Abstract
The voices of visionaries, especially in the Late Middle Ages, were deployed in discursive formations, engaged by and engaging in society and societal concerns. In this chapter, I discuss the construction of these discourses in The Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden and I compare it to the artwork of Erinç Seymen, aiming to queer how the historical past is looked at, and to re-orient the way we consider Saint Birgitta historically. The concept of ‘discourse’ used here is indebted to the works of J.W. Scott (1992) and Ernst van Alphen (‘Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma’. In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), and understands the concept in relation to experience, memory and the way it produces contexts and positions subjects. I argue that this discursivity was deployed in different media and processes that play with accepted images and literary forms. By touching their users in unexpected and performative ways, they open up queer spaces by acknowledging and showing alternatives ways of being and becoming in their given contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay has had many lives. It began in the seminar ‘Travelling Cultures: Movement, Conflict and Performance An intensive research seminar in Rome’ with Mieke Bal. I want to thank her for the detailed feedback during and after that seminar, as well as everyone at KNIR. Thanks also to Blanca Garí, Jonas Wellendorf, Lora Sariaslan, Helen Leslie-Jacobsen, Fina Birulés, Maria Teresa Vera-Rojas, Roberta Magnani and Pål Bjørby for their comments and invaluable feedback. This essay would not have been possible without the generosity and availability of Erinç Seymen; I am grateful to him and to Dilara Altuğ, Naz Beşcan and Serhat Cacekli at Zilberman Gallery.
- 2.
Tyson Pugh, Queeing Medieval Genres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1. See also my preface to this volume for an understanding of this method as a tool for dismantling chrononormativity.
- 3.
Thomas W. Laqueur argued that until the eighteenth century there was one sex model which considered women as imperfect men. Although he was right stating that conceptions of gender were historically different, his model needs to be nuanced because in different readings of his work, the one-gender model can be accessed by women who behave according to certain rules of the elite and of the power structures, and thus that can be interpreted as not defined by sex. His model, in my interpretation, fails when likening masculinity to that model. See, for example, Carol J. Clover, ‘Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe’, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 68, no. 2 (1993): 363–387, https://doi.org/10.2307/2864557. His views on the matter can be found in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). His views have been challenged by, amongst others, Monica Green, ‘Bodily Essences: Bodies as Categories of Difference’, in A Cultural History of the Human Body, Vol. 2: In the Medieval Age, ed. Linda Kalof (New York: Berg Publishers, 2010).
- 4.
Haraway is mostly concerned in this book with climate change and ecological devastation, but her theory can be useful and generative when applied not only to problems posed by historical constructs, but also by contemporary issues that are ignored and not addressed. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 11–12.
- 5.
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 12.
- 6.
I borrow this terminology from the work of Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 7.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 12.
- 8.
Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 2.
- 9.
See, for example, Daniel Wollenberg, Medieval Imagery in Today’s Politics (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2018). For an accurate analysis of the relation between Medieval Studies and White Supremacy, see Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‛Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia And White Supremacy’, Medium, 2018, https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3.
- 10.
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
- 11.
See Unn Falkeid, ‛The Prophetic Widow: Birgitta of Sweden and the Revelaciones’, in The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 121–145.
- 12.
Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, n.d.), 29–52.
- 13.
For consensual BDSM practices and the fluidity they present regarding sex see: Robin Bauer, Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014).
- 14.
For an overview of the different connotations of bottomness, see Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where ‘Black’ Meets ‘Queer’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 15.
Quoted in Cüneyt Çakirlar, ‘Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism’, in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, eds. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 81–92.
- 16.
Çakirlar, ‘Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism’, 83–84, in a response from the artist to a series of workshops convened by Çakirlar.
- 17.
See, amongst others, Gavin Fernando. 2016. ‘Opinion: This Singlet Is Everything That’s Wrong with the Gay Community’, Newscomau, accessed March 27, 2018, https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/dating/opinion-this-singlet-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-the-gay-community/news-story/2cfeb920f0fc968e4ac4145113538d27; Dominic Cadogan, ‘Why Should I Be Ashamed of Being an Effeminate Gay?’ 2017, accessed February 10, 2019. Dazed, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/38042/1/why-should-i-be-ashamed-of-being-an-effeminate-gay; Timothy Rawles, ‘New Study Finds: “Straight Acting” Gays Have More Privilege, Less Homophobia’, 2019. Diego Gay and Lesbian News, accessed March 27, 2017, https://sdgln.com/news/2016/10/27/new-study-finds-straight-acting-gays-have-more-privilege-less-homophobia.
