Christ's brides were hell bound by the end of the Middle Ages, when women—in the figure of the witch—were increasingly seen as Satan's spouses. Such is the narrative arc of Dyan Elliott's significant recent study of sponsa Christi (bride of Christ), The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. Elliott points toward the incarnational logic of Christianity in general and the type of physically immanent bridal mysticism that flourished among late medieval women in particular to locate some of the dynamic forces that helped make possible the theological ideas about witches that flourished from the fifteenth century onward. Elliott has done much to enrich our understanding of the development of an embodied version of the bride of Christ. Medieval and early modern Christianity held out an option, for women at least, to marry Jesus—to become a sponsa Christi—in a literal sense, a form of marriage sustained by such things as legal mechanisms, theological visions, particular emotions, religious rituals, and spiritual practices.Footnote 1 But Elliott's argument, stopping as it does right before the tumultuous sixteenth century, lends itself to a reading that the literalized sponsa Christi was bound henceforth to the early modern witch craze. Desiderius Erasmus's 1529 treatise De vidua christiana provides us evidence that the literalized sponsa Christi developed in alternative ways in the early modern period, including the creation of a distinctive vision of the Christian widow who is, at times, bigamous.Footnote 2 De vidua, then, can serve as the basis for expanding upon an alternative historical trajectory for the bride of Christ that Elliott mentions in passing in her study.
Elliott locates this other vision of the sponsa Christi in the work of one of her anti-heroes, John Nider. Nider, a fifteenth-century theologian, was hostile to the visionary, corporeal religiosity of bridal mysticism. Through his account of the widow Margaret of Constance, as Elliott teaches us,
the possibility of a different kind of bride of Christ emerges: a secular woman of modest background, whose commitment to chastity is as complete as her station allows, who not only transforms the world into a monastery but converts everyone around her and whose intimacy with Christ is based on a regimen of prayer and service, not flamboyant visions.Footnote 3
In De vidua, Erasmus, who likely was not directly influenced by Nider, paints a similar picture of the holy widow as the bride of Christ, albeit with little emphasis on an evangelical conversion mission. Erasmus does so, moreover, in a way that highlights the role that relationality plays in literalizing this version of the bride of Christ identity while wrestling with the fraught spiritual value of marriage and remarriage in this period. Lastly, these dynamics end up producing forms of unexpected and likely unintended concurrent bigamy—specifically forms of polyandry—in a piece ostensibly concerned with couples. Thus, paying attention to De vidua helps us to better map shifting conceptions of monogamy and polygamy in the history of Christian marriage.
Concurrent bigamy, which I hereafter refer to simply as bigamy, is a specific form of polygamy that involves three simultaneous spouses. In the history of Christianity, this form of bigamy stands in contrast with two others. Sequential bigamy occurs when a married person leaves his or her first spouse without a divorce and marries again. In this case, the person moving from partnership to partnership behaves monogamously while technically being married to more than one person. Then there is a form of bigamy, also known as digamy, wherein a person remarries after the death of the first spouse. This form of bigamy, while licit, was not lauded during the medieval and early modern periods. I employ the term “digamy” when referencing this final form of bigamy in this essay to differentiate it from the first version mentioned.Footnote 4
Erasmus ostensibly wrote De vidua to comfort Queen Mary of Hungary (1505–1558), whose husband Louis had recently died in a battle with the Turks. Erasmus targeted Mary at the prompting of Johann Henckel (d. 1539), Mary's court preacher. In 1528 Henckel requested Erasmus to write a treatise on Christian widowhood modeled on Erasmus's Institutio christiani matrimonii (1526), which Erasmus had dedicated to Mary's aunt Catherine, then Queen of England.Footnote 5 Henckel, like Mary, was sympathetic to Martin Luther (1483–1546) and other Protestant reformers.Footnote 6 Luther seems to have thought, wrongly as it turns out, Mary could be persuaded to join his cause and dedicated his Four Psalms of Comfort (1526) to her after Louis's death.Footnote 7 Erasmus appears to have written De vidua with reluctance, and may have done so partially to keep Mary in the Catholic fold. In 1529 Erasmus wrote to Antonio Hoyos de Salamanca, then Bishop elect of Gurk, about composing De vidua for Mary, “I do not feel very comfortable with the subject, which is complex and hardly suited to a young woman who, unless I am mistaken, is destined for marriage.”Footnote 8 Erasmus probably took into account Mary's and Henckel's religious sensibilities as well as his incorrect assumption that Mary was going to remarry while formulating De vidua. In spite of what he feared, Erasmus's ideas on vowed widowhood did not fall on deaf ears; according to Mary's secretary, Nicholas Olahus, Mary positively received the book and found in it “a most erudite lesson in how a widow should conduct and organize her life.”Footnote 9
But Erasmus's audience, following Henckel's recommendation, is larger than just Mary. Erasmus writes to educated noble and other upper-class women, expressing an awareness that widowhood customs vary across cultures. Some widows beyond Mary may well have read this treatise, which underwent three print runs in 1529 and was eventually translated into Czech, Dutch, and Spanish during the following century.Footnote 10 Interestingly, noble and other elite widows were increasingly the ones most inclined not to remarry from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century.Footnote 11 I read Erasmus's text as an early response to this phenomenon, with the humanist attempting to provide a spiritual way of life for those women that did not demand they become formal religious or quasi-religious. Erasmus's model renders holy widowhood accessible to a greater number of women in a period when religious vows were under attack by Protestant reformers.
