Abstract
A visitor coming today to the beautifully situated convent of Maria-Medingen in Bavaria will find a doll of the infant Jesus proudly displayed in a glass shrine. It is in a chapel dedicated to the fourteenth-century nun to whom the doll once belonged, the mystic Margaretha von Ebner. In the rear of the chapel the visitor will also find about sixty ex-voto images donated to Margaretha von Ebner in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 Some of them depict her praying or meditating in front of her doll. Others show her at the bedsides of sick babies for whose health the parents were supplicating. Yet most show her in intense contact with the doll, mediating between the donor’s concern and Jesus’s grace. Through her relationship to Jesus, mediated through the doll, Margaretha von Ebner gained a spiritual power which the laity could recognise. In her own time, the doll enabled her to bypass structures of clerical authority as it responded to her questions about people’s salvation and told her about God’s attitude towards individual saints and male mystics. But why did her devotion focus on an infant Jesus doll? We can only regard this as bizarre. The question takes us back to the context of medieval piety.
I wish to thank Lyndal Roper for her translation of all German quotations and for important suggestions, and Vic Gatrell for clarifying discussions, and for turning this into a readable English article.
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Notes and References
Otto Engelhardt, ‘Kloster Maria Medingen und seine Votivtafeln’, Schwäbische Heimat, 21 (1971) pp. 18–24.
For similar seventeenth-century pilgrimages see B. Rothemund and J. Packett, Gnadenreiche Jesulein. Jesuskindwallfahrtsorte: Enstehung — Geschichte — Brauchtum (Autenried, 1982).
Peter Dinzelbacher, Visionen und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1981);
Siegfried Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur im Mittelalter (Munich, 1980);
Ernst Benz, Die Vision: Erfahrungsform und Bilderwelt (Stuttgart, 1969);
Ursula Peters, ‘Vita religiosa und spirituelles Erleben: Frauenmystik und frauenmystische Literatur im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, in Gisela Brinkler-Gabler (ed.), Deutsche Literatur von Frauen (Munich, 1988) vol. 1, pp. 88–112;
Alois Maria Haas, Gästliches Mittelalter (Freiburg, 1984) esp. pp. 373–92.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Cal., 1987) p. 18;
Rosemarie Rode, Studien zu den mittelalterlichen Kindjesu-Visionen (Diss. Frankfurt a. M., 1957); Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur, p. 187.
On this see especially Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s recent articles, ‘The Visual and the Visionary: the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions’, Viator, 20 (1989) pp. 161–82, and ‘The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: the Case of Heinrich Suso and the Dominicans’, Art Bulletin, 1 (March 1989) pp. 20–45.
Elisabeth Vavra, ‘Bildmotiv und Frauenmystik’, in P. Dinzelbacher and D. Bauer (eds), Frauenmystik im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1985) pp. 201–30.
Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1935) p. 414.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento’, in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985) pp. 310–31 and p. 326.
Siegfried Ringler, ‘Gnadenviten aus süddeutschen Frauenklöstern des 14. Jahrhunderts — Vitenbeschreibung als mystische Lehre’, in Dietrich Schmidtke (ed.), ‘Minnichlichiu gotes erkennusse’: Studien zur frühen abendländischen Mystiktradition. Heidelberger Mystiksymposium vom 16. January 1989 (Stuttgart, 1990) pp. 89–104, esp. 103.
This close analysis has been most successful with the writings of religious women as a source. See in particular Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca and London, 1983);
Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford, 1986), and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast.
Phillip Strauch (ed.), Heinrich von Nördlingen und Margaretha von Ebner. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik (Freiburg i. Br., 1882) p. 1.
For a detailed account of Margaretha’s life see Manfred Weitlauff, ‘“dein got redender munt machet mich redenlosz…” Margaretha von Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen’, in P. Dinzelbacher and D. Bauer (eds), Religiöse Frauenbewegung und mystische Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter (Vienna, 1988) pp. 303–51.
Dictating and not writing in Latin both partly account for a more immediate style closer to oral thought, which makes this kind of writing different from men’s. See C. W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991) p. 196.
