FEMINISTS, PROPHETESSES AND WITCHES:
LESSONS FROM A WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES
by Abraham Van Luik, abevanluik@thoughtsandplaces.org
OVERVIEW
PART 1: This first part of a four part article describes a bona-fide women's movement that was part of a larger restorationist movement in the High Middle Ages, and how the female contribution to this movement was controlled through close relationships between spiritual counselors and confessors and women who were leaders in this new spirituality movement.
PART 2: The close, even intimate, relations that existed between the men and women leaders of this spiritual revolution of the High Middle Ages receives closer scrutiny in Part 2: This intimacy seems to have been both a direct consequence of the advent of a time of renewed spirituality and a tool through which traditional male hegemony over female spirituality was reinforced.
PART 3: The types of love-relationships described in Part 2 partly reflected the nature of the mystic vision that could be shared between mystics and also between a religious woman mystic and a sympathetic leader or confessor. It is the nature of this mystic experience, which allows a man like Francis to see Jesus as his spouse and a woman like Clare to see herself feeding at Francis' breast, that is given attention in this part.
PART 4: Not every prophetess of the High Middle Ages has had her revelations revered by her contemporaries, as will become evident in Part 4, which begins with the burning of Margaret Porete in Paris in 1310 and ends with a discussion of the witch craze and holocaust. Part 4 is a sobering exercise that follows the potentially euphoric discussion of much that is inspiring and spiritually delightful in Parts 2 and 3. Part 4 is a warning reminding us that hatred of women's spiritual power, or any other power challenging its authority, lies as magma below the crust of Christian theology. And the magma boils on.
REFERENCES: References follow, by Part, at the end of each Part. References in a later Part may refer to references more fully cited at first use in a previous Part of the paper.
PART 1: A WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES
Europe in the high middle ages was a seedbed of socio-political and spiritual turmoil from which sprouted the institutions of modern civilization: the breakup of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, the breakup of Catholicism, the rise of the Reformed churches, and the separation of church and state. In every century from the tenth through the fifteenth, events occurred that could be cited to indicate the pending dawn of the modern age.
But some of the movements of the High Middle Ages did not presage the modern age, some flowered and died while others flowered and were transformed. These transformed movements, like Christianity itself, may have continued to flower, but whether they continued as the true incarnations of their founders' visions is debatable.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the flowering of a number of movements within Europe that could be called restorationist, meaning an attempt to return to what was perceived to be the type of life intended by the original Christian message. For example, Ronald A. Knox, of Trinity College, Oxford, once characterized some of the heretical movements of the Middle Ages as putting forward "the momentous claim" (1) characteristic of restorationists:
The disciples of Amalric, in l2l0, claimed to be the church of the Holy Spirit, destined to succeed an outworn dispensation. Dolcino similarly held that the power of Christ had been made over to himself and his fellow