If you’re not already listening to My Favourite Mystic, AJ Langley’s podcast for scholars to confess their fannish devotion of all things mysticism, then you’re missing out. I’ve been a long-time listener, and back in the summer of 2023 I got the chance to record my very own episode. I will never tire of preaching the weirdo gospel of Christina Mirabilis. My conversation with AJ let me return to my beloved, extremely extra mystic with fresh eyes, and from fresh perspectives. What a gift. For your reading (and listening) pleasure, you’ll find a transcript (and embedded audio) below. Come join me on the Christina Mirabilis booster committee!
[Upbeat intro music plays 00:00:40]
00:00:55 AJ Langley Welcome to My Favourite Mystic, a podcast about the weird and wonderful world of mysticism. I’m AJ Langley, and today I’m joined by Alicia Spencer-Hall. They’re an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London [ed.: now at UCL] alongside being series editor of two book series; Hagiography Beyond Tradition at Amsterdam University Press and Premodern Transgressive Literatures at Medieval Institute Publications. Their last book, a volume they co-edited with Blake Gutt, Trans and Genderqueer subjects in Medieval Hagiography, just came out in paperback. And today, they’re here to talk to us about Christina Mirabilis. Alicia, thank you for being here.
00:01:30 Alicia Spencer-Hall Thank you so much, AJ, for that warm welcome. And I’m just going to say, I am a fangirl. I have to say that upfront. Also, I need to say that I have used your show in parenting a newborn. So, my son is probably your youngest fan. Just to put that out there, if you’ve got any merch in very teeny tiny sizes, he would love for some [chuckles] My Favourite Mystic onesies. As would I, of course. It’s a real pleasure to be here, so thank you for having me.
00:01:56 AJL That is so incredibly kind. I don’t imagine how on earth this could possibly be beneficial to parenting a newborn except that I’ve bored them to sleep.
00:02:05 ASH No! Lots of language development, lots of weirdness, and I get to go, “Look! Mama! Mama does that. Yeah. Let’s hear about this strange saint. Yeah.” It’s great.
00:02:15 AJL I love that. [chuckles] So, we’re going to talk about Christina Mirabilis. But before we do, let’s talk about you. Because the work you do is incredibly fascinating. But how did it all start? How did you get involved with dealing with mysticism and saints, and all of these incredibly fun and interesting people?
00:02:32 ASH Ah, well, my friend come into my saintly parlour. Okay. So, back in the day, I was going to be a modernist. Like, a resolute modernist. I went to undergrad and I was like, “Right. Nothing before 2000, I can’t be dealing with this.” And then I had a really great lecture by Bill Burgwinkle, a legendary French medievalist. And he introduced me to my gateway mystic, as I like to call her, Douceline of Digne, who I know has been subject of another fantastic podcast episode. And he was—Bill at the time was working on a book project with Cary Howie called Sanctity and Pornography. And I feel really lucky to be one of his students, like, from the earlier stages, I think, of that book project. So, he was starting to think through Douceline of Digne beyond kind of the paradigms that were available at the time, and then queerness, pornography, visual culture. So, I went through from my undergrad to master’s with him, and in fact my master’s project with him was about porny Douceline and embodied spectatorship, and the work of Vivian Sobchak. So, actually that kind of then turned into the—literally the little tiny seed of my PhD. So, you could sort of trace my entire career, really, of saints are cool, saints are weird, saints are important in the modern moment to my lovely Douceline. And I just remember this moment in the lecture being like, “Wait a minute. What?” where Bill was going like, “And then she was in stasis and ecstasy, and they pricked her with awls.” And firstly I was like, “What’s an awl? Like, can we Google that?” And secondly, then like, “This is bananas. [chuckles] What is happening?” And suddenly—I think that’s the glory of having, like a—one, a great gateway mystic, but two, a really great teacher who really lets the text kind of do its thing on you, and doesn’t suppress anything to be like, “Oh, this was Catholicism.” Bill really let this moment of the text speak and go, “What do you think? Open your mind to that. How can we play with this text? How can we meet Douceline? What do you feel about this woman?” And I was like, “I feel so many things. Oh my god.” And that’s kind of been, you know, the rest of my career.
00:04:34 AJL That is fantastic. Actually, there was a point where I was asking all the people I interviewed who their least favourite mystic is. And I have to say, Douceline was one of my least favourite mystics. I could never forgive her for the, like, “Ah, this young girl looked at a workman, so I beat her nearly to death.” And I was like, “No. No, no, no. Too far. Can’t forgive you.”
00:04:53 ASH Fair, fair. Now, I have something extremely controversial to say. I apologise to your listeners for something that will be distressing to hear. My least favourite mystic is Margery Kempe. I said it. I said what I said. I don’t regret it. But on the other hand, in the same moment, I kind of love her. My relationship with Margery is very like, “I cannot stand you, but also I would like to buy you a drink.
00:05:16 AJL I think she needed one.
