Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience

Abstract

The hagiographical source base has long been dogged by the problem of mediation. Can we know anything about the hagiographical subject, or just what her biographer wanted to say about her? Are we ever engaging with Marie d’Oignies, or only with Jacques de Vitry? Spencer-Hall tackles this issue head-on, leaning into mediation to approach hagiography as a form of media. Specifically, she argues that “medieval mystic episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic—the language, form, and lived experience of cinema” (11). Focusing on the Holy Women of Liège as her source base, Spencer-Hall uses modern cinema theory from four areas—photography, film, celebrity, and digital avatars—to generatively engage the Liègeoises.Spencer-Hall’s interdisciplinary approach is a real strength of the book. Her engagement with film, media, visual, and religious studies formulates a convincing way of encountering the Liègeoises as “animated visual objects and active icons . . . who are capable of ‘looking back’” at us (62). Central to this is Spencer-Hall’s “agape-ic encounter” (14). Building on Margaret A. Farley’s feminist approach to agape, Spencer-Hall connects the experience of the medieval visionary and the modern film viewer: “in the cinema, I meet the film’s gaze; in hagiography, a holy woman meets God’s gaze. So doing, we perceive (feel and see) ourselves being seen, and thus we are looked and felt into being” (16). This compelling framework enables Spencer-Hall to encounter medieval holy women beyond Laura Mulvey’s cinematic male gaze, blurring the subject/object distinction as they become objects who reciprocate. It is a little unclear who is looking at whom in this reciprocal spectatorship—is the holy woman looking only at God, or also at us through the hagiographic genre?Spencer-Hall structures her book into four chapters, moving chronologically according to cinematic developments rather than medieval history. This structure reemphasizes the importance of cinema theory to Spencer-Hall’s argument. Theory is not an add-on for Spencer-Hall; it is not something ripped from modernity and pressed onto a medieval past. Modern screens are not shoehorned into medieval saints but rather provide the explicit, structural framework from which Spencer-Hall constructs her argument. In her use of Latour’s polytemporal, helical theory of time, Spencer-Hall convincingly shows the close interface between medieval ecstatic and modern cinematic experiences.Chapter 1 draws a parallel between photographic technologies and hagiographic visions. Spencer-Hall begins by showing how photography and visions both disrupt linear time. When we view a photograph, we are experiencing a past moment that has been “fixed” and “superimposed” onto our present moment (71). Photographs are thus both chronological and atemporal, which help elucidate medieval concepts of time: the linear mode of earthly time, and the atemporal nature of sacred time. Medieval mystics access this atemporal sacred time in ecstatic experience, such as in Margaret of Ypres’s visions of St. Catherine, Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and Christ. Film—a series of still photographs put together to create the illusion of time passing—provides insight into medieval liturgical and purgatorial time. As we can replay a film, engaging with its plot repeatedly, so too did medieval holy women engage in the liturgical calendar through which they relive biblical events and reenact the Passion in particular.In chapter 2, Spencer-Hall compares theories of embodied spectatorship and medieval optical theories to examine visions as sensory experiences. Of particular importance here is Vivian Carol Sobchack’s theory of cinesthesia, or “the transposition of visual into tactile perception, with the physical grasp of individual sensory experiences portrayed visually onscreen felt in the moviegoer’s offscreen body” (112). Drawing on the context of medieval optics from Roger Bacon, Spencer-Hall highlights the corporeal effects of visionary experience. Juliana of Mont-Cornillon’s visions of Christ’s Passion, for example, pierced her own heart and caused her pain whenever she thought of the Crucifixion. Of particular interest in this chapter is Spencer-Hall’s term “coresthesia,” which replaces Sobchack’s cinema with the medieval corpus, “to describe the specific effects of interaction with the medieval manuscript” (143). Like the cinematic viewing experience, working with manuscripts is a visual and tactile process. This term speaks to the emerging confluence of disability and manuscript studies.Chapter 3, which uses celebrity studies to approach the construction of medieval sanctity, is Spencer-Hall’s strongest. She makes two pertinent and fruitful comparisons, which show that both saints and modern celebrities are hyperreal representations of real women. The first comparison is between Marie d’Oignies and Jessica Simpson. Simpson’s hairdresser physically fashioned her into a celebrity, and became famous by proxy himself. Similarly, Jacques de Vitry fashioned Marie d’Oignies into a saint through her vita, becoming a star himself. Spencer-Hall’s second pairing is Margery Kempe and Kim Kardashian, both famous for their crying. Both women are lambasted for “taking up space” with their tears, which Spencer-Hall connects with their actions to create their own fame (174). An important point is made here about how women are allowed to exist in public spaces. Spencer-Hall also makes a compelling case that fandom did not emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Jacques de Vitry and Margery Kempe can be read as fans of Marie d’Oignies.Chapter 4, the final chapter, parallels cyberspace with medieval vision space to consider where mystics go during their visions. The methodology of this chapter will be interesting to medievalists, overwhelmingly concerned with long-dead research subjects, as Spencer-Hall conducted interviews with Christian members of the virtual platform Second Life. On this platform, users log in to a virtual reality in which their avatars connect with others in different geographic spaces and time zones. Similarly, medieval mystics enter the communion of saints in their visions, interacting with biblical figures from different times, as well as the eternal divine. In a particularly fascinating example, Elisabeth of Spalbeek and Marie of Lille meet up during their mystical experiences, despite being geographically separated.Spencer-Hall’s book is an impressive union of medieval hagiography and modern media theory. It will be of particular interest to scholars of mystical experience, as it provides innovative ways of thinking through the time, space, and functions of visions and ecstatic experiences. Those working with a feminist approach to medieval studies will also find great use in this book, particularly through Spencer-Hall’s nuanced approach to the subject/object distinction, and her reconfiguration of the mediation problem. Finally, the book will appeal to undergraduate audiences. Its comprehensive introduction explains theory clearly and provides a history of the (unsatisfactorily termed) beguines, it is structured with guiding subsections, and it is open access. Most importantly, Spencer-Hall’s brilliant celebrity comparisons provide an excellent hook to show undergraduates the wonderful world of medieval hagiography.