women, due to sociological causes, but also among members of one sex. It is difficult to
defend an essentialist claim that distinctly female or male core experiences exist; yet the
unwillingness of the male medieval-church hierarchy to share its power with women
forced religious women on paths that favored certain types of experience and their
communication over others. It has been argued, for example, that women’s exclusion
from the priesthood fostered a uniquely feminine eucharistic piety that stressed an
intimate psychophysical union with the human Christ. Furthermore, women’s ability to
become pregnant, to lactate, and to nurse is said to have caused a specifically feminine
“mother-mysticism,” in which women visualized these activities visà-vis the Christ child
in the late Middle Ages. Yet all these “feminine” activities have also been reported for
male mystics, albeit with less frequency. And the reverse is also true: women visionaries
and mystics, such as Jeanne d’Arc (ca. 1412–1431), appropriated “masculine” patterns of
spirituality that stressed activism, or, as in the case of Aldegund (d. ca. 684), the woman’s
virilitas, or manliness. It is more helpful, therefore, to pay attention to the localization of
women’s spiritual experiences in their specific cultural and economic contexts; as this
survey will show, their spirituality changed greatly through the ages. It represents more
women’s sociologically determined commentaries on pressing issues of their day than an
ahistorical, archetypal feminine “essence.”
We need to assess our sources critically, since only a small minority of women left
written testimonies to their thoughts and lives. Most of our information is filtered through
devout or even hostile texts (as in the transcripts of trials conducted by the Inquisition)
written by men who either knew the women or merely heard about them. Therefore, we
are often confronted with reflections about what women’s religious experiences were
thought to be rather than with an accurate account of these experiences as authenticated
by the women themselves. Finally, the question of what constitutes women’s and men’s
distinctly gendered experiences is not a medieval but a thoroughly modern issue.
Medieval women writers who talked about their spiritual lives understood their
experiences to be paradigmatic and open to all Christians, no matter what their gender. It
is almost impossible not to distort their own accounts by attempting to isolate gendered
units of meaning.
Medieval France (however difficult to define geographically) produced some of the
highest intellectual and artistic religious achievements of its era. Nonetheless, we have
the names of only a handful of extraordinary French religious female leaders and authors;
not all of them were mystics or used traditional literary genres to channel their interest in
religious questions. For example, Héloïse (d. 1163/64), Christine de Pizan (d. ca. 1430),
and Marie de France (fl. 12th c.) achieved lasting fame as writers, but little attention has
been paid to their religious beliefs. Na Prous Boneta (d. 1325), Jeanne d’Arc, and
Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), fascinating innovators and mystics in their own right, were
condemned and killed as heretics. Little is known about 14th-century visionaries like
Constance de Rabastens or Marie Robine. In comparison with the lasting impact of
French male mystics, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090/91–1153) and the
Victorines (fl. 12th and 13th c.), the contributions of women mystics have been largely
neglected due to a lack of institutional support and access to a public forum in the
medieval period and indifference in the following centuries. Furthermore, women’s
monasteries, the ideal locus for intensely practiced religiosity, tended on the whole to be
poorer than men’s houses; nuns were more tightly cloistered than monks; and, with the
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1860