00:05:18 ASH Right? And I think, partially, I struggle with Margery because of the edifice that’s been built up around her. Like, when it’s just me and Margery’s text kind of hanging out, or I’m thinking through stuff, or you know, I write about her in my first book, that I actually really enjoyed and found kind of—again, kind of collaboratively productive with your source material. But I can’t sort of get into more of the modern cult of Margery. It feels a bit—again, listeners, gird your loins. It feels a bit like “Lean In feminist” to me. I think there’s a lot of quite white feminist interactions with Margery that I find a bit problematic. There. That’s it. You could just stop. Stop the recording now. I know, I’ve died on a hill.
00:05:58 AJL That’s it. Episode over. I mean, who cares about Christina? You’ve said something slightly unkind about the world’s favourite mystic.
00:06:05 ASH I know. Come at me, universe.
00:06:08 AJL You hear that universe? You have a full-fledged invitation. [laughs] It’s so interesting that you started out as a modernist because I went the other way. I started out thinking I was going to do Classics because I was in love with mythology. So, it seems like whatever time period people are originally interested in, mysticism is the way to steal them for the medievalists.
00:06:25 ASH Yeah. I mean, I think I was really helped because I did a lot of Latin back in the day. And I was really into mythology as well. And, again, kind of the way myth works and what narrative does and how it operates kind of in a sociocultural way is deeply personal, but also kind of a social construct. So, obviously, when it’s hagiography, it’s—these are very familiar themes and tropes. But what I really liked about the Latin stuff that I did was it was—most of it was just really close textual analysis. It’d be like, “How is this rhetorical device working?” Which at the time, you might think like, “Ugh. Do I really need to know what ‘litotes’ is?” But I really just like pulling apart a text as a text. Now I’m not completely “author is dead” because you know, I get context matters, and that’s important. But what I really appreciate, particularly when working with, like, the primary corpus I tend to work on is these, like, 13th century living saints. And they’re women, we don’t really know much about them. Did they exist? Probably. We don’t know anything from them. Most of them are Latin hagiographies written by men. So, actually, the only way to encounter them is directly in the text, word by word, line by line. And I really like living liberated from the construct of, “Okay. Well, like you said, who is the author? When was this written?” All of that kind of stuff. And you just—for me, it’s an intellectual purity, as it were, of just words and ideas and theory kind of meeting together.
00:07:54 AJL That is so interesting because coming from a history background, I can see how people would interpret your favouring of the text over the context as being absolute blasphemy. But I think that it’s one of the reasons that mysticism and these kinds of texts are so open to interdisciplinary work, and the variety of angles that you can consider these texts from.
00:08:18 ASH I think also it’s that notion, like—I’m a terribly bad historian because history is the text to me. [laughs] So, everybody who’s like, “Well, this happened at this point.” And I’m like, “Well, did it, though?” Because, you know, linear time is a construct, so—which always wins arguments over scheduling in my family because if time’s a construct, I’m never late, am I? So—and it is almost like why I like the Bible as a text. Again, as a text that we can do things with, which is why I’d be terrible in theology—like a pure theology context, because I’m not in it for trying to find something that we can ultimately never recover. We can never go back, you know. It’s Biblical times. But we can, again, interact with this text and pull apart, “Okay, what might it have meant then, but what does it mean now as well?” And interaction between those time zones is where I find the most kind of exciting meaning coming from rather than being like, “Oh, but so and so really did live.” It doesn’t matter to me at the end of the day if Christina Mirabilis was a real person or not. What matters to me is the life that is embodied in this text and in her manuscripts, and that is the person I interact with, and that’s the person I value.
00:09:26 AJL Absolutely. I mean, the main character of a story doesn’t have to be real or described in a completely one hundred percent factual way in order for the story to mean something to the people who read it and engaged with it and believed it. The text itself is fascinating in its own right.
00:09:44 ASH Totally. And also, again, it’s that classic thing of hagiography, is like what is real versus what is authentic. And I’m interested in authenticity, not necessarily in historical fact or reality because, again, I’m too much of a literary scholar to say that anything ever really happened for sure. So, what I’m interested in then is, like—is why—for example, for me, hagiography is very much like social media, which I talk about in my book and my current book project on Medieval Twitter. But it’s this idea of in everyday moments, we curate an idea of ourselves, a version of ourselves that is more or less true, but is authentic as a product of what we are in that moment. And so, you know, in these texts, okay, does Christina exist? Maybe, maybe not. But this version of her, it’s like this Instagram post showing that she’s really cool. That exists, and that has value for us to interact with. And that’s why—yeah. That’s why I’m in it, really. Just to see all these different versions of people through time.
00:10:42 AJL Well, let’s talk about this woman who maybe did, maybe didn’t exist, but is definitely existing within the scope of a text.
00:10:49 ASH [chuckles]
00:10:50 AJL How did you first encounter Christina Mirabilis?
