Proving Woman (45 page)

Auda’s behavior thus effaces the boundaries between scrupulous penitent, cooperative heretic under cross-examination, and
reformed heretic turned informer. Bishop Fournier’s role is simpler. Inquisitional manuals make it clear that the inquisitor’s
persecution of heretics was perceived not as conflicting with his pastoral role but rather as extending it. In the context
of sacramental confession, Raymond of PeÑafort had described how “the twisted [
tortuosus
] serpent should be led forth by the obstetrical hand from the breast of the sinner.” Gui effortlessly adopts and develops
this unfortunate metaphor. The sinner gives way to the heretic, while the inquisitor is likened to

a prudent physician of souls, [who] will proceed cautiously in regard to the persons whom he questions or concerning whom
he makes inquiry. He will weigh their quality, condition, standing, health, and local circumstances, and will act with caution
on the matters upon which there is to be inquiry and examination. . . .With the bridle of discretion, let him so harness the
wiles of heretical persons that, with the help of God and the skill of the midwife, he may draw the writhing serpent from
the sink and abyss of errors.
¹⁷⁸

In a similar vein, Ugolini, hoping to effect a conversion before sending a heretic to the stake, urges the inquisitor to try
blandishments (
blanditijs
) and right counsel, again paralleling the gentle demeanor recommended for confessors.
¹⁷⁹
In these ways at least, the inquisitor’s self-understanding and the confessor’s were identical.

There is every reason to believe that Auda herself collaborated with the inquisitor in sustaining his pastoral self-image.
In addition to her striking complicity in plumbing the depths of her own conscience as well as those of her companions, she
associates her release from the numbing experience of delusional error with her summons before the inquisition. Thus at the
time of Auda’s first testimony, “she was and remained continuously in that error, as she said, up until the present time when
she was led . . . before the said lord bishop . . . in whose presence she said that the Blessed Virgin Mary sent it into her
heart anew so that she believed that it was the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament.”
¹⁸⁰
The pivotal role of the inquisitor in Auda’s conversion becomes even more apparent in her next appearance, when she emends
her testimony as follows: “And then she persevered in the said error continuously until last Saturday. Now, however, as she
said, she had put aside the said error and believed, as she said, firmly all the articles of the faith and sacraments of the
church with them having been explained individually by the said bishop on that occasion.”
¹⁸¹

Auda was lucky in the end: her scrupulosity resulted only in very mild penalties. Her request for private penance was respected;
thus she was spared the public infamy she so dreaded.
¹⁸²
Nevertheless, her case suggests a failure to distinguish sufficiently between the two types of confessional tribunals, an
understandable confusion considering the overlap of both personnel and method. The potential for slippage between the two
fora was not only omnipresent; it would become particularly ominous should the interstitial figure of confessor-inquisitor
choose to abuse his position. In fact, an inchoate awareness of the way in which a corrupt inquisitor might exploit a woman’s
scrupulosity is already inscripted in an episode that ostensibly occurred during the antiheretical purge of Dominican Robert
le Bougre. The thirteenth-century chronicler Richer of Sens relates how Robert told a beautiful matron attending his preaching
to wait for him after the sermon. When she unsuspiciously followed him to a private spot “where she expected to make her confession
to him,” he attempted to seduce her. She resisted and he countered by threatening to have her burned for heresy. On the very
next day, moreover, he nearly made good his threat: placing his hand (which contained a concealed piece of parchment inscribed
with certain magical words) on her forehead, Robert compelled the innocent woman to confess herself a heretic. She was saved
by her son, who fortunately learned of Robert’s ruse from someone familiar with his techniques. Appearing at the bishop’s
consistory where his mother was to be reexamined, he wrested the parchment from Robert’s hand, breaking the spell and permitting
the woman to protest her innocence. Robert was perpetually enclosed in a stone prison.
¹⁸³

The incident of Robert le Bougre and his nameless female victim can be read as a potential repository for social anxieties
on the subject of confession, probing and possibly critiquing the dual aspect of the confessional relationship. The parchment
operates much like the purloined letter in Poe’s story: according to Lacan’s analysis, we never learn what is written in the
document, which is nevertheless possessed of the power to dictate a shifting array of subject positions formed in relation
to it.
¹⁸⁴