- 18.
R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005), 77.
- 19.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–660.
- 20.
For a similar view, see David M. Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and the Subjectivity (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2007).
- 21.
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
- 22.
Çakirlar, ‘Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism’, 82, with these words, but similar expressions can be found in different texts included in the booklets for the exhibition The Seed and the Bullet printed by the gallery RAMPA in 2012.
- 23.
Ernst Van Alphen, ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54, no. 1 (2008): 21. The expression is used by Ernst van Alphen to describe the response to an artwork and the result of being affected by it.
- 24.
For the English translation of The Revelations, see Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden: Vol. 1 Books I–III: Liber Caelestis, ed. Bridget Morris, trans. Denis Michael Searby, vol. 1 Books I–III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden.: Volume 2, Books IV-V: Liber Caelestis, ed. Bridget Morris, trans. Denis Michael Searby, vol. 2, Books IV–V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden: 3: Liber Caelestis: Books VI–VII, ed. Bridget Morris, trans. Denis Michael Searby, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Birgitta of Sweden, The Heavenly Emperor’s Book to Kings, the Rule, and Minor Works, vol. 4, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For the Latin critical edition see Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 1: Book I: With Magister Mathias’ Prologue, vol. 1 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 2: Book II, vol. 2 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 3: Book III, vol. 3 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1998); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 4: Book IV, vol. 4 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1992); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 5: Book V: Liber Questionum, vol. 5 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 6: Book VI, vol. 6 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1991); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 7: Den Heliga Birgittas Revelaciones: Bok VII, vol. 7 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967); Birgitta of Sweden, Revelaciones: 8: Book VIII: Liber Celestis Imperatoris Ad Reges, vol. 8 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002); Birgitta of Sweden, Opera Minora: 1: Regula Salvatoris, vol. 1 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975); Birgitta of Sweden, Opera Minora: 2: Sermo Angelicus, vol. 2 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972); and Birgitta of Sweden, Opera Minora: 3: Quattuor Oraciones, vol. 3 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1991).They have numbered the text numbered in sections, hence all the references to The Revelations are going to be given by Rev., and the number of book they belong to, RS, for ‘The Rule of the Saviour’, SA, for the ‘Sermo Angelicus’ and QO for a collection of prayers called ‘Quattuor Oraciones’; followed by the number of the chapter and section. For example, for section 34 of the third chapter of the fourth book of The Revelations, Rev. IV, 3:34.
- 25.
Rev. II, 13:25–27, ‘Quem eciam precedat vexillum potestatis secularis, ut sciat se potestati mundane in omnibus, que non sunt contra Deum, debere obedire. Ingresso autem eo cimiterium clerici occurrant ei cum vexillo ecclesie, in quo depicta sit passio Christi et vulnera eius in signum, quod Ecclesiam Dei defendere debet et eius prelatis eciam obtemperare. Cum autem ingreditur ecclesiam, vexillum temporalis potestatis foras ecclesiam remaneat et vexillum Dei precedat eum in ecclesiam in signum, quod diuina potestas precedit secularem et quod de spiritualibus plus curandum est quam de temporalibus’.
- 26.
RS, 10, ‘Et cum ingreditur ecclesiam, feratur ante illam vexillum rubeum, in quo ymago corporis mei passi depicta sit ex parte una et ymago Matris mee ex parte altera, ut aspiciens noua sponsa signum noui sponsi in cruce passi discat pacienciam et paupertatem et aspiciens Virginem Matrem discat castitatem et humilitatem’.
- 27.
Some of the visions are dated by the manuscript tradition of The Revelations , in other cases the date of composition might be hypothesised by considering alternative sources like the canonisation proceedings. I am following here the dates provided by the English critical edition of Morris and Searby, Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of Saint Birgitta.
- 28.
