This dissertation is also available as a pdf download.

Introduction

Putting to death the body for the sake of the soul, or the use and restriction of the body to live a more holy life through corporal mortification takes its inspiration from the Bible,[1] is still in use today,[2] and was commonplace in the later medieval period.[3] Some people during this period engaged in extreme mortifications such as flagellation, piercing and cutting the body, self-starvation, and the consumption of unpleasant substances, and the purpose of this essay is to investigate what benefits medieval people saw in such extreme mortifications, as well as examining the negative aspects they perceived in mortificatory practice, through looking at the lives and writings of two influential late medieval figures.

Catherine of Siena (1347 – 1380[4]) was an Italian laywoman and Dominican tertiary who transitioned from a life of contemplation to one of active service, travelling widely to support the Pope, as well as advising him on ending the Avignon papacy and the reform of the Church. She was the author of numerous letters giving advice to a wide variety of people[5] as well as of a mystical work, the Dialogue of Divine Providence. Known in her lifetime for her extensive fasting, Catherine died in Rome amidst the turmoil of the Western Schism aged just thirty-three. She was canonised in 1461, and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1970.[6]

Henry Suso[7] (1295 – 1366[8]) was a Dominican friar who became the lector and then Prior of a monastery in Germany. After entering religious life as a thirteen year old, Suso received higher education under the tutelage of the apophatic theologian Meister Eckhart,[9] before spending his time in teaching monastics and providing pastoral care to Dominican nuns, including his ‘spiritual daughter’ and collaborator, Elsbeth Stagel.[10] He was the author of works including a popular work of Passion meditations[11] and a quasi-biographical work, the Life of the Servant, which he collected together under the title of The Exemplar. Suso was an enthusiastic practitioner of corporal mortification before renouncing it at the age of forty. He died aged seventy and was beatified in 1831.

I have chosen to concentrate on Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso because they lived during the same time period, have a shared background in the Order of Preachers, and were both practitioners of extreme corporal mortification. Self-authored works are available for each of them, alongside a hagiography of Catherine of Siena written by her confessor. In contemporary scholarship, there are numerous resources discussing Catherine of Siena, and somewhat fewer discussing Henry Suso, as well as others discussing themes in medieval piety. Of particular interest is Esther Cohen’s The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture, discussing attitudes to suffering generally as well as to self-inflicted pain, together with Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women on female fasting and Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia, which treats extreme fasting from a psychological viewpoint. Essays in Catherine Mooney’s Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters have assisted me in reading my primary sources more critically.

Two of my most important primary sources in this essay are Henry Suso’s Life of the Servant, and the hagiography of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua known as the Legenda major. Suso describes the Life of the Servant as partially authored by his disciple Elsbeth Stagel[12] (which may or may not be the case),[13] and as a book to help beginners[14] using symbolic language.[15] The Life as we have it today is a version which was edited by Suso toward the end of his life and, in it, the figure of the Servant is “self-consciously exemplary”,[16] a “fictive persona inspired by the life of the author himself”[17] which may not exactly align to what Henry Suso, the man, rather than the pedagogical device, actually did. The Life reveals Suso’s thoughts about the positives and negatives of corporal mortification, but, as Frank Tobin writes, we “must be careful not to overestimate the reliability of the facts in the Life.”[18]

While the Life may have altered facts in order to present the “Servant” as a model for emulation, the Legenda major is altogether a more problematic document. It was written by Catherine’s confessor and disciple Raymond of Capua after her death and in order to promote her cause for sainthood,[19] using his own memories of Catherine, as well as the testimony of others.[20] It should be noted that Raymond’s emphasis on Catherine as an ascetic, mystic, and visionary, does not entirely match Catherine’s own writings, which concentrate on her work as an activist who aimed “to bring peace to Italy, to reform the Church, and to help save souls” and where she rarely talks about her own feelings, mystical experiences, or details of her life.[21] In her lifetime, Catherine was a controversial figure,[22] whose activism[23] and fasting[24] aroused both criticism and praise. Raymond may have concentrated on Catherine’s asceticism in order to fit her into “standard expectations of female sanctity”,[25] which during this period included extreme mortifications[26] while balancing criticism for her excessive fasting by giving an account of her body’s progressive death, first by privations and fasts, and later by supernatural experiences so strong that her weak female body could survive only by receiving more and more extraordinary graces,”[27] fitting her into a saintly narrative where surviving extreme fasting was a sign of God’s favour.[28] Karen Scott has noted the difficulty in determining how far Raymond’s accounts can be said to be “true”, as he includes a great deal of biographical material which Catherine never mentions in her own writing[29] and suggests that “aspects of the Legenda may be a pious fabrication determined by the late medieval ecclesiastical models of female sanctity and elaborated in view of her canonization.”[30]