Starting with Martin Luther, Protestant reformers leveled a frontal assault on the theological foundations and practices around religious vows, especially for priests and monastics. In his 1520 treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther attacked religious vows as contradictory to the sacrament of Baptism and against Christian liberty.Footnote 12 Luther expanded his critique of religious vows, especially the vow of perpetual celibacy, in his lengthy 1521 work The Judgment of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows.Footnote 13 Others quickly followed Luther's lead in taking up the pen against vows. Andreas Carlstadt (1486–1541) for example, published a wide-ranging attack on all forms of religious vows in 1522.Footnote 14 Swiss reformers, as early as 1522, started calling for clerical marriage.Footnote 15 In 1531 William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) raised the issue as part of his debate with Thomas More.Footnote 16 Vowed widowhood played a role in many of these discussions, partially because two key scriptural passages routinely used to support religious vows pertain to widows (i.e., 1 Cor 7 and 1 Tim 5).Footnote 17 These ideas spread quickly in early Protestant circles and encouraged a swath of priests, monks, and nuns to marry.Footnote 18
Erasmus was no stranger to these debates and indeed was often seen as an early advocate for ceasing mandatory celibacy for priests and monks.Footnote 19 As John Payne notes, Erasmus viewed compulsory celibacy for priests and monks to be de iure humano and thus open to revision as circumstances demanded. For many years, Erasmus encouraged marriage for priests who suffered from lust, which would have been most priests since, according to Erasmus, the divine gift of celibacy was rare.Footnote 20 As H. J. Selderhuis reminds us, Erasmus “makes a plea for a fundamental purification of the priestly apparatus and the abolition of compulsory celibacy, but does it cautiously, i.e., by ridicule and questioning.”Footnote 21 Erasmus advances this position while maintaining, in principle at least, that it is “the unmarried life that has the most potential for attaining the perfect Christian life.”Footnote 22
Yet Erasmus started to retreat from his earlier position as the 1520s wore on and as he grew increasingly frustrated with the Protestant reformers. Writing in late 1527 to an unnamed monk, Erasmus implores:
I fear you may let yourself be taken in by the chicanery of certain people who go about these days boasting in grandiose terms of evangelical freedom. Believe me, if you had a closer understanding of the issue, you would not find your way of life so tedious. I see a race of men springing up from whom my soul shrinks in horror; I see no one getting better, but all whom I knew well getting worse, so I am sorely grieved that I once preached freedom of the spirit in my books. . . . Some cities in Germany are filled with vagabonds, deserters from monasteries, married priests, most of them hungry and naked.Footnote 23
De vidua fits this more reticent position on vows and monasticism. Not only does Erasmus maintain that vowed states are, at times, laudable for Christians, but he also interprets 1 Tim 5 to license vowed widowhood, which can, in turn, support the post-biblical tradition of monastic vows.Footnote 24
Erasmus also may have acceded to Henckel's request to compose De vidua because, by dedicating it to Mary, a Habsburg, it would create an opportunity to cultivate continued support from powerful political allies. Mary, who was in 1528 and 1529 not yet regent of the Netherlands but also no longer the ruling queen of Hungary, obviously was not in a position to do much for Erasmus. Indeed, she was so destitute at the time that she sent Erasmus a handwritten letter to express her gratitude in lieu of financial support.Footnote 25 But Erasmus made sure that Mary's brother Ferdinand (1503–1564), the Archduke of Austria, received a gilded copy of De vidua, by way of Bernhard von Cleves, Bishop of Trent.Footnote 26 Notably not long before writing De vidua, Erasmus expressed a need to the Duke of Saxony, in September 1527, for support from rulers because of the hostile efforts of Erasmus's Catholic critics.Footnote 27
In the latter 1520s, Erasmus had real reason to fear his Catholic critics, especially the separate efforts against him in France and Spain. In France, Erasmus's theology was being reviewed for its orthodoxy by the faculty of theology at the University of Paris, an effort Erasmus had tried to stop by royal intercession. The faculty issued a formal condemnation of parts of Erasmus's works in December 1527, which was not made widely public in print until 1531. But Erasmus knew of it by 1528.Footnote 28 Independently, another investigation into Erasmus's orthodoxy was underway by the Inquisition in Spain. While the Inquisition did not censure Erasmus in 1527, its members did not absolve him either; moreover, the charges leveled against Erasmus leaked, inspiring Erasmus to write his Apologia ad monachos Hispanos.Footnote 29 Erasmus's position on vows, especially monastic vows, frequently was a topic of concern for his Catholic critics, including those in the Spanish Inquisition.Footnote 30 At least in the case of his Spanish critics, Erasmus thought De vidua would not exasperate his problems, classifying this text as among his works that “are less controversial and more likely to encourage piety.”Footnote 31
Erasmus goes beyond maintaining the validity of vowed widowhood in De vidua, suggesting that a woman is better off married to Christ than to a human husband and presents widowhood as a profound religious opportunity. Indeed Erasmus makes marriage to Christ an important element to his conception of Christian widowhood in De vidua. What I mean here is that the concept of sponsa Christi plays a vital role in the treatise even if the phrase itself does not. Erasmus uses marital language for the widow that necessitates that she is or should be a sponsa Christi. The good widow, for instance, is described repeatedly as a person who has Christ as her spouse (sponsus or, and less frequently, maritus) and, much more occasionally, one who is in a marriage (thalamus) with him.Footnote 32 Divine marriage, in De vidua, is superior to human marriage less because of its distinct attributes than because of the quality that these characteristics take on in the relational dynamics between the new marriage partners. The focus on the interpersonal elements of the union is perhaps most apparent when Erasmus discusses the role of love and grief in the widow's life.
