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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, by Barbara Newman (1995)

By Jacob Doss

What do virility, erotic passion, and child abandonment have to do with the history of Christianity? In her collection of essays entitled From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, Barbara Newman addresses these subjects in relation to a shift in gender ideologies in the medieval Church between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Newman’s essays explore ways women expressed holiness within an oppressive medieval religious culture. Newman is particularly interested in a gradual shift in gendered models of behavior from, what she terms the virago, or virile woman, to the “womanChrist.”. According to the virago model, women were measured against a normative male expression of righteousness. They could be equal to men inasmuch as they became like men. Women’s holiness entailed conquering their innate weakness and becoming virile. Conversely, the womanChrist model represented an emerging ideology of gender complementarity. According to this budding, though not universally accepted model, women could achieve holiness through devotional practices that drew upon their innate “femininity.”

Newman Cover

Newman begins in the twelfth century by comparing pastoral writings by men for religious women with those meant strictly for men. Using the letters of Heloise and Abelard as a ground for her analysis, Newman, echoing Heloise, asks a basic, but significant question, “is the nun’s life gendered or gender-neutral?” Abelard responds to Heloise by suggesting the basics of religious life are fit for both sexes, echoing the long-standing virago tradition; however, he then explains the inherent virtue and potential superiority of religious women. For Abelard, God’s power was more evident in holy women than holy men because of women’s inherent weakness. Furthermore, holy women enjoyed a closer relationship to God by virtue of their being “brides of Christ.” Exalted bridal status, however, was contingent on the strict maintenance of virginity. Women were thought particularly prone to lasciviousness, therefore imperiling their exalted but precarious status. In order to protect women (and men) from their lascivious, passionate, and impulsive nature, the church advised strict enclosure for religious women behind the monastery walls.

Abaelardus and Héloïse in the manuscript Roman de la Rose (14th century)
Abaelardus and Héloïse in the manuscript Roman de la Rose (14th century)

Newman finds the transition from virago to womanChrist in those supposed female shortcomings. Heloise, whose “chief claim to fame was…erotic passion,” did not aspire to spiritual virility, nor was she concerned with maintaining chastity. Through Heloise’s letters to Abelard, Newman finds the geneses of a “feminine” spiritual discourse of desire. Within this understanding a particularly female spirituality grew out of women’s innate passion and their propensity for intense love. This discourse championed passion, loyalty, and absolute self-surrender to the beloved. Newman reads Heloise as a “mystic manquée” whose language and impulses would later re-emerge in the mystical writings of the beguines, an urban, lay religious movement, consisting primarily of women, focused on works of charity and adherence to voluntary poverty.

Mechthild von Magdeburg
Mechthild von Magdeburg

A particular feature of the womanChrist model is that of vicarious suffering. Drawing on the Passion and the Virgin Mary’s life as models, cultivation of this suffering, along with a loving desire for and fearless obedience to Christ was often the goal of devotional literature for women. Though Heloise’s desire was for Abelard, three famous beguines, Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, used similar language to express their desire for and dedication to Christ. These beguine writers preferred to suffer in Hell if that were God’s will and might vicariously save others from the fire. For some mothers, the suffering that followed abandoning their child or allowing its death came to be praised. By merging the story of Abraham and Isaac with the Virgin Mary’s willing, but excruciating, personal sacrifice of her child on the cross, mothers had an innovative model of suffering to imitate. Children were sacrificed or abandoned to free their mothers to take monastic vows.

Medieval manuscript page of a Hadewijch poem from the 14th century.
Medieval manuscript page of a Hadewijch poem from the 14th century.

Another way women imitated Christ through their femininity was their “apostolate to the dead.” Women, now clearly exhibiting Newman’s womanChrist model, could reduce the deceased’s time in purgatory through their own suffering, thus mirroring Christ’s passion and descent into Hell to rescue the souls held captive there. A late thirteenth-century heterodox sect, the Guglielmites, further illustrate emerging notions of gender complementarity and the redemptive potential of women. They claimed their leader, Guglielma, was the Holy Spirit incarnate. Her promoters preached that the feminine Holy Spirit and a female leadership would restore the wayward Church to its true glory. Newman ends with a work lauding femininity, Cornelius Agrippa’s early sixteenth-century treatise On the Nobility and Superiority of the Female Sex. Newman argues that Agrippa’s work, though potentially satirical, illustrated a time of convergence where both female gender models, the virago and the womanChrist, could be employed as an intellectual challenge to patriarchy.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535/1538)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535/1538)

