In his celebrated Life of Mary of Oignies, Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) describes the saintly woman's deathbed scene that culminated her distinguished religious career. Anticipating death approaching in June 1213, the woman reportedly offered a virtuoso singing performance for three days and three nights:
She thus began to sing in a loud and clear voice and for three days and three nights did not stop praising God and giving thanks: she rhythmically wove in sweet harmony the sweetest song about God, the holy angels, the blessed Virgin, other saints, her friends and the holy Scriptures. She did not think about composing sentences, nor did she spend time arranging what she had composed rhythmically, but the Lord gave it to her just as if it had been written out before her at exactly the same time as it was spoken. She rejoiced with a continuous cry and did not have to deliberate over it, nor did she have to interrupt her song in order to arrange its parts. It seemed to her that one of the seraphim was stretching his wings over her breasts, and with this help and sweet assistance, she was inspired to sing without any difficulty.Footnote 1
The hagiographer goes on, diligently reporting on a whole sequence of Mary's songs, a bewilderingly complex array of liturgical chants, vernacular interpolations, and other stylized vocal acts. Her performance seems to have been structured around the Divine Office, but she constantly interpolated with French rhythmic songs,Footnote 2 “expounding (exponens) the holy Scriptures in a new and marvellous way and subtly explaining (edisserens) many things from the Gospels, the Psalms and the Old and New Testaments which she had never heard interpreted.”Footnote 3 In other words, the woman is said to have offered a running commentary in her native tongue, the Romance language, to the entire Scripture, in the form of song.
This account is noteworthy in that it does not readily conform to common hagiographical tropes. Liturgical piety is, of course, a conventional element in late antique and medieval idealized representations of Christian lives.Footnote 4 The twelfth-century visionary Hildegard von Bingen was constantly inspired by liturgical music and church rituals.Footnote 5 Recent research has emphasized the observance of liturgical routine as fundamental in shaping the devotional life in some German convents in the late Middle Ages.Footnote 6 However, Mary of Oignies's hagiographer seems to have placed emphasis, not primarily on her role as an exemplary participant of communal services or even an overwhelmed recipient of visionary experiences, but on her active possession of vocal talents, mastery of a large repertoire, and articulation of spiritual knowledge through the particular medium of sacred songs. Her younger contemporary, the royal saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231), for example, is also said to have made sweet voices “in her throat without any movement of her lips” while on her deathbed, surrounded by singing angels.Footnote 7 By contrast, the account of Mary's singing is conspicuously lengthier, filled with hagiographic hyperbole that reaches another level. The consummation of Mary's liturgical preparation for death is a prolonged solo performance masterfully executed and fully under her command. The hagiographer attributes exceptional agency to the dying woman and complexity to her performance, which may bear oblique yet intriguing traces of regional ritual practices, but more importantly, serve rhetorical purposes beyond fashioning a stereotypical dying saint.
This paper explores the role of singing in the hagiographical construction of religious women in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège. I argue that miraculous singing is by no means a literary trope unwittingly deployed by the hagiographers, but crucial in the construction of pious women as powerful intermediaries between the living and the dead. Women's singing should be understood within the context of local funerary beliefs in the thirteenth century, a period when the notion of purgatorial expiation was actively promoted by the reform-minded clergy and women's intercessory prayers were deemed especially potent.Footnote 8 Although the amorphous phenomenon linking women's songs with death rituals can be found across premodern cultures,Footnote 9 this article studies one of its particular historical manifestations in which singing was built into the imagery of a holy woman with heightened intensity, reflecting the conglomerate of ideas about death and the afterlife, the resurrected body, and suffrages current in thirteenth-century northern Europe.
This study also intends to highlight liturgical and musical performance as a compelling form in the articulation of female sanctity in the Middle Ages. In particular, the evidence presented here are remarkably early examples showing the complex ways in which Latin liturgy and its vernacular appropriation, popular beliefs and scholastic ideas about music were integrated and reshaped in the religious practice. Liturgy—that is to say, performative modes of communal worship—as the fundamental context of medieval piety is often assumed rather than investigated. This article attempts to offer a corrective to the tendency to characterize religious women's behavior as ecstatic and inexplicable—“mystical” in the narrow sense of being “disruptive” and “problematic” to the liturgical and parochial routine of the mainstream Christian society.Footnote 10 In fact, many such extraordinary phenomena were rooted in concrete ritual context and reflected shared practices and beliefs. Taking women's singing as a case study, the purpose here is to show, without subscribing to a claim of exceptionalism or marginality, that female spirituality in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège was distinguishable and precocious in the European context.
The religious women of Liège occupy a prominent place in the “origin story” of late medieval piety. The ensemble of attributes we commonly associate with a medieval “mystic,” from fierce asceticism to Eucharistic visions to bridal mysticism, were put together, took a definitive shape, and gained wide currency in the early thirteenth-century Low Countries.Footnote 11 Mary of Oignies (circa 1177–1213), a married woman living as an ascetic, has been hailed as a pioneer of this new female spirituality.Footnote 12 The Bishopric of Liège, which held spiritual jurisdiction over a geographical area much greater than the city itself, was conveniently located where some of the most important religious currents of the time converged:Footnote 13 densely populated with religious institutions, the diocese was under the successive reforming influences of the Cistercians, the Victorines, and the mendicants.Footnote 14 One of the most urbanized and most literate regions in Europe, Liège seems to have had a more assertive laity whose religious fervor had been nurtured in a longstanding crusading tradition.Footnote 15 The diocese was also receptive to the “pastoral revolution” led by scholar-preachers from the nearby University of Paris and facilitated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.Footnote 16 All these favorable conditions combined might explain the vibrant religious culture that cultivated the mulieres religiosae, the intense pastoral care they received, and the creation of a historiographical tradition that has certainly rendered them more visible to posterity.