Robert’s parchment is equally inscrutable and transformative. It metamorphoses the matron, implicated by the female predisposition
to confess, into a heretic, just as the confessor, implicated by the dual nature of confession, is transformed into an inquisitor—one
whose methods anticipate the modern techniques responsible for the feared specter of the false confession.
¹⁸⁵
The demarcation between the penitential forum and its heretical counterpart gives way, as do the ephemeral boundaries separating
the heretic’s stake from the martyr’s pyre.

¹
E. Longpré, ed., “Fr. Rogeri Marston et anonymi doctoris OFM quaestiones ineditae de B. Francisci stigmatibus,”
Antonianum
7 (1932): 242; Angela of Foligno,
Il libro della Beata
Angela da Foligno
1.1, ed. Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti (Grottaferrata, Rome: College of Saint Bonaventure, 1985), pp. 144–45; trans. Paul
Lachance, in
Angela of Foligno: Complete
Works
(New York: Paulist Press, 1993), pp. 128–29; Giacomo Scalza,
Leggenda latina della B.
Giovanna detta Vanna d’Orvieto del Terz’ Ordine di S. Domenico
c. 10, ed. and trans. V. Marreddu (Orvieto: Sperandeo Pompei, 1853), p. 36. (Vanna made this remark to her prioress following
the revelation of her impending death.)

²
Exceptions are made for exceptional individuals. Thus Francis of Assisi was said to have openly referred to Brother Rufino
as a saint—albeit in the latter’s absence. See Actus B. Francisci et sociorum eius c. 37, in
Fontes Franciscani
, ed. Enrico Menesto` and Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1995), p. 2165; ed. and trans. in
St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early
Biographies
, ed. Marion Habig (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1973), p. 1378.

³
On living saints, see Aviad Kleinberg,
Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the
Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); AndréVauchez,
Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages
, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 433–43; and Gabrielle Zarri,
Le sante vive: cultura e religiosita` femminile
nella prima et[agrave] moderna
(Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990).

⁴
John of Marienwerder,
Vita Dorotheae Montoviensis Magistri Johannis Marienwerder
1.7, ed. Hans Westpfahl, Forschungen und Quellen zur Kirchen-und Kulturgeschichte Ostdeutsch-lands, vol. 1 (Cologne and Graz:
Boïhlau, 1964), p. 50.

⁵
R. C. Van Caenegem, “Methods of Proof in Western Medieval Law,”
Mededelingen van
Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie
ï
, Academiae
Analecta
45, 3 (1983): 111–12. For example, it was largely adopted in Flanders over the course of the thirteenth century, but not in
Germany until the fifteenth. Adhémar Esmein notes that the spread of inquisitional methods in secular society corresponds
to the centralization of despotic power (
A History of Continental Criminal Procedure with Special Reference to France
, trans. John Simpson [Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1913], p. 10).

⁶
For a more detailed discussion, see Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in
Medieval Theology and the Natural Body
, ed. Peter Biller and Alastair Minnis (Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell and Brewer, 1997),
pp. 141–73. Much of the following discussion is indebted to this article. Also see Richard Kieckhefer,
Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 150–79.

⁷
VLA
, pp. 192–93; trans. King, p. 12.

⁸
De apibus
2.33.4, pp. 371–72.

⁹
See the original, longer vita (
vita prior
) of John Brugeman (d. 1473) in
AA SS
, April, 2:281. Brugeman’s shorter life (
vita posterior
) is also printed in
AA SS
, April, 2:270–301; the longer life is on cols. 302–62.

¹⁰
VCM
, pp. 653, 656; trans. King, pp. 10, 21. See Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and Bodily Movement in the
Vitae
of Thirteenth-Century Beguines,” in
Framing Medieval
Bodies
, ed. Sara Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1994), pp. 10–23; cf. Jacques Le Goff, “Gestures
in Purgatory,” in
The Medieval Imagination
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 86–92.

