When I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the fall and told people I was studying religion and literature, almost everyone said: “You need to take Amy Hollywood!”
Hollywood joined the HDS faculty in 2005, after teaching at Rhodes, Dartmouth, and the University of Chicago, where she earned her PhD. She has written several books on Christian medieval mysticism and its place within gender, theory, theology, philosophy, and poetry. Her most recent book, which she discusses on campus November 28, is Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (Columbia, 2015).
On Election Day I met Hollywood in her office on the HDS campus to discuss the book, how she became interested in Medieval Christian women’s writing, and the curious emphasis on the body and blood of female mystic saints.
HDS: In the introduction to Acute Melancholia, you admit you’re not a Christian, and even find some contemporary Christian practices “dull and repugnant.” Why study religion if you’re not a believer? And how did you become interested in Medieval Christian women’s writing?
AH: I went to a Catholic school for 12 years, and I went to college with no intention of ever taking another religion course again. Then I was drawn to it by teachers who were teaching philosophical and theological texts in really interesting ways in the religion department, much more interesting than what was happening in the philosophy department.
It provided an entree into looking at modern Western thought that was driven by real-life, existential issues, whereas most of the study in philosophy now has become very technical and removed itself from what feel like vital issues. I thought I wanted to study philosophy, but I ended up studying religion, because religion was where I could work with philosophical material in the ways I wanted to work on it.
I got really interested in the Medieval Christian texts because I thought that they were pointing to possibilities of what Christianity could be, or what the ends of Christianity were, or what something beyond Christianity was. At Chicago, I ended up studying with all these Catholics who were very much about what the French call “ressourcement,” about looking to old sources to revitalize our conception, either of what Christianity could be or of what something that wasn’t quite Christianity anymore might look like.
As I was studying the mystical texts, I got more and more interested in the practices that were associated with them. I realized people are doing things to make these texts and the experiences they’re describing happen, and that I needed to understand something about the practices of Medieval Christianity in order to understand what the relationship is between practice and belief.
So it was an attempt to understand a kind of training of the self that early and Medieval Christians knew how to do really well and were very self-conscious about and wrote about very self-consciously. They were doing these things to transform themselves in very specific ways, and that seemed to be related to a set of questions that modern Western philosophy was asking itself, but without that self-consciousness about the fact that we have to do something to ourselves to bring these things about. That’s the sort of conversation that I’ve been interested in for a long time—to try to think about Christian texts that are about how to work on ourselves to make ourselves who we want to be, both individually and in communities, and how that conversation might enrich philosophical and theoretical and other kinds of discussions about ethics, about political life, and about how we live that don’t often get posed in a very direct form. Often they get posed through literature, but kind of indirectly.
HDS: What did you learn by focusing particularly on writing by and about Medieval Christian women?
AH: One of the first things that I realized, reading all these hagiographies—the saints’ lives—was that there was a women’s religious movement, large numbers of women entering some form of religious life, in the late twelfth and then into the thirteenth century. There were a lot of hagiographies, a lot of saints’ lives—even though they weren’t actually ever made official saints—but lives of holy women that were written in that period. And then we had a handful of texts by women who were associated with the movement.
It’s this extraordinary thing that these women are writing in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth century, in Western Christianity. Even for a limited audience, even if a lot of manuscripts don’t survive, they still were producing work that was saved and was passed down. I hesitate to speak trans-religiously, but I don’t think there are examples of such written productivity among women in many other religious traditions. And certainly this is the first time within the context of Christianity that women were writing and thinking and producing art and producing literature and producing theology.
In the process of reading hagiographies and primary texts, I realized the way that these mostly male hagiographical authors are talking about women and the way they talk about themselves differ in some fundamental ways. One of the most important differences is that the mostly male-authored saints’ lives are filled with women’s bodily transformations. All this stuff happening to their body. They’re floating up in the air, they’re in trance states, they’re exuding holy oils, they’re not eating for weeks on end, they’re crying so much that they’re making rivulets down their cheeks, and also in the stones around them. There are all these physical manifestations of their sanctity, which makes sense for when you’re telling a life story and trying to make somebody look holy—to have something that people can see or visualize.
But when you look at the women’s texts, at least before about 1309, there’s none of that in there. They don’t talk about performing aesthetic acts, whipping themselves or flagellating themselves. There’s some talk of weeping, just because weeping’s a standard trope, but they don’t talk about bodily phenomena as part of their experience that they see as central to their relationship to God. They do not themselves emphasize the bodilyness of their religious lives. They don’t emphasize bodily miracles, and they don’t emphasize asceticism. So that shifts the tenor of what they’re doing from the hagiographies.
