The Nineteenth Century Lives of Medieval Mystics in Medicine and Culture
Virginia Langum, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Language Studies, Umea University, Sweeden
The relationship of the physical, gendered body to mental health is a common theme in literary studies, which have sought to understand historical and contemporary narratives by female authors. Medieval mystics, in particular, have invited psychological and medical intrigue, both in their own period and much later. While both male and female mystics often write in highly embodied imagery, female mystics often write in immediate relation to their own bodies. Mystics sought personal experience, or what is called mystical union with the divine, through certain practices, which ranged from contemplation to extreme fleshly mortification. Not only their own contemporaries but also far more recent readers have offered various biomedical and psychosomatic diagnoses for these medieval female mystics.
This paper will consider the various ways medieval mystics are invoked in medical and cultural discourses concerning health in the nineteenth century. In psychological discourse, mystics are generally pathologized as hysterics. Both Freud and Charcot found parallels between their own patients and medieval mystics in their writings. Charcot, for example, claims that Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) were “undeniable hysterics”. However, such ideas also occur in more popular writing. For “muscular Christian” novelists and thinkers, medieval mystics represent the antithesis of their values: femininity, weakness, sickness and sexual repression. Both in his non-fiction and fiction, Charles Kingsley portrays the perils of “Romish and Puritan” mysticism. For example, in his Two Years Ago, the character Grace Harvey with her mystical tendencies is fortunate to live in Protestant England otherwise she might have emulated “the ecstasies of St. Theresa, or of St. Hildegardis” and “have died in seven years, maddened by alternate paroxysms of self-conceit and revulsions of self-abasement”. Other writers, such as the physician Joseph Ennemoser, explained mysticism in reference to contemporary practices of magnetism. For Ennemoser, magnetism replaced mysticism, offering improvements to spiritual and physical health without “artificial means” such as fleshly mortification.
References to medieval mystics in nineteenth century discourses of spiritual and physical health reflect and respond to wider social anxieties and changes related to the rise of psychiatry (e.g., medical determinism and the impact upon perceptions of the will) and industrialization (e.g., decline of physical labour and the impact upon definitions of masculinity).
The relationship of the physical, gendered body to mental health is a common theme in literary studies, which have sought to understand historical and contemporary narratives by female authors. Medieval mystics, in particular, have invited psychological and medical intrigue, both in their own period and much later. While both male and female mystics often write in highly embodied imagery, female mystics often write in immediate relation to their own bodies. Mystics sought personal experience, or what is called mystical union with the divine, through certain practices, which ranged from contemplation to extreme fleshly mortification. Not only their own contemporaries but also far more recent readers have offered various biomedical and psychosomatic diagnoses for these medieval female mystics.
This paper will consider the various ways medieval mystics are invoked in medical and cultural discourses concerning health in the nineteenth century. In psychological discourse, mystics are generally pathologized as hysterics. Both Freud and Charcot found parallels between their own patients and medieval mystics in their writings. Charcot, for example, claims that Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) were “undeniable hysterics”. However, such ideas also occur in more popular writing. For “muscular Christian” novelists and thinkers, medieval mystics represent the antithesis of their values: femininity, weakness, sickness and sexual repression. Both in his non-fiction and fiction, Charles Kingsley portrays the perils of “Romish and Puritan” mysticism. For example, in his Two Years Ago, the character Grace Harvey with her mystical tendencies is fortunate to live in Protestant England otherwise she might have emulated “the ecstasies of St. Theresa, or of St. Hildegardis” and “have died in seven years, maddened by alternate paroxysms of self-conceit and revulsions of self-abasement”. Other writers, such as the physician Joseph Ennemoser, explained mysticism in reference to contemporary practices of magnetism. For Ennemoser, magnetism replaced mysticism, offering improvements to spiritual and physical health without “artificial means” such as fleshly mortification.
References to medieval mystics in nineteenth century discourses of spiritual and physical health reflect and respond to wider social anxieties and changes related to the rise of psychiatry (e.g., medical determinism and the impact upon perceptions of the will) and industrialization (e.g., decline of physical labour and the impact upon definitions of masculinity).