While it is important to note that while the Legenda was “shaped quite significantly by Raymond’s own hagiographic agenda and spiritual theology,” that Catherine practised extreme mortification is not in doubt. The earliest life of Catherine, the Miracoli, composed in 1374,confirms Raymond’s portrayal of Catherine’s asceticism, as it shows Catherine as being “ferocious in her ascetic denials, particularly in her refusal to enjoy the pleasures of the table”,[31] and she mentions her inedia in her letters.[32] The Legenda cannot be said to present an unproblematic account of Catherine’s life, but in it, Raymond offers us information about her life which we simply cannot find in other sources.[33] It is also worth noting that as Catherine’s confessor, Raymond held a privileged position in receipt of her confidences,[34] and, as Scott points out, Catherine herself may have been reticent about her mystical and other experiences from a sense of humility, and not wanting to call attention to her difference from others.[35] The Legenda is a problematic document, and it is difficult to tell just how far it accurately reflects Catherine’s view of her own mortifications, though it certainly tells us what other people during the period, particularly Raymond of Capua, thought of them.

Neither the Life of the Servant or the Legenda major are uncomplicated documents, as both are self-consciously hagiographical, and as such, may not reflect what actually happened, or what the figures actually thought about their mortifications at the time they were practising them. While reading the texts with some suspicion, we are able to glean from them information about the positives and negatives seen in the practice of corporal mortification.

Chapter One: Context

While Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena were extreme in their practice of corporal mortification, the use of self-wounding and fasting was not unusual in the late medieval period. Indeed, Esther Cohen has described the period as one which was marked by philopassianism, that is, “the deliberate, conscious attempt to feel as much physical anguish as possible.”[36] There are a number of factors which may have influenced this cultural embrace of pain in medieval Europe, including streams of devotion which can be identified in the writings of both Catherine and Henry Suso. In this chapter, I will discuss the cultural background to the lives of both subjects, with a particular focus on the changing conception of what it meant to imitate Christ, the growth of Passion-focussed piety, and theological reflection on the problem of suffering in general, rather than simply self-inflicted suffering, in the writings of Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso.

The Imitation of Christ

            The imitation of Christ in word and action is an ideal which dates back to the New Testament,[37] although the emphasis on how this imitation is performed has varied over the centuries. Giles Constable has described the ideal of imitatio Christi in the early church as fundamentally eschatological in nature, concentrating on the figure of the resurrected Christ, where the closest form of imitation was to suffer and die as a martyr,[38] and this focus on imitating Christ in martyrdom led some early Christians to expect suffering and martyrdom as a normative part of faith, or to see dying like Christ as truest form of imitating him.[39] After the end of sustained persecution of Christians, monastics, “whose sacrifice in renouncing the world was regarded as comparable to the death of the martyrs” provided a new ideal for imitating Christ.[40] Early Christian martyrs[41] as well as early monastics were known for their practice of asceticism, [42] which included fasting,[43] bodily mortifications,[44] and sexual renunciation.[45]  By the medieval period, the lives of the ascetic Desert Fathers were still influential,[46] and Henry Suso kept their sayings in his chapel,[47] while Catherine of Siena was described as consciously imitating (and surpassing) their asceticism.[48]

            Giles Constable has suggested that the emphasis in the early part of the Christian era was on imitating the divinity of Christ, a focus which shifted in the eleventh century to an emphasis on imitating Christ’s humanity.[49] While this never supplanted the imitation of Christ’s divinity,[50] the medieval period was focussed on a “personal ideal” which included imitating “all aspects of [Christ’s] life on earth”,[51] something which Ewert Cousins suggests may have had its genesis in the monastic practice of lectio divina, meditation on biblical texts and particularly the life of Christwhich encouraged “an identification with Christ and a desire to emulate his virtues…along with a willingness and even a longing to suffer with Christ in his passion.”[52] The imitation of Christ’s suffering in the Passion draws together elements of both the imitation of his divinity and his humanity, providing medieval people with the means to imitate Christ in “the one sensation they surely shared with Christ: pain.”[53] For thinkers like Catherine of Siena, the imitation of Christ necessarily involves suffering, as the individual is guided by him along the same road of “great pain, derision, torture, and reproach…passion and death” that he travelled,[54] following Christ along the “path of suffering” because “it is by such suffering that we become conformed with Christ crucified.”[55] For her and for others, imitating Christ meant experiencing suffering, and, together with the increasing emphasis on Christ’s Passion, is part of the reason why “self-inflicted suffering…was the most common form of imitatio Christ in the later Middle Ages.”[56]