The vocal and the musical are relatively understudied aspects of this otherwise well-known tradition.Footnote 17 Hagiography is often said to be an inherently argumentative form.Footnote 18 The hagiographer builds his narrative around selected behavior of the protagonist to construct a model of sanctity deemed compelling to his audience. A hagiographical enterprise is retrospective in that it retrieves ritual traditions to legitimize a constructed memory but also prospective so as to perpetuate such a memory. Admittedly, it is an interpretive conundrum to separate the protagonist's actions from the hagiographer's agenda, the woman's doing from the male cleric's understanding of it. But in the case of the Liégeois Vitae, given the choice of “living saints” as subject matter, it would have undercut the hagiographers’ ideological agenda if the narrative did not appear altogether conceivable to his audience, especially when these Lives were written shortly after the women's deaths and living witnesses were likely ample. Also, the circulation of the manuscripts suggests a considerable degree of overlap between the reading community of these texts and the spiritual network in which these women originally operated.Footnote 19 The persuasiveness of the saint's self-fashioning or the hagiographical representation about it depended upon its conventionality as well as its originality, on its acceptability as much as its subversiveness. It seems that some identifiable features of these women's religiosity spilt over to the textual level in the particular thematic choices in hagiographical composition. This is not necessarily in conflict with the ways in which the male clerics used precise liturgical and biblical language trying to make sense of what the women were doing. The textual result of such religious negotiations and exchanges reflected the central place these women occupied as ritual performers and powerful intercessors in the religious imagination of the local world.
I. Mary of Oignies's Deathbed Songs
The Life of Mary of Oignies is distinguishable, if not entirely distinct, from other literary accounts about liturgical singing as it provides a focused and sustained narrative about a triumphant, awe-inspiring, one-time phenomenon. It has been argued that the theme of miraculous singing was a way of acknowledging women's charismatic gift to teach without impinging upon the priestly prerogative to preach.Footnote 20 This line of analysis should be broadly applicable to lay instruction in the Middle Ages in general. But why singing stood as a preferable means of self-expression or self-fashioning chosen by women and recorded by their admiring hagiographers in this particular time and place needs further explanation. Bruce Holsinger has suggested a more specific metaphorical connection between the musical instrument and the suffering body awaiting resurrection in the exegetic tradition of the psalms.Footnote 21 It does seem that death and the concern for the afterlife are the underlying themes in many of the Liégeois Vitae and particularly in the singing episodes they contain. Even though Jacques de Vitry framed his narrative about Mary of Oignies's singing within the context of ritual performance carrying broad theological messages, it was first and foremost a deathbed song with fervent anticipation for the afterlife, a memorial service she performed for herself.
The ultimate model for Mary's singing was the angels singing at the moment of death, an extremely popular motif in religious literature from this region at this time. In Caesarius of Heisterbach's collection of monastic tales from the turn of the thirteenth century, celestial music sung by the angelic host was almost made into a defining feature of a blessed death.Footnote 22 To acknowledge someone's participation in the heavenly liturgy was to affirm his or her membership among the saved and glorified. This topos was also a statement about the person's certified sanctity that might legitimize their cultic veneration. But in Caesarius's stories the soul was mostly received into the angelic choir; rarely was a dying person said to be presiding over the performance with artistic mastery and stamina as displayed in Mary's act. In her heroic feat Mary was assisted by one of the seraphim “stretching his wings over her breasts,” a reference echoing the biblical passage about the seraphim covering God's face and feet with their wings while crying out “Sanctus” (Isaiah 6:1-3).Footnote 23 This is also a liturgical reference, as the hymn Sanctus, a joyful acclamation in praise of God, was sung by the church congregation including the laity well into the twelfth century but became exclusive to the clergy in the later centuries.Footnote 24 On the summit of the celestial hierarchy of angels, the six-winged seraphim, by their fiery nature, were unsurpassed in their burning love for God and had the special prerogative to sing praises to him.Footnote 25 The most famous encounter with a seraph in the Middle Ages was probably that of Francis of Assisi a decade later in 1224 when the saint received the stigmata. Mary's vision of a seraph encapsulates the multi-layered meaning of her performance: like an angel, she sang in praise of God out of ardent love, and she would soon join the angelic choir with a guaranteed entry into heaven.
The hagiographer Jacques de Vitry included considerable details so that the image of an angelic singer was conflated with that of an actual singer in a concrete and palpable manner. Sometimes it is unclear to a modern reader whether a reference in hagiographical sources to singing is meant literally or figuratively, especially when the reference includes biblical phrases such as “the new song” (e.g., Isaiah 42:10) or “songs from the spirit” (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16).Footnote 26 But this ambiguity does not appear to be the case with Mary's singing. Her performance was given precise temporal and spatial setting and was presented as a premeditated public spectacle of piety. In the year 1213, towards the end of a prolonged fast from the feast of the Annunciation on March 25 to the feast of John the Baptist on June 24, Mary sang unceasingly for three days and three nights in the church of Saint Nicholas near the town of Oignies, a public place of worship, with the priest by her side as a concerned yet acquiescent onlooker.Footnote 27
What first appears remarkable about Mary's singing is her bewilderingly inclusive and hard-to-categorize repertoire. The hagiographer made a meticulous effort in enumerating the different themes of her songs, many of which are comparable to surviving references about regional liturgical practices from this period. Although this does not necessarily prove the account to be a faithful transcription of an actual performance, it does indicate that the special relationship between the woman and the sacred songs was rooted in a much wider song culture. Mary structured her performance around the Divine Office, punctuated it with liturgical songs such as Magnificat, Canticle of Simeon, and Nunc dimittis and decorated it with numerous French songs, prayers, and variegated vocal acts.Footnote 28 Vernacular interpolation in Latin liturgy was a practice already known at this time as “farsing,” by which extensive elaborations were inserted to surround the Latin phrases to enhance the ceremonial effects of the liturgical occasion.Footnote 29 But Mary's performance was quite unusual in her systematic, sweeping use of this technique for wide-ranging purposes.
