readers identify deeply and personally with textual subjects—a merging of author and reader, through the medium of the text, that can even lead to “a change in . . . [the reader’s] very selfood.”9 Further, the textual production of intersubjective relationships is closely linked to the ways of knowing that are associated with mystical and visionary experience. “Incarnational epistemology,” as Warren names these ways of knowing, describes “processes of knowledge production and acquisition grounded in corporeal, sensual, and afective experiences.”10
Incarnational textuality is the vehicle for communicating knowledge received through experiences such as these, including immediate experiences of the divine. Exploring incarnational epistemology and its relationship to textuality, Warren indicates both the conundrum that mystical writers must face and its resolution. When knowledge is received through an embodied experience, how can it be translated into a communicable form? Understanding texts as incarnational—as breaching the boundaries between self and other and enabling the production of an embodied experience in the reader through the very act of reading—means that the text can convey knowledge that is seemingly inaccessible to the rational intellect and discursive expression. Warren’s work is an important corrective to the dictum that profound spiritual experience is inherently inefable; in her words, “individual experiences of the divine, even mystical experiences, . . . are not at all unrepresentable to others. . . . [E]mbodied knowledge can—indeed, even must—be conveyed in language for others to know and experience for themselves.”11 As will be evident throughout this study, I concur with Warren’s assessment. I argue, moreover, that the language of textuality itself allows writers of mystical and hagiographic literature to engage the problem of bringing their readers into an intimate encounter with their subjects. Textuality and reading ofer vocabularies for creating intimacy—a fact suggestive of later medieval assumptions about reading as an intimate act and about the privileged position of books in the medieval imagination. How does the book itself—as a material, created object written in fallen, human language—become a vehicle for the transmission of transcendent knowledge? While there is considerable overlap between incarnational textuality and intimate reading, my approach difers from Warren’s.
As its name suggests, incarnational textuality hinges on embodiment. “Incarnational texts,” Warren writes, “catalyze intersubjective relations and enable readers, through knowing another’s embodied experiences textually, to participate in those experiences.”12 She refects, for example, on the relationship between Julian and Christ, in which Julian does not merely sufer like Christ but actually feels Christ’s own sufering; that sufering must then be transmitted to the reader.13 Intimate reading includes but is not limited to the sharing of embodied experience. Indeed, through the course of the present study, I consider works that evince progressively less embodied modes of religious experience and understanding, until, with Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, we encounter a radically disembodied allegory that challenges the reader’s modes of rational comprehension.
Further, where Warren focuses on cases of specifc readers and how they incorporated or even incarnated the devotional literature that they encountered, my study concerns a broad range of strategies that medieval visionary and hagiographic writers employed to generate (or discourage) particular kinds of reader response. Yet the porosity of the boundaries between reader and text and between text and Christ, explored by Warren in Te Embodied Word, is a crucial foundation for my concept of textual intimacy, which centers on the blurring of self and other that can happen in the reading experience. As a framework, intimate reading hinges on three core terms: intimacy, affect, and materiality. In what remains of this introduction, I frst discuss each of these concepts as they relate to the project herein. I then ofer an outline of how this book’s fve chapters—each a sort of case study of one or more related texts—ft together to explore the variety of ways that intimate reading can be invoked in medieval women’s mystical literature.
Textual Intimacy
The term intimacy has numerous connotations. Associated with closeness, familiarity, and eroticism, it implies a mutual relationship between subjects. But genuine closeness between two subjects is necessarily attenuated in the temporally fragmented transaction of reading, in which immediacy and physical contact between the written and reading subject are impossible. At least in the cases under consideration here, the reader cannot write back. Any intimacy that can be achieved between the reader and the textual subject—be that subject the holy woman, the visionary writer, or God—is constructed and mediated by the text. Te text, both as a physical object and as a construct of fallen, imperfect words that will always run up against the limits of their signifcation, is simultaneously facilitator of and potential impediment to intimate union. Tere are precedents, however, for exploring intimacy in relationships other than those between people who are in physical or mutual contact. Lauren Berlant has cogently demonstrated that intimacy can be produced through texts’ ability to construct imagined interpersonal relationships among a community of readers. Such communities, which Berlant calls “intimate publics,” are created when narratives evoke or presuppose “a commonly lived history” among their consumers, a history that they convey by “expressing the sensational, embodied experience of living as a certain kind of being in the world.” Tese narratives ofer “a place of recognition and refection” where “emotional contact, of a sort, is made.”14
According to Berlant, these intimate publics are most commonly produced among nondominant groups, whose marginalized position creates a yearning for narratives of shared experience and a feeling of belonging within a larger, mutually understanding community, even if that community— comprised of other readers of the same narratives—can only be imagined.15 Her intimate publics are large, dispersed groups for whom feelings of intimacy are generated and mediated by consumer goods, including, especially, literature.16 Te intimacy that they experience is a perceived intimacy between human subjects with a shared identity or set of experiences.17 A medieval example of something like the textual intimacy that Berlant proposes appears in Rebecca Krug’s description of a community of readers and spiritual seekers in Te Book of Margery Kempe. Arguing that Kempe’s Book is the means for her readers to “fnd themselves,” Krug stresses its ability to generate community and companionship through its very materiality.
“The physical book,” she writes, “stops the perpetual loss of friends and companions by making permanent Kempe’s interaction with her readers through the written account of her life.”18 For the reader whose spiritual inclinations resonate with Kempe’s, the text is an actor in a new community, formed of Kempe and like-minded readers, with the Book itself as a mediating agent, a producer of spiritual communion.19 Signifcantly, this intimate community ofers greater permanence and stability than the community of spiritual companions that Kempe enjoyed in her own life. As I discuss in chapter 3, the representations of books within the Book—in particular, the Life of Marie d’Oignies—stress their ability to mediate intimacy.
As Krug argues, they are also able to create intimacy, bringing together far-fung participants in the “spirituality of high desire” in which Kempe participates.20 Berlant’s and Krug’s studies demonstrate that texts have the capacity to create a sense of intimacy between subjects who have no lived knowledge or experience of each other. In the cases that I explore, intimacy is generated not among a group of people with the perception of shared experiences but between the reader and the divine or someone who has had a direct experience of the divine. It is predicated precisely on the lack of such an experience in the reader (although the reader must desire it) and the generation of something like that experience through the text, which is meant to dissolve boundaries not between a subset of imagined readers but between the reader and its subject, whether that subject be the mystic or God. Rather than validating readers’ experiences of living on the margins of society, these moments of textual intimacy dissolve readers altogether, ideally blending them into the expansiveness of the divine. Te particularity of the reader fades into an awareness of God’s presence in and through the book. In this way, the text itself—as material object—rhetorically facilitates its own obsolescence, moving the reader into an experience, if only an imagined one, of the immaterial. This movement is the work of intimate reading.
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