Medieval Female Mystics, Motherhood, and Listening to Your Gut with Jia Tolentino
Hi friends,
As we round out National Women’s History Month, I’m looking back at “Mystic Lessons,” Jia Tolentino’s fantastic essay from Listening in the Dark on medieval female mystics and how their stories impacted her path to motherhood. Below is an excerpt from that essay, followed by a brand new interview with Jia about women, mysticism, what we can teach the next generation about their own superpowers, and so much more.
The following text has been excerpted from the essay “Mystic Lessons” by Jia Tolentino, which was originally published in Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition (Park Row Books, 2022). Reprinted with permission.
In the summer of 2019, I flew to France with my friend Emma. . . . One night, under a silvery twilight that was reflected in the slowly rising water around our paved walkway, we carried our bags to Mont-Saint-Michel, the surreal tidal island and former medieval monastery. . . . I had been thinking about the ahistorical gift of self-determination, of being a woman who had spent much of her twenties writing all day and all night. In a place like Mont-Saint-Michel, where the stones themselves seemed held together by history, it felt especially tangible that—despite my well-practiced complaints about the various immoral and destructive aspects of contemporary living—my entire existence was an unlikely luxury. If I were to disappear and reappear at a random place on the fabric of planetary space-time, I had a high chance of materializing as a subsistence farmer in an era before antibiotics: a woman married off mid-puberty, with no books in the house, no access to solitude, and little in the way of sexual or reproductive choice.
We went back to the inn and sat on the balcony, looking at the walkway snaking out into the dark. On the mountain, you could see anything coming from miles away. You could prepare a loving welcome. You could mount a defense. That summer, I was on the precipice of switching my psychological orientation toward pregnancy from aversion to desire—I had been walking slowly, for years, toward a door I would soon knock on in the dark.
I was in gentle, preemptive mourning for my life of impulsivity and consciously wielded independence. In that moment, wearing the black night like a blanket, I felt a new understanding of what religious consecration meant for women in bygone centuries: it was a way—perhaps the only sanctioned way—to receive freedom from pregnancy, labor, and childrearing. It was a way to never live in service of babies or of men. I had nursed an obsession with medieval female mystics for years, admiring them primarily as writers. But I saw then that I loved them—Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Clare of Assisi, Margery Kempe, and others—for finding a way to do, so many years ago, what so many women in our era of deceptive bounty still dream of. They had built unbreachable stone walls around the things that were most precious to them: their faith, yes, but also their time, their minds, their intuition.
The scholar Monica Furlong writes that, for a medieval woman, life generally “began with a limited, often purely domestic, education, followed by marriage in the mid-teens or earlier . . . the marriage would be followed by repeated pregnancies and the births of many children.” Childbirth, back then, was an event that wore a strong association with death. Furlong cites Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century Italian mystic, as an example: Catherine was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children, half of whom had died by the time she was born. Catherine was one of premature twins when she was born in 1347. By this point, half of her twenty-two other siblings had already died; soon afterwards, Catherine’s twin died too.
She was fifteen when her sister Bonaventura died during labor and the duty to marry Bonaventura’s widower summarily fell to her. But Catherine refused, cutting off her hair and going on a hunger strike. As she later told her friend and mentor Raymond of Capua, she built a cell in her own mind from which she could not flee. She began living as a recluse in her family’s home and then turned, radically, toward a life of outward-facing public service: she became a preacher and a reformer, rejecting the other roles that were available to her, finding a choice beyond living as a mother or a nun.
When Catherine was around thirty—three years before she would die, weakened by a lifetime of extreme fasting—she entered an ecstatic state of communion with God. The theology that emerged was simple and psychedelic: God was life itself—a sea in which we were all fish. “Every step of the way to heaven is heaven,” she wrote. . . .
These mystics are one of my last strands of connection to the religion I grew up with—these women, and their irradiating desire to search for something beyond the visible, some access to a kaleidoscoping realm of presence and love and terror. That desire has filtered through to me, though I’ve followed it in such ordinary contexts, seeking out bouts of extreme solitude and overwhelming physical experience, in the midst of what is an otherwise profoundly conventional life. I feel stunned by the lack of compromise in the lives of these mystics, the clarity of their intuition. . . .
Six months after that trip to France, I got pregnant, and then two months later, the pandemic took hold. My boyfriend and I relocated to Upstate New York, to the house we’d bought after I sold my book. I had formerly associated solitude with stretches of psychedelic loneliness or furious writing; I had always craved isolation as the equivalent of a dark room, a sort of temporary anchor-hold, in which my thoughts would flare like lighted matches. But there was nothing like that in pandemic isolation: no sparks, no sharpness. Isolation in the woods, with trees and space and sunlight—this was another instance of ahistorical, arbitrary, undeserved luck. As my body expanded, I felt like a slowly growing plant, like a strong and sweet and capacious animal. I stopped writing and felt myself moving toward a different kind of knowledge, one that required not force and sharpness but instead surrender, patience, the willingness to be a vessel for time.
I began to understand that this was part of what the medieval female mystics had intuited. In studying these women, I had always seen—and identified with—primarily a tormenting, salvific, internally generated desire to render thoughts onto paper. Peter Dronke writes that the “medieval woman’s motivation for writing at all seems rarely to be predominantly literary: it is often more urgently serious than is common among men writers; it is a response springing from inner needs, more than from an artistic, or didactic, inclination.” But their openness to revelation had left them open to the truth about it: that transformative experience is rarely entirely legible right away.
An Interview with Jia Tolentino