Revelations of Margarethe Ebner"

Sabine Jansen Constructions of Female Religious Experiences and their Functions in Mystical Vitae- and Revelation-literature of the Later Middle Ages: The "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 1999 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2007) Paper No. 490 Universität Duisburg-Essen Sabine Jansen University of Cologne (Germany) Constructions of Female Religious Experiences and their Functions in Mystical Vitae- and Revelation-literature of the Later Middle Ages: The "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 1999 (2nd ed. with divergent page numbering 2007) Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 490 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen Order LAUD-papers online: http://www.linse.uni-due.de/linse/laud/index.html Or contact: [email protected] Sabine Jansen Constructions of Female Religious Experiences and their Functions in Mystical Vitae- and Revelation-literature of the Later Middle Ages: The "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" Abstract Looking for the 'woman in the Middle Ages', one inevitably encounters those text-corpora of female mystical Vitae- and Revelation-literature which were written in south-west German Dominican convents in the later Middle Ages. Written by women and relating the religious life of the nuns, these texts seem to release a view on specific forms of female religiousness and female writing. This impression is reinforced at these texts in which the 'writing acting I' and the 'experiencing I' become one and thereby suggest the idea of quasi- autobiographical, confessionlike records. As an example, the lecture chooses the so called "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" († 1352, nun of the Dominican convent Maria Medingen) preserved in the oldest manuscript of 1353. In this text a nun (without naming herself) narrates her religious, mystical experiences during her convent life. Characteristic on the one hand is that these experiences are always perceived physical, the body functions simultaneously as space and expression of her encounter with God. On the other hand, these experiences are interdependent with the process of writing them down. They are not only the cause for her record but the writing down itself functions as cause and catalyst for mystical experience. First of all, these poetically proven religious experiences of the 'textual I' will be brought out. Using the commendable studies of Caroline Walker Bynum concerning medieval female religiousness, it must be asked how far these religious, corporeal experiences and the narrating of them can be classified as specifically female. In other words, how do they relate to the institutionalized 'male' discourse about female religiousness and the writing about them in the Middle Ages? Is the 'poetic space' used to originate specific female ways of experience literarilly and to set them against the prevailing gender- constructions or are these constructions taken up affirmatively? The previous research about the "Revelations" has regarded them - both from a conservative-misogynistic and a feminist point of view - as 'factography', as a realistic depiction of female religiousness, of the biological and social experiences of a woman in the Middle Ages. Thereby the literary constructions of female religiousness were taken as real- life situations. In contrast, this lecture will focus on the text as a literary one. The depicted experiences will be treated as genre-dependent, imaginary testing of female religiousness and female writing in the poetic space. This perspective will lead to a new estimation of the 1 narrator in the "Revelations" who will not be taken up with historical referentiality to a medieval female author 'Margarethe Ebner' anymore but with her textual, poetic function. Therefore it will also be neccessary to refer to the handing down-situation of the manuscript and how the ascribing of the text to Margarethe Ebner has taken place. Thereby the view will be directed from the textually mediated but apparently real female religious experience to the text itself, to its function as a literary tested, in an I-gesture transposed female religiousness. I. When we look for texts recorded by women which convey ideas of female religiousness, we hardly expect to find them in the Middle Ages. But indeed, from the 13th to 15th century comparatively many hagiographic and revelation-texts were produced which seem to convey directly female ideas of religious experience, not least - one believes - guaranteed by the sex of the female protagonist and 'author' herself. These texts are subsumed under the term 'mystic' because they explicitly depict the strived for or even performed encounter of the female protagonist with the divine partner. This encounter is mostly carried out via the person of Christ - especially his humanitas - and leaves aside the world outside and the protagonist's work upon it. Therefore many scholars have directed their attention to the quality of the protagonist's relationship to and encounter with the divine partner Christ. Both are - according to the modern opinion - of an almost provocative affectivity and they stress the role of the body as a space for the experience of the Divine. Apart from other texts, particularly the vernacular vitae- and revelation-literature of the southwest Dominican convents have caught the critic's attention as evidence of such a conception of an affective, the body stressing religiousness: in the middle of the 14th century, about a hundred years after the convents had been incorporated in the Dominican order, they developed literary activities and a corpus of texts were produced which, roughly speaking, sum up the religious life of the women who lived in the respective convent. One distinguishes between the so-called sisterbooks and the single-personal vitae- and revelation-texts. The sisterbooks are compilations of life-descriptions of several sisters - especially from the initial stage of the convent - which were expandable for the vitae of following sisters.1 Within the sisterbooks the narrator acts as eye-witness or as someone who gathers oral evidence of the sisters' religious life. In contrast, the extensive, single- personal vitae- and revelation-texts2 are mostly written down from the viewpoint of the experiencing I, who is at the same time introduced as the telling and writing I. 1 Up to now we know the Adelhausener, Engelthaler, Katharinentaler, Kirchberger, Oetenbacher, Tösser, Unterlindener (in Latin), Weiler, and the so-called 'Ulmer sisterbook'. The origin of the latter is not clear yet, even Graf (1984), who assigns it to the convent of Gotteszell, cannot submit conclusive evidence. Regarding the sisterbooks altogether cf. for an overview the recent study by Jaron Lewis (1996). 2 Besides the "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" cf. the "Revelations of Adelheit Langmann" and "Elsbeth of Oye" and the "Life" and "Revelations of Christine Ebner". 2 II. From out of these texts I have selected the "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" for my lecture. The oldest manuscript is dated from the year 1353 and it was written at the Dominican convent Maria Medingen (near Donauwörth) where two years before the nun Margarethe Ebner had died. She is identified as the protagonist and narrating I of the "Revelations".3 If we take a look at this text from the aspect of the protagonist's experience of and encounter with God, we also notice a kind of spirituality which is centered on the Person of Christ and characterized by a high degree of affectivity between the textual I and her divine partner. This impression is above all evoked by the charging of the text with images taken from the interhuman sphere and by the depiction of the God-woman-relationship as a family or sexual one. But what seems to be piquant is that these images, which are used to describe the religious experiences within the "Revelations", are apparently applied without metaphorical speech. This way, the depiction of the textual Fs encounter with especially Christ's humanitas appears to be based upon concrete, real experiences; and regarding these experiences - like the graces and revelations centered on the passio, the eucharist, or the childhood of Christ - both the protagonist's and Christ's body have a very prominent function. For a long time, most scholars who have dealt with the "Revelations of Margarethe Ebner" have agreed that these religious experiences would represent a kind of typically female spirituality. Above all the emotionality, the somatizing of the religious experiences, and the concentration upon the childhood of Christ would correspond to the "Wesen der Frau" ('woman's nature') and her predestined "Liebes- und Hingabefähigkeit" ('ability to love and devotion') (Zoepf 1914: 13); here, too, the "fraulich und mütterlich" ('feminine and motherly') kind of religiousness would be shown, that characterizes female mysticism altogether (Kunisch [1968]: 158). The intellectual achievement of the 'author' of the "Revelations" is considered to be very low: Weitlauff (1973: 239f), for example, suggests the danger of "Verflachung der Mystik" ('mysticism becoming shallow') not least resulting from the fact that "Margarethe" was no "geistvolle Persönlichkeit" ('wise personality'), while Wentzlaff-Eggebert ([1969]: 63) even detects "pathologische Züge" ('pathological features'), which would show the danger of "verdrängten weiblichen Gefühls" ('suppressed female emotions'). The list

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