00:10:52 ASH So, she is one of these living saints of Liège in the 13th century. And Marie of Oignies—another fantastic podcast episode, by the way, on My Favourite Mystic—is sort of the ur-beguine. So you know, the beguines were these women who were not enclosed, but not not enclosed. So, they’re between kind of secular and religious society. And Marie of Oignies is, one, the big hitting text by Jaques de Vitry, but two, is kind of the node through which most people, I would say, then learn of the other living saints. And so what I like also about Christina is that she’s part of a network. You get the Marie of Oignies text by Jaques de Vitry and a mention—an anonymous mention to this woman who does like these really well odd things, everyone, but, of course, I won’t mention her name. And then in the text we have of Christina Mirabilis, which was written by Thomas of Cantimpré, that’s picked back up again. So, I kind of went from Douceline of Digne to thinking, “Well, who else out there is a female saint? A bit odd, let’s face it. Kind of the same time period.” And then Marie of Oignies is the big hitter. And then kind of exploring through—kind of diffusing through Marie’s networks. And then, I’ve got to say, once you read Christina Mirabilis, I don’t think you ever go back. She’s just delightfully odd. And I think what got me is—she had me at hello—because the beginning of the text, she dies, like, straight away. [chuckles] So, the beginning is the end is the beginning. And, again, for somebody like me who’s like, you know, “Linear time is a lie! What are we thinking about, kind of constructs of everything!” To encounter a text that starts in such a sophisticated and engaging way, that when I first read it, it was like, this is—this feels very modern. Right? This feels very, novella written in 2012. I was just like, “This is wild.” I mean, it could have been the most boring text ever after that. But to have this ballsy—let’s face it, it’s a ballsy opener—to be like, “So, I’m going to tell you about this woman. Yeah she died. Then she came back. Boom.” How can you not get excited about going forward with that?
00:12:58 AJL Absolutely. It’s like we’re going to start with the most unbelievable part of this, and then hang on because we’re going to get even less believable as we go. [chuckles]
00:13:07 ASH Totally. And I do appreciate that there’s a lot of buttressing of women doing things that are not approved by from the patriarchal church, hierarchies, etc. And they have to do a lot of, you know, “Oh, well, there’s a young child. This woman was actually very humble, blah blah.” There’s all this kind of making nice to allow these women to do things like maybe preach or have visions or, you know, meet God themselves. And it’s very carefully staged. And don’t get me wrong, Christina’s text is also carefully staged, but it’s much more like, “No, Christina was a weirdo. Move on.” It’s kind of upfront about—you can’t really apologise for Christina. [chuckles] You can’t really even put her in a little box that makes her palatable upfront. The only way to understand her is, like, she is beyond. She is the extra.
00:13:57 AJL Oh one hundred percent. [chuckles] Extra is most certainly the word.
00:14:00 ASH And one of Thomas’s big refrains is, “Okay, well, you might not believe these things. All of these things are really hard to believe, but, you know, they really—God did intend it. Yeah. Yeah. No.” And just this anxiety from Thomas himself being like, “Oh God.” She’s a great woman as, like, source material, particularly for the trials of purgatory. But also, she’s too much. And so him having to keep back being like, “No, readers, like, go with me. Honestly, God did it.” And I think one of the most striking things about that is so you start the text and, “Oh, she’s dead, alright. Okay.” And she has to be lured back down from the rafters by a priest waving a bit of Eucharist. So, you start and you think, “Wait. She—her coffin’s empty. She’s levitated to the rafters.” And in a very, I got to say it, zombie-like way, a priest has to lure her back down with, like, the Holy Sacrament. And then immediately, Thomas has to say, “But then Christina delivered a very erudite [chuckles] soliloquy about how she just met Christ, and this is how you can understand her coming back to life.” And it’s, like, the disjunction of this super bodily out there cinematic moment. And then, you know, purportedly, Christina then delivers this very, you know, learned—on how she had died, in fact, but it’s okay because she met Christ, and he’d offered her a choice. And he said, “Do you want to go on, or do you want to go back to Earth and relive purgatory to save other sinners and yourself?” And she chooses to return to Earth and kind of help everyone out. I think that’s another thing that gets me, is however much of an artifice it is, again, the text shows that she chooses. She chooses to come back. This is not one of those, “And God said, ‘You should do it because it’s good for everyone else.’” Or—you know, “And I said, ‘No. Please can I go to Heaven.’” No. She makes the choice herself. I think that’s really meaningful to come back and say, “No, I’m doing it my way.”
00:15:52 AJL I love when you get a sense of deliberate direct agency in these texts, that they are given choices and they make the right choice. And one of the things I really like about Christina is, firstly, her book is full of choices. Full of things that she’s doing that no one would choose to do ever. And also on the same note of, you know, you can’t put her in a nice little box where everyone’s like, “Ah, yes. This is totally reasonable.” No one believes her. Everyone thinks she’s possessed. It’s not just the reader who might not believe it. Her contemporaries didn’t believe it.