See, for example: Michael Robson, The Franciscans in the Middle Ages, Monastic Orders (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). For the specific controversies around the Spiritual Franciscans; David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).
- 29.
It was not only Joan of Arc who was known as a warrior woman in the Middle Ages, for other examples, and the role of women in the crusades, which is probably the narrative that Birgitta wanted to link to this ritual, see Christoph T. Maier, ‘The Roles of Women in the Crusade Movement: A Survey’, Journal of Medieval History 30, no. 1 (1 March 2004): 61–82.
- 30.
‘DEVOTIONAL | Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary’, Dictionary.Cambridge.Org, 2019, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/devotional. ‘DEVOTIONAL | Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary’, Dictionary.Cambridge.Org, 2019, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/devotional.
- 31.
Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion—Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 2015), 695.
- 32.
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 2.
- 33.
For the concept of affect as a cultural force, see Mieke Bal (English manuscript) ‘Afekt jako siła kulturowa’ (Affect as a cultural force, trans. Anna Turczyn), in Historie afektywne I polityki pamienci (Affective Histories and the Politics of Memory), eds. Elżbieta Wichrowska, Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska, Roma Sendyka, and Ryszard Nycz (Warsaw: Institut Badan, literackich pan wydawnictwo, The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2016), 33–46.
- 34.
For the exchange of handmade illuminations and woodcuts see: Kathryn M. Rudy, Postcards on Parchment The Social Lives of Medieval Books (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, n.d.); Kathryn M. Rudy, Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016) and David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe, Visual Culture in Early Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
- 35.
The commissioners stated so when describing their work on their edition in the postscript. See Carl-Gustaf Undhagen, ‘General Introduction’, in Revelaciones: 1: Book I: With Magister Mathias’ Prologue, 1.
- 36.
Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt, ‘About the Cover’, Postmedieval 9, no. 3 (1 September 2018): 250. One example of a manuscript with such messages is Stockholm, National Library, Ms. A 43. For a bibliography related to this manuscript see David Carrillo-Rangel, ‘“Do not forget me if you live longer than me”: Queer Strategies of Memory in the Construction of a Prayerbook from Vadstena Abbey’, forthcoming; David Carrillo-Rangel, ‘Textual Mirrors and Spiritual Reality’, in Continuity and Change: Papers from the Birgitta Conference at Dartington 2015, ed. Elin Andersson et al., vol. 93 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2017); and Ingela Hedström, ‘Hand in Hand. Scribes and Books among the Vadstena Nuns’, in Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena, ed. Claes Gejrot, Sara Risberg and Mia Åkestam (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2010).
- 37.
Bridget Morris, ‘St. Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelationes (1492) in York Minster Library’, Journal of the Early Book Society (Pace University Press, 2010), 221–236.
- 38.
For example, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct 1Q 1.6.
- 39.
For other similar examples, see David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe.
- 40.
Exemplum is here understood as a guide of conduct rather than as a model for imitation in the contemporary meaning of the word. An exemplum was a literary device with educational purposes which also designated the explanation of exemplary stories during the sermons as part of its rhetorical and ideological construction. This mixing of elements in literary constructions of the Middle Ages is an example of the difficulty of defining clear-cut genres, and for this reason I use the term ‘literary device’.
- 41.
This way of annotating or marking the pages of a manuscript was a common feature among scribes at this time, however the way in which books linked with the Birgittine order feature this deserves further attention. Some examples are Oxford, Bodleian Library Rawl. D. 403 with the Five Wounds sign added to the top of each page, London, BL, Cotton App. XIV, f. 57v, where the sign ends a rubric requesting prayers, or London, Lambeth Palace, Ms. 3774, f. 5v, in a marginal illumination.
- 42.
For the ritual of profession and the five wounds, see David Carrillo-Rangel, ‘Textual Mirrors and Spiritual Reality’ and Erik Claeson, ‘Imitatio Christi-Spiritual Marriage, Female Role Models and the Passion of Christ in Fifteenth-Century Vadstena Abbey’, in Continuity and Change: Papers from the Birgitta Conference at Dartington 2015, ed. Elin Andersson et al., vol. 93 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2017).
- 43.