The most outstanding feature of Mary's all-encompassing repertoire was the vernacular song commentary she interpolated into the Latin liturgy. These songs were unquestionably exegetical and doctrinal in nature, according to the hagiographer. Mary began with an antiphon about the Trinity. This liturgical chant might have been taken from, or shared similar concerns with, the Feast of the Holy Trinity composed by the tenth-century Bishop Stephen of Liège, which was later adopted throughout western Europe and would be formalized as a universal feast by Pope John XXII in the fourteenth century.Footnote 30 Then she inserted “marvelous and, as it were, ineffable things into her song about the holy Trinity.”Footnote 31 Mary further continued with an exposition on “many things from the Gospels, the Psalms and the Old and New Testaments, which she had never heard interpreted.”Footnote 32 She also commented on the humanity of Christ and the blessed Virgin, as well as other theological issues, all “rhythmically and in the Romance language.”Footnote 33
That is to say, according to the hagiographer, Mary of Oignies expounded on the entire sequence of biblical books and on the two greatest mysteries of Christianity, the doctrines of Trinity and the Incarnation, in the form of versified songs in her native French. Anneke Mulder-Bakker, who seems to read Jacques's account literally, calls Mary outright a “proficient theologian.”Footnote 34 Mary should have sufficient Latin to be able to read the Psalter as Jacques tells us that she owned a copy.Footnote 35 It would be extraordinary but not inconceivable that Mary, a lay woman with mediocre background, managed to acquire knowledge about the Bible with astonishing range and depth through oral communicative means.Footnote 36 We know that Maurice de Sully (d. 1196), Bishop of Paris, left his homilies on the Gospels in the vernacular French prose.Footnote 37 Jacques de Vitry was a follower of Master Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) who exerted influence in creating an intellectual culture in Paris orienting towards pastoral efficacy.Footnote 38 Jacques was fascinated by and found his great hero in Fulk de Neuilly, a superficially educated popularizer who preached to the ordinary lay folks “in a simple and vernacular way.”Footnote 39 Mary was recounted as listening to sermons on the scriptures everyday (even though she did not need to do so as someone graced with divine illumination).Footnote 40
However, even given the possibility that Mary gained scriptural knowledge through attending liturgy and sermons, an inventive exegesis in French songs would still make her case uniquely precocious. The surviving evidence for early French religious songs with musical notation is mainly of two kinds: short, devotional lyrics such as Passion songs and Marian hymns, notable mainly for their emotional intensity, and longer narrative poetry of saintly adventures, such as that of Saint Stephen.Footnote 41 The handful of twelfth-century Old French religious texts on the Scriptures targeting the laity were ostensibly selective paraphrases or translations from the Latin original, intended for a limited, aristocratic audience.Footnote 42 No audacious theological novelty was claimed and certainly no comprehensive knowledge about the Bible was attempted. An apparently school-educated Cistercian nun from the nearby region, Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), who had practiced the craft of copying Latin liturgical manuscripts, composed a short treatise in Middle Dutch on the seven degrees of loving God. This work is most often described as mystical.Footnote 43 In Mary's case, although it is not unthinkable for a non-monastic, non-aristocratic woman to grasp scriptural knowledge, given that the only available evidence are the writings of her hagiographer, it is difficult to draw an unequivocal conclusion. What is truly remarkable in Jacques's account is not the precise extent or depth of Mary's understanding of the Scriptures, but rather his understanding of her relationship with them. To provoke hagiographical veneration, Jacques de Vitry found it important to describe the woman as adroit in vernacular scriptural commentary that was both orthodox and theologically respectable.
Besides theological issues, Mary also sang about saints. A featured song about Saint Stephen is particularly interesting: “When she sang of St. Stephen, the first martyr who is called ‘the crown of heaven,’ she also said that when he prayed at his death, the Lord gave him St. Paul as a gift. When St. Paul was crowned with martyrdom in his turn and breathed out his spirit in death, St. Stephen was present and offered St. Paul's spirit to the Lord, saying to him, ‘You gave me this great and singular gift and I, with the fruit multiplied, give it back to you.’”Footnote 44 This passage seems to suggest that Mary was not singing a lyrical song but rather a narrative song about the saint's martyrdom with dramatized monologues from the protagonist. This song might be in the form similar to a troped epistle for the feast of Saint Stephen. The so-called “tropes” are lengthy narrative songs about Stephen's Passion in Old French usually sung by the subdeacons during the high Mass on the saint's feast day, intended to magnify the importance of the Latin reading and the joyfulness of the occasion, because the feast took place on December 26 right after Christmas.Footnote 45 In the surviving early medieval French texts with music notation on their manuscripts, Saint Stephen's epistles constitute an impressive proportion, which certainly testifies to the immense popularity of this genre.Footnote 46 They were mostly produced in the area around Paris and Chartres, not far from Liège. It is unclear from a liturgical or calendrical point of view, though, why Mary would sing this song at this time, presumably in June. Chanting this particular piece mostly occurred during the Mass of the saint's feast on December 26 and the other feast concerning Saint Stephen was the Finding and the Translation of his body celebrated on August 3. It has been pointed out that Mary used this song as a prelude to her prayers for a certain priest, unnamed in the text but presumably Jacques de Vitry himself, so that she could “offer his spirit to the Lord at her death.”Footnote 47 Just like Stephen presented Paul to God at his martyrdom, Mary commended Jacques de Vitry at her death.