Passion Piety

            By the late medieval period, an increasingly individualistic piety[57] was emphatically directed to the sufferings of Christ.[58] In paintings and sculptures of the period “scenes of the passion, crucifixion, deposition, and burial of Christ were represented in…great detail and with intense emotion,”[59] with fewer representations of Christ as a victorious High King upon the Cross in favour of the portrayal of Christ as the Victim of Calvary, the display of whose bloody, “grotesquely distorted” body[60] was intended as means to contemplate the reality of his pain.[61] In literature, writers described Christ’s sufferings in ever more detail,[62] and numerous books of meditations on the Passion were produced,[63] amongst them, Henry Suso’s Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, which was “the most successful devotional book in the late Middle Ages.”[64] The Stations of the Cross were developed in conjunction with this rising Passion piety, and, in the same vein, Henry Suso describes creating an imaginary Way of the Cross using places in his monastery and in the streets, in order to better meditate on scenes from the Passion.[65]

            By the Middle Ages, Christ was depicted as suffering greater pain than anyone else could ever suffer,[66] and a view developed that every part of Christ’s life, from birth to death, involved suffering,[67] something seen in Catherine of Siena’s thought, as she described to her confessor, how, throughout his life, Christ had “always borne the Cross in his soul”.[68] From the twelfth century, the shedding of Christ’s blood in circumcision was seen as prefiguring his Passion,[69] part of a thread of thought that by the late medieval period, as Esther Cohen writes, “takes every single element in Christ’s life and weaves it into a pre-Passion Passion.”[70] This intense interest in Christ’s pain was expressed in devotional piety as well as in theological debates where Christ’s suffering was seen as “central to understanding the humanity, divinity and body of Christ”.[71] The thirteenth century reintroduction of the works of Aristotle into the West[72] alongside those of his commentator, Avicenna,[73] enabled a new framework for understanding the connection between soul and body, and encouraged discussion about how pain was experienced in the body and the soul.[74] Discussing human pain led to debate about how Christ experienced pain, and enabled the discussion of his humanity and the hypostatic union between his humanity and divinity with greater precision[75] and this also enabled theologians to “explain more clearly why fasting and penance were important elements in spiritual improvement.”[76] Theologians emphasised the essential role of the body, rejecting a dualistic view of the connection between body and soul,[77] concluding that the voluntary infliction of “physical pain would also cause a re-ordering of soul and body”,[78] as well as strongly affirming that Christ had chosen suffering;[79] something mirrored in Catherine of Siena’s thought when she argued that, in Gethsemane, Christ was eager for his Passion and death,[80] adding that his suffering was greater than anyone else had ever endured, but was freely chosen out of love, asserting that it was “love and not nails fastened him to the Cross.”[81]

            While there is, as yet, no comprehensive explanation for the intense focus of medieval piety on the Passion of Christ,[82] both theology and piety combined to emphasise the humanity and the sufferings of Christ in a way that highlighted more strongly than ever before the positive value of Christ’s immense, lifelong suffering, and the similarly beneficial effects of externally- or self-inflicted pain on the human soul.

“A Short Affliction and a Long Joy”[83]: The Consolations of Suffering

            The encounter with pain and suffering is part of the universal experience of being human. As the German philosopher Max Scheler observed, the desire to find meaning in pain is at the core of religious thought, which also gives “an invitation to encounter suffering correctly, to suffer properly.”[84] The late medieval period came to give significant positive meaning to the sufferings of illness and injury, seeing them as not simply a negative aspect of life to be endured, but as “the most reliable – indeed, the only – path to union with God.”[85] Pain, suffered well, came to be seen as a means of spiritual advancement, and a way of becoming like Christ; ultimately, it was a “salvific instrument of great power”,[86] whose benefits were great enough that Henry Suso’s most popular book could report God as saying that “I would prefer to create unnecessary suffering rather than let my friends go without suffering.”[87]

