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3 - Of Loves Both Spoken and Silent: Rābi‘a al-‘Adawiyya and the Wooing Group
- Edited by Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Swansea University, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Shizuoka University, Japan
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- Book:
- Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 21 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 November 2023, pp 57-76
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Summary
I would like to begin this essay by sharing an encounter I had with Catherine Innes-Parker in 2019. With her characteristic generosity, she had made time to see me during her sabbatical in Oxford (UK), and, again characteristically, she insisted on using her time to discuss my work rather than her own. As we talked, I showed her a quotation from an Arabic poem attributed to a Proto-Sufi woman who lived in the eighth century:
Wherever I am, I witness His beauty.
He is my prayer-niche and my prayer-direction.
When Catherine read this quotation, she remarked: ‘that's like saying, “He's my anchorhold”!’ For me, this comment has become an encapsulation of the many ways in which I was impacted by Catherine's scholarship and by her humanity. That parallel she instantly made, so effortlessly and with such open-heartedness, made me read these texts in entirely new ways. Her words also gave me so much more confidence in taking a comparative approach to Christian and Islamic medieval women's writing – a task that I had, until that moment, felt very doubtful about attempting. I did not know, then, that this would be one of the last times I would ever speak with Catherine.
There are so many ways in which Catherine Innes-Parker's scholarship gave voice to silence. This included her pioneering work on the meditations known collectively as the Wooing Group, research that spanned many decades and that was crowned in her ground-breaking edition of these five texts in 2015. The work of Innes-Parker and her fellow feminist scholars on anchoritism – Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Elizabeth Robertson, Diane Watt and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, among others – inspired me to search for the agency of devotional and contemplative women in texts outside of Europe. I was motivated by these scholars to listen to the ways in which Arabic Islamic texts may speak with their English Christian counterparts. In this essay, I seek to situate three of the Wooing Group meditations (Ureisun of God, Wohunge of ure Lauerde, and Lofsong of ure Louerde) in a global context, particularly through a comparative reading of these texts with poems attributed to Rābi‘a Al-‘Adawiyya (d. c. 801), an influential ascetic and contemplative in Basra in the Arab lands.
1 - Speaking Across the Stars: Parallel Affective Communities in Islamic and Christian Hagiography
- Edited by Kathryn Loveridge, Liz Herbert McAvoy, University of Wales, Swansea and University of Bristol, Sue Niebrzydowski, Bangor University, Vicki Kay Price
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- Book:
- Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 January 2024
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- 04 April 2023, pp 23-42
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Summary
In a hushed eighth-century night, one woman's cry may have pierced the silence:
My God! The stars have been extinguished, all eyes have slept, the rulers have closed their doors, and each lover is alone with their beloved. This is when I am all Yours.
This is a prayer that has been attributed to a number of contemplative women of eighth-century Basra. In its version above, found in one eleventh-century hagiography, it is spoken by the Proto-Sufi Ḥabiba al-ʿAdawiyya. The stars’ movement begins her prayerful encounter with the Beloved. Astral imagery is also associated with later contemplative women at a geographical distance to Ḥabiba al-ʿAdawiyya. In his thirteenth-century Vita of Marie d’Oignies, Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) indicates Marie's celestial brightness: she is as a sun among the stars (‘tamquam sol inter stellas’), and her virtues are said to be as innumerable as the stars of the sky. Stars are said to protect Marie, restraining heavy rain from falling on her (28: 643D). Most strikingly of all, the Beloved Christ himself sometimes appears to Marie as the ram of the zodiac, Aries, with a shining star on his forehead (‘quasi aries, stellam lucidam habens in fronte’, 88: 659F). Even chapter headings, says Jacques, will allow the reader to follow the path of the text, ‘as though illuminated by flashing stars’ (‘tamquam stellis interlucentibus, illustretur’ (11: 638F)). In these Islamicate and Christian-European lands, contemplative women seem to converse among the stars.
For modern scholars, these cross-textual stars might signify the need to speak – and to listen – internationally. One significant area of comparative study resides in the synergies between the ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ communities formed by hagiographies of contemplative women in Islamic and Christian traditions. This is powerfully evident in a range of texts, including: Abū ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān al-Sulamī's (d. 1021) Dhikr an-Niswa al-Mutaʿabbitdat As-Ṣufiyyat (Remembrances of Women Sufi Devotees); Jacques de Vitry's (d. 1240) Vita Mariæ Oigniacensis (Life of Marie d’Oignies); and Thomas de Cantimpré's (d. 1272) Vita Lutgardis (Life of Lutgarde). There is a clear rationale for studying these traditions comparatively. In both religious traditions, intimate and rapturous encounter of the Divine is shaped by loving, prayerful exchange with the Beloved – an exchange strengthened by reclusive asceticism. In addressing resonances across the traditions, it is clear that there is not always a rigid polarisation between genetic influence on the one hand, and ‘mere’ parallel on the other.
5 - Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group
- Edited by Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Roberta Magnani
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- Book:
- Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 22 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2015, pp 79-94
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In the third book of his Liber confortatorius, the Flemish cleric Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c. 1035–1107) advises his beloved Eva, now an anchoress, to remember Christ’s suffering, resurrection and ascension in all hours of her existence. Goscelin encourages the anchoress to engage in a relentless process of remembrance: a process designed to be painful and all-consuming, stirring the heart towards love of Christ. In Aelred of Rievaulx’s (1110–1167) De institutione inclusarum, the author discourages his biological sister, also an anchoress, from becoming a schoolmistress. Aelred foregrounds the threat that such a profession poses to her ‘memoria Dei’ (‘remembrance of God’):
Qualis inter haec memoria Dei, ubi saecularia et carnalia, etsi non perficiantur, mouentur tamen, et quasi sub oculis depinguntur.
(There before her very eyes, even though she may not yield to them, the recluse has worldly and sensual temptations, and amid them all what becomes of her continual remembrance of God?)
As Aelred suggests, an anchoress’s existence is characterized by a never-ending remembrance of Christ as man and Christ as God. This is discernible in the Wooing Group, a group of thirteenth-century lyrical meditations on Christ and the Virgin Mary associated in manuscript and linguistic history with the anchoritic guidance text Ancrene Wisse. In the Wooing Group, it is made clear that Christ is absent to the anchoress: his distance in Heaven is compounded by his distance from her soul, burdened as it is with sins. But the anchoritic existence is also defined by a need to make Christ almost present – both spatially and temporally – through remembrance of him. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, among others, Patrick Fuery foregrounds absence ‘not as a nothing, or nothingness, which might in turn reduce things and subjects to nothingness, but as part of an active process’. In line with this concept, the anchoress creates herself as a ‘desiring subject determined by absences’, as she pursues Christ’s presence through meditation. In her 2010 monograph, which includes a chapter on the Wooing Group text Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, Sarah McNamer observes that meditations from c. 1050 to 1530 demand imaginative presence.