This account about Mary singing vernacular saints’ lives shares some thematic similarities with another type of evidence about laity singing sacred songs. A late eleventh-century work composed in the diocese of Liège tells about a jongleur's miraculous singing on the occasion of the translation of Saint Remaclus's body to the monastery Stavelot. During the vigil, a jongleur who happened to be sleeping in the hospice, received a vision calling him to venerate the saint; jumping to his feet the jongleur joined the vigil service, and began to sing. He “did not know what he was to sing; he began to sing many things about the saint extemporaneously.”Footnote 48 Without any contemptuous tone toward the performer's humble profession, this account mainly focuses on the instrumental use of his song in narrating the deeds, i.e. the “many things” about the saint and arousing devotion in an apparently distinguished lay audience including the future Emperor Henry IV. Musicologists and scholars of Romance literature have long recognized that a jongleur could perform epic poetry as well as saints’ legends, perhaps during a liturgical service if the service was the commemoration of a saint.Footnote 49 In one of the well-known sources from the turn of the fourteenth century, the Parisian cleric Johannes de Grocheo talked approvingly about the jongleurs singing “the life of Blessed Stephen, Protomartyr, and the story of King Charlemagne.”Footnote 50 Although this reference cannot prove a connection between a jongleur song about Saint Stephen with the one sung by Mary of Oignies, it nonetheless testifies to the popularity of such vernacular genre in propagating knowledge about saints’ lives among the lay society and the church's tolerant attitudes towards such a devotional form.
Mary's singing style requires a comment. The hagiographer repeatedly mentioned her voice being “loud and clear” (alta voce et clara) and “high and sublime” (acuta et sublimi voce).Footnote 51 He even took care to mention that the quality of her voice deteriorated to hoarseness at the end of the first day but miraculously recovered its strength the next morning.Footnote 52 To describe her voice in English as “loud” and “high” can be confusing as if it resembles some high-pitched shrieking, especially when in one place the hagiographer seems to be comparing the sound to the pangs of women giving birth.Footnote 53 In fact, the Latin words belonged to technical terminology about the quality of human voice. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) in his well-known Etymologies discussed the three qualities of the perfect voice being “loud, sweet, and clear” (alta, suavis, et clara).Footnote 54 In a thirteenth-century anonymous Summa Musice from Paris, there were three modes appropriate to the human voice, the low, the high, and the very high (gravis, acutus, and peracutus), and proper modulation of the three would produce a sound pleasing to all.Footnote 55 A late thirteenth-century treatise on singing techniques distinguished chest, throat, and head voices, which correspond respectively to the low (gravibus), the high (acutis), and the highest range (superacutis).Footnote 56 But it was probably irrelevant to Jacques de Vitry whether Mary's voice was technically well-trained or pleasing to the ear. The vocabulary he used conformed to what was formulaic to say about liturgical singing in the medieval church. For example, Amalar of Metz in his treatise on the liturgy instructed that the hymn was replete with thanksgiving and praises of the angels, so it should be sung in “a very high voice” (excelsa voce) befitting the dignity of the ceremony.Footnote 57 Mary's “loud and clear” voice was what was expected or even required for jubilant praise to God.
Another word pregnant with biblical resonances yet hard to translate is Mary's “cry” (clamor). She was joyful with “continuing cry” (continuo clamore);Footnote 58 “She cried from day to night” (tota die usque ad noctem clamasset);Footnote 59 and she was “crying out of joy from a fullness of heart” (pre gaudio clamans ex plenitudine cordis).Footnote 60 These “cries” were not ecstatic, unintelligible, uncontrollable piercing wails but rather were most likely stylized vocal acts to be expected in a medieval church assembly. The word clamor and its various verbal forms frequently occur in the Latin Vulgate to denote the unique relationship the Israelites had with God.Footnote 61 These “cries” can express a complaint against God or his enemies, a supplication to redress the injustices, a groan of suffering and distress, or they can simply be synonymous with any prayer directly addressing God: “In my trouble I cried (clamavi) to the Lord, and he heard me,” (Psalm 119:1). Cries can also be those of praises and jubilation. The Gospels give the messianic description of Jesus entering Jerusalem while people followed him and “shouted (clamabant) Hosanna,” (John 12:13; also: Mark 11:9, Matthew 21:9). This passage became the Scriptural foundation for the ritualized cries during the Palm Sunday procession in the medieval Latin Church. Amalar of Metz explained this custom in the early Middle Ages: “It is our custom to carry palm branches through our churches and cry (clamare) ‘Hosanna’ in memory of Him the King.”Footnote 62
Therefore, the words Jacques de Vitry used to describe Mary's singing were carefully chosen to meet the expectations that a medieval audience would have about a ritual performance. A corollary is that the emotions displayed in Mary's singing that appeared to be uncontrollable and spontaneous were, in fact, framed by liturgy. The overall mood of Mary's singing performance was one of “exultation” (exultatio) and “jubilation” (iubilatio).Footnote 63 The word jubilus in the Middle Ages had a more concrete meaning than its modern English counterpart: it was usually associated with “the extended singing of the second part of the Alleluia which was a vital component of the Benedictine liturgy.”Footnote 64 This word could denote a joyful spoken or sung prayer, with or without the implication of mystical ecstasy. Despite literary flourishes, the account about Mary's singing contained elements—from vernacular “farsing,” to narrative poetry on saints’ lives, to acclamatory vocal acts—that would have been recognized as ritual practices for a contemporary audience: regardless of whether Mary lived in such a mode of religious expression to its full extent, her hagiographer emphatically represented her as such.
