The Oldest Vocation In this late fifteenth-century wood carving, St. Anne holds the Virgin Mary on her knee, while Mary-herself a childlike figure-holds the Christ Child. From the Munster Landesmuseum fur Kunst and Kulturgeschichte. Photo courtesy of Marburg /Art Resource The Oldest Vocation Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages Clarissa W. Atkinson Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1991 by Cornell University First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1994 Second paperback printing 2019 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8014-2071-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4088-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4089-3 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-5017-4090-9 (epub/mobi) Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Cover illustration: Saint Margaret of Antioch, protector of women in childbirth. Images de la Vie du Christ et des Saints. MsNAF 16251 (BN). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. For Holley, Meg, and Matthew Contents Preface [ ix] Abbreviations [xi] 1. Christian Motherhood: "Who Is My Mother?" [1] 2. Physiological Motherhood: The Wandering Womb [23] 3. Spiritual Motherhood: Extraordinary Women in the Early Middle Ages [64] 4· Theological Motherhood: The Virgin Mother of God [101] s. "Mother of Love, Mother of Tears": Holiness and Families in the Later Middle Ages [144] 6. Motherhood Reformed: The Parson's Wife and Her Children [194] y. The Construction of Motherhood [236] Works Cited [247] Index [263] [vii) Preface Writing of her experience of motherhood "in the family­ centered, consumer-oriented, Freudian-American world of the 1950's"-and of her own wrenching ambivalence-Adrienne Rich said: "I did not understand that this circle, this magnetic field in which we lived was not a natural phenomenon" I Of Woman Born, pp. 4�5 ). Rich made a vital contribution to the recognition of the historicity of motherhood, the ancient vocation that is also an institution. My work was inspired in part by that recognition, which challenges both scholars and activists and continues to produce questions and demand answers. As an institution, how is motherhood constructed? How are its ideologies developed and proclaimed? How have "good" and "bad" motherhood been de­ fined andevaluated -by whom, and in what contexts? How is the work of mothers related to the political and economic institutions of a society? How are the language and imagery of motherhood related to other cultural symbol systems, particularly those of religion? With these and other questions in mind, I set out to extend the exploration of the history of motherhood into medieval Europe, where its roots are inextricably entangled with the history of Christianity. A complicated project such as this touches several centuries and geographic areas and makes use of many kinds of materials : its scope is much too large to be confined to any "field." I have (i x ] PR EFA CE accumulated many debts and depended very much on the learning and insights of others. Apart from works cited in the notes and bibliography, I have gained greatly from discussions with col­ leagues and friends. Constance Buchanan read every chapter, sometimes more than once, and suggested the title. I very much appreciate the excellent advice of Bernadette Brooten and Marga­ ret Miles, the patience and good humor of my friends at Cornell University Press, and the persistence of Holley Atkinson in trans­ atlantic negotiation. Rosemary Hale and Claire Sahlin generously shared their own researches into the lives and works of medieval holy women. I am especially grateful for the care, attention, and affection with which Kay Shanahan and Margie Thornton worked on the manuscript. My dear friend and colleague, the late Nancy Jay, made wise and helpful comments on several drafts; her enthusiasm always inspired further effort. Her students and friends miss her very much. I have the advantage of an interested and loving family. My sisters, Elizabeth Hogeland and Eleanor Shakin, are long-time boosters of me and my projects. The three people to whom the book is dedicated are responsible for my intense, sustained passion for the subject. Whatever may be said about the historical con­ struction of motherhood, it has embodied rewards. CLARISSA W. AT KINSON Cambridge, Massachusetts [x) Abbreviations AS Acta sanctorum SUSF Samlingar utgivn a CSEL Corpus scrip torum av svenska ecclesiasticorum fornskriftsiillskapet latinorum WA D. Martin Luthers ·LW Luther's