Erasmus's use of sponsa Christi enables him to construct a marital system beyond first and digamous unions, all of which he subjects to a comparative evaluation regarding their religious worth. In De vidua, Erasmus envisions the sponsa Christi as a specific female person who must cultivate her sponsa identity. Just being a Christian is not good enough since a first (and sacramental) marriage, about which Erasmus raises spiritual criticisms, precedes a woman's marriage to Christ. Such a formulation means that the generic soul as spouse, which Erasmus uses elsewhere, is not in effect in De vidua.Footnote 33
Theorizing the holy widow in this manner proves unexpected in widowhood conduct literature. Erasmus's Patristic sources and his friend Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) deploy the concept of sponsa Christi only in passing, when they use it at all, in their writings on widows.Footnote 34 And unlike Vives's work and other popular texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Erasmus's treatise does not demand that the widow fixate on her deceased first spouse.Footnote 35 Thus Erasmus offers his reader a distinct vision of the Christian widow.
Although Erasmus may have meant his use of sponsa Christi to be metaphorical in De vidua, he treats it as an actual, literal marriage. Marriages to human males and to Jesus are evaluated comparatively in terms of better or worse, rather than as distinct kinds and, at times, are viewed as mutually exclusive. This wife of Christ also cultivates an embodied identity by way of certain emotions related to Christ and spiritual practices. This embodied widow-wife identity provides a woman with a relational self, which is enabled by being “imagined as someone’s wife,” in a similar way that early Christian thinkers handled the virginal bride metaphor for celibate female Christians.Footnote 36 Yet Erasmus's widow-wife operates more in terms of self-identity and elective kin than in extra-familial social legibility, as was frequently the case in many forms of medieval sponsa Christi.
Erasmus's use of vows in De vidua plays an important role in his construction of the holy widow. Erasmus conceives of his truly Christian widow as a vowed person. Erasmus tells the reader in a cautionary passage, “indeed none should be compelled to undertake a vow,” with Erasmus specifically referring to “younger widows” (Viduis junioribus) here and the vow is for “perpetual chastity” (perpetuis abstinere).Footnote 37 Erasmus insists “mortals should not try to legislate” the widow's vow.Footnote 38 While Erasmus urges widows to undertake vows carefully yet spontaneously and by their own free will, he also holds that widows who intend to remarry also behave as if they have undertaken this vow to chastity.Footnote 39 Yet widows who do vow perpetual chastity, which is also to say perpetual widowhood, have simultaneously chosen Christ as their new spouse.Footnote 40 The widow's vow to chastity doubles as a marriage vow.
The way Erasmus handles this merged marital-chaste widowhood vow reworks the medieval vowess tradition. The medieval holy widow was supposed to take a formal, public vow pledging perpetual chastity before a bishop, a move that also privileged her to don the vowess's ring and mantle.Footnote 41 As Alan Bray has demonstrated, vows in medieval and early modern Europe usually served to create social selves linking communities. This occurs even as these vows simultaneously forge exclusive obligations between select persons in the cases of friendship and marriage.Footnote 42 But Erasmus's widow's vow is more personal, between the widow and Christ alone; Erasmus never demands that she announce her divine widow-marriage to anyone else. Erasmus thus is able to understand Judith from the Hebrew apocrypha as having Christ as a spouse in her widowhood seemingly without her contemporaries being aware of this marriage.Footnote 43 In so doing, Erasmus implicitly encourages his readers to abandon a conceptualization of holy widowhood in terms of a distinct public persona, which the widow could claim in the late medieval period.Footnote 44 Erasmus, it might be said, transforms the widow into Christ's secret, and at times bigamous, spouse.
The Value of Human Marriages in De vidua
In De vidua, Erasmus focuses on matrimony's relational failures and its emotional successes in order to critique human marriages and to set up the value of a widow being a sponsa Christi. A first marriage between a man and a woman is not presented as a particularly enabling institution for Christian life in De vidua, which differs from how Erasmus handled these unions in the Encomium and Institutio. Rather, Erasmus depicts such a marriage as a stumbling block for the wife's religious pursuits. In De vidua, a woman's second marriage, although allowable, is even more spiritually suspect, with her decision to remarry exposing a flaw in her personality that adds to the religious problems already present in the first marriage.Footnote 45 The great humanist does not condemn these two types of unions but steadfastly refuses them any real prestige. Instead, Erasmus partially construes these marriages as a concession to the human condition. But this concession carries a steep spiritual cost in matters such as split loyalties, misdirected emotional bonds, and an over-attachment to the pleasures of life, all of which work against a woman's religiosity.
A woman's first marriage starts off promisingly enough. Meditating on Queen Mary's marriage to the felled Louis, Erasmus stresses that this loss is “all the more bitter as the bonds of love were tighter, the association holier and happier.”Footnote 46 About marriage's sacramental nature, furthermore, Erasmus waxes poetic: “Among the many ties that bind souls together, moreover, no attachment can be compared with that which couples a husband and wife in a lawful and holy covenant and ties them, in a word, in a Herculean knot, as the ancients were wont to say.”Footnote 47 As Constance Furey argues, Erasmus aligns with many other humanists and Protestants in configuring companionate marriage as the setting for a “spiritualized corporeality.” This understanding of marital unity involves a process that works to transcend differences between the spouses, a move infused with tension since these thinkers also accept a gendered marital hierarchy.Footnote 48 Through their nuptials and marital life, the spouses become interlinked beings.