It is worth noticing that the use of this kind of image was advised as a mnemonic tool in Medieval manuals of rhetoric, although for use in more shocking images than the ones under discussion in this section, see below. For Medieval texts on mnemonics, see Jan M. Ziolkowski and Mary J. Carruthers, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
- 44.
The best account of the iconography of the Five Wounds is still Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 188–202. See also D. Gray, ‘The Five Wounds of Our Lord—I’, Notes and Queries 10, no. 2 (1963): 50–51. For its use in prayers as affective, M. Amsler, ‘Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies 18, no. 1 (2001): 83–110.
- 45.
Rather, seals and coat of arms were linked to individuals, each bishop for example having a different seal. It is noteworthy that Joan of Arc commissioned a similar banner displaying the passion of Christ, emphasizing the idea that she was defending the true faith and the message of God. These details are known through several transcriptions of her inquisitorial process, see G. Duby and A. Duby, Les Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, Folio Histoire (Editions Gallimard, 2013).
- 46.
This renewal was the consequence of different factors: the arrival of the friars, the development of urban populated centres, the access of the laity to religious texts, in part promulgated by the Second Lateran Council. See Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), vol. 3, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
- 47.
Turkish society is even considered a model of civil-military relations; see O. Varol (2013). ‘The Turkish “model” of civil-military relations’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 11, no. 3 (2013): 727–750. I borrow Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection from the interpretation given to it in queer and transgender studies, see Robert Phillips, ‘Abjection’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (1 May 2014): 19–21.
- 48.
For a brief account of the use of the ‘performative’ from its origins in Austin’s philosophy of language, see Jonathan Culler, ‘The Perfomative’, in The Literary in Theory, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), and Jonathan Culler, ‘Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative’, Poetics Today 21, no. 3 (1 September 2000): 503–519. Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender is outlined specifically in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2011); and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an application of the concepts of performance and performativity, which have been used in this paper for analysing Sangoi, see Mieke Bal, ‘Performance and Performativity’, in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Green College Lecture Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 174–212.
- 49.
Culler, ‘Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative’, 510.
- 50.
These were certainly elements at play in the way Birgitta of Sweden projected an image of herself to the ecclesiastical authorities, but a more complex reading of the strategy that her writings as well as the accounts about her in the form of depositions for the canonisation proceedings should be undertaken before anticipating any categorisation of her figure into any binary category. By doing this, researchers working on her in the present fall in the trap of fuelling the historical constructs coined by both Reformist and Counter-Reformist and Nationalism movements subjected to political agendas when considering her figure.
- 51.
André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, Les Laïcs Du Moyen Age (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1993), 220–224.
- 52.
There are several biographies of Birgitta, among them and specially relevant to this essay: Bridget Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, vol. 1, Studies in Medieval Mysticism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999); Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy, vol. 3, Studies in Medieval Mysticism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001). Although not strictly a biography, it is also worth mentioning two monographs that analyse Birgitta of Sweden as linked to concepts of power and politics: Päivi Salmesvuori, Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014); Ingvar Fogelqvist, ‘Apostasy and Reform in Revelations of St. Birgitta’ (Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993).
- 53.
They have been edited and discussed by, among others, Bertil Høgman, Heliga Birgittas Originaltexter, vol. Bd. 58 Samlingar (Uppsala: Svenska Fornskrift-sällskapet: Trykt Utg.), 1951. In Fogelqvist, ‘Apostasy and Reform in Revelations of St. Birgitta’, 14 and n15 there is an overview of the debate around to what extent these were altered by the confessors. In my own research I have concluded that there are no substantial changes in the text, and even if admitting that they exist, it is impossible to determine who was ultimately the responsible for them.
- 54.
Unn Falkeid, The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena, 143.
- 55.
Ernst Van Alphen, ‘Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma’, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), conceives the discursive as an experience linked to trauma and memory, considering trauma a failed experience because of the inability of the traumatised person to articulate a discourse. I do agree with the concept of experience as a discourse, either internal or external, and mediated by memory, but not necessarily with the view of trauma as a failed experience, but rather, as an experience that cannot be construed for the others. For example by fear of showing vulnerability, not being understood, being labelled, etc... I use the term construct and construe in the sense of the psychologist George Alexander Kelly, A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs (New York: Norton, 1963).