¹¹
De apibus
2.41.3, p. 411. Though the woman is described as a nun, this probably refers to Mary of Oignies, who produced a sweet involuntary
song just prior to her death (
VMO
, p. 562; trans. King, p. 95).

¹²
Scalza,
Leggenda latina della B. Giovana detta Vanna
c. 5, pp. 13–18.

¹³
Ibid. c. 6, pp. 22–23. Cf.
De apibus
2.54.4, p. 519; Enrico Menesto`, ed.,
Il processo di
canonizzazione di Chiara da Montefalco
(Regione dell’Umbria: La Nuova Italia, 1984), Sr. Marina, witness 38, ad art. 42, pp. 117–18.

¹⁴
AA SS
, February, 3:320. The vita is by her confessor, Giunta Bevegnati.

¹⁵
Ibid., p. 308.

¹⁶
AA SS
, June, 5:248. Christina’s life was written by the theologian Peter of Dacia. For a discussion of the peculiarities of Peter’s
account and a detailed analysis of their relationship, see Kleinberg,
Prophets
, pp. 71–98.

¹⁷
Kleinberg,
Prophets
, pp. 121–25; Daniel Bornstein, “Violenza al corpo di una santa: fra agiografia e pornografia. A proposito di Douceline di
Digne,”
Quaderni medievali
39 (1995): 31–46.

¹⁸
Caroline Walker Bynum,
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 245 ff. As Bynum herself points out, the eucharistic
cult is also animated by a virulent antisemitism that gives rise to these tales of host desecration (pp. 63–64). An exaggerated
instance of proving the host occurs in the antisemitic
Play of the Sacrament
(in Norman Davis, ed.,
Non-Cycle Plays and
Fragments
, EETS, supp. text, no. 1 [London: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1970], pp. 58–89). On alleged historical instances, see
Miri Rubin,
Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late
Medieval Jews
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

¹⁹
See, for example, Placido Tommaso Lugnano, ed.,
I processi inediti per Francesca Bussa
dei Ponziani (Santa Francesca Romana, 1440
–
1453
) (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1945), process of 1440, pp. 27, 31, 65. For the elaborate explanation of
how she could speak in this condition, see
AA SS
, March, 2:147. Cf. Dyan Elliott, “
Dominae
or
Dominatae
? Female Mystics and the Trauma of Textuality,” in
Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom:
Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, C.S.B.
, ed. Constance Rousseau and Joel Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), pp. 68–76. John Mattiotti
was not particularly learned, as his vernacular life suggests. Some of his proofs reflect this lack of sophistication.

²⁰
Lugnano,
I processi
, process of 1440, p. 149.

²¹
Ibid., pp. 29, 61–62.

²²
Ibid., p. 64.

²³
AA SS
, March, 2:147.

²⁴
Ibid. The confessor’s efforts to collect proof could backfire. Lydwine of Schiedam asked to be left alone because an ecstasy
was coming on. But when the confessor furtively reentered the room to observe, the rapturing angel would come no nearer (John
Brugeman,
vita prior
,
AA SS
, April, 4:284). For the role of angels in rapture, see Elliott, “Physiology of Rapture,” pp. 149–51.

²⁵
“Vita Elizabeth sanctimonialis in Erkenrode, Ordinis Cisterciensis” c. 2, in the Bollandists’
Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum bibliothecae regiae bruxellensis
(Brussels: Polleunis, Ceuterick et Léfebure, 1886), 1,1:363. A Middle English translation of Elisabeth’s life has also been
edited by C. Hortman, in “Proslegenden: Die Legenden des MS. Douce 114,”
Anglia
8 (1885): 107–18. On Elisabeth’s cult, see Walter Simons and J. E. Ziegler, “Phenomenal Religion in the Thirteenth Century
and Its Image: Elisabeth of Spalbeek and the Passion Cult,” in
Women
in the Church
, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, Studies in Church History, vol. 27 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 117–26; Godefrido Geenen,
BS
, cols. 1100–1109. Despite later claims, Elisabeth was not affiliated with any order.