Newman’s essays illustrate a significant shift from an ancient Christian gender model to a gender complementarity model still prevalent today. Women’s roles in Christianity are still a cause of debate, illustrated by Jimmy Carter’s recent resignation from the Southern Baptist Convention over women’s unequal roles in leadership and the Vatican’s controversial investigation of American nuns. Similarly, in the context of the Vatican’s “Humanum: An International Interreligious Colloquium on The Complementarity of Man and Woman,” Newman’s study remains relevant to understanding current Christian gender ideologies. Newman illuminates Christianity’s longstanding subordination of women and how women undermined patriarchy, while revealing the origins of current models. The stories Newman relates are often shocking, interesting, and counterintuitive. Rather than anachronistically seeing her subjects’ actions as illustrating personal commitments to self-empowerment or conscious subversion, Newman rightfully understands her subjects’ stories to be based in expressions of their religion, thus seeing their self-understanding as products of the texts and traditions of Christianity.

Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)

You may also like:

Julia Gossard reviews State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State by Ulrike Strasser (2004).

Miriam Bodian discusses seventeenth-century radical theology

 

All images via Wikimedia Commons.

Carved in Stone: What Architecture Can Tell Us about the Sectarian History of Islam

by Stephennie Mulder

Syria – birthplace of civilization, home of the first alphabet and the earliest cities, land that bears the spectacular architectural imprint of empires from the ancient Hittites, to Alexander, to Rome, to the Ottomans  – is now a country synonymous with civil war, fanaticism, and unspeakable brutality. The stories coming out of contemporary Syria are horrifying and heartbreaking, and, we’re often told, have their roots, in part, in a primeval sectarian conflict between Islam’s two main sects, the Sunnis and the Shi’is. Sectarian conflict, it is said, has raged for 1,400 years, since the founding of Islam in the 7th century.  This truism is usually accepted uncritically by the media, is common in popular discourse about the Islamic world, and, as we’ve seen in recent months, is also one embraced by violent extremist groups like the Islamic State (IS), who use it to justify heinous acts of cruelty against minority groups. But it’s worth pausing for a moment to imagine how it would look if a similar narrative were applied elsewhere: if today’s tensions between, say, Turkey and Europe were said to stem from an ancient conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and the Byzantine Empress Irene. Attributing modern sectarian conflict in the Middle East to events that transpired in the 7th century is every bit as nonsensical.

Mulder cover

One reason for the continuity of this narrative of unending conflict is that it’s a tale frequently told in the medieval Arabic texts themselves. In this version, the key moment was the Battle of Karbala in Iraq in AD 680, when Sunnis martyred al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the early group of Shi’i partisans, and took his head and his family members in chains back to Damascus, capital of the triumphant Sunni Umayyad Caliphate.  The Sunnis prevailed and the Shi’is became a persecuted minority, devoted to the Prophet’s family, which they marked by the proliferation of a culture of shrine building and veneration. Another pivotal episode in this text-based narrative occurred between the 11th and 13th centuries. The Arabic sources call this the era of “Sunni Revival,” for it saw the demise of the last Shi’i caliphate and the final entrenchment of Sunnism as the predominant sect in most regions of the Islamic world.

But architectural historians don’t rely only on texts alone, and in this case, the history of architecture in Syria reveals a somewhat different tale. If we let the buildings speak, some vivid contradictions to the familiar narrative arise. For example, we learn that the period of Sunni Revival in Syria was, counterintuitively, the one in which the largest number of “Shi’i” shrines were built, some 40 of which survive into the contemporary period. And, we find that these “Shi’i” shrines were endowed, patronized, and visited by both Sunnis and Shi’is: in many cases, by some of Islam’s most illustrious Sunni rulers. Far from being vanquished during the Sunni Revival, Shi’ism may well have been the dominant sect in northern Syria in the 11th-13th centuries.  Although episodes of conflict are certainly part of the sectarian history of Islam, it would seem there’s another tale too. Looking at architecture reveals an equally important past marked by cooperation and accommodation.

Magnificent 12th century shrine, Mashad al-Husayn, in Aleppo surrounded by modern buildings. The red-roofed structure in the shrine’s courtyard was built to provide shade for today’s pilgrims.

Let’s take as an example a shrine in northern Syria and read it through the eyes of an architectural historian. The building in question is the Mashhad al-Husayn, dedicated to the Prophet’s martyred grandson, who was also one of the Imams, the perfect and infallible religious leaders of the Shi’a. On aesthetic grounds alone, the Mashhad al-Husayn is one of the most spectacular buildings of the 12th-13th centuries, but despite its magnificence, it has rarely been studied. Imagine for a moment that Chartres Cathedral had been largely ignored by architectural historians, and you’ll get a sense of how peculiar this is. The reason probably has something to do with the fact that the standard, conflict-driven narrative had no room for the construction of such a monumental “Shi’i” building during the era of Sunni revival.

