"Visionary Women and Female Friendship"
Jennifer Brown
February 7, 2020
7:30 pm
Graduate Center
Room 4406
Room 4406
The
medieval women whose lives have come to us in most detail are the exceptional
ones, those championed by powerful men, and those who were or remain
controversial. In some cases — such as with visionary or mystical women — they
are all three of these things at once. And all too often the stories that
survive — their hagiographies, most likely — are told by men and primarily are
concerned about the men with whom these women had often deep, intimate
friendships. Many scholars have written about the close relationships between
male writers and their female subjects. But surely for many of these women,
particularly those who lived or ended their lives in cloisters surrounded by
other women, their friendships with their sisters and female friends were the
deepest although often not as clearly recorded. This talk seeks to answer the
question that Karma Lochrie raises in her essay “Between women:” “Where [in
medieval texts] were the women who formed communities with each other, engaged
in deep abiding friendship together, and experienced sexual bonds with other
women?” I have chosen to
look at visionary women, whose specific burden of care and support is perhaps
more urgent than other medieval religious women, due to the physical and
emotional toll of their raptures. In choosing a few examples from the twelfth
century to the sixteenth, in various European contexts (modern day Low
Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and England), I hope to demonstrate how
necessary the female friend was to the medieval visionary women and how, by
looking closely at their surviving textual evidence, we can see those
friendships in stark relief.
