Saturday 18th March 11:15—12:45, Session 3

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Overview of programme

Session:

Gender

Place:

Seminarraum 3

Moderator:

Elizabeth Tyler

Paper 1:

Translatio, Raptus, and the Female Body in Middle English Legends of Winifred of Gwytherin

Mami Kanno

Paper 2:

Translating the Gender of God in English Translations of Henry Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae

Steven Rozenski

Paper 3:

Revelations of the ‘Approved Women’ and Their Readership

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa

Translatio, Raptus, and the Female Body in Middle English Legends of Winifred of Gwytherin

Mami Kanno

Saint Winifred was a virgin martyr and abbess in seventh-century century Holywell and Gwytherin. Despite her Welsh identity, her posthumous translation from Gwytherin to Shrewsbury in 1138 opened up the wider celebration of this saint, not just as a Welsh but also as a national saint in late medieval England. The famous episode of her posthumous translation, the removal of her relics to Shrewsbury, is often considered as a furta sacra narrative, but by introducing gendered perspectives of medieval translation, it also reveals how the female religious body was treated by men.

This paper explores the relationship between translation, rape and body, shown in the Middle English legends of Winifred. Drawing upon the idea of raptus, which signifies not only sexual violence but abduction, the translation of Winifred can also be considered as a symbolic rape. With this approach, this paper demonstrates how medieval translation can be reconsidered as a particular kind of violence against the body and text.

Given that medieval translation always involved various acts of transference of both subject and object into a different frame, I also explore the translation of Winifred in the textual sense. Her popularity in late medieval England is demonstrated by a number of vitae translated from Latin into Middle English, including the Supplementary Gilte Legende, John Mirk’s Festial, Caxton’s translation of Golden Legend, the South English Legendaries, and Osbern Bokenham’s Abbotsford Legenda aurea. By reading these vitae, this paper argues that the textual translation of Winifred played an important role in providing their contemporary audiences with a picture of national saint in late medieval England.

Translating the Gender of God in English Translations of Henry Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae

Steven Rozenski

The gender of Jesus and Jesus-as-Wisdom is central to Henry Suso’s devotional project: he fills his texts with oscillating and intertwining genders for characters both divine and human. Most notably, rather than imagining himself or his soul as a female wedded to Christ, he describes an elaborate courtship leading to spiritual marriage with Eternal Wisdom. He also, however, meditates on the (male) humanity of Christ, imagining his soul as female in order to respond to the bridegroom within the expected heteronormative boundaries.

Barbara Newman accounts for some of these differences in Suso's corpus – the Horologium focusing on Suso's relationship with Jesus as Eternal Wisdom, the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom on the humanity of the male Christ – as a function of different audiences. A predominantly vernacular readership, she argues, would also be largely female, and thus more comfortable with marriage to Jesus than the Latinate, male, audience, who in turn need a female spouse in the form of Jesus-as-Sapientia. Were this the case, we might expect significant shifts in the gender dynamics of the vernacular translations of the Horologium – a re-masculinization of Sapientia for a vernacular-female audience.

Although I cannot yet account for the entire vernacular reception of the Horologium, the English translations alone show a range of widely divergent evidence on this matter. The only thing that seems certain about the gender of characters in these texts is that they are persistently oscillating. In languages with or without grammatical gender, the ability to shift rapidly from one register to another is the hallmark of a strategic deployment of the language of gender and sexuality in the German and English traditions of bridal mysticism – whether applied to humans or to God.

Revelations of the ‘Approved Women’ and Their Readership

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa

The Booke of Gostlye Grace is the Middle English translation of Liber Specialis Gratiae, the revelations of Mechtild of Hackeborn (1240-98), a German mystic and chantress at the Benedictine/Cistercian convent of Helfta. Liber Specialis Gratiae is thought to have been compiled by Gertrude the Great (1256-1301/2) and other nuns at Helfta during the last decade of the thirteenth century, but it was soon abridged by an anonymous redactor and circulated widely in Europe.

The Booke is the only Helfta text to have been translated into Middle English in the early fifteenth century probably at Syon, from the abridged version of the Latin text; during this same period Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis and Catherine of Siena’s theological treatise, Dialogo were being translated into English in a Carthusian or Birgittine milieu, responding to the monastic reform led by Henry V.

These translations were disseminated as approved texts of vernacular, mystical materials in fifteenth-century England and their reader included the female nobility, such as Cecily Neville, Duchess of York. Of the three texts, Catherine of Siena’s Orcherd of Syon is probably the text most like Mechtild’s Booke of Gostly Grace. This paper will explore the possible influence of Mechtild’s Latin Liber on Catherine’s Dialogo through their Dominican linkages (for the former from confessors, while for the latter in terms of a religious order she belonged), focusing on their deployment of vineyard/tree imagery, and examine the (mostly) female readership of their Middle English translation in order to illuminate the textual sisterhood of the continental mystics to which the late fifteenth-century female readership was attracted.