            For Suso, the sufferings of human life can be interpreted as signs of a special closeness to God; rather than a sign of God’s displeasure, the experience of suffering is “the safest and surest path, and the most perfect” method of becoming God’s friend.[88] For Suso and others, the experience of suffering granted friendship with God, because it was the means by which individuals came to be like him,[89] and sufferings were granted in order to form individuals into the image of Christ,[90] a view also expressed by Raymond of Capua who wrote that Catherine was “likened to her Spouse by suffering.”[91] Suffering was the primary means by which individuals could imitate Christ, and other positive meanings were given to pain, including that it makes individuals like the apostles[92] and martyrs,[93] it preserves individuals from sin,[94] corrects their defects, reduces time in purgatory,[95] purity, and grants the “crown of eternal happiness”.[96] Suffering also grants patience, self-knowledge, and wisdom, and, overall “in suffering all virtues prove themselves, a person is adorned, one’s neighbor is improved, and God is praised.”[97] For Catherine of Siena, all suffering is given by God in order to make people holy, and allows the sufferer to show that they truly have living faith in God,[98] and because of its great benefits, Suso declares that “every suffering [is] good, whether it be willingly taken on or befalls on unexpectedly when a person then makes a virtue of necessity.”[99] 

            The virtues of suffering were seen as nearly endless, but only when suffered properly. Catherine of Siena argued that suffering should be accepted with reverence, “considering ourselves unworthy of so great a good as to put up with hardship for the Lord,”[100] and she makes a distinction between those who suffer well, and who will be rewarded in heaven, and those who suffer “angrily or impatiently”, and who will receive eternal suffering hereafter.[101] Henry Suso warned about people who suffer only from their desire for sinful things, as well as those “oversensitive people [who] create suffering…where none exists.”[102] In Suso’s Life of the Servant, God declares that “a person who knows how to suffer well is partly rewarded for his suffering on earth because he attains peace and joy in all things. And for him following upon death is eternal life.”[103] This emphasis on correct suffering is highlighted in Suso’s vision of a six-winged seraph on whose wings were written the words, “receive suffering willingly”, “bear suffering patiently”, and “learn to suffer as Christ did.”[104]

            The emphasis of medieval thought was on the suffering Saviour whose pain was immeasurable and a major focus for devotion. The desire to imitate him during a period which focussed on his pain allowed human suffering to be reinterpreted as a gift from God which could make them more like Christ. Through their own pain, individuals could hope to understand the pain Christ suffered,[105] increase in virtue, and lead a Godly life. Ultimately, for many medieval people, pain suffered well could be seen as “the greatest blessing God could bestow on a human being,”[106] something very rich in its positive potential. Moving on from the many positives medieval people saw in general suffering, in my next chapter, I will examine the positive benefits which Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso saw in their own, self-inflicted pain.

Chapter Two: The Reasons Why

By the late medieval period, the self-inflicted pain of corporal mortification had become “part and parcel of spirituality” in clerical, religious, and lay society,[107] and Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso were enthusiastic practitioners. While both used a variety of mortificatory techniques, Catherine of Siena’s asceticism was focussed on fasting to an unusual degree,[108] while Henry Suso’s extreme asceticism focussed more on wounding his body.[109] By examining what they, and those closest to them identified as the benefits of corporal mortification, I hope to give some insight into the reasons why they chose to damage and wound their bodies in their religious practice. In this chapter, I will cover what Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso did to their bodies, before moving on to discuss the reasons why they did so.

The Practice of Mortification

Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena’s life was marked by her practice of food abstinence, a form of mortification which she engaged in from her childhood. Following a vision of Christ at the age of six, Catherine displayed “decidedly odd eating behaviour,”[110] reducing her food consumption and abstaining from meat,[111] following that with a gradual restriction of her diet, refusing sweet foods and wine, and preferring to eat “only a little bread, and some uncooked vegetables.”[112] By her adulthood, her hagiographer describes a pattern of total food abstinence interrupted by occasionally eating bread and vegetables from necessity, along with receiving the Eucharist as often as possible.[113] Raymond of Capua, who became her confessor in 1374,[114] when she was 27, stated that, during the time that he knew Catherine, she did not eat enough to sustain life,[115] and that her prolonged fasting had severely weakened her body so that she seemed permanently on the brink of death.[116]

