After decades of scholarship following the feminist turn, the linguistic turn, and the materialist turn, one might think there was little more to be said about the bodies of medieval women mystics. But one would be wrong. In this formidable study of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, Patricia Dailey uses the second paradigm, the linguistic, to correct the excesses of the first and third. More strikingly, Promised Bodies heralds the return of the repressed, which is theology itself. Dailey argues that the category of gender has, for now, yielded all the wisdom it can, so it is time to stop reading women in a same-sex ghetto of our own ideological making. Nor is it enough to itemize, then dismiss, their theological influences. Building on carefully laid Pauline and Augustinian foundations, Promised Bodies develops an intricate theological interpretation of Hadewijch's writings in prose and verse. Other mystics furnish comparisons, but despite the title, Hadewijch is always front and center.
Dailey contends that in women's mystical texts, the “body” beloved of a generation of critics is never simply the material, corporeal self, nor does it give access to a sensual immediacy absent in male writers. Instead, we must reckon with “the mystic's two bodies” as Kantorowicz did with the king's, acknowledging their correlation with two forms of temporality. The mystic's outer body—corresponding to the Pauline and Augustinian exterior homo, Hadewijch's materie, Julian's sensualite—is indeed the corporeal self, living in historical time. But its spiritual value lies in its ability to “host” the inner self (Paul's interior homo, Julian's substance). This is not simply the soul, for it has a figural body of its own (Hadewijch's lichame), with inner, spiritual senses and an orientation toward eternal time, where God dwells. In short, the inner self lives in the “already and not yet” of the gospel. In Dailey's preferred metaphor of hospitality, it is capable of hosting the divine, in particular the body of Christ. But this is still a promised body, not an actual one. By the same token, visions give genuine access to the divine, but only as promise. God's longed-for presence is sensed through a glass darkly, not experienced fully. Language plays a mediating role, not only communicating the vision to others, but enabling its enigmatic message to abide in time during a latency period, until the mystic can understand and retranslate it into the present. Here Dailey diverges from the apophatic tradition, with its tendency to blame language for impeding the possibility of direct experience. Rather, just as the Word once became flesh, so body must now be transmuted into words, into text: “The inner body is strangely co-substantial with language and necessitates faith in order to be granted substance” (40).
The outer body's other vital function is to perform werke, deeds of love that allow the mystic to fulfill in time the Christic unity that her inner self has perceived in vision. Dailey characterizes works as the soul's “postscriptum” because they come after writing, after the visionary text, yet without them it remains barren. A single sentence hints at what these works might be—“activities as varied as weaving, tutoring in Latin, caring for the sick, agricultural work, the copying of manuscripts, and duties relating to everyday life in beguinages” (92). For Hadewijch they always entail suffering, not because of mortifications, but simply because immersion in outer activity means alienation from the Beloved. Paradoxically, it is by enduring God's felt absence that the inner self becomes most Christlike. Because the soul longs at all times for the “fruition” that remains only a promise, she can fall into what Hadewijch calls “noble unfaith,” fearing that Love does not love her enough or that nothing she does can content Love. Such souls travel painfully toward God by “the way of hell” and “the way of purgatory.” (There is also a “way of heaven,” but Hadewijch says little about it.) Once again, Dailey links the suffering body with textuality: pain is a divine message, a text needing interpretation.
In her final chapter, Dailey interprets Hadewijch's songs (formerly called stanzaic poems) with due attention to their original Dutch text. Downplaying aspects that others have described as sensual or courtly, she stresses the psalmlike character of these songs: their formal qualities “simultaneously incite and order the passions so that they are understood in relation to their greater promised work of salvation” (127). Hadewijch's lyric “I” both is and is not autobiographical. As in troubadour lyric (my comparison, not Dailey's), the subject position of each song can be inhabited by anyone who sings it and claims a similar relationship to Love. Dailey offers the subtlest reading these songs have yet received in Anglophone scholarship. In a suggestive conclusion, she further develops the themes of her “embodied poetics” through a comparison with Julian of Norwich.
Promised Bodies is not an easy book. Addressed to readers who already know Hadewijch well, it is written in lucid but unremittingly abstract prose, as one might expect from a personal student of Jacques Derrida. But Dailey's polemic is clear enough. In effect, she critiques feminist readings of the last century much as medieval exegetes critiqued imaginary Jews—and women. By insisting too much on the literal, carnal sense, these naïve readers miss the text's inner, spiritual meanings and flatten it to triviality. The reminder stings, but the time may be ripe. Dailey's work will now be indispensable for anyone who wants to understand this most elusive of mystics, or to think in a more sophisticated way about mystical bodies.
