monastery as the location for a royal cult, Feminine spirituality as promoted by early-
medieval women saints and their followers is marked by an affirmation of community
ties and the continuity of secular and religious identity rather than status reversal and
conversion.
From the following centuries, hardly any female voices survived. This is in part due to
the fact that women’s monastic communities sharply dropped in numbers, a development
that did not reverse itself until the 11th century. We have, however, an exceptional
testimony from the 10th century, the vita of the serf Flothilda of Avenay (d. 942), who
died shortly after she received her revelations. The first set of her visions describe
Flothilda’s persecution by demons and men on horses and her escape to safety, an almost
timeless topos reflecting women’s fear of sexual violence. The second cycle deals with
church-political questions of her community at Reims and the decline of moral standards
among the clergy. From the 12th century, the era of Marie de France and Héloïse, we
possess a fascinating document depicting the lively cult and rich visionary talents of
Blessed Alpais of Cudot (b. ca. 1156 in northern France), a simple peasant woman. At the
age of twelve, Alpais became gravely ill and was unable to leave her bed for the rest of
her life. Her body was so disfigured with open sores that her brothers decided to let her
starve. At this point, Alpais began to receive regular apparitions and visions, proved to be
capable of telepathy and vision at a distance, and abstained completely from food, a sign
of holiness that reached back to the desert fathers and eventually became a hallmark for
later women mystics. The Cistercians supported her cult and, against her strong
resistance, the local archbishop built a church adjacent to Alpais’s house during her
lifetime, since she was recognized as a living saint. Spirituality in the 12th century is
marked by a rise in Marian piety and in eucharistic devotion; both trends are well
represented in Alpais’s visionary accounts. Most remarkable, however, is her vision of
the Cistercian abbot Gilduin, who is seen as feeding his monks with milk from his
breast—a highly suggestive image preceding that of the younger Italian St. Clare of
Assisi (ca. 1193–1253) receiving milk from St. Francis (1181/82–1226) and reminiscent
of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who received milk from the Virgin Mary. Alpais’s
contribution to eucharistic piety is her account of the heavenly events that parallel each
earthly celebration. As the priest conducts the eucharistic rite, she sees a beautiful child
being offered by angels to God and then returned to the altar of the church. Visionary
participation in the eucharist, often expressed in observing the transformation of the host
into the human Christ, miraculous revelations about the worthiness of priests, and
revelations surrounding the host became in time characteristic of women’s religious
experience of the high Middle Ages, the second distinctive phase of medieval women’s
spirituality.
The other great spiritual theme of the 12th century and late 13th is voluntary poverty,
that is, a desire for the apostolic lifestyle of early Christianity and a thorough moral
reform of the church. Within the church, this impulse found expression in the new orders
of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Cistercians, which almost immediately had to
confront the uncomfortable question of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of women
attached to the order either as nuns or as tertiaries.
In distinction to the social landscape of early-medieval women’s religiosity, we note
the inclusion of women of the middle and lower classes, as in the case of Alpais of
Cudot. New centers of religious activity and creativity appeared in northern and southern
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1862