This, of course, was to flatter prejudices that had always come naturally to men. Theologians who justified the masculinity of the priesthood by pointing out that neither Jesus nor any of his apostles had been women could cite an authority even older than the gospels. ‘The female,’ Aristotle had written, ‘is, as it were, an inadequate male.’6 Just as the great philosopher had provided inquisitors with a model of how to conduct an interrogation, so had his writings on biology swung the immense weight of his prestige behind a perspective on female inferiority that many clerics were all too ready to embrace. Steeled as they were to see in their own virginity the proof of an almost angelic fortitude, they found in the model of physiology taught by the ancients confirmation of all their darkest, their most festering fears. Women oozed; they bled; like bogs at their most treacherous, they were wet, and soft, and swallowed up men entire. Increasingly, wherever Aristotle was taught, Eve’s daughters were being measured by standards that were less biblical than Greek.
Women, physically the weaker sex and formed by nature for pregnancies, could never be reckoned the equals of men. If Guglielma’s was the most radical protest against this assumption, then it was not the only one. Scholars who cited Aristotle as justification for viewing women as biologically inferior had to reckon with profound ambiv-alences within the Bible itself. The sanction given husbands to rule over their wives was not the only perspective provided by scripture on relations between the two sexes. Thomas Aquinas – great admirer of Aristotle though he was – had struggled to square the assumption that a woman was merely a defective version of a man with the insistence in Genesis that both had been divinely crafted for precise and specific purposes. Eve’s body, ‘ordained as it was by nature for the purposes of generation’, was no less the creation of God, ‘who is the universal author of nature’, than Adam’s had been.7 The implications of this for the understanding of the divine were too glaring to be ignored. ‘But you, Jesus, good lord, are you not also a mother?’ Anselm had asked. ‘Are you not that mother who, like a hen, collects her chickens under wings? Truly, master, you are a mother.’8 Abbots, even as they lived their lives in chastity, might not hesitate to compare themselves to a nursing woman, breasts filled with ‘the milk of doctrine’.9 It was no shame for a priest to talk of himself in such a manner – for the feminine as well as the masculine was a reflection of the divine. God the Father was also a mother.
But what did such teaching mean for women themselves? Paul, writing to the Galatians, had insisted that there was no longer either male or female, for all were one in Christ Jesus. Yet even he, on occasion, had felt unsettled by the sheer subversiveness of this message. The equality of men and women before God was a concept that he had often flinched from putting into practice. Hence his prevarications over the vexed issue of whether women should be permitted to lead prayers and to prophesy, one moment insisting that they should not, and another that they might – but only if veiled. Letters written in his name after his death, and incorporated into the canon of scripture, had provided an altogether more emphatic resolution. ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.’10 Here, in this single verse, was all the justification that the inquisitors had needed to suppress Guglielma’s cult: to haul her corpse from out of its tomb, and to consign Maifreda to the flames.
Yet the Dominicans, great scholars that they were, and thoroughly steeped in Paul’s teachings, were not blind to the value that the apostle had placed on the role of women in his churches. Dominic himself, only two years after the establishment of his order, had founded a convent in Madrid. His successor as Master General, a Saxon nobleman by the name of Jordan, had been a great sponsor of Dominican nuns. Writing regularly to one of these, the prioress of a convent in Bologna, he had done so not merely as her spiritual director, but as an admirer of her often imperious charisma. The pattern set by this relationship was one that many Dominicans had followed. Priests though they were, they readily stood in awe of the closeness their female correspondents seemed to have to God. They knew that their Lord, risen from the dead, had first revealed himself, not to his disciples, but to a woman. In John’s gospel, it was told how Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus cured by him of possession by demons, had initially mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener – but then had recognised him. ‘I have seen the Lord!’11 The Dominicans, while they never doubted their own authority as clerics, knew that authority had its limits. Power – even that of a man over a woman – was of necessity an ambivalent and treacherous thing. It was those without it who were most surely the favourites of God.
‘My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.’12 So the Virgin Mary, after learning that she was to bear the Son of God, had sung. No human being had been so honoured; no human being raised so high. Even as the bones of Guglielma were being reduced to ashes, even as the legal and political status of women across Christendom was steadily deteriorating, even as the female body was being excoriated in ever more abusive terms by preachers and moralists as a vessel of corruption, so the radiance of the Queen of Heaven, full of grace, blessed among women, blazed with the brightness of the brightest star. ‘O womb, O flesh, in whom and from whom the creator was created, and God was made incarnate.’13 The virgin mother who had redeemed the fault of Eve, the mortal who had conceived within her uterus the timeless infinitude of the divine, Mary could embody for even the humblest and most unlettered peasant all the numerous paradoxes that lay at the heart of the Christian faith. It needed no years of study in a university, no familiarity with the works of Aristotle, to comprehend the devotion that a mother might feel to her son. Perhaps this was why, the more that scholars laboured to elucidate in vast and intimidating works of theology the subtleties of God’s purpose, fusing revelation and logic in profound and learned ways, so the more, in works of art, were Mary and her son portrayed as joined in simple joy. So too, in scenes of Christ’s death, was the Virgin increasingly represented as the equal in suffering and dignity of her son. No longer was the gaze of the Queen of Heaven as serene as once it had been. Emotions common to all were being rendered that much more Christian. Enshrined at the very heart of the great mysteries elucidated by Christianity, of birth and death, of happiness and suffering, of communion and loss, was the love of a woman for her child.
Here, to Christians fearful of where the world might be heading, was a precious reassurance: one that did not depend upon any policing of heresy, any demands for reformatio. Maifreda, teaching her followers that she was destined to be pope, had stood in the line of a thoroughly familiar tradition: one that aimed at setting all of Christendom on the correct foundations, and scouring it clean of corruption. Confident that the papacy remained the surest vehicle of reform, she had dreamed of doing as Gregory VII had done, and seizing the commanding heights of the Roman Church. Her ambition had always been a vain one, of course; but even popes themselves, amid all the gathering challenges and upheavals of the age, were discovering the limits of their authority. Two years after Maifreda’s execution, Boniface VIII was prompted by the open defiance of Philip IV, the king of France, to issue the most ringing statement of papal supremacy ever made: ‘We declare, state and define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’ What, though, from the lips of Innocent III might have sounded intimidating, from the lips of Boniface was merely shrill. In September 1303, Philip’s agents seized the pope at his summer retreat outside Rome. Even though he was freed after three days of captivity, the shock of it all proved too much for him, and within a month he was dead. The new pope, a Frenchman, was altogether more securely under Philip’s thumb. In 1309, he settled in Avignon. Decades passed, popes came and went, but none returned to Rome. An immense palace, complete with banqueting halls, gardens and a private steam-room for the pope, came to sprawl above the Rhône. Moralists appalled by its display of luxury and wealth began to speak of a Babylonian captivity. Hopes for the dawning of an age of the Holy Spirit seemed bitterly disappointed.