As an adult, Catherine experienced pain when she tried to eat,[117] and believed that eating weakened her,[118] and might even kill her.[119] The Legenda relates that, after being criticised for her fasting, Catherine did attempt to eat with others (while still abstaining from meat, wine, eggs, and bread). Although she merely masticated what she attempted to eat, and then spat it out, her attempts at eating were a disaster, leaving her visibly in pain, and making her nauseous to the degree that Raymond felt obliged to assist her in vomiting what she had eaten.[120] Catherine regularly vomited spontaneously when she tried or felt forced to eat, was also known to use twigs in order to induce vomiting.[121] Catherine’s fasting continued, and even increased during her more active life outside Siena,[122] and towards the end of her life, amidst the turmoil of the Western Schism, she chose to begin a fast even from water, which ended in a physical collapse, followed three months later by her early death.[123]

Raymond of Capua’s Legenda is particularly focussed on Catherine’s “ascetic understanding of food”,[124] but he does recount other methods that Catherine used to mortify her body, stating that she chose to sleep on planks,[125] even when attempts were made to stop her doing so,[126] and that she practised sleep restriction, first sleeping for only a quarter of an hour a day,[127] and later reducing this to half an hour every other day, describing this as a “triumph”, and saying that “no [other] victory had cost her so dearly”.[128] Alongside sleep deprivation, Catherine practised physically wounding asceticism, including flagellation from the age of six,[129] and wearing a hair-shirt, which she later exchanged for “a chain of iron which she drew around her person with such force that it entered her flesh”[130] and which caused fainting fits until Raymond compelled her to take it off toward the end of her life.[131] Catherine could be inventive in finding ways in which to mortify her flesh, and, while on holiday, used the hot springs she was visiting to scald her skin,[132] and would later find ways to engage in mortification while caring for the sick. While nursing the sick with the Mantellate, Catherine encountered a woman named Andrea who had a cancerous tumour on her breast. As a form of mortification, Catherine chose first to suck the pus coming from the woman’s breast,[133] and then later drank the water with which she had washed the wound.[134]

Henry Suso

Whereas Catherine of Siena’s ascetic practice focussed primarily on food restriction, fasting, and consuming noisome substances, Henry Suso concentrated on physically wounding his body in his mortifications. In the Life of the Servant, Suso recounts that, after his conversion at the age of eighteen, he had an intense desire to have a permanent sign that he belonged to God, and of the love he shared with God. Feeling what he describes as “an immense fire” of love, he carved the initials “IHS” into his chest with his pen. The wound caused him great satisfaction as well as extensive bleeding and, later, scarring, and he kept it secret from all but one close friend.[135] Like Catherine, Henry wore a hair shirt and an iron chain and, again like Catherine, had to desist from the use of the iron chain, in his case because it caused excessive blood loss. He replaced this chain with an undergarment made to his own design, filled with nails and tight enough that “the pointed nails would press into his flesh,”[136] and also made a regular practice of flagellation.[137] Perhaps the most memorable of Suso’s mortifications is his literal bearing of the cross. He made a cross to fit his back, and hammered thirty nails into it. He wore this on his bare skin day and night for eight years “to praise his crucified Lord”, adding seven needles to it in the final year in honour of the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. He describes this cross as causing him acute pain at all times, and especially if someone touched him.[138]

Like Catherine of Siena, Henry Suso used sleep as a way to mortify his flesh. He slept in his garment of nails, with his cross attached to him,[139] immobilising himself overnight with straps and padlocks, as well as creating spiked gloves to wear on his hands at night[140] so that, “when, while asleep, he tried to use his hands to help himself, he would run the pointed tacks into his chest and scratch himself,” creating wounds which he then allowed to become infected, making new ones once they had healed.[141] Suso also slept on a lice-ridden bed made from an old door, with a lumpy pillow and wearing the same clothes day and night, summing up his sleep as “wretched”.[142]

Caroline Walker Bynum has described Henry Suso as the “most extreme food ascetic among fourteenth-century men,”[143] though without the total lack of desire for food which was common to many female ascetics, including Catherine of Siena.[144] For Suso, mealtimes were an occasion for devotion, where he would drink five times at meals in honour of the five wounds of Christ, offered his cup to Jesus to drink, and dedicated the first and last mouthfuls of food to Christ’s heart.[145] Suso tells us that he loved fruit, but abstained from it for a time after being convinced in a vision that he was too fond of it. After his monastery was given a donation specifically in order to buy apples, Henry’s fast from fruit came to an end. Afterwards, he divided each piece of fruit into four quarters: three for the Trinity, while the fourth was for the infant Christ, which “he would eat unpeeled because children usually eat it unpeeled.”[146] While he practised devotion with his food and drink, he also practised abstention, “allow[ing]…himself only a very small amount to drink”, and abstaining from wine entirely for a period.[147] Later, he restricted himself to only drinking at breakfast, and offering all other drink he was given to God rather than himself.[148] This fasting from water gave him a terrible thirst, a dry mouth, and “his tongue became cracked and would not heal for more than a year.”[149] Like Catherine of Siena, Suso reports that his mortifications caused a weakening of his body,[150] unlike Catherine, however, he does not appear to have shortened his life with his practices, perhaps because his came to a definitive end when he was forty.[151]

