Virgin, Bride, Mother: Mary and Mystagogy in the Late Medieval Low Countries c.1250-c.1550

Abstract

While the imitation of Christ has been abundantly explored in late medieval devotional literature, and in mystical texts specifically, the imitation of his mother, the Virgin Mary, was also a significant theme. This dissertation draws attention to the imitation of Mary as an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of mystical texts, particularly vernacular mystical literature written in Middle Dutch between c.1250-c.1550. Mary has often been defined by her inimitability—her perfection as simultaneously a virgin, bride, and mother was definitionally inaccessible to earthly women. Here, however, I argue that some vernacular mystical texts exhort the imitation of Mary in and through these paradoxes, which they present as constitutive to the mystical encounter with God. This imitation of Mary is particularly evident in what I have called mystagogical texts—works that instruct, guide, and exhort their audience toward the mystical encounter. While mystical texts in many genres could teach or instruct, the mystagogical function is particularly evident in texts like sermons and liturgical commentaries that invoke or address their reader or audience directly. My analysis of such mystagogical texts, many of which have rarely been studied, takes place across four chapters. First, I explore Mary’s role as an underexplored aspect of the canonical mystical authors Bernard of Clairvaux and Hadewijch. I argue that, while Bernard’s IV Homilies in Praise of the Virgin Mother put forth a model of Mary as a paradoxical and inaccessible ideal, the rhetorical strategies employed in the Homilies also enable later vernacular authors to present Mary as an imitative figure. I show this first in the mystical writings of Hadewich, at the end of Chapter One. I then explore, in Chapters Two and Three, the imitation of Mary in the Limburg Sermons, a collection of anonymous vernacular mystical sermons that draw on both Bernard and Hadewijch. I argue that Mary is central to the sermons’ mystaogogy as virgin, bride, and mother. The same is true for the texts I analyze in Chapter Four: the Evangelical Pearl, the Temple of Our Soul, and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. These sixteenth-century mystical texts, all by female authors, portray Mary as an ideal contemplative, and invoke her example in their creative expression of late medieval mystical topoi. Throughout the dissertation, I show how these mystagogical texts sought to both teach and transform, presenting the Virgin Mary as the ideal model for the mystical encounter and employing specific rhetorical and exegetical technique that, in provoking a sense of immediacy and intimacy, assimilate their audiences (both male and female) to her example.