Translating Christ in the Middle Ages: Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text

by Barbara Zimbalist

Overview

This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion.

From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers.

This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi.

Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268202217
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	02/15/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	330
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Barbara Zimbalist is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Read an Excerpt

Female visionaries experienced a variety of encounters with Christ. A single visionary experience might include multiple modes of perception, and an individual might experience different types of vision at different points in her spiritual career. Many of these women speak and write about seeing Christ as well as speaking with him. Others describe feelings, sensations, smells, sounds, and voices as Christ’s speech. Visionary experience was not always visual, as Christine Cooper-Rompato observes. Moreover, entirely auditory communication with the divine occurred frequently in mystical visions despite the terminological associations of visual imagery. This variety of perception reveals an understanding of visionary experience among women—and in particular the visionary experience of Christ—as diverse and sensorially varied. For this reason, conventional sensory terminology creates difficulty for analyzing visionary texts; one recent attempt to create new language for the diversity of visionary experience, for example, borrows the language of modern psychology to describe Margery Kempe’s “multi-sensory” or “multi-modal” visions as “fused visions,” a term adapted from the “fused hallucinations” of modern clinical discourse. Regardless of sensory mode, however, the process of transforming Christ’s modally disparate visionary communication into text demands textual, linguistic, and interpretive work of the visionary narrator—what I call in this book the “visionary translator.” This narrative work took a wide range of literary forms, but the most important precedent for this interpretive process remained the medieval discourse of translation itself.

In the Middle Ages, the representation of Christ’s speech within human language was always already an act of translation. For medieval Christian thinkers, human speech and language were fundamentally translations of truths, concepts, and realities whose origins lay beyond any system of human signification. As Marcia Colish explains, “language, redeemed through the Incarnation, was both a necessary and an inadequate means to the knowledge of God.” Christ occupied a central role in this epistemology. As the Word made flesh, He mediated between humanity and divinity and, scripturally, transmitted God’s message of love to humanity. In transforming Christ’s speech into text, visionary translation emphasizes the common feature of visionary literature and translation: their difference and distance from, and yet similarity to, their object of representation. Like visionary texts, translation remains distanced from its source, which it imitates and interprets but never exactly mirrors; medieval theories of translatio studii et imperii emphasized this distance. Moreover, medieval translation—like all translation—did not simply replace a source text (often Latin) with a different language (often vernacular). Rather, the concept of translatio functioned metaphorically to signal the broader transformations of ideas and ideologies affected by linguistic translation. The translated text represents multiple transfers of meaning—the transformation of multiple figurative meanings and interpretations over and above the translation of literal meaning—just as the visionary text represents the transfer of multiple modes of perception and interpretations of visionary experience into literature. Ultimately, the translator, like the visionary narrator, engages in authorial activity that mediates, interprets, explicates, and expands the text.

Visionary authors drew on the discourse and narrative techniques of translation to create new positions of rhetorical authority and exemplarity. First, visionary authors share in what Rita Copeland terms the “impulse to yield and receive a formative influence,” or the willingness to be changed, that characterizes medieval translation. For visionary translators, this becomes a willingness to inhabit and subsequently to be altered by the epistemological and rhetorical positions of exemplar and instructor affiliated with Christ. At the same time, the understanding of translation as a constructive, interpretive process suggests how the visionary participates in the narrative and textual construction of Christ’s speech. The practice of making a text more accessible to readers through linguistic translation that incorporated interpretation, exegesis, and commentary remained the norm throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval translators often commented on the scope of their narrative and authorial roles, acknowledging their contributions to the translated text in ways that revealed an understanding of themselves as participants in the creation of meaning and content—a process Andrew Kraebel terms “commentary-translation.” The visionary author and the medieval translator thus shared a similarly constructive narrative role that could range from direct reportage to interpretation to invention. When the subject of translation was Christ’s speech, that role gained new authority.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Accomplished Word

1. The Origins of a Mode: Collaboration, Conversation, and Community in the Diocese of Liège

2. Vernacular Saints’ Lives and Female Community in the High Middle Ages

3. Vernacular Authority and Visionary Authorship in the Low Countries

4. Revisions of Authority: Rhetoric, Participation, and Devotional Reading

5. Vision, Speech, and Textual Community in the Late Middle Ages

Conclusion

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages breaks new ground in the study of medieval women’s visionary and hagiographical writings.” —Christine F. Cooper-Rompato, author of The Gift of Tongues

"An erudite and carefully constructed book, each chapter building on the preceding one in an ever-widening circle of the significance and scope of visionary translation." —Speculum

"An invaluable contribution to the ever-growing literature on gender, authorship, and visionary text which has sprung up in the past two or three decades." —Medieval Mystical Theology

"Zimbalist's book opens up a new avenue for the study of women's verbal rather than bodily devotion, and for an appreciation of female visionaries as skillful sermonizers and inventors of new forms of verbal devotion."—Studies in the Age of Chaucer

From the Publisher