Erasmus's placement of the wife in this hierarchy has negative spiritual implications as well. Erasmus insists to his readers that “everybody knows what a risky business marriage is.”Footnote 49 A major risk involves marrying an incorrigible man who is hostile to the wife's religious life. As Erasmus notes while alluding to Luke 10:38–42, a wife with such a husband cannot “along with Mary sit forever at the feet of Jesus, so that she might be nourished by the honeyed words of his conversation.”Footnote 50 By establishing a situation in which the husband is the center of the wife's world, much of her time and devotional acts must be directed at him, time and attention that come at the expense of piety.Footnote 51 The logic here is that marriage is a form of servitude, especially—but not exclusively—for the wife. Or, as Erasmus formulates the relationship between wife, husband, and Jesus in his paraphrase of 1 Cor 7:32–33 (1519), “[the wife] cannot be entirely free for Christ, but, split apart among various concerns, half of her serves Christ, and half serves her marriage.”Footnote 52 Thus matrimony, while licit, structurally produces obstacles for devotion.
The presence of a husband can also affect whatever religious practices a woman may undertake. As Erasmus elaborates, “Often an unchaste husband will undermine the chastity of his wife; a husband who is jealous of his property will impede her generosity towards the poor; the man given to other interests will get in the way of her prayers.”Footnote 53 In short, being united to the wrong man can deform the quality of a woman's relationship with the divine.
Yet the religious threat a husband poses to a wife cannot be restricted to his bad character. The love that a wife may have for her husband, the love that Erasmus praises in De vidua’s opening, may itself prove a stumbling block. “The woman who loves her mortal husband in such a way that because of her love for him she neglects those things that pertain to piety—this woman has but one spouse, and that a mortal one, whom she none the less loves as if he were immortal.”Footnote 54 By isolating marital affections as a spiritual problem, Erasmus exposes a fault line in the ideology of conjugal love that emerged in the late medieval period.Footnote 55 Erasmus fears desire's potential all-consuming element, which might make it hard for a person to pursue multiple emotional investments. A wife suffering from this type of love cannot help but mistake a man (human, mortal, finite) for the Man (divine, immortal, infinite).
A digamous union poses even greater religious problems than a first marriage does. Indeed, a second marriage starts off as a spiritual problem because of why the widow would enter into it. Erasmus understands the death of a husband to be an emotionally challenging event for the wife. In her attempt to find happiness, or at least a measure of comfort, the new widow may decide to remarry. If she does, however, she exposes herself as spiritually deficient. According to Erasmus, “Likewise she who prepares herself for a new husband has not yet placed her entire hope in God but rather looks to her new mate for solace.”Footnote 56 Grief can condition the widow's ill choice of the human male as an object of solace. The widow's response to her widowhood combines with the fact that a second marriage still contains all the structural elements that made marriage problematic in the first place.
The digamous woman reveals her spiritual personality by her refusal to place her “entire hope in God.” By remarrying, the wife exposes herself to the risk of gaining a reputation for sexual incontinence, whether or not an intense desire for sexual intercourse actually motivates her decision.Footnote 57 But the self-indulgent nature, to which the wife's (possible) attachment to sex hints, extends to other spheres of life as well. Erasmus associates remarriage with women who desire to live pleasurably and luxuriate in wealth and social status.Footnote 58 Of course, a widow could choose to live in a similar spirit, but Erasmus considers her a flawed widow who would be better off remarrying. Widowhood should never feature such elements, but marriage can since it is the proper estate for those “people [who] absolutely cannot refrain from self-indulgence.”Footnote 59
Digamy carries other relational threats as well. The presence of a second husband can foster a division of the wife's affections between her two spouses and her children. If the woman is fond of her new husband and relishes marital life, she may neglect the offspring of the first marriage, a problem that families at times actually faced in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence.Footnote 60 In contrast, Erasmus praises the committed widow since, by forgoing digamy, she prioritizes such things as her children's education over the pleasures of remarriage.Footnote 61 The implicit assumption of this criticism is that whereas in the first marriage the wife would treat the education of these children as part of her service to her husband, her wifely duties to the new husband would not include this pedagogical element and would probably pull her away from it.Footnote 62
But these conflict-riddled relational dynamics do not always work in the second husband's favor. If a woman clings too heavily to the memory of her first mate, then she is prone to compare him against her new spouse. “When they [digamous women] feel slighted in any way, they reproach their new husbands with the character of their dead spouse, and the same man upon whom they looked down while he was alive they praise now that he is dead.”Footnote 63 In other words, death can change a woman's understanding of and relationship with her first husband. No longer facing him in the flesh, the wife is able to reconstruct an idealized version of the deceased. In short, the first spouse psychically and relationally survives physical death. As the “living dead,” he is able to provide the wife fodder with which to chastise her new husband, a situation rife for uxorial insubordination that Erasmus does not favor.
For these reasons, Erasmus encourages the widow to refrain from remarrying. Yet, he will not close it off as an option since second marriages may be necessary for certain women. If a newly widowed woman, especially if less than thirty years old, is “corrupted by leisure” (otio corruptae), then, in Erasmus's view (by way of 1 Tim 5:11–13), she will become a gossipy nuisance and generally meddlesome.Footnote 64 The proper solution for these “evils” (mala) is marriage.Footnote 65 This justification envisions digamy as a form of social control.
Beyond its gendered policing function, Erasmus also encourages digamy if a widow cannot remain perpetually celibate. A widow who starts wanting sex with a human is described in De vidua as beginning “to lust against Christ.”Footnote 66 Before Erasmus, the Patristic theologians who envision the widow as a sponsa Christi represented this waxing wantonness as a form of spiritual infidelity akin to adultery.Footnote 67 Vives argues that the remarrying widow joins herself not only to a new human husband, but also the devil, two moves that make her a “wydowe, wyfe, and adulterer.”Footnote 68 Erasmus similarly presents the remarrying widow as an adulteress. Yet his version of this adulterous remarriage emphasizes that the marital relationship with Christ is being destroyed.
