Veerle Fraeters 0103

Question: Can you tell us something about the type of spirituality these women practised?

Fraeters: I have said that women developed their own form of spirituality. This was characterised by prophetic gifts and ecstatic experiences. This should not surprise us, since women in that period - just as today - were not entitled to hold religious office ex officio . They could not become priests. They could not assume a leadership role towards other believers through the office of priest. Instead, women of that period had to find other ways to prove to the community - and also to themselves - that they were called to wield religious authority over others and to talk in the name of God, something which priests could do through their office.

Women in the Middle Ages could acquire such religious authority by having contact with God in a very visable way. They did this by having ecstatic experiences, not in private, but usually in public, often during the liturgy in church, but often just plain "in public". These ecstatic experiences could come in a wide variety of forms. So a woman might have a short ecstatic experience, a vision in which she received information about herself or about other people in her environment, or about souls trapped in purgatory, the souls of the deceased, and so on. But she might also experience forms of ecstasy that we would find aberrant: climbing trees, singing or shouting with joy for days on end. These were all phenomena by which women could prove to the community, but also themselves, that they had religious authority.

And the worldview, or the "anthropology" - the view of man and his ultimate purpose  - in the Middle Ages assumed that every human being was called to become equal to God. Men and women were called in a similar way to become equal to God. Both were called, since God created Man in his image as is written in Genesis. This meant that God had created not only man, but also woman in his image. So, according to the Christian myth in which the culture of the Middle Ages was rooted, all human souls were called equally to become God’s equals. And so women who displayed these kinds of experience, were assumed to have acquired religious authority ex gratia, out of grace.