- 56.
Quoted in Çakirlar, ‘Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism’, 90, from an interview with the artist in the newspaper Radikal: ‘Erinç Seymen “Den” “Çuvallamış Ütopyalar”’, Radikal, 2019, http://www.radikal.com.tr/hayat/erinc-seymenden-cuvallamis-utopyalar-1111099/.
- 57.
Çakirlar, ‘Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism’.
- 58.
Visionary as defined in ‘Visionary | Definition of Visionary in English by Lexico Dictionaries’, Lexico Dictionaries | English, 2019, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/visionary.
- 59.
See, for example, Päivi Salmesvuori, Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden.
- 60.
See Brian Folker, ‘Wordsworth’s Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War’, ELH 69, no. 1 (2002): 167–197.
- 61.
Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7. It is important to note here that Balin a footnote, nuances her use of the concept ‘shared time’, as used by Johannes Fabian, in the context of a historical relationship, rather than as an epistemological requirement.
- 62.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Some of these ‘involuntary’ accounts have been interpreted as projections of the personal circumstances of the historian into the past, specifically for the Middle Ages see Norman F Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. Morrow, 1991) and the forthcoming Dorothy Kim, Digital Whiteness & Medieval Studies.
- 63.
Erinç Seymen, personal communication, October 2017.
- 64.
Homo Fragilis, Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul. I am grateful to the artist for making images of the installation and how paintings were displayed available, as well as for the catalogue of the exhibition, September 12, 2017–November 4, 2017.
- 65.
Nicole O’Rourke ‘Erinç Seymen in Homo Fragilis’, in Erinç Seymen: Homo Fragilis [Exhibition Monograph] (Istanbul and Berlin: Zilberman Gallery, 2017), 62–65.
- 66.
Erinç Seymen, personal communication, October 2017. ‘O homo fragilis, et cinis cineris et putredo putredinis, dic et scribe que vides et audis’. Both Latin original and English translation quoted in Cüneyt Çakirlar, ‘The Non-Ameliorative Art: Erinç Seymen’s Unsettled Scenes of Cruel Optimism’, Erinç Seymen: Homo Fragilis, October 2017.
34. I have slightly modified the translation given by using the word ‘fragile’ rather than ‘frail’.
- 67.
Erinç Seymen, personal communication, October 2017. The artist uses Hildegard of Bingen as a metaphor and accuses her of bigotry, although does acknowledge some revolutionary aspects of her work.
- 68.
Constant J. Mews, ‘Hildegard of Bingen and the Hirsau Reform in Germany 1080–1180’, in A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Beverly Kienzle, George Ferzoco and Debra Stoudt (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 78.
- 69.
Rev. VIII, 48:49–56, ‘Et cum ego attente intuerer ad eundem pulpitum tota consideracione mentali, intellectus meus non sufficiebat capere sicut erat, nec eius pulchritudinem valuit comprehendere anima mea nec lingua exprimere. Cuius pulpiti aspectus erat quasi radius solis, habens colorem rubeum et album et aureum fulgentem. Color vero aureus erat quasi sol fulgens, albus autem color erat quasi nix candidissima, rubeus quoque color erat quasi rosa rubens, et quilibet color videbatur in alio. Nam cum aspicerem colorem aureum, videbam album et rubeum in eo. Et cum viderem album, videbam in eo reliquos duos colores. Et similiter erat, quando aspiciebam colorem rubeum, ita quod quilibet videbatur in alio et tamen quilibet erat discretus ab alio et per se. Et nullus alio prior aut posterior, nullus alio minor aut maior, sed in omnibus et ubique equales videbantur. Cumque aspicerem sursum, non valui comprehendere longitudinem et latitudinem pulpiti, respiciens vero deorsum, non valui videre et apprehendere immensitatem profundi eius, quia omnia erant incomprehensibilia ad considerandum. Post hec autem in ipso pulpito vidi librum resplendentem quasi aurum fulgentissimum et habentem formam libri. Qui quidem liber apertus erat et scriptura eius non erat scripta atramento sed unumquodque verbum in libro erat viuens et seipsum loquebatur, quasi si aliquis diceret: “Fac hoc vel illud”, et statim cum prolacione verbi esset factum. Scripturam quoque libri nullus legebat, sed quidquid continebat scriptura, hoc totum in pulpito et in illis coloribus videbatur’.