Such a “lusty” widow, according to Erasmus, causes “injury” (injuria) to Christ.Footnote 69 God has made the woman into a widow in order to have a new relationship with her. As Erasmus explains, “For God appears to seek a special closeness with women whose husbands he has taken away.”Footnote 70 It is not just that God comforts women who happen to have become widows. Instead Erasmus has Christ inform the widow, “I have snatched your husband away, so that there should be nothing to keep us from the sweetest of embraces.”Footnote 71 The widow who intends to remarry from the start forthrightly rejects this invitation to a new relationship with the divine. Worse yet, the widow who pledges to remain perpetually in widowhood and then decides to remarry actively violates her marriage to Christ. Erasmus adds a specifically sexual component to the meaning of this infidelity to Christ since this marriage contains a form of spiritual eroticism. In order to avoid this potential problem, Erasmus would rather have the young widow not marry Jesus and, instead, opt for a remarriage with a mortal male. But, of course, Erasmus prefers the widow to be Christ's bride.
The Monogamous Sponsa Christi, or the Widow as Wife
Erasmus offers a complex answer to why a widow would choose perpetual chastity and to marry Christ. First of all, God wants to be with her, as we saw above, and thus causes the death of the human husband. Having caused the widow's mourning, the celestial spouse desires to offer her something better than what she had: a marriage that includes a richer religious life and that provides her with true marital solace. As Erasmus advises, “if one loves him [Christ] with one's whole heart, there is more pleasure than in six hundred marriages, however happy.”Footnote 72 A portion of her comfort comes from her reflecting on how, “luckily” (feliciter), her dead husband “traded his mortality for immortality.”Footnote 73 Her happiness increases further still from Christ serving as his new wife's protector.Footnote 74
Part of the divine marriage's promised pleasure derives from the widow having a new erotic life. There is nothing like this spiritual eroticism in the writings on widows by Ambrose (ca. 340–397), Augustine (354–430), John Chrysostom (347–407), Jerome (ca. 340–420), or Vives. Having had Christ kill off the competition, Erasmus allows the widow to find solace in “kissing Jesus daily,” which a widow would want to do since Christ is “loveable in every way.”Footnote 75 Each time a widow does “touch him” (contrectas) they find such contact “to be nothing but sheer delight.”Footnote 76
This erotic contact between bodies occurs by means of spiritual interactions, not the corporeal brushing of flesh against flesh. The heart serves as the primary medium through which a “widow embraces her Spouse and kisses him.”Footnote 77 The heart responds to the contact that the woman encounters with her divine husband while praying to him, praising him, and reading sacred texts.Footnote 78
This eroticism implies a deep affection for Christ. Since Christ is the widow's second husband, Erasmus then retains a version of the idea of the unfaithful wife who soon looks for a new spouse in his understanding of sponsa Christi. Yet here the shifting of love from one person to another is valorized, not condemned, seen as spiritual, not sinful. Christ thus benefits from the solace bequeathing transfer of love that Erasmus marks out as problematic and undesirable in digamy.
Yet the happiness promised, to which the erotic life should contribute, does not emphasize levity and frivolity. Instead the happiness contained in this marriage is, paradoxically, somber and sorrowful in tone and quality. As Erasmus declares, “She who has placed all her hope in God has nothing but mourning in this world and expects no other solace than from God.”Footnote 79 If the widow is supposed to be perpetually mourning, for whom is she grieving? Erasmus laboriously works to ensure a woman does not mistake her dead human spouse for the proper object of her prolonged grief, which Erasmus characterizes as a “mourning of a limited kind.”Footnote 80 Erasmus recognizes that a widow should mourn her dead spouse, and insists that she should do so within the cultural perimeters of the society in which she lives. Yet, Erasmus also warns women to keep this mourning moderate, which means to avoid intense, corporeally expressed grief such as tears and verbal lamentations.Footnote 81 In this respect Erasmus largely reflects and sustains the gendered ideology of mourning in the Early Modern period.Footnote 82
But Erasmus is uninterested in foreclosing grief or its external expressions entirely. Instead a widow's mourning becomes a rich emotional force for her spiritual development in De vidua by means of a two-part redirection of grief. In the first, the death of a husband serves as a powerful reminder of a widow's own mortality. The widow replaces the husband as the object of mourning with herself in her spiritual exercises. This transition should induce the widow to lament and confess her sins. It is by means of this demanding spiritual program that God “inveigles people into eternal life” since “the first step in turning to God is penitence.”Footnote 83
This process establishes the conditions for the second transfer of grief. The widow now reorients some of her lamentations toward Christ since he is the person who can aid her in improving her spiritual state and attaining salvation. But by approaching Christ, the widow is forced to reflect on his absence as much as his presence, which her erotic life highlights, since the widow's grief is characterized by a “longing for the heavenly spouse.”Footnote 84 This mourning will cease when the widow attains a “complete and eternal union” with Christ after her death.Footnote 85 Becoming a widow, in Erasmus's configuration, is a type of conversion experience that bequeaths unto the woman a new marital identity with attendant emotions (e.g., love and mourning), which in turn helps facilitate salvation.
