Suffering for Love: the attitudes toward pain in the thirteenth-century Vitae of holy women Beatrice of Nazareth and Lutgard of Aywières.

Abstract

Pain is a fact of human life as everyone has experienced at least some kind of pain once. Perhaps it is for this reason, it being so common, that we think to know what pain is and with that, we take its complexity for granted. Not always is pain as straightforward; pain can be hidden, inexplicable, personal, temporary, chronic, empathetic, but also culture-bound. Recent debates on the nature of pain have sparked ideas on perceiving pain as an emotion. Historians of emotion have argued against the universalist standpoint toward emotions but rather perceive emotion as something specific to each culture. Pain in this sense, then becomes something that changes over time. Working with Barbara Rosenwein’s conceptual model of emotional communities, I compare medieval hagiographies from two prominent living saints of the Southern Low Countries, Beatrice of Nazareth and Lutgard of Aywières, to uncover the pain culture they belonged to. The practice of pain is approached from a holistic perspective by which attention is given to the body, the mind, and the emotional, but also the possibility of feeling pain for others. This is fruitful, especially for medieval sources that presume the human body as a psychosomatic unit, as well as the acts of intercession in which these women were involved. From a textual analysis of the emotional paragraphs, it appears that the holy women experienced the following kinds of pain: mortifications of the flesh, guilt, grief/desire, illness, and compassionate suffering. While differences in the expression of these types of pain arise due to the backgrounds of the authors, the personalities of the women, and other external factors, their pain culture remains similar. Pain, whether self-inflicted or involuntarily experienced, served to distinguish them from others, manifest their love for God, signify God’s presence, and aid in their spiritual progress. Hence the title of this thesis: "Suffering for Love."