Some Thirteenth Century Women in the Low Countries

Author(s):  
Brenda M. Bolton
Author(s):  
Sean L. Field

Courting Sanctity traces the shifting relationship between holy women and the French royal court across the long thirteenth century. It argues that during the reign of Louis IX (r. 1226-70) holy women were central to the rise of the Capetian self-presentation as uniquely favored by God, that such women’s influence was questioned and reshaped under Philip III (r. 1270-85), and that would-be holy women were increasingly assumed to pose physical, spiritual, and political threats by the death of Philip IV (r. 1285-1314). Six holy women lie at the heart of the analysis. The saintly reputations of Isabelle of France and Douceline of Digne helped to crystalize the Capetians’ claims of divine favor by 1260. In the 1270s, the French court faced a crisis that centered on the testimony of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, a visionary holy woman from the Low Countries. After 1300, the arrests of Paupertas of Metz, Margueronne of Bellevillette, and Marguerite Porete formed key links in the chain of attacks launched by Philip IV against supposed spiritual dangers threatening the most Christian kingdom of France.


2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Njus

Elisabeth of Spalbeek (fl. 1246–1304) was one of the mulieres religiosae who flourished in the Low Countries during the thirteenth century. Although she is known today almost exclusively for her stigmata and her performance of Christ's Passion, I will argue that she provides an exceptional example of the spiritual networking described by scholars such as John Coakley and Anneke Mulder-Bakker. As they have shown, medieval holy women—recluses and anchoresses included—functioned only within tightly woven spiritual networks that connected other mulieres religiosae, sympathetic clerics, and powerful nobles who provided economic and political support in return for the women's prayers and spiritual authority. No one has analyzed Elisabeth's network in this light in part because the chief source for her life—the text written by Abbot Philip of Clairvaux, who visited Elisabeth in 1266/7—omits the proper names of most people surrounding Elisabeth and fails to mention many of the people with whom she must have come in contact. In addition, major documents concerning Elisabeth have, until now, escaped any collective analysis, so we have been unable to place Elisabeth in any context. Through a painstaking review of all the pertinent documents, however, I have succeeded in uncovering Elisabeth's political and spiritual alliances, allowing me to study her in her milieu and to provide a detailed analysis of her possible secular and religious influence. I argue that she was actively engaged in building and extending her own network, and in my consideration of the evidence for this “politics of mysticism,” I offer a perspective on Elisabeth that has led me to reinterpret her role in the last recorded event of her life, the French court battle between Queen Marie of Brabant and the chamberlain Pierre de la Broce.


2016 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 586-610
Author(s):  
Rachel Smith

Many years before the death of Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246), a thirteenth-century Cistercian nun renowned for her asceticism and visionary insight, Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–ca. 1270) approached a group of nuns and lay brothers to arrange for the disposal of her relics should she die during his absence. Thomas—a Dominican preacher and theologian who penned a hagiography of Lutgard in addition to several other holy women of the mid-thirteenth century Low Countries—wanted her hand as “a sacred memorial” (sacram memoriam). The abbess Hadewijch agreed to his request. Repeating a medieval misogynistic commonplace, Thomas then wrote that “since it is women's nature to be unable to keep secrets. . . the nuns told Lutgard how I had ordered her hand to be cut off.”


Rural History ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-75
Author(s):  
Colin Shepherd

AbstractIt can be argued, based upon a limited range of surviving evidence, that the land-locked centre of Buchan formed a distinctive upland zone functioning alongside and interwoven with the surrounding lower lands during the thirteenth century. The area can be characterised as less densely settled and engaged in extensive pastoral farming regimes that contrasted with contemporary arable farming of a more intensive nature on the lower-lying lands. Subsequent demographic and agricultural changes have rendered that former environment invisible and the limited documentary sources of the thirteenth century have compounded its mystery. Although a relatively remote upland area, its economy was at least as successful per capita than the rich grain lands surrounding it. Rather than representing a place of secondary importance, it may well have been instrumental in fuelling Aberdeen’s rich thirteenth-century export trade of sheep products to the Low Countries and, perhaps, shared a symbiotic relationship with the lower, arable lands.


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