Women Prophets and Visionaries in France at the End of the Middle Ages

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Women Prophets and Visionaries in France at the End of the Middle Ages

An overview of women, similar to but less heralded than Joan of Arc, whose mystic religion frequently brought them into conflict with authorities.

In Avignon, where the French pope resided in the South of France, the peasant Marie Robine (d. 1399) had visions of a great number of weapons and of a virgin bearing arms. A voice reassured her, however, that the weapons were not destined for her, but for a virgin who would come later to deliver the kingdom. It was the end of the 14th century, and the worst period of the Hundred Years' War between England and France. King Charles VI, stricken with madness since 1391, could not control the conflicting factions in France. The Burgundians, who fought in support of the duke of Burgundy, and the English and Armagnacs, who were loyal to the king and his allies, were involved in a fierce civil war.

The virgin savior who would accomplish Marie Robine's prophecy was none other than Joan of Arc , the "Maid from Lorraine," herself viewed as a prophet by her contemporaries. The mythic stature of the young war leader, associated with Biblical heroines in chronicles of the time, generally outshines the interventions of many other self-proclaimed prophets then making predictions about the political and religious situation. The chaos and disruption of the period, in fact, proved an opportunity for women to voice their moral guidance and expressions of public will. Their visions and revelations, aimed at the king and his entourage, sought a resolution of the political troubles, and their challenge to leaders of the Church was to put an end to the Great Schism which had divided Christianity since 1378, with an Italian pope trying to rule from Rome and a French pope established at Avignon.

[Pieronne of Brittany] affirmed and swore that God often appeared to her in human form and talked to her as one friend does to another; that the last time she had seen him he was wearing a long white robe and a red tunic underneath, which is blasphemous. She would not take back her assertion that she frequently saw God dressed like this and so was this day condemned to be burned.
—Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris

Marie Robine, known also as Marie of Gascony, or of Avignon, had arrived at Avignon in 1387, on a pilgrimage in the hope of being cured of an illness. Miraculously healed at the tomb of the cardinal Pierre of Luxembourg, she settled at the cemetery of St. Michael, where she lived as a recluse. Visions compelled her to advise her king, Charles VI, and particularly his queen, Isabeau of Bavaria , whom the peasant woman reproached for her misconduct. On June 2, 1398, Marie was in Paris, where the French prelates were holding a council, when she tried in vain to speak before them in favor of the pope of Avignon. The following year, she warned the monarchy in apocalyptic tones that if the instructions coming from her voices were not followed, France and Paris would be destroyed by the Antichrist.

In the crisis of the two opposing popes, neither party was above capitalizing on the revelations of prophets. While Marie Robine advocated in favor of Avignon, Constance of Rabastens was taking the side of the Roman pope, Urban VI. Constance first received revelations in 1384, transcribed by her confessor in 1386. What the prophecies had in common, and shared with the messages of two other famous prophets, Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna in Italy, was a disappointment with the institutions of the Church. The problem for these women was that their view of themselves as elected by God could reach an almost heretical dimension when they put their obedience to Him above their obedience to the Church.

It was Constance's wish to restore peace in France, reestablish the legitimacy of the pope, and reconquer the Holy Land. Her designated champion to accomplish these tasks was Gaston Fébus, count of Foix, a partisan of Charles VI and hostile to the English. For these views, she was forbidden to publish her visions and imprisoned by the Inquisitor of Toulouse, in 1385.

With these two prophets in mind, it is easier to understand both the destiny of Joan of Arc and her place in a broader context in which exceptional women felt compelled to play the role of spiritual and political leaders. Neither view weakens the extraordinary accomplishments of the Maid of Lorraine, which gave her a mythical dimension even in her own time. But it is interesting to see that in her campaign for the recognition of the legitimacy of the dauphin who was to be Charles VII, and to drive the enemies of France off her soil, she met—and sometimes even competed with—other women visionaries and warriors.

What is peculiar to Joan of Arc is the legend surrounding her, which helped to give substance to the belief that she was the savior virgin, coming from the eastern borderlands of the kingdom. Before 1429, the year she left her village of Domremy, there were already several prophecies circulating about a miraculous restorer of France. Two that are attributed to Merlin, the famous enchanter of Arthurian legend, played a decisive role in both her success and her fall: the first involved an armed warrior virgin destined to campaign against the English; the second announced that a miraculous maid would come from an oak wood. This wood later came to be identified with the large tree in Joan's village where she sometimes heard voices of St. Margaret of Antioch , St. Michael, and St. Catherine of Alexandria advising her. These prophecies were accepted not only by the populace and her followers, but by the clerics during her trial, who found in them the grounds for indicting Joan as a heretic.

It is fair to say that Joan identified with just such prophecies, and that she began to see herself as a thaumaturge and a prophet. She never questioned the sanctity of her visions or the powers she received from them. Among these powers were her ability to inspire terror in the English troops, and the conviction that she was invulnerable, shared among the French soldiers. Miraculous-seeming also was the perplexing sexual impotence that arose among her companions in arms when they came into close contact with her. Credited with such miracles as bringing a baby back to life after it had been dead for three days, she could not avoid the development of a cult around her.

