
The William H. Hannon Library will host “Women’s Voices,” an annual series showcasing women’s cultural and social contributions, on March 23 at 5:30 p.m. This year’s program will present the voices of four of the most significant women writers from the late Middle Ages through the early modern period.
The lives and writings of these women helped to shape Catholic intellectual history and the pious practices that would define the religiosity of their period and beyond. Composing in a range of literary genres in spite of efforts to curtail their education, speech, and public address, these women frequently made claims to vision and ecstasy, insisting that the words and insights they offered were not their own, but came to them directly from Christ, Mary, or the saints. They thus presented themselves as vessels of celestial communication, a creative means by which to bypass prohibitions on their public communication and to insert themselves into the contemporary theological discourse.

Women wrote about a variety of topics central to the Western European Christian intellectual tradition. Under the direction of Professor Stacey Cabaj of the Theatre Arts Program, “Women’s Voices” showcases some of these: God’s creative and vivifying presence in the whole of creation; the fall; the incarnation of Christ; and self-discovery as encounter with God. Students Teresa Araf, Jenn Robbins, Khaleana Stell, and Victoria Martinez will perform readings from the works of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Catherine of Siena (1347-80), Julian of Norwich (1343 after-1416), and Teresa of Avila (1515-82), offering us a glimpse into women’s intellectual achievements from the distant past.
Hildegard was the abbess (head of household) of an elite monastic community. A visionary and theologian, she claimed her knowledge of the Bible and of theology came to her directly from God in fiery revelations. Hildegard, who may have thought herself to be the first woman writer, was 43 when she began to write on an astonishing range of topics, producing an encyclopedia of medicine and natural science; a trilogy combining theology, ethics, and cosmology; a liturgical play; a body of music (including 70 hymns); two saints’ lives; and several hundred letters. Hildegard was also a preacher who inserted herself into the thick of controversial church politics, advocating for a reform of the priesthood that emphasized clerical purity and power. She chastised and directed popes and emperors, prophesized the world’s imminent end, and dispensed advice on matters domestic and divine.
In the heavenly pantheon, there’s a saint for almost every cause or need. And praying to the saints for help goes back centuries. In LMU Magazine, read Who You Gonna’ Call?
Students will read two poems that take up the elusive notion of viriditas. Threaded throughout almost all of Hildegard’s writings, viriditas has been variously translated as greenness, verve, and verdant. To Hildegard, it seems to have meant something like the creative, life-sustaining, healing, and salvific power of the divine that is visually evident in plant life and moves throughout all of creation, including human beings, body and soul. “No creature,” Hildegard heard from God, “among growing creatures grows unless its greenness binds it together … No form is able to exist unless it is from me. I am their verdure.” Hildegard wrote and preached on viriditas in part to combat the perception that the material world is not good but evil, a teaching that gained much traction in the later Middle Ages and which Hildegard denounced as contrary to Catholic teaching on the goodness of creation.
Catherine was born into a prosperous family and immersed herself among the large population of urban poor in her native city of Siena, where she tended to the sick and dying, fed the hungry, and pled the cause of condemned prisoners. Her religious fervor thrust her into the arena of power politics, and the scope of her activities, was, for a woman, largely without precedent. She became a major player in international church affairs and was appointed advisor to a pope. Catherine was inspired to activism and to service by her robust inner life. She attributed the stuff of her mature religious reflections to the visions that routinely came to her, and which included extended conversations with Christ. Although Catherine received no formal education, she harnessed the authority that accrued to her from her visionary encounters to inflame, counsel, and exhort, and to address matters of pressing theological significance.
Students will read from one of many of Catherine’s writings focusing Christ’s pain during the Passion. Catherine drew attention to Christ’s physical sufferings because to her, our body in some very real sense is our humanity. And bodies hurt: our bleeding, headaches, and hunger pangs are who we are. Thus, Catherine reasons, the bridge joining us to God must take our own suffering flesh into account. To Catherine, Christ is this bridge, and what is most significant in Christ’s assumption of our humanity is his taking on of the burdens associated with physicality, including the physical pains of death. Catherine taught that because Christ is both human and divine, by joining our sufferings to his, we are lifted into the divinity.
Julian was an anchoress in Norwich, England. After prayers for the dead were said over her, an anchoress withdrew to a small room (a cell) and was walled in for life, becoming “dead” to the world. Yet anchoresses were, paradoxically, much engaged with the larger community, who perceived the choice to withdraw as an indication of holiness. Anchoress’ cells were typically equipped with two windows: one through which they dispensed advice to townspeople and another through which they could view Mass, the central religious ritual of the Catholic late Middle Ages. We know almost nothing about Julian’s life, with the exception of a near-death experience she recounts in her “Showings,” one of the theological masterpieces of the Middle Ages, in which she elaborates a notion of Jesus as Mother, glories in Christ’s bloody crucifixion, and presents an account of the Fall that stands apart in the Western Christian tradition. As Julian lay on her deathbed, so we read, a group of people gathered around her and a priest held a crucifix before her eyes; the man on the cross seemed to Julian to come alive, and a series of visions, or “showings” followed.
Students will read Julian’s unique account of the Fall. In the common Medieval version, Adam and Eve “fell” when they succumbed to temptation of the devil, who promised them divine wisdom and power if they would eat fruit from a tree forbidden to them. God punished Adam and Eve for their disobedience: they lost the happiness and the immortality of the body that would have been theirs and were separated from God. In Julian’s retelling of the story, God is a lord and Adam is the lord’s loyal and loving servant. Here the servant’s fall — Adam’s fall — is in consequence not of disobedience but of his eagerness to please God. As Julian relates, the lord never ceases to remain close to Adam. Unaware of his lord’s loving presence, the servant suffers great pains. The lord does not punish the servant but promises him great rewards for his good fall.
Having attended a school for the children of the Spanish nobility, Teresa was 20 when, against her father’s wishes, she entered the Monastery of the Incarnation in Avila. Teresa was a bookish woman, and her voracious appetite for literature coupled with her rigorous prayer life provided the platform from which, as an older woman, she soared into a series of extraordinary experiences, including — so she claims — hearing Christ speak directly to her and beholding the Trinity; she also related a terrorizing vision of hell. These visions fueled Teresa’s desire to promote Catholic teachings: She supported efforts underway to evangelize India and to fight the growth of Protestantism. Teresa founded monasteries throughout Spain, in the process collaborating with and fighting against the Spanish king, princesses, and university professors. As was common for nuns, Teresa spoke regularly with male spiritual directors, a number of whom suspected the visions she related came not from God but from the devil. Teresa’s writings caught the attention of the Inquisition whose job it was to ferret out so-called heretics. Convinced of the divine origin of her insights, Teresa wrote about the access to her inner self and to God that she discovered through a lifetime of prayer.
Students will read from Teresa’s “Interior Castle,” an account of her self-exploration, a process of self-discovery that she encourages in her reader, to whom she promises that there is nothing “comparable to the magnificent beauty of a soul and its marvelous capacity.”
Please use this form to RSVP for: Women’s Voices 2022.
By Anna Harrison
Professor of Theological Studies
DEI Buzz
- Register: For our next Systemic Analysis Report Out Session on March 29, from 4-5 p.m. with Mission and Ministry, and Student Affairs. Register here.
- Celebrate Women’s History Month with LMU: Visit the Community hub.