Works Werk e PL Patrologiae cursus WA Br D. Martin Luthers completus: Series Werke: Briefwechsel latin a WA TR D. Martin Luth ers S RM Scriptores rerum Werk e: Ti schreden merovingicarum SRP Scriptores rerum prussicarum [xi] The Oldest Vocation CHAPTER ONE Christian Motherhood: UWho Is My Mother�77 According to a very old story, a woman pope ruled the Church of Rome for a few years in the middle of the ninth century. Her name was Joan, and as a young woman she lived in England, where she fell in love with a traveling student who was a monk. (Before there were universities, most students were monks, and the intellectually curious among them moved from library to library and from teacher to teacher, in search of books and instruc­ tion.) Monks were not allowed to marry, but Joan was brave as well as beautiful and brilliant, and she joined her lover in his studies and travels, wearing male clerical clothing for safety and concealment. The two wandered through Europe, acquiring vast learning,until the man died and Joan was left alone. She continued to study and to dress like a monk: Boccaccio, who told the story in the fourteenth century, said that she refused "to attach herself to anyone else or acknowledge that she was a woman." 1 Eventu­ ally she found her way to Rome, where her outstanding virtue and learning were rewarded with election to the papal throne. Joan reigned as pope for a time, with nobody the wiser. Boccaccio remarked: "This woman was not afraid to mount the Fisherman's throne, to deal with all the sacred mysteries and proffer them to 1. Giovanni Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino jNew Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 23 1. [ I) THE OLDEST VOCATION others, something which the Christian religion does not allow to any woman." Such audacity was soon punished. Boccaccio says that the devil tormented her with lust and "the Pope happened to become pregnant. Oh, what a shameful crime! "2 Joan's celebrated wisdom did not help her to appreciate the implications of her condition, or even to recognize the beginning of labor. During a solemn procession through the streets of Rome, the pope gave birth and died in shameful agony.3 In the salacious iconography that surrounds this story, Joan frequently is depicted lying in the street in a crowd of horrified onlookers, a triple crown on her head and an infant emerging from beneath the papal robes. Lawrence Durrell, working with a modern Greek version of the legend, captured the chaotic, sacrile­ gious atmosphere of visual representations of Joan's travail: Great was the consternation when a premature infant was produced from among the voluminous folds of the papal vestments. The at­ tending archdeacons recoiled in horror while the great circle of wor­ shippers pressed in even closer, screaming and crossing themselves. Women climbed on the backs of their menfolks for a better view, while those already mounted on horses and mules stood in the saddle until the deacons were forced to use their standards and crucifixes as clubs to hew a passage through the mob.4 The uses to which the story has been put are no more edifying than its iconography. It gave Boccaccio an opportunity to castigate 2. Ibid., p. 232. 3. In most versions of the tale, she died in the street; in Boccaccio's story, the cardinals put Joan in prison, "where this wretched woman died in the midst of her laments." On the implications of the story for his own time, Boccaccio noted that "when the Pope goes on a procession with the clergy and the people ...when they reach the place where Joan gave birth, the Pope turns away and takes different streets because of his hatred for that place" (ibid., p. 233). Constance Jordan points out that Boccaccio's Joan is virtuous as long as she stays in the private sphere, "monstrous" in the public: "As an event, her motherhood figures her grotesque­ ness"; see "Boccaccio's In-Famous Women: Gender and Civic Virtue in the De mulieribus claris," in Ambiguous Realities: Wom en in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1987), p. 33· 4· Pope Joan: A Romantic Biography by Emmanuel Royidis, trans. Lawrence Durrell (London: Andre Deutsch, 1960), pp. 154-155. [ 2 ] CHRISTIAN MoTHERHOOD bold women, but it has also been used to discredit the clergy, to make fun of pious hypocrites, and to denounce the papacy and the entire Roman Catholic Church. The legend of Pope Joan begins with a love affair and ends with an out-of-wedlock birth, but it is not about love or sex, and Joan was not punished for sexual immorality.