HDS: Yet in Acute Melancholia you focus a lot on the body, and many of the most striking images from your book have to do with the body, such as Beatrice of Nazareth’s blood boiling and bursting from her veins, and the chapter called “The Glorious Slit,” about the imagery of people drinking blood from Christ’s wound.
AH: Beatrice wrote that the love between the soul and God is one that creates a kind of madness, a kind of lovesickness that is violent and self-annihilating. She wrote, “It felt to me as if my blood was boiling and my veins were bursting.” She’s very clear that it felt “as if.” Whereas the man who writes about her writes, “And then she was so overcome by love that her veins burst and blood was pouring from her body.” He literalizes the whole thing. Partly, I think, because he needs to display her holiness in the hagiography. But maybe it was also this particular hagiographer’s lack of imagination, that he couldn’t recognize the “as if.”
But the thing that’s really interesting about it is that the medical literature on lovesickness in the Middle Ages talked about lovesickness as involving your blood boiling and your veins bursting. It’s exactly these symptoms and whether it feels as if this is happening or this is what happens externally isn’t always clear in the medical literature.
In the twelfth century, Richard of Saint Victor wrote a treatise, The Four Degrees of Violent Love, and in it he very explicitly takes the medical definition of lovesickness and looks at how love for God both is like and not like lovesickness. He paints the picture of the one in love with God as lovesick for God. With Richard, the physical symptoms are probably meant to be read spiritually but it’s not quite clear.
For that glorious slit, I think one of the things that I’m pointing to is the fact that the language of love, in both male and female authored texts, is very ambiguous. Because on the one hand, Christ is understood to have died on a cross, his blood literally to be redeeming, and the Eucharistic bread and wine is the body and blood of Christ. So, there’s this very corporeal sense of participation in the sacramental life. But how do we get from here to claims like those made by Angela of Foligno and others: I’m going to suckle on the Christ side wound, and that blood will purify me, that blood will feed me, or that blood will cleanse me.
Bernard of Clairvaux has these sermons where he’s riffing on religious language. He knew the whole Bible. He’d say a word and would pull up seemingly any and every Biblical text that related to it. In the Sermons on the Song of Songs, he writes about the dove in the cleft of the rock—which is a line from the Song of Songs— where the cleft of the rock is Christ’s side wound and the dove in the cleft of the rock is hiding from or seeking refuge in Christ’s side wound. So, even there, where I don’t think it’s necessarily tied to specifically medical language, that blood wound, heart, slit, which is always vaginally represented—in the visual program, at least—all that stuff is already happening in Bernard and the Cistercians.
People read Bernard and they say, “Oh look at how he’s elaborating these metaphors: It’s the crooks and crannies in Christ’s heart in which the soul is seeking salvation.” They just automatically read that as metaphorical. Whereas when you get to Angela of Foligno and her book, which is mediated by a scribe, it’s: “I am curled up in the side wound of Christ, being washed clean by his blood.” And then you get to the Moravians in early Modern Germany, and they’re drawing pictures of Christ’s heart with all the daily activity of the Moravian brotherhood taking place, including sex. There was a little room for having sex in Christ’s heart, and it’s all with blood pouring over everybody. So, things get really weird.
HDS: How does Acute Melancholia relate to what you’re currently teaching or other projects you’re currently interested in?
AH: I’ve been teaching a lot of classes on contemporary poetry, particularly contemporary American poetry, and that’s driven by a sense that the kind of work on the self and reflection on how one works on the self and communities is happening in contemporary poetic practice in ways that parallels Medieval religious writing and practice. I’m interested in various modes of literary reading and writing and engagement that have—I don’t want to say they are religious, because that’s thin, but I want to say that looking at them in relationship to various Christian modes of reading and writing and engagement might show us something that this poetic work is doing that has not been rendered fully explicit.
The poetry I’m most interested in is poetry that’s really pushing its genre distinctions, like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Is it literary non-fiction, or is it poetry? She doesn’t describe it as one of her books of poetry, but to me, it’s as much poetry as it is literary non-fiction. And so, what’s the boundary between those two things? And what difference does it make? I think that place where those boundaries are collapsing is really interesting. It suggests we desire narrative or story, the particular affects generated through poetic speech, and an analytic register, in which we can think about what we do and what we desire. All of that is happening at the same time in Nelson’s work, much like it is in Hadewijch or Angela.
—by Randy Rosenthal