The Life of the Servant and the Legenda major reveal two people with a similar preoccupation with corporal mortification, although differing in their actual practice, and both Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso appear to have believed that beneficial effects could be gained from asceticism. It is, however, worth pointing out that discussion of the benefits of corporal mortification assumes that the practice is undertaken voluntarily, and there is some debate about whether Catherine of Siena’s choice to mortify her flesh was always truly voluntary. At times, the Legenda appears to suggest that, at times, Catherine’s fasting was compulsive, describing her as attempting to eat, only to find herself incapable,[152] and Rudolph Bell suggests that “what may have begun as religiously inspired fasting at some point escaped Catherine’s full conscious control.”[153] In a letter to a critic, Catherine mentions praying repeatedly “for the grace to live as other people do in this manner of eating,”[154] which may suggest some form of compulsion in her fasting, although, as Caroline Walker Bynum has suggested, Catherine’s “true understanding of asceticism” may be revealed in a passage from the Dialogue where she suggests that “survival without eating is characteristic of ‘the perfect.’”[155] Raymond of Capua’s focus on Catherine’s asceticism, with his concomitant argument of the God-given nature of her fasting makes it difficult to know whether Catherine always practised extreme fasting and other mortifications because she perceived there to be benefit in them, whether she continued with them because she felt God was compelling her, or whether she reached a point where she could not stop, but where she and others continued to attribute positive meaning to her practice. With few clues from Catherine’s own writings, it remains debateable whether Catherine freely chose to mortify herself in the way that she did as her own references to her daily life, feelings, and mortificatory practice are few and far between. Catherine does, however, attribute positive benefits to bodily mortification without reference to her own practice, and her biography gives further information about the perceived beneficial effects of corporal mortification.

Analysis of the primary sources about Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena reveals a number of benefits that were perceived in the practice of corporal mortification. These benefits can be roughly categorised as the avoidance of temptation or promotion of virtue; reparation for sin; divine rewards; and imitation of Christ and the Saints. I will also cover in this section how those mortifications were perceived by others.

The Advantages of Mortification

            One meaning of asceticism, common in the early Church, was that of discipline, or training,[156] and in the fourth century acts like fasting were described as aiding bodily sanctification and aiding the individual in keeping himself pure.[157] The theme of using mortification to order to control the body and to increase purity was common in the late medieval period, where it was seen as “destructive of vice and constructive of internal strength”,[158]  and this understanding is reflected in Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso.

            In the Legenda, Raymond of Capua describes Catherine’s belief that “there was nothing more necessary for preserving her virginity than sobriety and mortification in her diet,”[159] and Catherine herself expressed a belief that, for her, fasting was “a very special grace [given] to overcome the vice of gluttony.”[160] More generally, in her Dialogue, Catherine commends mortification as a way of helping the practitioner lead a Godly life, saying that, “you should mortify your body and put to death your selfish will. In other words, learn to keep your body in check by disciplining your flesh when it would war against the spirit.”[161]For Catherine, mortification was an aid to help her avoid sin, and, in an incident recorded in her hagiography, it also assisted her in avoiding supernatural defilement. Raymond describes an incident where Catherine was tormented and tempted by devils whose presence threatened to defile her ears and eyes. Her reaction to this threat to her sanctity was to whip herself bloody with a chain and deny herself sleep,[162] although it took her declaration that “I have chosen sufferings for my consolation; not only will it not be difficult for me, but even delightful to undergo similar afflictions [to these] and even greater ones,” to finally see the demons off, at which point she was rewarded with a vision of Christ.[163] Mortification, and the expression of her embrace of suffering, served to drive away the temptation and threat of falling into sin that she faced. Catherine experienced disgust when faced with the suppurating wound of Andrea, whom she was nursing, and, so, “stooping down over the breast of the cancerous woman, she applied her mouth to the ulcer, until she was sensible of having overcome her disgust, and triumphed over that natural revolt.”[164] Here, Catherine mortified her flesh because she felt that her bodily weakness had led her to revulsion towards her “Sister who is redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ,”[165] and that act of mortification, followed by later drinking water used to wash the wound, enabled her to continue to nurse Andrea, and be commended by Christ.[166]