Jacques de Vitry's account about Mary's singing granted her a privileged position to offer intercessory prayers and the commendation of souls. He insisted on the angelic or, more precisely, seraphic origin of her last songs, which is a powerful statement about the woman's promised glorification. During her three-day performance, Mary “said much about her friends who were still in the world and commended them in order, one by one, to the Lord, and poured out many prayers for them to the Lord.”Footnote 65 Jacques de Vitry highly valued Mary's song about Saint Stephen and found a great sense of validation in her commendation to God on his behalf, as mentioned above. He also recounted a dream he received after her death in which Mary's body was turned into a precious gemstone; the underlying meaning of this imagery is that her resurrected body is translucent and glorious, incorruptible and impassible.Footnote 66 Jacques has been described by historians in modern terms as a “sponsor” of female spirituality, or, in a more reciprocal sense, a “collaborator,” whereas he likely understood himself as a devotee venerating a saint in the properly “medieval” sense of the word.Footnote 67 After Mary of Oignies's death, Jacques kept the bones of one of her fingers as talisman, which, as he believed, worked miracles and safeguarded him from perils during his journey to the crusader states.Footnote 68 Jacques would later establish a prominent career as Bishop of Acre in the Holy Land and Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum in Rome, where presumably there was no shortage of saints or relics, but despite this he chose for his body to be returned to Oignies and buried, ad sanctam, besides Mary almost thirty years after her death.Footnote 69 Whatever ideological reasons he might have had when writing her Vita, Jacques de Vitry perceived Mary, as manifested in his lifelong unwavering devotion, primarily as a powerful saint and intercessor on behalf of her spiritual network of friends including himself as a favored beneficiary.Footnote 70
Michel Lauwers has demonstrated that in the thirteenth century there was a major shift of control over the death rituals and the commemoration of the dead from the local monasteries to the emerging mendicant orders and the beguine communities in Liège.Footnote 71 The religious women's major work of charity, conducted daily, was to take care of the sick and dying and to prepare for their proper burial. Women's intercessory prayers were considered especially potent in alleviating pains and eliminating sentences the dead had to suffer in purgatory. Mary of Oignies is said to have “occupied herself above all in assisting the sick and being present at deathbeds for contrition, or at burials.”Footnote 72 Not content with her own assistance, she diligently accumulated prayers and Masses for the tortured souls in purgatory from other people in her spiritual network.Footnote 73 The saints’ various Lives from Liège at this time are replete with stories about the tormenting dead coming back to this world and requesting intercessions from the religious women. In one local legend, even Pope Innocent III, right after his death in the year 1216, with purgatorial fire all over him, appeared to Lutgard of Aywières (d. 1246), a Liégeois nun, requesting intercessory prayers to alleviate his pains.Footnote 74 The ghost of Emperor Otto IV (d. 1218) also appeared to a certain nun, asking punctiliously for prayers: she should recite the psalter 10,000 times, and for each verse add the angelic salutation, i.e. the Ave Maria, as well as the Lord's Prayer.Footnote 75 The most frequent guests received by the holy women on a daily basis in Liège were either dead people returning from purgatory seeking intercessory prayers, or dead people from heaven recounting the splendid vision and delivering inspirational speeches about the afterlife. It seems that the religious women's one major raison d’être was to facilitate the communion between the living and the dead.
The most important saint the beguines identified themselves with was Mary Magdalene, who was a quintessential penitent and reformed sinner for sure, but also a model of funerary piety: she featured prominently in almost every Passion or Deposition scene in medieval art, weeping copiously at the cross by the side of Virgin Mary; she visited the Sepulcher and brought ointment to embalm the body of Christ according to the Gospels and the patristic traditions. She was also identified as one of the first witnesses of Jesus's resurrection from the dead. Her image in the Middle Ages was further conflated with that of Mary of Bethany whose brother, Lazarus, was raised from the dead by Jesus in the Gospel of John.Footnote 76 Mary of Oignies, the only mulier religiosa from the Low Countries to receive a local liturgical feast, had her office texts and music heavily borrowed from those of her namesake, Mary Magdalene.Footnote 77 The Mass text from Mary of Oignies's liturgical office petitioned for the saint's intercession on behalf of the living and the dead: “Most benevolent God, we ask you, sanctify this Host in view of the grace of the blessed Mary, your benevolent one, and by the most mighty power of your love grant it to all the faithful living and dead for the animation of their souls.”Footnote 78 And, “God, may the sacraments of your goodness, through the intercession of blessed Mary, your benevolent one, purify us from all that is old, and bestow upon all the faithful living and dead the salutary effect of your perpetual redemption.”Footnote 79
Mary of Oignies was by no means an isolated case of ritual singing in the Diocese of Liège. The most extravagant among the singing women from the region, or perhaps anywhere in medieval Europe, must have been Christina of Sint-Truiden, whose Vita was written by the Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpré.Footnote 80 Mary and Christina were roughly contemporary and from the same religious environment. Thomas, an admirer of Jacques de Vitry, was familiar with the Life of Mary and even provided it with a supplement of miracles.Footnote 81 But the two Lives are significantly different in style as well as in approach. For one thing, the act of liturgical singing, though grandiosely staged, occurred only towards the end of Mary's life and was but one of the themes explored by Jacques de Vitry, who had a more complicated theological program and whose depiction of Mary was multifaceted. Ritual singing towards death—the ultimate validation of her saintliness—was a vital but not the dominant element in Mary's overall religious identity in Jacques's narrative. By contrast, Thomas, who never met Christina in person but worked from others’ testimonies, pursued his protagonist with some single-mindedness: his aim was to present Christina as purgatorial saint who sang. Singing was both a more frequent mundane activity for Christina and a more integral element in Thomas's portrayal of her as an awe-inspiring intermediary between the living and the dead.