To express her admiration for Joan's accomplishments in a masculine world, Christine de Pizan wrote the Ditié de Jeanne d'Arc, a poem glorifying the image of the female warrior. The experience of the author, recognized as the first French woman of letters and one of the most important authors of the 15th century, was in some respects similar to Joan's, in that both took on masculine roles. Widowed at age 25, Christine succeeded in earning a living for herself and her three children as a professional writer and an intellectual in the modern sense of these terms, taking on a role usually restricted to men while sharing the prophets' sense of mission. Writing mostly essays, in which she gives firm expression to her political and social views, she discusses the condition of women, the responsibilities of the various components of society, war and peace and the obligations of those in power.

In the fall of 1429, the year before her trial and condemnation, Joan of Arc met another female lay prophet, Catherine de La Rochelle . Catherine was a follower of a Franciscan preacher, Brother Richard, who gathered a group of women visionaries around him to announce the imminent coming of a liberator of the French kingdom. When Catherine claimed to have seen an apparition in which a lady in white instructed her to raise money to hire soldiers to follow Joan, the Maid of Lorraine replied with a terse injunction for her to return home and look after her husband and children. To test Catherine's legitimacy, Joan decided to share her bed, stayed awake all night and then declared that she had witnessed nothing; one reason, probably, was that Catherine promoted peace negotiations with the Burgundians, while Joan was convinced that the solution lay in taking up arms. Catherine's revenge was to give testimony suggesting the devilish nature of Joan's visions.

Another disciple of Brother Richard, Pieronne of Brittany , along with another woman, had also taken up arms but on the side of the Armagnacs. The two were caught and tried in 1430. Once in jail, Pieronne declared her support of the Maid and insisted that God had appeared several times to her. She was burned at the stake in Paris.

The most intriguing woman linked to the story of Joan of Arc was another warrior, Claude des Armoises , the so-called Maid. Like Joan, she claimed to have been instructed by God to wear male attire, and to undertake the life of a soldier. According to a chronicler, she got into trouble in Germany with the inquisitor of Cologne, then fled to Italy where she fought in the pope's army, killing two men. From there she came to France, where she married a knight, Robert des Armoises, and also became mistress of the bishop of Metz. In 1436, six years after the Maid of Lorraine had died at the stake, Claude appeared as Joan, and many people, convinced that their heroine had not been burned at Rouen, were persuaded that a woman soldier clad like a man could only be Joan of Arc. Joan's two brothers even recognized Claude as their sister, gave her a horse and sword, and exhibited her on a tour. In 1439, she was received by the town of Orleans, although she was later arrested and tried, only to resume her life as a soldier. The "Bourgeois de Paris" who chronicles her story does not relate how her life ended.

In spite—or perhaps because—of her ambiguity, a figure like Claude des Armoises reveals a great deal about the role played by women who intervened in public events, particularly in times of crisis, at the end of the Middle Ages. On the one hand, they fulfilled collective expectations at every level of the social spectrum; in their personalities and their messages, believers found both hope and guidance. On the other hand, their behavior, projecting images of role reversal, was a potential threat to the norms of social order. It is not surprising, then, to find them greeted by clerics with hostility. Among the most prominent of their antagonists was Jean Gerson, a cleric and chancellor of the University of Paris. In several treatises, he expresses his skepticism toward the authenticity of visions and revelations claimed by women. His suspicion comes from his discomfort with both their femininity and the paranormal aspect of their mysticism. Surprisingly, he wrote a treatise in support of Joan of Arc, and against the majority of the theologians of the University of Paris, who played a crucial role in her condemnation. Years later, he manifested no such understanding for another visionary, arrested in 1424 for claiming to be one of five women sent by God for the redemption of souls. Tortured and tried in Lyons, she confessed her so-called imposture.

The phenomenon of female visionaries finds only part of its explanation in the war and religious crisis brought by the Great Schism. It must also be situated in the larger context of lay mysticism at the end of the Middle Ages, and its female subculture. During this time, both men and women found ways of leading religious lives without belonging to institutionalized religious orders. Groups of lay men, called beghards, and lay women, known as beguines, living in half-secular, half-religious convents, were often attacked and persecuted as heretics. Their worst enemies were the mendicant orders, Dominicans and Franciscans, who saw them as competitors and outside their control.

Women, particularly, seem to have been attracted to these less authoritarian, less hierarchical forms of community. A less formal environment offered them a suitable context for the expression of a religious urge characterized by the pursuit of mystic experience. Through the mystic experience, a woman could free herself from male authority as represented within the structure of the Church. By her direct communication with God or the saints, she was invested with a superior authority that allowed her to advise and instruct those in power like the pope or the king.

Delphine of Puimichel (1284–1360, also known as Delphine de Sabran) was one such influential mystic. In 1299, she married Elzéar of Sabran, scion of a powerful aristocratic family in Provence. Both were considered at the time to be saints, and at her request, the marriage was never consummated. After her husband's death in 1323, Delphine gave away all her patrimonial possessions, and in 1333 she made a vow of total poverty. Living as a recluse, she conversed several times with the pope in Avignon, very likely on the state of the Church.