00:16:21 ASH Absolutely. And I think, again, that’s a strand through the work, is I think there’s a very good kind of crip narrative that comes through. And I do appreciate that some of the kind of—I would say “early” scholarship, but that’s not really true. Maybe 80s, 90s, 2000s scholarship, has been about identifying Christina as somebody who has lived with some kind of neurodivergence. So, Barbara Newman suggested perhaps she had brain damage from a seizure. Various neuroscientists have actually written papers about, like, “Is this our first record of epilepsy?” Now I find this kind of diagnosis problematic, but I do appreciate there is this examination within the text itself of somebody’s behaving in a way that we don’t know how to deal with any more. We don’t have the infrastructure for this, and so we do get an insight into the way people potentially were perceived as being neurodivergent, or with troubling bodyminds, were treated. So, you know, Christina is bound up. She’s chained. So, she’s kept in the community, but also imprisoned. And the text makes a note that it’s a “wicked physician”, for example, that first binds her. And, again, there’s no amount of her saying, “But God—you know, but God wanted me to do this.” Because at the time, again, we have these records of demonic possession, but also mental illness being invoked as synonymous with this kind of God-like possession as well. On the other hand, what I really almost respect in a way, there’s a moment where her family—and it’s just her two sisters, they’re orphans, one of the reasons they lock her up is because they’re embarrassed by her. And the text literally says “embarrassed”. And that’s, like, what, two words in this text. But having that kind of fracture, of that’s very human. It’s uncomfortable to have that moment. But you can imagine for them—you know, your sister is throwing herself off water mills. She’s lying on the riverbed for six days. She’s prophesying all sorts of things. She’s a lot. And having these women be like, “Well, what do we do with her? We’re embarrassed.” Adds another dimension, I think, to her story. And also what she herself is living with as somebody who is extraordinary,so—and for whatever reason—whether that’s extraordinary holy, or in their terms, extraordinary cursed.
00:18:34 AJL So, let’s do the biography stuff. Obviously, you said earlier you worked on 13th century living saints, so we can kind of estimate time period. And we know that she dies at the beginning. Other than that, [chuckles] can you kind of run us through what we know about her life as it’s constructed in this work?
00:18:49 ASH Yes. So, we know that she was born—well, “we know”, again, do we? She’s born around 1150 and the text starts in 1182 with her first death. Hold on to your hats because there will be three. And in this moment of her first death, her life is changed forever. So, before that, she is—a “cow-herding orphan” is kind of the popular phrase. So, yes, she’s from a respectable family and pious. There’s an allusion that she has kind of holy traits in her childhood, but we don’t know anything about that. She dies. It’s spectacular. She levitates, and then she—again, she delivers this kind of—it’s almost a gloss, I would say, on how people should now interpret her and her behaviour. So, Christ has offered her the choice, “Do you want to go to heaven? Do you want to come back to Earth and do purgatory?” She comes back, and from then on, things get very, very weird. So, she starts to do things that are utterly commonplace if you look at other texts about purgatory and, in fact, doctrine, but which are horrifying and very difficult to witness. You know, she hangs herself between thieves on gallows, she jumps into fiery ovens, she sits on the bottom of the river for days at a time. And she also—she lives in trees, like, in the manner of birds. So, she’s possessed by this kind of lightness and subtlety. This is because she’s come back in a resurrected body. Well, aha! The plot thickens. It’s partially resurrected. Because a resurrected body, you shouldn’t be able to feel pain, for example, and you shouldn’t be able to die again. And this is kind of the big point of Christina’s biography is, in this body, she does feel pain sometimes, and she does bleed and things like that, but she always recovers so she can die again.
00:20:30 AJL Okay.
00:20:31 ASH Now this weirdness goes on for some time. And at the beginning, she can’t stand the stench of men, so she flees. And it’s kind of quite a classic—I think of, like, Mary the Egyptian, for example. It’s kind of a classic model. She flees into the forest—this is where I love how, that she’s hanging off branches like sparrows. It’s very bird-friendly, her life at this point. And her family don’t know what to do. And also those around her in a little village, which is in Sint-Truiden—which is now in Belgium. They just don’t know what to do. So, they start—you know, they bind her and imprison her. But thanks to God, she breaks free. She then goes [to the] forest again, and she’s starving, but God makes miraculous milk flow from her breasts. And so she survives off that for, I think, nine weeks. Then she’s caught again, and it happens two more times that she’s caught because there’s no—again, there’s no amount of her embodying purgatory, in what are quite obvious ways to some extent, convinces her friends and family. They’re embarrassed, they’re terrorised. They just don’t know what to do with her. So, every time she’s caught, God does something to help her out, breaks her free. At one point then she flies out of a window. And it’s a turning point is when for the third time, she’s been imprisoned and, like, chained so tightly that she has a terrible wound. And again, she’s starving, but now she has miraculous oil drip from her breasts. And she puts that on her body and is healed fully, and she ingests that. And it’s—you know, it’s great. And it’s, like, the best protein shake that she’s ever had. And finally, people go, “Oh, okay. Guess you are of God then.”