II. Christina of Sint-Truiden's Miraculous Singing
Christina “the Astonishing” is arguably one of the most bizarre holy persons in the Middle Ages. Scholars read her Vita with wonder, bemusement, and bewilderment, calling it “all but impervious to history.”Footnote 82 Active in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and from the Flemish town of Sint-Truiden near Liège, Christina reportedly died three times, was resurrected twice, and engaged in various outlandish practices of self-torment. Her behavior was deemed so peculiar that it earned her the epithet “the Astonishing” (mirabilis). Christina's life is often cited as the startling extreme of the so-called “embodied spirituality,” and has been treated as either entertaining fantasies or with a rhetoric of “excessiveness” by the male hagiographer.Footnote 83 However, I would like to demonstrate that this text is much more than a bewildering “tissue of extravagances” or an account of “flamboyant mental illness.”Footnote 84 It is a serious work of serious execution—the text is remarkably strenuous in its attempt to offer a coherent set of ideas about the afterlife, the resurrected body, and the posthumous soul.
Scholars have long pointed out purgatorial piety as a dominant theme in the text and Christina's “bizarre” behavior as a mimesis of purgatorial torments.Footnote 85 But they have invariably focused on the theme of suffering. I would like to push this observation a bit further. First, Christina, as represented in the text, was not merely a human volunteer for vicarious penitence, which might well be a constitutive identity of the historical Christina, but a dead person still living in this world in glorified body.Footnote 86 Thus, all the bizarre awkwardness of Christina's behavior in the Vita was a result of experimenting with this transgressive “inbetweenness.” The hagiographer, Thomas of Cantimpré, took the contemporary ideas about the resurrected body, learned or popular, rather seriously and with utter literalism. Christina was not quite like other pious people, whose glorified resurrection was prefigured in bodily signs yet unfulfilled. She literally had a spiritualized body, which the hagiographer obsessively placed in touch with the concrete, natural world of physicality, as if to see what would happen at the contact surface of the two worlds.
Second, I would like to demonstrate how singing, a repeated theme in the Vita, was integral to Christina’s overall imagery as a glorified intercessor much more potent than a mere pious human being. The text as a whole is a salient example showing the connection between women's songs and beliefs about the afterlife. At the beginning of the story, Christina was already dead. During the Requiem Mass of her funeral, Christina's body stirred in the coffin and she returned to life. She then told the horrified crowd that she had toured in Purgatory, Paradise, and Hell and accepted an offer from God out of great compassion: she would return to the world as a living revenant, and by her exemplary suffering she would convert the living from their sins and eventually return to God's embrace after the task was done.Footnote 87 In this not-very-long biography, Christina died three times and was resurrected twice. Her major work of charity in the world was to take care of the dying, both Christians and Jews: “She assisted the dying most willingly and gladly and exhorted them to a confession of their sins, to the fruit of penance, to a hope of everlasting joy, and to a fear of the destroying fire.”Footnote 88
Notably, in a significant reversal to some earlier medieval tales about other-world journey, Christina was not a sinner only to be terrified into penitent after touring in Purgatory or Hell, but a God-appointed blessed returning to this world voluntarily. In order to fulfill her promise to live through the purgatorial pains for the salvation of others, Christina intentionally inflicted upon her own body grotesque sufferings, such as creeping into hot ovens prepared for baking bread or jumping into cauldrons full of sizzling water.Footnote 89 Most of these torments centered around either water or fire. They can be seen as deliberate mimesis of the purgatorial torments: to make the excruciating pain not only imaginable but almost palpable by invoking the audience's everyday experience; the purgatorial fire was as cruelly insufferable as touching the inside of a hot oven and worse. But more likely, these details might be built on some common metaphors in medieval visionary literature. For example, in the mid-twelfth-century Tundale's Vision recounting a first-person journey through purgatorial torments, the gluttons and fornicators are said to be shoveled into a house in the round shape of “an oven where bread is usually baked.”Footnote 90
Besides this general theme of vicarious punishment, the other prominent trope in Christina's Vita is her miraculous chanting. Suffering and singing may appear to be uncorrelated, capricious choices made by a whimsical hagiographer. The crucial nexus, however, is Christina's overall identity as someone between-the-worlds, a half-human-half-spirit who “led the souls of the dead as far as purgatory, or through purgatory as far as the kingdom of heaven, without any harm to herself.”Footnote 91 Miraculous singing is a threshold practice as it fundamentally separates the world of the dead from the world of those who are about to die but also bridges the two.
In the text there are two imageries of Christina's body, possibly indicative of two different notions about posthumous glorification, and in each scenario she sings. At one instance dismissed as incredible physical “abuse” in scholarly opinion,Footnote 92 Christina rolled up her body into the shape of a ball in order to contemplate and pray. She gathered together all her limbs “into a ball (in unum globum) as if they were hot wax, and all that could be perceived of her was a spherical body (sphaericum corpus);” after her spiritual inebriation, her limbs would then extend back to their original positions.Footnote 93 This ostensibly bizarre account verging on absurdity, in fact, alludes to a belief about the posthumous disembodied soul widely circulating in the Cistercian monasteries in the region. In one of the exempla stories compiled by the hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, at the deathbed of a Cistercian abbess Genta of Florival, the convent community saw “a globe of the brightest splendor” appear for three nights and stay immobile for the duration of those nights.Footnote 94 In an exemplum recorded by Caesarius of Heisterbach, a Cistercian abbot died and later returned to life and he was asked about the “shape and power” of the soul; the soul after death was said to be “like a glassy spherical vessel” which had eyes both before and behind and a universal range of vision.Footnote 95 Re-affirming this story, a recluse believed that “the soul is of spiritual substance, and in its nature spherical, in the likeness of the globe of the moon.”Footnote 96 This idea about the posthumous soul being the perfect round shape and resembling a celestial body, with features such as immobility, luminosity and translucency, was popular among the Cistercian circles in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
But Thomas of Cantimpré further reworked this idea. Christina, unlike the actual dead in those exempla stories, was the glorified dead. Nor was she a stereotypical returning dead in the tradition of vision literature, who would still be unquestionably human. What she had was a spiritualized material body, which certainly sounds like an oxymoron. Thomas was very careful to let Christina assume the perfect spherical shape of a heavenly body yet without the transparency or luminosity; she still retained her individuality with limbs that were recognizable both before and after the transformation process. The “incompleteness” and “inbetweenness” of Christina's transformation, albeit extremely awkward to visualize, was indicative of her intermediary status crossing here and hereafter.