The case of Jeanne-Marie de Maillé (1331–1414) was similar. Born in 1331 into an aristocratic family in the Touraine region, she grew up under the guidance of an erudite Franciscan monk who served the family as confessor and children's tutor. Taught to read and comment on the Scriptures, and influenced by the lives of the saints, she obtained an agreement from her husband at the time of their marriage, in 1347 or 1348, that the union would not be consummated. After her husband's death in 1362, she lived as a recluse, first settling in Tours and then moving near a Franciscan monastery in 1386. In a life divided between prayer and care of the poor and sick, she had visions and apparitions of Mary the Virgin and St. Francis. In 1396, she prophesied that the Great Schism would be brought to an end by a Franciscan, a prophecy that came true in 1409, with the election of Pope Alexander V. Despite her hermit's life, Jeanne-Marie de Maillé kept close links with the aristocratic families of Touraine and Vendée, exerting her spiritual influence on the members of the same aristocratic circle who were later supporters of Joan of Arc. She met King Charles VI privately and also reproached Queen Isabeau, who was mistress of the king's brother, Louis of Orleans. When she died after a long life, in 1414, Jeanne-Marie Maillé was considered to be a saint.

The Hundred Years' War and the Great Schism provided the context within which these women could play the role of spiritual leaders. However, conditions in the early 14th century had also been favorable for the emergence of a feminine spirituality characterized by its mysticism and by its prophetic dimension. One factor was the crisis which occurred when troubles in Rome first forced the popes to take refuge in Avignon.

One of these popes, John XXII, became the target of a visionary's curse, when a beguine of southern France, Prous Boneta , began receiving visions of Jesus. Believing that God had chosen her to be the incarnation of the Holy Ghost, she attacked John XXII, accusing him of being the Antichrist; it is no wonder that she was tried and burned at the stake at Carcassonne in 1325. But it is also probably significant in her case that she was linked with a branch of radical Franciscans who were denounced as heretics by the Inquisition. As a follower of Peter-John Olieu, or Olivi, a leading figure of the movement, who preached poverty and chastity even within marriage, Prous Boneta typified the Franciscan influence on lay piety, particularly among women. The women following Brother Richard—Joan of Arc, Delphine of Puimichel, and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé—can all be considered examples of the impact of the Franciscan movement on feminine mysticism.

Chastity and poverty were fundamental to the ideal of perfection espoused by groups of beghards and beguines. When they engaged in their preaching, hostility against them could turn at times into persecution. One victim was Jeanne Daubenton (also seen as Péronne Daubenton), burned in Paris in 1372 for belonging to an association of the poor called "Turlupins." Although associations of lay devout women had been granted permission by the pope to live together in 1216, they were not allowed to preach, translate or comment on the Scripture, and their autonomy from ecclesiastical supervision was not well accepted.

Another victim of this attitude of suspicion and hostility was the beguine Marguerite Porete (d. 1310, also seen as Poiret or Porret, or Marguerite of Hainault) who wrote a book at the very end of the 13th century that was burned in 1306 on the public square in the northern town of Valenciennes. The bishop of Cambrai prohibited its reading and forbade Marguerite to spread her ideas. In her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite taught the doctrine of the pure love of God. The soul contemplates God, and in that mirror she sees herself and unites with the object of her contemplation. It is an attitude of passivity to God, of liberation from will and desire, as indicated in the full title of one of the extant manuscripts: The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls who only Dwell in the Will and Desire of Love. Porete never questioned the essentials of the faith. However, her detachment and indifference to religious practices suggested heresy to the Inquisition. Some of her statements can easily be misunderstood, for example when she says that in its state of liberation, the soul "gives to nature, without remorse, all that it asks," or when she makes a distinction between the "Holy Church the Little," governed by reason, and the "Holy Church the Great," governed by divine love.

Despite the bishop's warnings, Marguerite disseminated both her ideas and her book. In 1308, she was brought before the new bishop of Cambrai and the Inquisitor of Haute Lorraine for having sent it to the bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne. Refusing to answer to questions or to take the necessary oath, she remained in prison for many months. Almost two years later, she was again interrogated in Paris where articles from her book had been examined by 21 theologians of the University of Paris and declared heretical. Refusing to retract, she was burned in the Place de Grève. The cleric who had supported her, Guiart de Cressonesart, had been arrested in Paris in 1308, but escaped death by retracting and was condemned to life imprisonment.

Marguerite's condemnation has been explained politically: supposedly, she had been the object of an exchange between the Inquisition and King Philip the Fair who wanted to have free hand for trying the Templars. However, the success of Marguerite's book—15 manuscripts remain, among them versions in Old French, Old Italian, Middle English and Latin—seems to justify the Church's concern. It clearly suggests that her ideas were in tune with a conception of personal spirituality shared by many others.

The French visionaries and prophets of the 14th and 15th centuries must be considered in the larger context of feminine mysticism, such women as Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe , Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna. What is special with figures like Joan of Arc or Marie Robine, however, is their involvement in the political and religious conflicts of their time, along with their conviction that they had a mission to accomplish.