00:22:03 AJL So good of them to notice. [chuckles]
00:22:05 ASH But she’s still extra. She’s still too much. And so whilst her fame is now building, and she starts to prophesy some great things, and she starts to get kind of a network—because she’s allowed to beg around town. So, she likes begging particularly from sinners. I just love this idea if she goes around being like, “You. You’re a sinner. I’ll have some bread, thanks.” And she has “prophecies”, quote, unquote, about who should give her extra bits of clothing. And if they don’t give it to her, well, she knows that—like, God has told her it’s hers, so she just takes it anyway.
00:22:36 AJL [laughs] Fantastic.
00:22:38 ASH So, she’s even—again, in this kind of her slightly more moderate phase, quite a lot to deal with. Now she’s getting a patron at this time, Louis the second of Loon, who ultimately will go on to call her mother. And she takes his final confession and takes on actually fifty percent of his purgatorial burden. And so—well, we talk about renown. The text is presenting it that she is sought after, but she is still, like I said, too much. So, there’s a point of really important agency in the text. Because her friends and family are very worried about people. Yes, people think to come and because she’s holy and her fame, but they won’t really understand her. What do they do? And in fact, Christina just happens to go to a different church and goes through her own self baptism and throws herself into the font. And after that, when she gets back out, she’s not, you know, quote unquote “normal”, but she’s more moderate and more palatable to those around her. For a period then, she goes to live with a recluse, Jutta, for nine years. Which again is a classic, like, “Well, why did she go?” We don’t know. She just decided to go there. And then at the end of her life, she has—it’s about the last year of her life, she wants much more isolation again. So, she moves back into Sint-Truiden, into the Benedictine monastery of Saint Catherine’s, and hangs out there, basically. Once more, she’s not a nun, but she’s not not a nun. It’s very much on her own terms. So, she then dies again in 1224 of a short illness. And, again, at this moment, I think it’s very important we recognise that she dies actually on her own. Again, on her own terms here. Uh-oh, though. Beatrice—who sounds like really pretty annoying to be around, to be honest, this lovely nun Beatrice is like, “What? Why didn’t you ask for—that you could die?” And sort of was having a go at the corpse. And Beatrice has a pressing question for Christina. And so Christina comes back to life in a very long-suffering way. It’s like, “Okay, yeah. Thanks. I’ll let you know.” And, crucially, the text doesn’t tell us what the question was. [chuckles] All we know is that Christina’s like, “Oh, right. Yeah. I’m back. Yeah. This is your answer. Bye then.” So, then she dies again in 1224. So, there’s two deaths in 1224. Now this is kind of the end of the story, and kind of not. So, next up, in 1232—so actually very close proximity to her life, Thomas of Cantimpré writes her hagiography. And he stresses, as all hagiographers do, you know, the firsthand accounts that he’s gathered, and particularly the account of Jaques de Vitry, his mentor—his, you know, number-one bro. But seven or eight years later, actually, Thomas adds another section to kind of explain some things because he’s had a chat with the abbot and he would like an addition made. So, it’s a couple of paragraphs then added, which kind of clarify what’s gone on with Christina. And then some point after that, we have a few extra paragraphs right at the end by a different hand—so, an unknown hand. And that is another return, question mark, of the saint. So, in 1249 a woman in white visits the monastery and says that Christina’s relics must be translated to be closer to the altar, and bad things will happen if they’re not. So, the text does not identify this woman in white and it’s an older woman, but I make the assumption—most critics make the assumption that this is Christina once more coming back from the dead to say, “Actually, guys, like, look after me.” And a woman who lived with paralysis has contact with the relics and is healed. And that is the end of the text.
00:26:11 AJL What an absolute whirlwind, reminding me I’m going to put a content warning on the tweet for this episode because so much self-harm that’s not actually harmful to her, but also you can definitely see why her family, in addition to being embarrassed, were potentially very concerned.
00:26:31 ASH Oh, absolutely. At one point she is covered in blood because she’s running through bramble bushes. Like, that is worrying. You would want somebody to care for you. The fact that she often—it’s not necessarily that she fasts per se, though she does, but she rejects food. And if she’s given food by, like, particularly, like, sinners, or it’s—the food is gotten through ill-gotten gains, it tastes like, you know, the bowels of toads and frogs to her. So, it’s a classic—like, the level of self-care happening here is not great. And she is surviving, it seems, but not necessarily thriving in a mortal sense. And that is difficult, one would imagine, to witness.
00:27:11 AJL Wonder how she knew what the bowels of frogs and toads tasted like for that comparison.
00:27:16 ASH I like to think that she—in her bird life, that sort of helped her out there.
