Lurid lives

When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.