Whose Rules? Medieval Women and Pilgrimage

Leigh Ann Craig
Virginia Commonwealth University

As I explore the history of medieval Catholic religious culture, I have found that it is important to remember that cultural mores are, like written statutes, abstract.  As such, their effects are not entirely predictable when they are applied to specific people and situations.  Generalized statements about rules, customs, or social expectations can only be a beginning point in our discussion of the human experience of ritual and of faith.  My book, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Brill, 2009) explores this dynamic in the context of pilgrimage:  religiously-motivated travel to a sacred destination, often (but not always) performed in the hope of material benefit.

In medieval Latin Christendom, women’s travels, and their movement in public space, were typically frowned upon. While legal statutes and social tolerances varied from place to place, a variety of sources make clear that women were expected to remain at home or close to home, safely enclosed and supervised, lest their natural inclinations to vice lead them to misbehave.  Satirical portraits of women who wandered (of whom the single most famous example is Chaucer’s Alison, the Wife of Bath) hinged on the assumption that women were naturally lustful, greedy, proud liars, who would do nothing but strut their finery, fornicate freely, and lie to those with supervisory authority over them if they were allowed to wander about.  Alison, who displayed and even defended all of these traits, is not a lone satirical figure, and satire is not the only genre in which such concerns were expressed. Courtesy literature – handbooks of behavior, the literal social rulebooks – warned women not to seek out pilgrimage or other kinds of unsupervised travel, for fear of damage to their reputations.  So did sermon literature.  Indeed, female pilgrims were so closely associated with illicit sex and other misbehavior that one carnival, or satirical, pilgrim’s badge from the fifteenth century badge dressed a vulva up as a pilgrim. The vulva-figure carries a staff, holds rosary beads in its opposite hand, and wears the pilgrim’s typical large, floppy-brimmed hat, and reduces the concept of a woman on pilgrimage to a striking image of inappropriate sexuality.  The rules, then, have been clearly established:  women should not become pilgrims, because wandering women are nothing but trouble.

It is in the context of these sorts of social limitations that real, flesh-and-blood women went on pilgrimage anyway.  In my study of such women, I found that they adapted other sorts of feminine social traits (such as meekness and patience) and normative social roles (such as caregiving) to justify, and even sanctify, their sacred travel.  Further, a woman who wished to undertake pilgrimage might also find that she had powerful allies.  Husbands and sermon-writers and givers of social advice might have thought it safer for women to remain at home, but others – specifically, the keepers and promoters of saints’ shrines, the destination of most European pilgrims — had ample reason to encourage women to undertake sacred travel.

Miracle stories, small personal histories of miraculous healing, recorded at the shrines of saints who were believed to be able to heal the sick, thus paint a very different picture than courtesy literature.  These stories were collaborative efforts, wherein a scribe at the shrine would record a story verbally delivered by the pilgrim who had benefitted from a miracle.  The papacy often fact-checked the stories against living memory of the principal players, so they had to reflect a community consensus about the events they described.  In these negotiated narratives, despite satirical mistrust of wandering women, women appear as pilgrims almost as often as men do.  In the 711 miracle stories I have studied, women acting alone constituted 37.5% of those seeking help from the saints, while men made up 40.8%.(1) Therefore, the distress about female pilgrims that led to Jankin’s rules and proverbs must be understood as a response to their common participation.

Miracle stories were intended to celebrate the miraculous efficacy of the saint and shrine, and so the pilgrims who appear in them — even the women — were generally understood to have made a very good decision.  In the case of female pilgrims, whose motives were so often considered suspect, this more positive portrayal was framed one of two ways.  When women took pilgrimages on their own behalves, authors supported their actions by evoking empathy for their suffering.  In these narratives, women were strongly represented amongst those seeking help for chronic problems, rather than for the dramatic injuries, shipwrecks, and imprisonments that more commonly befell men.  Instead, women commonly suffered from long-term problems such as blindness, deafness, mobility impairments, or pain.  Those complaints together account for about half (50.7%) of women who acted for themselves and whose illnesses are clearly identified, but only for about one-third (34%) of the corresponding population of males.  While these chronic conditions were not as life-threatening or dramatic, they were nonetheless carefully presented so as to excuse a pilgrimage because of the misery they caused.  Narratives depicting women’s healing, then, focused hevaily on the duration and severity of the woman’s suffering.  Women were generally said to have been suffering from such problems for longer than men who brought the same chronic complaints to the saints, and their pain was described as more severe than that of their male counterparts.  For example, only six men (24% of blind men) were blind for more than a year, but some thirteen women (46.4% of blind women) were; women were more than twice as likely to be described as suffering pain alongside their eye trouble as men were (28.6% of blind women as opposed to12% of blind men).  Pain was only infrequently mentioned in cases of blind men, and when it is, it was rarely described in detail;  but women’s pain was ‘most grave,’ ‘most vehement,’ and in one case, so severe as to constitute a threat to a woman’s sanity.