00:27:21 AJL [laughs] Yeah, that has to be it. One of the things I always find really intriguing about her is this post-baptism chill out where all of a sudden, all of the, quote, unquote, “stunts” that she was pulling earlier, all of these kind of really extreme behaviours stop. And then all of a sudden, she’s associating with people of note and traveling around and just being—not normal, because no one is, but also you definitely aren’t if you’re a zombie saint. But she’s acting much more inconspicuous.
00:27:52 ASH Yeah. I just pulled the text up. Just let’s check, like, what it says immediately after the self-baptism. And so it’s, “Her manner of life is more moderate with regard to society. She behaved more calmly and was more able to endure the smell of men and to live among them.” And I think maybe literally just practically speaking, that’s the key thing. Because before this time, it’s very much like the stench of men that she flees from, and she’s very one with the birds. It’s very Moira Rose’s The Crowening. You know, she lives in the trees. And how exactly are you going to get good patrons or a bigger network of devotees if you can’t physically stand to be in the same room with them? So, it’s almost—again, a much more sceptical take is like, okay, she’s had this baptism and decided, “I’m going to have to associate with these people, like, to survive going forward. Okay. I’m just going to have to suck that bit up.” It’s almost like how to monetize your talent. “Well, okay. I’ll be less extra in this one dimension and more palatable in another dimension.” Now, again, what I find interesting in a modern response to this is that her more moderate era is still pretty extra, guys. Like, she’s still prophesying things. She’s still doing this begging thing. I mean, she is still out there, but she’s doing it in a way that both modern and medieval audiences can pass as filling kind of boxes of sanctity and boxes of sanctity for holy women at the time. So, what I mean about the modern response is that there’s not been much scholarship saying, “But actually, that’s also quite weird. Okay. Whatever about the medieval context?” Like, yes. The purgatory or torments, the, you know, being underwater, the fire, the ice is weird, but it’s of a par with these other behaviours. It’s just that there’s been much more apparatus to make those behaviours legible by and for the Church and within a community. And frankly, they’re less literally disturbing. Right? Like, if you’re going about your daily business and you’re going to, like, the watermill and you just see a woman throw herself off it a couple of times, I mean, that punctures your day in certain ways. Whereas if it’s like, “Oh, okay. The holy woman that I—I get, we’ve got one our town too. She’s begging.” It kind of fits with the social rhythms in a different way.
00:30:10 AJL That makes total sense. I mean, 13th century begging becomes much more of a common sight with the mendicant movement, and then on top of that, increased forms of serious ascetic practice, where people are starving themselves or engaging in self-flagellation become more popular for people beyond the strictures of monastic houses. So, you can see how some of these things would be much more commonplace and understandable than the extremes of standing at the tops of trees and throwing yourself into burning ovens. I do like that she was, one, it’s like, “Ah, yes. You are a sinner. You will give me alms.” Because that’s not normally the people that you would think would be the most willing to, and then she’s like, “God says that’s mine,” and just straight up steals.
00:30:59 ASH It’s Christina flipping a script on this. Like, who’s supposed to have the agency in this moment? Again, the text is very much, like, begging for her is a very empowering thing, which, again, you can understand within the context. You know, she’s free in a sense. She’s independent. But being like, “Well, it’s not that I depend on you. It’s that you should give me that. That is mine. It just happens to be on your person. So, like, what are you going to do? God wants me to have it.” And that’s kind of the ultimate trump card.
00:31:24 AJL It is a weird form of entitlement to just be like, “I’m sorry. God says that’s mine. Snatch.”
00:31:29 ASH Exactly. But, again, I think it works because she’s clearly very selective and because she does eat garbage food—literal garbage food. So, she’s not doing it in this overtly hypocritical sense. It’s very much a “needs must” vibe happening to when she’s like, “Oh, no. God said I needed that bit for my clothes, so I’m going to have it.” Because she’s so self-abnegating at all other times. And it’s kind of like she walks the walk, so if she’s saying this, she gets away with it.
00:31:58 AJL No. I love that. Is there a particular moment from the text or a particular incident that she has that you always kind of think of first when you think of her?