To complete the assimilation of Christina's body with the heavenly body, she participated, according to Thomas, in the cosmological order by emitting sounds resembling celestial music, musica mundana. According to the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic idea that was later picked up by some Christian authors, the concentric revolutions of the planetary bodies would give rise to a music that represents the perfect harmony of the cosmic order.Footnote 97 Christina's vocals were presented as follows:
She whirled around with such extreme violence that the individual limbs of her body could not be distinguished. When she had whirled around for a long time in this manner, it seemed as if she became weakened by the violence of the rolling and all her limbs grew quiet. Then there sounded between her throat and her breast a wondrous harmony that no mortal man could understand, nor could it be imitated by any artificial instrument. That song of hers had only the pliancy and the tones of music. But the words of the melody, so to speak—if they could even be called words—sounded together incomprehensibly. No sound or breath came out of her mouth or nose during this time, but a harmony of the angelic voice resounded only from between her breast and throat.Footnote 98
This passage is the only place in the Vita where Thomas uses the term musica to describe the sound Christina made. By saying that her song (cantus) had “the pliancy and the tones of music (musicae),” he discreetly maintained the distinction between cantus and musica. In medieval usage while cantus or cantilena referred to a song, musica was more often reserved for the intellectual discipline studying mathematical laws of proportions and the type of harmony manifesting such laws and principles.Footnote 99 In accordance with this tradition of speculative music and astronomy, the sound Christina produced was said to be wordless and incomprehensible, breathless and nonhuman. The subtlety resides in that her cantus was closely approximate, but not equivalent, to the celestial musica from the planetary movements, just like her body transforming into a sphere but incompletely. Only in the next stage, when she “returned to herself” but was still in spiritual inebriation, did she begin to lead the nuns of St. Catherine of Sint-Truiden to sing Te Deum laudamus, an identifiable chant appropriate for a human choir.Footnote 100 This somewhat hierarchical notion of songs was made more clear in another passage when Christina attended the vigils of matins and sang a marvelous Latin song in the church. This song was considered less sweet and inferior to the incomprehensible harmony, musica mundana she voiced when rolling up into a sphere.Footnote 101
The other imagery of Christina as glorified dead is scattered throughout the text. She is repeatedly said to stand erect in high places, like a bird, and sing. Despite the folkloric flavor of such description, this might be a reference to the scholastic doctrine of the four endowments, or dotes, of the glorified body.Footnote 102 In Caesarius of Heisterbach's version of the doctrine, the elect after resurrection will assume a much better body endowed with the virtues of “subtlety, clarity, immortality, and agility” (subtilitate, claritate, immortalitate, agilitate), each corresponding to the four elements—air, fire, earth, and water—that constitute the human material body on earth.Footnote 103 Thomas of Cantimpré was especially keen on the supposed subtlety and levity of Christina's body.Footnote 104 The endowment of subtlety, subtilitas, often referred to the soul's power to penetrate physical surfaces without harm or effort. Thus, Christina was said to have jumped into the deep streams of the Meuse and re-emerged completely unscathed on the other side of the river like a “phantasm.”Footnote 105 The endowment of levity, levitas, is even more frequently mentioned in the text. When Christina first returned to life at her funeral, her body ascended to the rafters of the church like a bird.Footnote 106 She fled the crowd “to the tops of towers or churches or any other very high spots.”Footnote 107 She lived in the woods “in the manner of birds.”Footnote 108
It is a hauntingly beautiful image that Christina walked at vertiginous heights and stayed on the slenderest branches of trees like a sparrow.Footnote 109 While standing erect in high spots, she sang the psalms.Footnote 110 This convergence of the sparrow imagery and the concern for the afterlife resembles the themes in Bede's famous parable about the Northumbrian conversion, in which the ephemeral human life is compared with a sparrow flying into the hall during the winter cold and swiftly flying away.Footnote 111 As a biblical reference, the sparrow represents something insignificant and humble that nonetheless is not forgotten by God (Matthew 10:29; Luke 12:6) and finds shelter in his house (Psalm 83:4). In Venantius Fortunatus's Easter poem, the poet as “the humblest sparrow” sings “from love” (minimus passer amore cano) celebrating Christ's triumphal resurrection.Footnote 112
It seems that Thomas of Cantimpré struggled with the two notions of the glorified body and tried, if not to reconcile, at least to juxtapose them. He was even meticulous enough to maintain the distinction between the two kinds of songs of Christina's two bodily states: the incomprehensible musica of celestial harmony versus the clearly recognizable psalmody. Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed out that medieval Christians, in conviction of the ultimate union of body and soul, were nevertheless torn between whether the posthumous soul before bodily resurrection should be entirely spiritual without corporeal particularities or individualized with earthly traits such as gender and class. She has pointed to a change of preference around the year 1200: in the early Middle Ages, soul was sometimes depicted as a bird or a spark without personal singularities, but by the thirteenth century souls appeared predominantly in highly individualized corporeal forms.Footnote 113 Thomas's portrayal of Christina was either a curious amalgam of both tendencies or an experimental transition from one to the other. Christina never completely lost her earthly body form but simultaneously adopted qualities of a celestial entity or a nimble bird. Thomas's depiction of her might have been crudely literal, but it was done with care and consistency.
