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Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno

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Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37925649 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno A dissertation presented By Travis A. Stevens To The Faculty of Harvard Divinity School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology In the Subject of History of Christianity Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2017 © 2017 Travis A. Stevens All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Amy Hollywood Travis A. Stevens Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno Abstract This dissertation examines four medieval Christian texts that describe the love between the soul and Christ in violent terms and demonstrates how images of violence, such as wounding, striking, and beating, illustrate the reciprocal suffering of the Christian who is lovesick for Christ and of Christ, lovesick for the soul. These texts challenge the normative account of suffering in Christian theology as always rooted in sin and uncover an underappreciated historical moment when Christian thinkers conceptualize suffering as intrinsic to loving God. Through my readings of Richard of St Victor (d. 1173), Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), Hadewijch (d. 13th c.), and Angela of Foligno (d. 1310), I trace the emergence of this alternative vision of suffering as well as its waning and merging into more normative theologies of sin. In calling attention to this little known strand of theology, I draw on the history of medicine to analyze how “violent love,” as Richard of St Victor calls it, harnesses the concept of lovesickness, in order to show how specific, historical constructions of the body inform and produce an incarnational theology that defines the relation of humanity to an embodied Christ. Such a Christian notion of desire that is embodied in both the Christian and in Christ, lovesick for one another, offers an alternate history of Christianity’s fraught relations to bodies, gender, and desire. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Richard of St Victor: Lovesickness as a Sign of Violent Love 12 Chapter 2: Love’s Violent Manners: Beatrice of Nazareth’s Seven Manners of Love 43 Chapter 3: Affect and The Songs of Hadewijch 74 Chapter 4: Hadewijch and The Pleasure of Suffering 123 Chapter 5: Angela of Foligno: From Crucified Love to Apophasis 158 Conclusion 196 Bibliography 208 iv Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of different people and a few institutions for their support of this project and of me. First and foremost, thanks to my advisor, Amy Hollywood, whose patient and persistent assistance in formulating the project and in editing chapter drafts was invaluable. Thanks to my other committee members, Mark Jordan, Charles Stang, and Beverly Kienzle for agreeing to read the fruits of my labor and offer suggestions, but also for their advice on how to go about writing a dissertation while still living a rewarding life. Thanks also to Rob Faesen, who coached me through reading and analyzing Middle Dutch texts during my time in Belgium. Thanks also to Harvard Divinity School and the Clarence B. Campbell family for financial support. Thanks to reference librarian Renata Kalnins at Andover Harvard Theological Library, who provided timely and helpful research assistance. Thanks to the Graduate Theological Union, which supported a writing group and generously allowed me to join. Thanks to the members of the writing group at the GTU, and especially to Jennifer Owens, Leslie Bowling-Dyer, Sarah Levin, Diandra Chretain, Yohana Junker, Michelle Mueller, Mandie Kaminski, Reuben Shank, Su-Chi Lin, Ann Woods, and Eleanor Shapiro, for your camaraderie in our shared work of scholarship. Thanks to my other scholarly friends, Noa Bar, Joel Street, Kris Trujillo, Jennifer de la Guardia, Klaus Yoder, Ian Beacock, Emily Johnson, and Tom Poynor, who helped me through the fraught process of formulating my argument and offered encouragement and support throughout the writing process. I am deeply thankful for the support of my parents, Sandra and John, who believed in the possibilities of my achievements since before I was born. Special thanks also to my sister, Sara, who paved the path to doctoral studies in my family and provided much needed emotional support and practical advice along the way. Two children came into my life during my doctoral studies: my niece, Harper, who teaches me all the new Canadian words she learns, and my nephew, Arlen, who patiently teaches me Cantonese. Finally, thanks to my partner Kerry, who endured over five years of a very long-distance relationship so that I could do this work, and who taught me a thing or two about lovesickness. v For Kerry vi Introduction Richard of St Victor’s The Four Degrees of Violent Love conceives of the love between the soul and Christ through the prism of a single verse from the Song of Songs. Much of his interpretation, and especially of the intersecting discourses in which he locates this love, hinges on his knowledge of two different Latin translations of the biblical verse in question: the Vulgate and the Vetus Latina, or Old Latin, of Song of Songs 2:5.1 In The Four Degrees of Violent Love, Richard begins his treatise with this verse, but uses a different translation of the same verse in the Benjamin Minor. In the Benjamin Minor, Richard follows the Vulgate, Fulcite me floribus stipate me malis quia amore langueo. (Canticum Canticorum 2:5, Vulgate)2 Prop me up with flowers, press me with apples, for I am sick with love. However, in the treatise The Four Degrees of Violent Love, he cites the same verse but from the Vetus Latina.: Confirmate me inter unguenta, constipate me inter mala, quia vulnerata caritatis ego sum. (Canticum Canticorum 2:5, Vetus Latina Itala, Cod. Sal. (De Bruyne R.B. 1925)3 Strengthen me with oils, press me with apples, for I am wounded by love.4 1 The earliest Latin translations of the Bible that survive come from North Africa. These texts, collectively known as the Vetus Latina, are not a single entity, but a set of roughly contemporaneous translations of biblical texts into Latin. Jerome’s 4th-century Vulgate translation, which notably translated the Old Testament from the original Hebrew rather than from the Septuagint, gradually replaced the Vetus Latina texts over the span of the Middle Ages. For more information, see C.S.C. Williams, “The History of the Text and Canon of the New Testament to Jerome,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, ed. G.W.H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 27-53; and Raphael Loewe, “The Medieval History of the Latin Vulgate,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, ed. G.W.H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 102-154. 2 Cited in Richard of St Victor, Benjamin minor, PL 196, Col. 17A. 3 The Vetus Latina includes examples like this one, evoking woundedness, as well as others more similar to the Vulgate version that refer to being sick with love. http://www.brepols.net/Pages/BrowseBySeries.aspx?TreeSeries=VLD-O 4 Richard’s version has a different case ending for charitas from the Vulgate; his version reads: “Vulnerata charitate ego sum.” (PL 196, 1207C). Translation of the Vulgate here is my own. 1 The phrase “for I am wounded by love / quia vulnerata caritatis ego sum” then forms the basis for an extended rumination on the violence of love, which is the main topic of the treatise. By freely alternating between the two translations of the verse, Richard suggests a parallel between illness and woundedness, as well as between lovesickness and violent love. One point of departure for this dissertation lies in the substitution of woundedness for illness and the convergence within Richard’s treatise of violent love and lovesickness. Violence and sickness provide two different etiologies of suffering that come together and are transformed through their interactions in the context of Christian theology. In that sense, this dissertation might be understood as part of a history of the suffering of love—a pun on the two senses of passion. In the pages that follow, I will analyze texts that use figures of violence and illness to describe that suffering love. Though it is tempting to try and maintain the rhetorical nature of these figures, they continually escape such characterization and bleed over into the realm of the physical and of bodies. This is to say that medieval people speak and think differently about how love, and especially Christian love, works. Love is an illness with physical and psychic effects. Christian love is also a wounding that mirrors Christ’s crucifixion in the soul of the Christian, while shifting that wounding from the physical and historical to the spiritual and the now. Lovesickness is a concept inherited and developed by medieval writers from classical authors of both medical and literary texts. Although symptoms varied, the understanding was that love was a passion of the soul, in other words, a psychological condition rooted in an imbalance of the humors. Medieval thinkers would develop more specific symptomologies, which varied from source to source, but included burning fever, insomnia, pallor, thinness, difficulty speaking, sunken eyes, unstable pulse, depression, and various kinds of insanity.
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