00:32:08 ASH Oh, this is a very good question. Because I suppose, you know, I’ve written articles about, like, “She’s a zombie! Is she?” So, if it’s one word you want, it’s “zombie”. And what does that mean? But, actually, the thing that sums up Christina for me and why I think she’s so interesting to us now is this dialogue she stages between her body and her soul right at the end of the text. So, I said earlier about the addition of these extra chapters when the abbot has asked, “Thomas, can you just, like, add a bit to explain some things about how this body and soul connection post-death works?” Because clearly, Christina is troubling. Even to me, she’s troubling. That’s kind of her—how great she is. So, this need for a gloss on how do we understand how her body works after death when she’s alive and how her soul fits in. So, right at the end, we have this—I would say it’s very beautiful, it reminds me quite a lot of the kind of the classical rhetoric I used to work on—when her body is saying, “Soul, what—you know, why are you tormenting me?” And her soul is saying, “Just let me go. Like, why are you a prison?” And for me, it really reminds me of a moment of a very beloved family member of mine who was—I think he was a hundred and two, a hundred and three at the time. And this very intellectual man. And he said to me—quite near his death he said, “I know that my brain is failing faster than my body, and I wish it were the other way around.” And it’s this moment, again—quite apart from if you’re a medieval Catholic and believing in resurrection or whatnot, but this very human moment of, “How do I, as a person, as an identity, exist between this kind of—the bodymind?” And they are connected, and they have to negotiate. And for me, you know, I’m disabled. I identify very proudly as a crip. It’s a very crip moment as well. It’s about saying, like, what these two bits of me that are one but often are in conflict, while they talk to each other, and how difficult that friction is and how productive. And like, that is the job of life in a way, is to figure out how the body and mind can peacefully cohabit. I mean, then, unfortunately I say, the text has to be like, “But then it’s alright because, you know, God made it okay.” And then she sort of goes, “And, actually we cohabit fine and it’s okay.” So, for me, it’s the beginning bit of this dialogue where you have body and then soul speak and these really beautifully balanced apostrophes. That is the tension of Christina.
00:34:32 AJL Speaking about things like disability and infirmity, and potential mental or physical ailments when it comes to historical figures is always kind of a tricky space because we don’t want to retroactively diagnose. But you could really see what you’re talking about here with this disagreement between mind and body, and the idea that those don’t necessarily cooperate—
00:34:49 ASH Absolutely.
00:34:50 AJL —in the way that she wants them to. But I feel like sometimes with women like Christina who experience symptoms of what we might consider being mental illness, physical illnesses, experience extreme forms of pain as we often see with mystics in this period, there is a kind of dichotomy between the pious, sanctified way that they experience infirmity and disability and illness and pain, and those who then, either in their lives or posthumously, request assistance from them in order to relieve their own experiences of disability or pain or illness. So, it seems like it’s a complex narrative between those who suffer these things willingly and piously and almost as a sign of favour from God, compared to the average person who, the narrative seemed to make us believe, desperately want a cure from the same or similar illnesses.
00:35:57 ASH Absolutely. I mean, I’m just finishing up work on a edited volume with Stephanie Grace-Petinos and Leah Pope Parker, literally called Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages, which really looks at this issue of, like, you know, what can we do, particularly as modern disabled people, with narratives of saints who themselves may be identified as disabled but apparently just cure everyone and annihilate disability? Like, what do we do? I mean, I think in that volume a lot of our work is saying, like, it’s not quite as clear cut as that. And whilst it’s important to recognise this, and kind of instrumentalization of disability and disabled bodies to prove quote unquote “holiness”. So, you know, a saint needs a disabled body to prove they’re a saint because their act of healing shows they’re holy. At at the same time, there are moments in texts and full texts and traditions that give us alternate, very kind of crip-centric paradigms. So, what I think actually is interesting is in Christina’s text, this cure of a woman’s paralysis is tacked on right at the very end. So, yes, it is literally the last word we hear about her, but healing is not a thing in Christina’s text, like, at all, nor is illness per se. Because, yeah, she dies at the beginning, and at the end she dies, like, of an illness. But there’s not a lot of drama about it. Now if you look at a lot of her other contemporaries in the corpus of the Holy Women of Liège, there’s a lot of really, shall we say, over egging the illness pudding, of glorying in it, wanting bigger haemorrhages and more and more. Well, that’s absolutely not Christina’s schtick at all. Hers is very much a bodymind that is going to do what it’s going to do. It is at odds with the culture and society she’s in, but she does not have the ability to stop it or change it—nor does she seem to want to, because she understands that she adds something different. And to me, that is a form of cripistemology. So, the kind of knowledge one gets through being a crip; through being disabled. And, again, I think it’s a very interesting and provocative standpoint to consider whether this idea of Christina inhabiting a partially glorified body is in fact a crip body and a crip bodymind. And what does that do to our understanding of disability in the Middle Ages and now, to consider this kind of glorified bodies as disabled, which really kind of upturns some very ableist narratives of disability. But it has to be underscored that, you know, people don’t react well to her non-normative bodymind. Again, the embarrassment, again, disbelieving her. And so, arguably, from that point of view, you could say that’s actually quite a resonant narrative for people with an unexplained—with an invisible disability, with something that’s happened that there’s no category, there’s no diagnosis that could fit it, of the stigmatization, the potential of marginalization. And if you took a very secular, macro view of Christina, you know, she comes back to life with a fundamentally different bodymind, and she builds a life that recognizes that. She does whatever she has to do, and she survives without sacrificing that bodymind. I think that’s kind of survival, eight? There’s a hope to be in that. There is a resistance in that. Yeah. That’s—for me, it’s a very powerful crip and queer text.
00:39:09 AJL I think you’ve proven [chuckles] what a fascinating text it really is. How has she been received in scholarship? What kind of uses is her text put to, outside of the ones that you mentioned in your own work?