As a new wife to Christ, the widow is, theoretically speaking, subject again to the rules of marriage. This relationship, though, is different in crucial ways. Given the lack of direct verbal communication with Christ, the widow has greater interpretative leeway in her efforts to demonstrate her wifely deference to the new lord of her house. There is also the freedom to be like Mary (the sister of Martha), which was denied to wives in first and subsequent human marriages. As Mary, the widow can pursue her religious devotions without divided attention or outright spousal hostility. In pursuing this role, the widow can reconfigure her private space, and do so in a way that befits the erotic possibilities of her marriage to Christ because “the widow's bedroom should be nothing but a place of prayer.”Footnote 86 She should also spend much of her time listening to sermons and reading the Scriptures and other spiritual books.Footnote 87 These activities are the basis for her simultaneously sober and erotic piety that operates in the pursuit of the “holy, sublime, and pure studies.”Footnote 88
While spiritual practices are important, this marital life exceeds meditation. It also harbors an active component that is a spiritualized form of being Martha. Erasmus provides a conventional list of potential religious activities that a holy widow might perform: “tending to the aged and the sick, giving useful advice to young girls, offering consolation to those who are suffering, [and] rousing the indolent from their sloth.”Footnote 89 For these to be spiritually valid, such actions are not to be undertaken in the pursuit of praise but for purification. There is, then, a social component to this transcendent, penitential marital system.Footnote 90
This marriage, however, never really becomes a public affair because of the internalized nature of the widow's vow. Traditionally the widow vowed to remain perpetually celibate before a bishop during a ritual. Many medieval women may have also unofficially assumed the life of the holy widow “in their minds and in their communities.”Footnote 91 Either way, being a medieval vowed widow was a public affair and often was sartorially signaled. As Susan Steuer points out, the vowed widow could wear this clothing whenever it was “expedient. . . to remind whomever she was with of her religious status.”Footnote 92 In De vidua, though, Erasmus makes the vow something that remains known solely to the widow and Christ. He provides no religious service to declare this vow formally and his vowed widow is to dress like other widows in accord with local customs.Footnote 93 This move frees the widow from having to have episcopal approval in order to make a legitimate claim on the holy widowhood identity. In shifting from the public profession of vowed widowhood to an internalized version, Erasmus switches from a minoritizing to a universalizing logic concerning who can be a chaste widow.
While potentially universalizing, the internalization of the vowed state also carries the strong possibility of a split between the public's perception of the widow and her personal identity. As far as the world is concerned the woman is simply a widow. Erasmus's widow knows, however, that her life is not bereft of a significant other since she follows Erasmus's advice: “You are widows to the world, but should enter into the delights of a marriage with Christ.”Footnote 94 This implies that such a widow's life will be relationally richer and more complex than her friends, family, and neighbors suspect. Moreover, how the widow constructs her life—including how she spends her time and with whom she socializes—is intimately bound up with her relationship to Jesus. This secretive relationship may leave other people confused about the widow's decision-making process and might well cost her the religious authority that the publically pledged vowess could claim.
Being a widow-wife is unmistakably Erasmus's preferred option when he compares it with first marriages and digamous unions in De vidua. This monogamous relationship between Christ and the widow is predicated on her focusing all of her love and affections on her divine spouse. Yet, as Erasmus himself is all too aware, such emotional exclusivity is a challenging demand. As we saw with digamous unions, emotional bonds can merge marriages together. These colliding emotional elements lead Erasmus to polygamous possibilities that he probably had not meant to conjure.
Unintended Bigamies
In De vidua Erasmus associates the best Christian life for women with chaste widowhood. In so doing, Erasmus aligns widowhood with the quality of piety proper to the philosophy of Christ.Footnote 95 Technically this is a religious life open to everyone, but unequally so. In De vidua, Erasmus explicitly sets off several partially overlapping groups as better suited to the Christian life, even if only in their spiritual potential. The courtly and educated constitute two such converging populations. Intersecting with these groups are women as a distinct category, who, according to Erasmus, are more likely to be good Christians than men are.Footnote 96 Widows, furthermore, are seen as better students of this religious philosophy than wives. For the holy widow, Erasmus qualifies this piety as “emulating the life of angels in purity of body and mind,” an angelic piety that elsewhere Erasmus associates with the non-married.Footnote 97
But this argument, which closely aligns being Christian with widowhood for women, leads to a troubling question—can a wife live a truly Christian life? Erasmus attempts to resolve this dilemma by arguing that the wife can be a “widow” during her marriage to a human male. What Erasmus effectively does is propose a situation in which widowhood functions more as a spiritual state than a social one (i.e., the survivor of a specific death). This form of spiritual widowhood is characterized by a wife's religious intentions being valued even if her ability to act on these intentions is encumbered by a human husband. Erasmus thus splits the meaning of “widow” in a way similar to how some late medieval people differentiated virginity as “a bodily and as a spiritual quality.”Footnote 98
By inserting widowhood into the uxorial state, Erasmus accidentally forges the first of his bigamous arrangements for the wife. Erasmus appears to incorporate into this bigamy the medieval tradition of the chaste or “spiritual marriage,” a feature that helps to keep this model distinct from the less laudable standard first marriage.Footnote 99 By having been alerted to the bigamous potential of Erasmus's account, the reader can also discern the “ghostly” presence of a second bigamous type, a form of bigamy in which only the widow remains on Earth and her two husbands reside in heaven.
The Christian wife, burdened by her (first) human husband, is in a predicament because “women who have been joined to husbands cannot have hope in the Lord unless they become widows.”Footnote 100 At times, as we have seen, this wife becomes an actual widow. Yet for a wife to become a widow does not always have to be in the literal sense. Rather, near the end of his treatise, Erasmus presents the option of the wife as widow. But this wife-as-widow would be the kind of widow who would marry Jesus. As Erasmus offers a new widow two choices (marry Christ or another human), so likewise Erasmus shows that there are two paths for a woman to follow during an earthly marriage, the carnal marriage with Christ and the one without him.