            Henry Suso also saw his mortifications as a means to help him escape temptation, and live a morally upright life, and used the memory of his mortificatory act in carving “IHS” into his chest to provide a permanent reminder of God’s love, and his dedication to God, something which assisted him whenever he faced trials in his life.[167] His description of his food asceticism, eating and drinking in honour of Christ’s wounds, the Trinity, and Christ’s heart,[168] reveals that he used it as a form of training to enable him to concentrate on God, and he describes his mortifications with the cross, nails, and chain as being intended to “make the flesh subject to the spirit,” a remedy for his “lively” nature,[169] and he prevented himself from scratching his body in a mortificatory act intended to preserve purity.[170] Suso’s conception of mortification as a form of training to enable the practitioner to resist focussing on anything other than God is perhaps best expressed in his conception of voluntary mortification as a “school”, the lower of two which, together, will enable the practitioner to annihilate the self to focus only on God.[171]

Mortification could help individuals keep from sin, aiding them in living a virtuous life, and it could also remove the penalty for sin in penance. Esther Cohen writes that, in the late medieval period, “penitence was perhaps the most salutary of pains, inflicted by one’s own self in remittance of sin,”[172] and both Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso show a keen awareness of sin, both their own and that of other people. As well as keeping them more closely conformed to Christ and to virtue, their mortifications acted as a purgative, cleansing them of the sins they had committed, and their intense sense of their own sinfulness could be seen as a sign of sanctity.[173]

            Raymond of Capua describes Catherine of Siena as someone greatly burdened by a sense of sin, describing this as a sign of her sanctity, saying that “holy souls frequently fancy they discover faults where there is none in reality, and exaggerate much the imperfections they commit.”[174] He describes her as tormented by the memory of the “slight vanity crisis” during her brief flirtation with the idea of marriage,[175] which she repeatedly confessed to him “with so many tears and sobs, that one would have supposed she had committed some great crime.”[176] Her sense of her sin was matched with a belief in the value of corporal mortification to expiate that sin. Catherine wrote that we should “use our bodies to expiate our sins and failings just as we have used our bodies to offend,”[177] and suggested that fasting is an appropriate way to expiate sin and maintain purity.[178] Catherine demonstrated her belief in the purifying effects of corporal mortification when she scalded her body at the hot baths, telling Raymond that, during the incident, she had reflected on heaven, hell, and purgatory, and had “besought my Creator, whom I had so often offended, to deign to accept for the torments I had merited, those that I then voluntarily underwent.”[179] More broadly, Catherine also asked to suffer vicariously for the sins of others,[180] took the punishment due to her father in purgatory on herself,[181] and mortified her flesh in fasting at the end of her life to remit the sins of those who opposed the Pope.[182]

Like Catherine, Henry Suso practiced penitential mortification in response to even minor sins. In the Life of the Servant, Suso describes an incident where he held the hands of two girls in church, describing it first as “carelessness,” but later as “sin” for him to do so. As a result, “he thought that the unbecoming action should be atoned for…[so] he struck himself on the back of the cross for this misdeed so that the sharp nails stuck in his flesh,” and then, while in church, he whipped himself “thirty times, so that the blood ran down his back. Thus did he bitterly make amends for his inordinate pleasure.”[183] In a later incident, a general confession of sin prompted Suso to take beat himself until his “blood ran down, as happens in [medicinal] bloodletting”, beating himself hard enough that the scourge broke, after which “he knelt down in the cold, naked and bloody…and begged God to wipe away his sins from his loving sight.”[184]

For both Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso, mortification served a positive purpose in assisting them to combat temptation and train the body to assist and not distract from living a virtuous life.[185] Alongside the benefits of both preventing sin and helping to expiate it, both Catherine and Henry experienced divine approval, consolation, and reward for their embrace of bodily asceticism. A noticeable difference between the asceticism of Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena and that of the early Christians recorded in legendaries and martyrologies is that they never display impassivity to pain.[186] Self-inflicted mortifications, along with the pains of illness, “could bring salvation precisely because they were painful,”[187] and while it was not the reason they mortified their flesh, their self-inflicted pains were rewarded by God.