00:39:21 ASH Christina is sidelined on the one hand in a lot of scholarship. So, like, the Bollandists—the Bollandists who put out the Acta Sanctorum—so these are the people who, like, edit and promulgate saints’ lives, have this amazing conversation about—it’s a written conversation about 1900. They’re like, “What do we do about Christina?” Like, it’s very Sound of Music. Like, “What do we do about Maria?” “What are we going to do about Christina? Because, like, we can acknowledge that her text has authenticity, but does it have any actual historical value? Did she really fly? Can we allow that?” And then more modern scholars—again, even path-breaking feminist scholars really struggling, like, “Is she a ghost? Is she a zombie? Is she a monster? Is she weird?” Or turning to slightly problematic, “Like, we must diagnose her. We must fix her within a medical category. Oh, it’s epileptic, there’s a seizure,” or whatever. And then you have kind of the sideline of pop culture references to Christina. So, like, the classic one everyone mentions is the Nick Cave song, “Christina the Astonishing”, which is from 1992. And it—I mean, is not Christina the best topic for Nick Cave? I mean, it’s a very dirge-like track. It’s very kind of minds meeting through time. And I think also, side note, he says that she’s twenty-two when she first dies in it and dies of a seizure. And I think that’s where actually a lot of particularly online sources cite twenty-one or twenty-two and a seizure. I think they get it from the Nick Cave song. So, this pop culture reference is—kind of feeds into the online particularly portrayal, understanding of this thing. If you look at the text, actually, it puts the date, so she’d be thirty-two when she died for the first time. But then we’ve seen quite a few poetic or lyrical retellings of Christina’s story, including in 2017 in the New Yorker. They published a piece by Kirstin Valdez Quade, which was a retelling of Christina’s story from the point of view of her eldest sister. And it’s both kind of a feminist reclamation, I would say, but it’s more highlighting how difficult Christina must have been to live with, how fracturing of the family of familial relations. And then that takes me to Nurse Jackie, my final pop culture reference. So, Nurse Jackie is a TV show starring Edie Falco about a nurse called Jackie who’s addicted to painkillers and pills, and has struggles with her family life and her job and her ongoing addiction. And in one crucial episode called “The Astonishing”, Grace, who is Jackie’s daughter, plays Christina the Astonishing at a school pageant of saints. And the refrain in the episode is, “She’s not an angel. That’s why she doesn’t wear wings. She is a saint.” And the kind of the close of the episode make a very clear allusion to nurse Jackie, who is not an angel, but is a saint, and Christina [the] Astonishing. Because Jackie does her best. She saves people’s lives, but she’s also in the midst of this addiction, which is kind of ruining her own life at the same time. So, I think there, in a tiny nutshell, as it were, we have some of the key kind of responses to Christina, which show, one, she is like a lightning rod for people trying to figure out, what does she mean? How do we get her? What can she do for us? But two, it’s about, fundamentally, from my point of view, how to be a person in the world, how to deal with being different, how to be in a box but not in a box, and how to live authentically but also within certain constraints.
00:42:50 AJL I love seeing medieval mystics pop up in pop culture. So, to have so many references to one that I feel like does not actually get as much scholarly attention as such an interesting, detailed, and genuinely out-there text truly deserves is really, really fun. You have kind of inadvertently already answered the final question of the podcast, but perhaps you have a different way of approaching it. So, I will ask you anyway. Alicia, why is Christina Mirabilis your favourite mystic?
00:43:21 ASH To quote Moira Rose, she is a “potent grape”. I like that she is exactly who she is on her own terms. And when it becomes necessary to change that, for whatever reason, then it is her decision to do the self-baptism, to figure out a way that she can still honour who she is, and build a life for herself, but in a way that works better for other people. And so in a very odd sense—full disclaimer, I am not actually a zombie, nor a saint—I do feel a kinship with her, in that being different and carving out a space to accept yourself and to find a role, and to resist, and to keep going because you are, exactly who you are is enough. You’re not too much. You’re exactly right. And that I think is a profoundly important message for the crip community, the queer community, and frankly, for all of us right now.
00:44:20 AJL What a wonderful answer. If Christina is too much for you, go find less.
00:44:24 ASH Exactly.
00:44:25 AJL And with that, we have come to the end of the episode. Alicia, thank you so much for joining me today and for telling me all about Christina Mirabilis!
00:44:33 ASH You’re so welcome. You have given me the joy of returning to Christina again and again, and thank you for really making me think about why this matters to me, why my work matters in general, it’s been a really special thing, so thank you.
00:44:46 AJL Thank you so much. That is so kind, and it has been really lovely speaking to you. Thank you all so much for listening. In the time since this episode was recorded, Alicia’s book, Medieval Twitter, has been released. There is a link to that in the show notes, and I will also link that on our Twitter at @MyFavouriteMystic, as well as on Bluesky. Please check it and all of their work out, and thank you again for listening.
[End of recording]
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