But the other way of presenting female pilgrims as blameless and sympathetic was by emphasizing that, in becoming pilgrims and seeking miraculous healing, they were acting in their daily roles as caregivers. This approach appears when women took pilgrimages not for themselves, but as intercessors, seeking healing for somebody else.  All told, 43.4% of women, either alone or in groups, were seeking help for someone else, but only 25.5% of men did the same.  Most frequently, these women were seeking healing on behalf of their own children, or for some other blood relation. In other words, when they sought out the saints, women were far likelier than men to be acting not selfishly, but as mothers and caregivers.  This was, from the medieval perspective, a normative and blameless role to play, especially compared to the scandalous behavior of Alison of Bath.

But mothers who acted as intercessors were more than merely tolerable, or excusable.  Pilgrim intercessors arguably engaged in an imitatio sancti, a reenactment of the role of the saint as a bridge between a suppliant and God.   This meant that they were in some measure holy, themselves.  A striking example of this imitatio sancti, and its effects on the image of the female pilgrim, can be found in the story of three-year-old Beatrice Shirley of Wiston, Sussex.  Beatrice was killed in an accident, crushed to death by falling logs.  Beatrice’s mother quite literally took matters into her own hands; she snatched up her dead daughter, ran to the local church, and began to pray to Henry VI of England for a miracle.  Beatrice’s mother had thus become an intercessor herself, and even reinforced her own imitation of the saints by fleeing to a church, underscoring the powerful connection between saints and sacred places.   And then, having pled for grace, she received it and acted as a conduit for it, just as the saints were understood to do:

The which she had not yet finished, when behold the baby girl that she held tightly in her arms recovered the breath of life and looking at her sought its mother’s arms. The mother, then, seeing that she had either gained the comfort she desired, or at least was not yet disappointed of it, began to glow with a great warmth of devotion, and to magnify with ever greater courage the divine power.  Nor was her motherly anxiety more readily bestowed upon her daughter than the speedy manifestation of God’s pity.  The mother prayed, the daughter felt relief; nor had the mother yet come to the end of the prayer she had set about making when the daughter received the grace that was asked for.  For recovering that very instant her regular breathing she spoke to her mother, albeit with difficult utterance, complaining of the pain she felt . . .(2)

As if she were herself haloed, she glowed with a great warmth of devotion, an image suggesting that her whole being was overheated with grace. But the next lines of the miracle story leave the source of this grace unclear.  Did healing power come from God, or through a saint, or was it something innate in Beatrice’s mother?   The clerical scribe presented all of these interpretations at once.  The power was divine, but its magnification was the result of the intercessor’s innate holiness.

Beatrice’s mother’s breast even milk became a repository of healing:

And, when she {Beatrice} had drunk once of her mother’s milk, she neither used nor needed any other medicine afterwards, for she was saved only by the grace of the heavenly gift.3

Hence, the imitatio sancti begun when her mother made an intercessory appeal was completed.  The intercession successful, and she becomes a repository of grace.  And, like the saints who cured the illnesses of those who touched or kissed their relics, Beatrice’s mother passed that healing grace along to her daughter through the physical contact between them.  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the height of Marian devotion, no pattern of motherly intervention, breastfeeding, and caregiving could fail to recall the Virgin Mary.  By the High Middle Ages, Mary herself like other saints, had been cast by theologians in the role of an imitator of Christ.  All of these women, then, from the pilgrims to the Blessed Virgin, were understood to be engaging in actions which were acceptable because they are patterned on the life of a sacred figure.  Furthermore, like Mary, whose body acted as a vessel for Christ’s entry into the world, these female pilgrims could be interpreted ‘empty vessels’ to be filled with grace. Such portrayals of women as pilgrims – portrayals that were authored, in part, by the women themselves, after they had successfully negotiated for the right to become pilgrims at all – laid out a completely different interpretation of social expectations about women, virtue, and travel.

Leigh Ann Craig is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has published numerous articles on pilgrimage as well as her book Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Late Middle Ages (2009).  She served as an associate editor for The Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage (2009) and is on the Membership Committee of the American Catholic Historical Association.

FOOTNOTES

i The remaining appeals for help were made by married couples and other mixed-gender groups.

ii Knox and Leslie, ed. and trans., The Miracles of King Henry VI, 52-5; or Grosjean, ed., Henrici VI Angliae Regis Miracula Postuma, 36-7: “Quod sane nondum perfecerat, cum ecce infantula eius brachiis astricta, resumpto vite spiramine, matrem aspiciens quamfamiliariter se reiecit in eam.  Mater igitur, cernans opotato se potitam solacio aut certe penitus non frustratrum, fervere cepit devocionis ardore et divinam magis magisque animata mganificare potenciam.  Unde iteratis dehinc et multiplicatis precibus, augmentatur consequentur et gracia.  Nec promcior fuit in filiam materni affectus sollicitudino quam divine pietatis acceleracio.  Itaque precatur illa, relevatur ista.  Nec illa prius quas ceperat oraciunculas consummavit quam ista quod querebatur acceperit.  Namque, refuncta iam tunc anhelitu consueto, lenta licet voce, matrem alloquitur, dolorem scilicet quem senciebat conquesta . . .”

iii Knox and Leslie, ed. and trans., The Miracles of King Henry VI, 52-5; or Grosjean, ed., Henrici VI Angliae Regis Miracula Postuma, 36-7:  “At illa, hausto semel ex ubere lacte materno, reconvalescere perhibetur, nec alio quidem medicamento postac vel usa est vel indiguit.  Gracia enim sola superni muneris sospes efficitur.”