The Gothic Saints And Their Mystical Songs: Performing Sanctity In The Thirteenth-Century Diocese Of Liège

Abstract

This dissertation studies the centrality of musical and liturgical performances in the hagiographical representation of pious women in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège. It is a well-known fact that the Liégeois women occupied a preeminent place in the origin story of later medieval piety. The ensemble of attributes we commonly associate with a later medieval holy person, ranging from fierce asceticism to ecstatic visions, were put together, took a definitive shape, and gained wide currency for the first time in the thirteenth-century southern Low Countries. I would argue that many of these devotional practices should, in fact, be understood as ritualized and stylized reception of the liturgical music and texts, and that liturgy constituted a major explanatory framework for their behavior. This project also attempts to rethink some conceptual dichotomies underpinning much of the scholarship in medieval religious history. “Mysticism” is an umbrella term often used to label religious women’s “embodied” spirituality, as opposed to the supposedly intellectualized “theology” practiced by male clergy. Mysticism defined as such is said to be “disruptive” and “problematic” to the liturgical and parochial routine of the mainstream Christian society. However, I would argue that there is nothing “mystical” in these religious women’s spirituality. What they practiced was thoroughly embedded in the liturgical tradition of the diocese. Their seemingly peculiar practices constituted one end in the wide spectrum of medieval liturgical life. Each chapter deals with one supposedly “mystical” phenomenon and interprets it as a liturgically inspired practice. Miraculous singing, for instance, a prominent theme in these women’s Lives, had its roots in the regional musical tradition, but also had to do with women’s role in offering prayers in the funerary rites. Visions were most often part of the monastic liturgical routine. Some other startlingly somatic performances can also be explained as the religious women’ desire to use their bodies as the monumental site for liturgical practices. The last chapter offers a comparison with the performative functions of the popular preachers. In sum, the Liégeois religious women should be placed at the center, rather than the margin, of their community, where their practices were properly understood and duly admired as part of the common liturgical culture.