The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell is a dazzling book that traces the metaphor of marriage to Christ in the lives of religious women across more than a millennium—from late antiquity, when the bridal metaphor was first applied to the individual female virgin, until the fifteenth century, when anxieties concerning the bride's potential for adultery coincided with gendered and erotically inflected charges of witchcraft. In seven chapters that proceed chronologically, Dyan Elliott explores how the marriage metaphor came to be associated primarily with women, and what the religious woman's marriage to Christ meant—for the women themselves, for the churchmen who “married” them to Christ, and for the male theologians and exegetes who promoted the metaphor, ultimately investing it with embodied possibilities that transcended mere language. As Elliott persuasively argues, the seeming elevation of the religious woman as a bride of Christ also raised the specter of her potential faithlessness: the bride was held to be permanently at risk of falling into the arms of the wrong lover, whether human or, worse, demonic. By the later Middle Ages, the bride of Christ was on a downward trajectory, which—as the book's title makes plain—would lead her directly into Hell.
The bride's “Descent into Hell,” the subject of the seventh and final chapter, provides the narrative focus for the book, showing how early fears concerning the bride's physical and moral frailty intensified in the later medieval period. The book's earlier chapters establish a prehistory for the bride's final descent, offering a rich and learned account of the bride's symbolic currency within late antique and medieval Christianity. Chapter 1 explores the processes by which the female virgin was identified with the bride of Christ in the second-century church, arguing that the bridal motif was initially imposed on female virgins as a disciplinary tactic designed to limit virginity's potential to undo gender. In the second chapter, Elliott demonstrates how marriage to Christ was used to justify increasing checks on the virgin's freedom and independence, requiring her seclusion and separation from men. Virgins like Thecla, who had been celebrated for their active ministry in the early church, became increasingly rare as modesty and passivity were established as appropriate bridal behaviors, and as gynecological examinations—at least in the east—could be required to prove the virgin's physical intactness. By the fourth century, with the adoption of symbols and practices from secular marriage rites within the emerging ceremony for virginal consecration, the virgin was, paradoxically, defined by the very institution she had rejected.
Chapter 3 charts the responses of churchmen to the uncertain marital landscape of post-Roman Europe, noting early attempts to develop a more inclusive vision of the bride. Elliott shows how the seventh-century English writer Aldhelm briefly experimented with a bridal persona that could encompass both male virgins and previously married nuns, although he ultimately retreated from the idea. The inclusive potential of the bridal metaphor was more fully embraced by Baudonivia, biographer of the sixth-century Frankish captive queen-turned-nun Radegund. Although Radegund's marriage had been an obstacle for her male biographers, Baudonivia acknowledged the saint as a bride of Christ—evidence, as Elliott argues, that women were drawn to the motif and also that virginity could be treated as a “state of mind” (102).
Two subsequent chapters focus on the late-eleventh and twelfth centuries, characterized by Elliott as an “Age of Affect.” Chapter 4 explores how the traditional emphasis on the virgin's intact body was affected by evolving legal conceptions of secular marriage, which increasingly privileged consent and not just consummation. Within the spiritual sphere, Elliott argues that the shift may have emboldened non-virgins to claim a sort of “virtual virginity” (121), based on claims that they had never properly consented. The mother of Guibert of Nogent was one such virtual virgin, whom Elliott suggests probably achieved consecration as a bride of Christ, despite being a widow and mother. Heloise was another virtual virgin, at least in the imagination of her once-husband, Abelard, who encouraged her to see herself as Christ's bride.
Chapter 5 explores the implications of close spiritual relations between men and women within the religious life, introducing the term “heteroasceticism” to characterize the intimate spiritual and emotional bonds that could develop between holy women and clerics. Marked by spiritual “interdependence” and “co-dependence” (151), these relations were not, however, disruptive of gender roles, but were quasi-conjugal. Drawing examples primarily from male-authored hagiography and works of spiritual guidance, Elliott suggests that religious women were profoundly drawn to matrimonial models and relations, sometimes transferring their devotion to Christ onto the person of the priest.
The final two chapters showcase, first, the blossoming of mysticism and mystical marriage among thirteenth-century women, and then the increasing suspicion of women's capacity for sexual and spiritual misconduct. As Elliott shows, by the thirteenth century, many of the self-styled beguine “brides” of Christ were not virgins, but previously married matrons. The frankly erotic language used by the women and their biographers to describe union with Christ reflects a climate in which intimacy—between a woman and either Christ or her priest—could transgress accepted boundaries. Elliott shows how even men, like Thomas of Cantimpré, who were seemingly supportive of beguines were concerned by women's sensual experiences of mystical marriage and their interactions with male clerics.
The dangers of women's intimacy with the wrong men are powerfully outlined in Chapter Seven in which the peril to women inherent in mystical marriage is laid bare. Late antique fears that female virgins might have sex with angels (a fear that had motivated Tertullian's campaign to see virgins veiled) were horribly twisted during the later Middle Ages into suspicions that religious women might have sex with demons. The fear of demonic miscegenation emerges, too, in witchcraft trials from the mid-fifteenth century, which assume a ceremony for the witch's induction that paralleled rituals for the virgin's consecration as bride of Christ: a ring was exchanged, and the new witch had sex with a demon. Although the ceremony was superficially unisex, the language of the extant texts reveals the growing presumption that the witch was a woman: the devil is described as consummating his relationships only with female witches, and never with male postulants.
The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell seeks, as Elliott writes, to “make sense of witchcraft in the context of female spirituality” (6). By taking the marriage motif as the book's focus, Elliott reveals the dangers of even spiritual marriages for virgin brides. Once the virgin bride had been married to Christ, constant vigilance was required to safeguard her purity for her heavenly bridegroom. The expansion of the bridal motif to non-virgins, their spiritual intimacy with clerics, and their sometimes embodied experience of a spiritual metaphor, worried churchmen who, while they may not have expected the bride to climb into bed with the devil, had long warned against bridal lapses. As Elliott so convincingly shows, the virgin bride was a dangerous identification for women from the very outset: the virgin, seemingly elevated as Christ's bride, had nowhere to go but down.