In conceiving the wife-as-widow option, Erasmus populates the marriage with three members. This is problematic since it would appear to have Erasmus promote polygamy. Erasmus attempts to forestall this potential criticism. He defensively declares, “Nor indeed does that celestial Spouse vitiate a marriage as if by adultery when he is received into that conjugal relationship; rather he renders that very corporeal alliance holier and more auspicious.”Footnote 101 Erasmus appears to be trying to stave off criticism that Jesus's presence with its spiritual eroticism will, as in cases of sequential bigamy, create a form of adultery within the marriage.Footnote 102 Christ's presence may not sully the marriage, as a third human theologically would, but that is only to say that there is a holy bigamy.
But what does it mean for a married woman to be a “widow”? Erasmus answers that such a wife must be a widow in spirit. This state of spiritual widowhood involves acting as if she does not possess earthly things and, rather, demands that she contemplate how “lowly and vanishing” all such material and social goods are in “the eternal scheme of things.”Footnote 103 By taking this stance, the wife will cherish her human husband more and work to be as obedient as possible to him. She embraces the subservient model of marriage because of her love for her heavenly spouse. In other words, Christ's presence not only increases the marriage's holiness, but it also makes matrimony, at least in theory, more harmonious and hierarchical.
Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31) provides Erasmus with an inspirational historical model for living the widow's life in marriage as well as in actual widowhood. Elizabeth was declared a saint in 1235 and, according to the hagiographical account in the Legenda aurea, which Erasmus used as a source, spent much of her marital life serving the sick and poor and attending to other religious pursuits.Footnote 104 Elizabeth is a telling choice that exemplifies how much Erasmus is rethinking the meaning of Christian widowhood in relation to his medieval inheritance. In the Legenda aurea, Elizabeth does not become a sponsa Christi until her death, which is rendered as the wedding day itself.Footnote 105 Although Erasmus never explicitly designates Elizabeth as a sponsa Christi, the fact that Erasmus introduces her precisely to serve as an exemplar for widows implies that she is Christ's bride in De vidua. Yet Erasmus chooses to focus on Elizabeth as a person married to a human male instead of the saint's life in widowhood. Thus Elizabeth's situation is more analogous to Erasmus's bigamous wife-as-widow than his monogamous option.
In Erasmus's hands, Elizabeth supplies aristocratic women with an example of how the wife-as-widow can properly perform the spirituality that marks Erasmus's Christian widowhood in a courtly setting. Elizabeth models a wife who “divided herself in such a way between her husband and Christ, between the court and the church” so as to remain free of “contagious evils,” and who pursued her religiosity through her eating, clothing, and charitable practices with a penitential bent.Footnote 106 As Erasmus asserts, “These ignoble acts by which the stains are purged from our souls are good.”Footnote 107 In short, Elizabeth demonstrates a penitential piety while living at court and fulfilling her royal and marital obligations.
Living out the widow's “spirit” involves the wife not enjoying her human spouse or viewing him as a source of happiness, which Elizabeth's case also illustrates. But it appears to demand a chaste (i.e., sexless) or spiritual marriage as well. Elizabeth shares this intention, just not its execution. Not being able to enter into a spiritual marriage, Elizabeth maintained her dedication to perpetual chastity by promising to be a chaste widow upon the death of her husband.Footnote 108 Yet Erasmus provides evidence that a wife-as-widow should be celibate during marriage.
In the section where Erasmus briefly sketches out the wife-as-widow model, he highlights sex as a religious problem. While commenting on 1 Tim 5:5, Erasmus focuses on the second half of the verse, which claims that widows should pray “by night and by day” (nocte & die).Footnote 109 Erasmus explains that this passage can only work inside a marriage between two humans when both parties “by mutual consent have cut themselves off from marital relations completely.”Footnote 110 Sex must be suspended in order for prayer—a key activity for the spiritually valid widow—to be possible.
Erasmus may mean for this chastity to be only temporary in nature. Medieval marital theology, in which Erasmus was well versed, recognized and, to an extent, prioritized the conjugal rights that both parties possessed upon the other's body.Footnote 111 Erasmus, therefore, rightly notes that stopping sex for religious practices requires both spouses’ consent. In his paraphrases on 1 Corinthians, Erasmus understands sex as an act that weakens the spirit and body so as to render the person ill fit for prayer.Footnote 112 A mutually agreed upon period without sex—“but not for too long”—constitutes Erasmus's answer to this problem.Footnote 113 In the Institutio Erasmus argues that marital sex “should be infrequent and restrained” and undertaken simply for procreation, not to sate lust.Footnote 114 The occasional nature of these sexual relations stems, in part, from needing to be in the proper state for prayer.Footnote 115 Mary's and Joseph's marriage serves as the template for the virginal marriage being advocated here, especially with the bed as a site of prayer, not sex, even if it is to be emulated, but not imitated.Footnote 116 By emulating the holy couple and practicing sexual restraint, a married Christian can become virgin-like.Footnote 117 Thus, the bigamous union of the wife-as-widow in De vidua may align with this spiritual commitment to chastity that embraces limited sexual congress between the spouses.
