A generation of gender and queer scholars—among them Ruth Mazo Karras, Judith Bennett, and Karma Lochrie—has labored to complicate a master narrative of embodiment obscuring the extent to which patriarchy and a gender binary have inflected human experience in Western Europe. In, her painstaking study of stigmata in medieval and early modern Christian Europe, Carolyn Muessig focuses this inquiry on what remains a divisive question: Who can imitate Christ, bearing the suffering of stigmata to manifest divine favor and authority? In unpacking the historiography of stigmata and its changeable reception, Muessig's conclusion is surprising, even for medievalists on familiar ground. The rich devotional material culture of late medieval Europe blazoned the wounds of Christ on rings, prayer rolls, pendants, and stained glass, as well as in the intimate books of hours that functioned like portable altars for ordinary people. By the end of the Middle Ages, stigmata were not the exclusive grace of a few saintly people, but “had entered into personal worship where everyday Christians could bear either good or bad stigmata, depending upon their interior selves” (187). How did this democratization of a religious phenomenon that many readers associate with pathology, dissociated personality, psychosomatic illness, or autosuggestion evolve, and why does it matter? Readers of Muessig's The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe will find a variety of compelling responses.
The interlacing of discrete narratives that we have tended to treat separately presents an exciting facet of Muessig's argument. For example, the rapid development of the medicalized body in the thirteenth century makes shifting constructs of the human person rooted in Christocentric theology a scientific and religious issue. And both have a logical place in the extension of ecclesiastical power through a priestly privilege that mediates visible signs of invisible grace through the sacraments. The pastoral focus on individual intentionality that spurred a vast body of penitential writing for the laity, responsible for much of what we currently know about the daily lives of medieval people, is also central to shifting anxieties about the balance between divine intention and human agency. Muessig's argument, like other ambitious inquiries that have benefited from culturally sensitive revisionism (current scholarship on the nature of medieval magic, the construction of race, and medieval medical practice), reveals that the medieval view of stigmata was far more diverse than a modern view rooted in a more reductive paradigm of person. As a faculty of the soul, the heart shared the soul's plasticity, enabling individuals to respond to the beloved in myriad ways that could materially mark the body. Although Francis of Assisi's stigmata became the dominant paradigm of mutual love mapped onto the human body, this bodily miracle generated extensive theological debate and allowed diversity in the ways in which the devout experienced Christ's wounds on their own bodies.
Like medieval sainthood, which became more inclusive after the thirteenth century, the narrative of stigmatics reflects changing factors of phenomenology, gender, and embodiment, as well as epistemology. Patristic and early medieval exegetes understood Paul's reference to bearing wounds for Christ (Galatians 6:17) in evangelical terms. These were not Christ's wounds but the sufferings and hardships his ministers endured in serving the church as monks, priests, and especially bishops. Twelfth-century incarnational theology, however, undergirded the literal imitation of Christ that produced the extraordinary legacy of creative devotional practices extending sacerdotal wounds to women religious and the laity. More women followed Francis in bearing dominical (literal) stigmata, and this is not surprising given the traditional identification Christ's flesh and blood with female embodiment. Stigmata became “the gold standard of female sanctity,” providing women with a stage on which to perform as “living icons of Christ” (91). The fierce, extended quarrel between the Franciscans and Dominicans about the legitimacy of Catherine of Siena's invisible stigmata and the papal deferral of her canonization are just the most historically visible instances of the way in which the diversity of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century stigmatics, like saints, occurred despite a dominant view of women as prone to superstition and falsehood. Within their religious communities, and even in princely courts, female stigmatics garnered soft power and influence. Chapter 5, devoted to women like Osanna of Mantua and Maria de Santo Domingo, prophetesses and political advisers by virtue of their stigmata, is an illuminating extension of more familiar scholarship on the role late medieval women mystics played in church politics that spurred a need, voiced by critics like Jean Gerson, for discernment of spirits given female unreliability. Despite both physical and mental inquisitorial examinations, despite the persistent efforts to vilify them on the part of theologically trained detractors like the Dominican Johannes Nider (1380–1438), stigmatics like Magdalena Beutler (1407–1458) survived with her reputation for holiness intact.
As readers will expect, the Reformation disdain for performative devotion and material religious culture reauthorized the notion of Pauline stigmata. Stigmata as a sign of divine love, like other rituals and devotional performances, was idolatry and fraud. The Counter-Reformation responded with what Muessig calls the project of “critical hagiography,” a written tradition, exemplified by the Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum, which preserved these powerful, strange stories of bodies—often female—privileged with divine love (245). Muessig's epilogue brings the reader back to two contemporary female stigmatics whose Lebanese and Samoan communities embrace miracles to refute the same Western narrative that dismisses traditional medicine in nonwestern cultures. Muessig does not concern herself with the reality of miracles, but she explores the way this particular miracle affirmed and continues to affirm the faith of both individuals and communities through story.
