american-holocaust

160 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTstones, whipping herself with chains, and wearing a crown of thorns. AsCaroline Walker Bynum dryly remarks:Reading the lives of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century women saints greatlyexpands one's knowledge of Latin synonyms for whip, thong, flail, chain,etc. Ascetic practices commonly reported in these vitae include wearing hairshirts, binding the flesh tightly with twisted ropes, rubbing lice into selfinflictedwounds, denying oneself sleep, adulterating food and water withashes or salt, performing thousands of genuflections, thrusting nettles intoone's breasts, and praying barefoot in winter. Among the more bizarre femalebehaviors were rolling in broken glass, jumping into ovens, hangingfrom a gibbet, and praying upside down. 34Such behavior was motivated primarily by the now traditional Christiancompulsion to deny and to rout the pleasures of the flesh and by sodoing to accentuate the importance of the spirit, for by this time the sunderingof the mundane from the spiritual, the profane from the sacred,was a well-established characteristic of European Christian culture. But bylistening closely, Bynum has shown that the sounds of other promptingsto asceticism can be discerned as well. These additional (not alternative)explanations for such extreme performances included straightforward effortsto escape the restrictions and menial activities dictated by life in authoritarianChristian families and communities. This was a motive particularlylikely among women living in a harshly misogynist world, womenwho by becoming acknowledged saints and mystics were able to use theinstitution of chaste marriage to negotiate non-sexual relationships forthemselves during an era when sexual marriage could be an extraordinarilybrutal institution, and women who, when all else failed, sometimeswere able "accidentally" to drop an unwanted infant into the fire duringa trance of mystical ecstasy. 35To be sure, much as its priesthood fondly wanted it to be, Christianitynever was able to become an entirely totalitarian religion. During the thirteenthand fourteenth centuries in particular, some citizens of Europe foundfor themselves cultural pockets of at least some sensual freedom. Whatthese exceptions almost invariably demonstrate, however, is that once Europeansexual mores and attitudes toward the body had been shaped onthe anvil of early Christian asceticism, whatever variations those moresand attitudes underwent during the course of time they always were variationsthat remained partially embedded in that repressive ideal. As a culture,the Christian West never was (and still is not) at ease with sexuality.Thus, even on those short-lived occasions when erotic repression relaxedfor a time, the emerging liberatory impulse indulged in by a relative fewinvariably had about it an almost desperate quality of both flamboyanceand risk.When a few women of prominence in certain parts of Europe during