- 70.
In Christian mysticism there exists different degrees of contemplation, as expressed for example by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. The highest is an imageless contemplative state, which paradoxically if expressed in the form of a literary work, needs to be put into words. See Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550), vol. 5, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 2012).
- 71.
Rev, VIII, 48, 224–228. ‘Item loquebatur verbum de pulpito dicens michi: “Pulpitum quod tu vidisti significat ipsam deitatem, scilicet Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum. Quod vero non potuisti comprehendere pulpiti longitudinem et latitudinem nec profundum nec altitudinem, significat, quod in Deo non est inuenire principium neque finem, quia Deus sine principio est et erat et sine fine erit. Quod vero quilibet color dictorum trium colorum videbatur in altero, et tamen unus color discernebatur ab altero, significat, quod Deus Pater eternaliter est in Filio et Spiritu Sancto, et Filius in Patre et Spiritu Sancto et Spiritus Sanctus in utroque, unum veraciter natura et distincti proprietate personarum. Quod vero unus color videbatur sanguineus et rubeus, significat Filium qui illesa deitate humanam naturam assumpsit in suam personam. Albus vero color significat Spiritum Sanctum, per quem fit ablucio peccatorum. Aureus autem color significat Patrem, qui est principium et perfeccio omnium”’.
- 72.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), where she discusses these in relation to relics and miracles related to the blood of Christ.
- 73.
Rev. VIII, 48, 232–235. ‘Item loquebatur verbum ad me dicens: Liber, qui in pulpito videbatur, significat, quod in deitate est eterna iusticia et sapiencia, cui nichil addi vel minui potest. Et iste est liber vite, qui non est scriptus sicut scriptura, que est et non fuit. Sed scriptura huius libri semper est. In deitate quippe est sempiternum; est et intellectus omnium presencium, preteritorum et futurorum absque transmutacione et vicissitudine, et nichil est ei inuisibile, quia omnia videt. Quod vero verbum loquebatur se ipsum, significat, quod Deus est verbum eternum, a quo sunt omnia verba et in quo viuificantur et subsistunt omnia. Et ipsum verbum tunc visibiliter loquebatur, quando verbum factum est caro et cum hominibus conuersabatur’.
- 74.
Apoc. 20:15, ‘And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the pool of fire’. All the biblical references from the Douay-Rheims Bible Latin Vulgate edition (Latinvulgate.com, 2017).
- 75.
There are other revelations that contain trials of souls in which the trial is set in Heaven as a royal court rather than in front of a pulpit.
- 76.
Parts of this common cultural landscape, in terms of spirituality and lay piety, can be explained through the contacts between religious networks, promoted by monasteries and communities such as guilds. For an account of these interactions at the borders of Europe, see Karen Stöber and Emilia Jamroziak, Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe: Conflict and Cultural Interaction, vol. 28, Medieval Church Studies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
- 77.
From the catalogue of the exhibition, see H.G. Masters, ‘Mirrored Menagerie’ in Erinç Seymen. The Seed and the Bullet [Exhibition Monograph] (Istanbul: Rampa, 2012), np.
- 78.
Hans Zulliger, Psicoterapia infantil por el juego (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1968), 65–106.
- 79.
Hans Zulliger, Psicoterapia infantil por el juego, 67.
- 80.
Erinç Seymen, personal communication, October 2017.
- 81.
Erinç Seymen, personal communication, October 2017.
- 82.
‘En godh bøn som sancta birgitta plægadhe læsa’. The prayers have been edited in G. Klemming, Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser. (SFSS 14:2–14:4: Stockholm 1860–1862), 160–161, for Rev. IV, 74 and R. Geete, Svenska böner från medeltiden (Stockholm: 1907), 245, for Rev. IV, 89.
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Carrillo-Rangel, D. (2019). The Making of Queer Visionary Discourses. In: Carrillo-Rangel, D., Nieto-Isabel, D., Acosta-García, P. (eds) Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26029-3_7
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