Interior, Mashhad al-Husayn

Interior, Mashhad al-Husayn

The story of this shrine begins in the year 1177, when a shepherd sat on a high hill overlooking the medieval city of Aleppo in northern Syria. His name was Abdallah and he was from a poor neighborhood of immigrants. Abdallah had just returned from the noon prayer at the mosque and, from his perch in the warm sun atop the mountain, he could see his sheep and hear their tinkling bells as they cropped the green shrubs and yellowing grass that grew down the hillside. On the horizon, inside the stout medieval walls newly rebuilt by the son of the great Saladin – the Sunni Muslim general who would soon recapture Jerusalem and evict the Crusaders from the Holy Land – the towering mass of the ancient fortified Citadel shouldered its way toward the sky. Below the Citadel, the vast, labyrinthine suq (market) sprawled for miles in colorful, chaotic splendor under shady, vaulted-stone passageways, testimony to Aleppo’s long history as a vibrant and cosmopolitan trade entrepôt, a key terminus of the Silk Route that linked China to the ports of the Mediterranean.

Citadel_of_Aleppo

Ancient Citadel, Aleppo (Memorino via Wikipedia)

In the heat of the afternoon, Abdallah began to doze off. As he slipped into a dream, he had a strange vision. Nearby, a man emerged from a cleft in the rock and ordered in a commanding voice: “Tell the people of Aleppo to build a shrine here and call it the Mashhad al-Husayn (a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad)!” Abdallah awoke, and, awestruck at the miraculous vision, dropped his shepherd’s staff and ran to the suq, where he began recounting the miracle and exhorting the city’s inhabitants to come build a shrine. Excited crowds quickly gathered and, inspired by the vision of the humble shepherd, organized themselves for the task. Within days, groups of volunteers were created, workdays were assigned, and soon, the merchants of Aleppo had arranged a surcharge on their goods to provide funding for the project. Not long afterwards, the shrine gained some more illustrious patrons. The mayor of the city of Aleppo himself built an elaborate portal and, a few years later, in 1196, that portal was torn down and replaced by an even more spectacular one built by Aleppo’s Sunni governor, al-Malik al-Zahir, the son of Saladin. Thus, even the Arabic textual sources reveal much that complicates the narrative of perpetual conflict. We learn, for example, that the shrine was an intra-sectarian project, and that it was built by elites and commoners alike. What more can we deduce using the methods of an architectural historian?

Portal of al-Zahir, Mashad al-Husayn

We can begin by observing some formal elements of the building. The portal built by al-Zahir was higher and taller than almost every other medieval architectural portal in Syria and it was ornamented with a particularly exquisite kind of radiating, inlaid-stone interlace pattern on the outer face, married with a complex type of three-dimensional, interlocking, faceted stone ornament called muqarnas on the interior. In other words, al-Zahir’s portal was a monument meant to awe and astonish. Above all, it was something that the Sunni ruler, al-Zahir, was proud to sponsor and build alongside the Shi’i residents of Aleppo, and as if to confirm this, he emblazoned his name over the entrance on a large, square foundation plaque. Thus we can already see that al-Zahir wanted to emphasize that through the process of its construction and ornamentation, the Mashhad al-Husayn became not a “Shi’i shrine,” but rather a monument to pragmatic cooperation centered on a sentiment shared by both sects: reverence for the Prophet’s family. Indeed, as if to drive the point home, al-Zahir left yet another inscription.

Detail, Inscription Praising Rightly-Guided Caliphs

Detail, Inscription Praising Rightly-Guided Caliphs

This one wrapped around the portal’s entrance façade and was located just under the heads of visitors entering the shrine. It bore a remarkable message, for it named the twelve Imams of the Shi’a alongside the four Rightly Guided Caliphs of the Sunnis, and, by using calligraphy of similar size and style and directly juxtaposing the two inscriptions, it visually equated the two groups of holy men. At the end, in clear, bold script, he wrote an unambiguously worded entreaty: “May God be pleased with all the Companions of His Prophet.” And with these words, al-Zahir carved in stone a sentiment that powerfully reflects the nuanced, negotiated sectarian history of Islam in Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

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Stephennie Mulder is Assistant Professor in the  Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin. This essay comes from her new book, The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnies, Shi’is and the Architecture of Coexistence

Photographs are by the author, except where noted.

Further reading on the history of Islam and on sectarian co-existence in the Middle East may be found here.

Previous articles on Not Even Past on the history of Islam are listed here.

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