The splendid beauty of Christina's songs fit perfectly with her eerie status as a revenant. Singing as a liminal practice separating the living from the dead seemed to be a widely held belief in this region around this time. Thomas told a tale about the miraculous chanting of the angels the midnight before the sudden death of a certain blessed Cistercian monk. The singing voice was at first mistaken to be from the choir nuns, perhaps indicating that the angelic voice was considered rather similar to women's voices in medieval imagination.Footnote 114 In speculative music theory, the harmony of musical notes was compared with the union of the body and the soul.Footnote 115 A corollary of this idea was that a certain disharmony in voice was considered ominous, adumbrating the dislocation of the human soul from the body. In Thomas of Cantimpré's encyclopedia of natural scientific knowledge Liber de natura rerum that he compiled before writing Christina's Vita, he used the metaphor of musical harmony to describe the relationship between body and soul.Footnote 116 Moreover, he put this theoretical idea into the concrete narrative context of medical practices. In one of his exempla stories, once when Count Louis of Loon and his court were enjoying the incredibly sweet singing of a beautiful young girl, a court physician suddenly made a grim, Cassandran remark that she would soon die, which later proved to be true.Footnote 117 Thomas, the editor, directly addresses the reader to “take notice” (et nota lector) that the doctor was able to discern a certain subtle defect in the girl's singing voice (vocis cantantis vix indagabili vitio) to make this accurate prediction. These stories suggest, in contemporary imagination, an intimate connection between singing and death: a harmonious beautiful voice indicating a blissful death, a discordant voice somehow prefiguring an unexpected, unfortunate death.
It can be argued that the guiding principle of the selection of attributes of Christina's spirituality was her role as the purgatorial saint in the funerary ritual of the local society: the outlandish torments she inflicted upon her body were part of an extensive, vivid dramatization of the medieval beliefs about the afterlife, and her vocal talent was consistent with her function of guiding the human souls through the rite de passage to the other world. Our Dominican hagiographer was unstinting in his imagination and his acknowledgment of Christina's role as an angelic intermediary effortlessly gliding between here and hereafter. In fact, Christina's charismatic presence was so potent in the society that she might have sometimes usurped priestly prerogative to hear the last confessions of the dying: Count Louis of Loon called Christina to his deathbed, lay fully prostrate before her feet, and recited all his past sins to her. Christina alone heard his last confession and advised him how to dispose his worldly possessions. Thomas was obliged to add an awkward explanation that as a lay woman she was not allowed to grant absolution, but only to pray for the count's atonement.Footnote 118 This passage, nevertheless, tells us that Christina was at the center of local funerary piety as sometimes people's fear and hope were directed at her rather than the priest.
III. Conclusion
This article has focused on two of the most important hagiographical texts about religious women from the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège and demonstrated that behind the plethora of accounts about women's songs lurked a great concern for death and the afterlife. Mary and Christina were by no means exceptional or rare in the diocese. A remarkable proportion of religious people from this region are reported in their biographies as either possessing exceptional vocal talents or being sensitive to musical stimulation. Their monastic or clerical hagiographers utilized all intellectual sources at their disposal lavishing women's singing with ornate biblical imageries and liturgical allusions and bestowing a sense of theatricality as well as dignity to their performance. Lutgard, the nun who received Pope Innocent III's petition for intercession as mentioned above, sang wondrously during liturgical service where the paschal lamb was seen sucking melodies out of her mouth.Footnote 119 In the case of the recluse Juliana of Mont-Cornillon (d. 1258), who was known for her patronage in the composition and establishment of the Feast of Corpus Christi, she attended multiple liturgical services before her death, fervently listening to communal singing, and sang “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs in her heart” (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16).Footnote 120 The deathbed singing of the Cistercian Alice of Schaerbeek (d. 1250) was both splendid and grotesque, a horrid monstrosity to behold but mellifluous to hear: after years of agonizing leprosy, the woman's skin was wounded and dried like the bark of a tree, her legs like excoriated calf, oozing flesh and pus. Without a good part on her body and both eyes blind due to the disease, she had only her tongue; and “without break, as long as she could, she sang praises to God.”Footnote 121 After her death, she was seen joining the choir of the Cherubim and the Seraphim, as was so commonly said about the Liégeois saints in their Vitae.Footnote 122 And like them, her primary work for her community was to pray for the purgation of sins of all the living and the mitigation of purgatorial punishment for all the dead.Footnote 123
This article has argued that hagiographers were strenuous in their efforts to represent women's singing as ritual performance reflective of mainstream beliefs and shared practices in their communities. The overriding purpose of such hagiographical enterprise was to promote religious women as effective intercessors for the living and the dead in their spiritual networks. To offer intercessory prayers is certainly one of the most important and conventional functions of Christian saints; in the thirteen-century Low Countries, such saintly efficacy was for the first time allocated to women without high-aristocratic background or established institutional positions who commanded awe and devotion solely for the perceived potency of their way of life. The singing women of Liège impressed their hagiographers and evoked their imagination; women's angelic songs would bring to their followers a great sense of hope beyond death in “the palace of the eternal kingdom. . .where there is life without death, day without night, truth without falsehood, joy without sadness, security without fear, rest without labour, eternity without end.”Footnote 124