Yet Erasmus, in De vidua, may intend more of an imitation of Mary and Joseph for the polygamous wife. The fact that Erasmus does not qualify the duration of this suspended sex in De vidua tilts the weight toward the permanent option. Moreover, how Erasmus discusses Mary in De vidua differs from that found in the Institutio. Erasmus only briefly incorporates the Virgin Mary into his account, but does so in a telling way. After noting that wives and widows have Mary as their “captain” (ducem), Erasmus focuses on Mary's actions in the world.Footnote 118 Erasmus argues that Jesus's mother “behaved in such a way as if she did not [have a husband], going to and fro among the apostles and attending to their needs (along with other women and widows).”Footnote 119 Erasmus isolates Mary's ministerial role as a distinctive trait that marks her as a widow while married. Furthermore, the humanist reformer does not modify Mary's exemplarity as something to be emulated as he did in the Institutio. As the wife-as-widow is to follow Mary in her ministerial service, so too, the implication goes, she should imitate Mary's chaste (i.e., sexless) marriage. In doing so, the wife would act as if she has no human husband. The presence of a spiritual marriage would also aid Erasmus in separating the standard first marriage with the wife-as-widow.
Erasmus ends De vidua soon after introducing this bigamous option. The closure is premature, raising as many questions about how this model operates as it answers. The reader could legitimately ask: How does the wife get the husband to consent to transform the marriage into a chaste one? What does it mean for the wife to serve Christ through the husband and, simultaneously, act as if she did not have one? Why do intentionality and interiority count more than external actions in this model even though they do not rectify the religious imbalance of the monogamous first marriage? And what is the role of mourning in this marriage? But if this polyandrous arrangement remains unstable, then its ghostly counterpart proves even more so.
I have been referring to this second type of concurrent bigamy as “ghostly” for two reasons. First, the male spouses are spectral since Christ and the human husband both reside in heaven. Second, when Erasmus brings up loyalty to the deceased first husband, Erasmus does not explicitly introduce Christ into the post-mortem marriage, but his reasoning necessitates Christ's conjugal presence.
The second type of bigamous widow, unlike the widow in the monogamous sponsa Christi model, never parts with her human spouse. Erasmus encapsulates this mixture of subjective presence with physical absence well when he states, “She remembers her husband sufficiently who refuses to marry another and keeps her plighted troth to him as if he were not dead, but simply away.”Footnote 120 This postmortem attachment is possible because her love for her human husband continues after his death.Footnote 121 By focusing solely on an emotional connection as the means by which the marriage is maintained, Erasmus differs sharply from Vives and Chrysostom. Vives conceives of the enduring marriage in terms of obedience coupled with the dead husband employing angels to spy on his widow.Footnote 122 Chrysostom focuses on how dead husbands might keep the marriage alive through visiting their living wives in visions and dreams.Footnote 123 In contrast, via marital affection, the widow maintains an uxorial subjectivity after her husband's death in De vidua.
Erasmus illustrates this postmortem emotional commitment of the wife to the husband with Judith, the Israelite heroine preserved in the Hebrew apocrypha, which Erasmus accepted as canonical. According to Erasmus, Judith deals with the loss of Manasses, her husband, quite well. As Judith embraced Manasses with a “chaste love” (amore casto) during his life, the bond was maintained when he died since Judith “knew that the better part of her husband yet lived” and that they would come together again in the afterlife.Footnote 124 But this loving bond does not remain completely unchanged. While Judith did have a “carnal connection” with Manasses during his earthly life, she does not cling to it. Instead, she maintains and intensifies only their loving, spiritual connection.Footnote 125 Thus, Judith acts as if she is still married partially because her affective bonds endure and because she knows a fuller version of their marriage will eventually be restored to her. Judith does this while entering into a marital relationship with her new heavenly “spouse” (sponso) to whom she prays.Footnote 126
As Judith's case shows, this arc of matrimonial memory can, but does not necessarily need to, directly conjure Christ, which leads to my second reason for calling this bigamous model ghostly. Christ's marital presence inheres in the logic of certain elements of the text rather than being overtly formulated. In De vidua, Erasmus pushes a widow either to marry Christ or enter into digamy. After Erasmus declared how the wife should recall and relate to her dead husband, Erasmus comments that this type of recollection “is worthy of Christian widows.”Footnote 127 Yet Christian widows in De vidua are those women who marry Christ. Hence, if a woman truly loved her husband at the time of his death, then she will enter into bigamy once she marries Christ in her widowhood.
Unfortunately, what it would mean for the widow to live out this ghostly bigamy remains opaque. Clearly it is a “good” marriage in as much as it embraces Christ. But the reader is left unsure about exactly how it differs from the wife-as-widow model. Both forms of bigamy, moreover, raise a troubling contradiction. Part of the reason why a woman should not enter into a second marriage is because she is presumed to have a finite amount of marital love, which a second spouse would divide and thus make insufficient for either himself or (the children of) the first husband. This issue of divided affection also inheres in Erasmus's idea that the remarrying widow would be committing an injurious lusting against Christ. How then can the widow have enough affection for two husbands? This problem Erasmus fails to address.
Both forms of bigamy, though, are likely unintentional; Erasmus accidentally generates them in his efforts to think monogamously. Erasmus's bigamies depend on his use of sponsa Christi for their basic intelligibility. Unsurprisingly, all three forms of marriage involving sponsa Christi are characterized positively, and all engage in a reformulation of the medieval holy widowhood tradition. Erasmus mutes the social aspect of the chaste widow's identity, especially by making the widow's vow internal rather than social. The widow's religious identity emerges in a highly personalized manner, which allows for both a type of spiritual eroticism and (probably) the return of the chaste marriage. By lacking this internal spiritual identity, strictly human-human marriages do not fare well in De vidua. In short, Erasmus pits marriage against marriage in a manner that exposes his ambivalence about matrimony and its relational potential for spiritual wellbeing, and, in so doing, fashions anew the Christian widow.