O. W. Oslo (ed.), Gertrude von Helfta, ein botte der götlichen miltekeit (Ottobensen, 1973) p. 127.
Anton Gabele (ed.), Deutsche Schriften von Heinrich Seuse (Leipzig, 1924) pp. 27–9.
Otto Kastner, ‘Die Gottesmutter und das Kind mit dem Vögelein’, Alte und moderne Kunst (1961/2) pp. 10–15; on Italian infant Jesus figures see Ursula Schlegel, ‘The Christchild as Devotional Image in Medieval Italian Sculpture’, Art Bulletin, 52 (1970) pp. 1–10.
Wentzel, ‘Christkind’, pp. 590–608; for examples in Dominican convents see Hironymus Wilms, Das Beten der Mystikerinnen, dargestellt nach den Chroniken der Dominikanerinnen-Klöster zu Adelshausen, Diessenhofen, Engelthal, Kirchberg, Oetenbach, Töß und Unterlinden (Leipzig, 1916) esp. pp. 155–9,
and Francis Rapp, ‘Zur Spiritualität in Elsässischen Frauenklöstern am Ende des Mittelalters’, in P. Dinzelbacher and D. Bauer (eds), Frauenmystik im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1985) esp. pp. 354–7.
Valentin Lötscher (ed.), Felix Platter. Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibungen) 1536–1567 (Basel and Stuttgart, 1976) p. 373.
Ferdinand Vetter (ed.), Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß beschrieben von Elsbeth Stagel (Berlin, 1906) p. 52.
W. Schleussner (ed.), Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (Mainz, 1929) p. 40; Engl. transl. Christine Mesch Galvani (ed.), Mechthild von Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Divinity (New York and London, 1991).
Vetter, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, p. 39. For an almost identical account see Karl Bihlmeyer (ed.), ‘Mystisches Leben in dem Dominikanerinnenkloster Weiler bei Eßlingen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert’, in Württembergische Vierteljahreshefte für Landesgeschichte (1916) p. 84.
On popular door-knocking customs and spiritual exercises in convents see Hans Moser, ‘Zur Geschichte der Klöpfelnachtbräuche, ihrer Formen und ihrer Deutungen’, in Hans Moser, Volksbräuche im geschichtlichen Wandel (Munich, 1985) pp. 1–28, esp. p. 6.
F. W. E. Roth (ed.), ‘Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens während des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts’, in Alemannia, 21 (1893) pp. 145.
J. König (ed.), ‘Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen’, in Freibuiger Diözesan-Archiv, 13 (1880) p. 176.
Bernhard von Clairvaux, Ansprachen auf die kirchlichen Zeiten (Wittich, 1934) vol. 1, pp. 187–96.
See Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (London, 1983) pp. 50–65.
Ulrich Köpf, ‘Bernhard von Clairvaux in der Frauenmystik’, in P. Dinzelbauer and D. Bauer (eds), Frauenmystik im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1985) p. 69.
See Marianne Schuller, ‘Hysterie als Artefaktum. Zum literarischen und visuellen Archiv der Hysterie um 1900’, in Marianne Schuller, Im Unterschied. Lesen/Korrespondieren/Adressieren (Frankfurt a. M., 1990) pp. 81–94.
Jean Martin Charcot’s and Paul Richer’s Les démoniaques dans l’art was published in 1887. I quote from the German reprint, Manfred Schneider (ed.), Die Besessenen in der Kunst (Göttingen, 1988) p. 135.
Oscar Pfister, ‘Hysterie und Mystik bei Margaretha von Ebner’, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 1 (1911) p. 468.
Joseph Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Studien über Hysterie, 3rd edn (Berlin/Leipzig, 1916) pp. 89, 141, 162;
Renate Schlesier, Konstruktionen der Weiblichkeit bei Sigmund Freud (Frankfurt a. M., 1981) pp. 61–74.
Adolf Spamer, Weihnachten in alter und neuer Zeit (Jena, 1937) p. 32.
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© 1996 Ulinka Rublack
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Rublack, U. (1996). Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus in Late Medieval Dominican Convents. In: Scribner, B., Johnson, T. (eds) Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24836-0_2
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