Both Catherine and Henry experienced reward from God which was fitted to the mortification they had undertaken, and so Suso, who had made himself miserable by restricting his fluid intake was rewarded with a drink of water given by Christ and the Virgin, and later by a “healing drink” of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk, who said that his “parched mouth…earned it in so much agony.”[188] Catherine of Siena also experienced a proportionate reward for her action in drinking pus from her patient, as this was followed by a vision of Christ, who offered her first a jewelled crown in heaven,[189] and then a drink from his wounded side, saying that “it will inebriate thy soul with sweetness and will also plunge in a sea of delight thy body, which thou didst despise for love of me.”[190] This reward was then followed by further asceticism, as she no longer required food to sustain her,[191] and was so satisfied by Christ’s presence in the Eucharist that she required nothing else.[192]

In the first chapter of this essay, I argued that, during the late medieval period, the imitation of Christ became increasingly tied to the imitation of his suffering, allowing all human suffering to be reinterpreted as something which more closely conformed the sufferer to Christ. Bearing the pain of illness, accident, or disease in a Christ-like manner could be seen as a form of imitatio Christi, so could the self-inflicted pains of mortification in the thought of figures like Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena, alongside being able to “gain firsthand comprehension of the Crucifixion” through self-inflicted pain[193].

In fashioning and wearing a nail-studded cross on his back, Henry Suso was consciously imitating the Passion of Christ.[194] He writes that it was a “sign of his heartfelt sympathy for the intense sufferings of his crucified Lord,” and a “special remembrance of all his wounds,” and that the needles he added later to his cross were “in praise of the deep sorrow of the pure Mother of God.”[195] In his practice of flagellation, Suso was also consciously practising imitating Christ’s Passion, describing the sight of his wounded body as reminiscent of Christ’s scourging.[196] His mortification was an attempt to become like Christ, and, as Ronald Rittgers writes, when Suso “punishes his body…he is also seeking to effect a kind of union between his body and Christ’s body.”[197] Suso’s wounded body, like Christ’s, would become a source of blessings for others: later in life, Suso would bless pieces of silk, pressing them against his scar, and “which serve[d] as devotional objects that bless those who carry them.”[198] Just as Henry Suso saw himself as imitating Christ, Catherine of Siena also interprets asceticism as a way to imitate both Christ and the Saints. She informed a friar that Christ chose to suffer bodily in order to combat sin, before pointedly reminding him that “he is there as our rule, as our way,” also mentioning the suffering of St Francis. She concludes by saying that he should punish and mortify his body as Francis did, because “the more pain we endure here below with Christ crucified, the more glory we shall receive.”[199] Catherine later commends Francis for his mortifications in the Dialogue,[200] and signals that “massacring our bodies” like St Lucy should be the object of prayer.[201]

The benefits that Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena found in their painful self-mortifications included the avoidance of temptation and of sin, the remittance of sins committed, heavenly rewards, and a closer imitation of Christ and his Saints. While their mortifications aroused criticism, which will be addressed in the following chapter, they also brought positive assessments from their contemporaries. Both Suso’s Life of the Servant and the Legenda of Catherine of Siena display an awareness of how other people viewed their acts of bodily mortification. Suso, writing after he had ceased his mortifications, wrote that they had “caused [him] to be highly esteemed by people,”[202] while in the earliest account of Catherine’s life, the Miracoli, written as Catherine was becoming famous outside Siena, depicts a woman whose asceticism and service to the sick was the source of the holy reputation[203] which later allowed her to participate in her aim of reforming the Church.

It has already been noted that Raymond of Capua displays great interest in Catherine’s mortifications in his Legenda, depicting her early asceticism as something which formed part of her “preparation for a saintly future”,[204] and which only intensified during her God-given mission to the world.[205] For Raymond, Catherine’s extreme mortifications were a sign of her holiness,[206] and of God’s supernatural favour, something he used to promote her cause for canonisation. While Catherine did not dwell on her mortifications in her own writings, her ascetic practices were seen as “highly significant aspects of her impact on others” by her mostly male followers.[207] In her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that female religiosity in the later Middle Ages was marked by an extreme asceticism[208] which enabled women to gain control over their own lives, and also to “to claim for themselves teaching, counseling, and reforming roles for which the religious tradition provided, at best, ambivalent support.”[209] Catherine’s extreme corporal mortification fitted the picture of what it meant to be a saint in the later Middle Ages,[210] and gained for her the “reputation for genuine holiness” which ensured that “her voice was heard where few women’s voices would gain an audience.”[211]

While Catherine of Siena rarely mentions her mortifications in her own writings, Henry Suso dwells on his in great detail in the Life of the Servant, which has fittingly been described as an “auto-hagiography”.[212] As a self-promotion of sanctity,[213]  the Life stresses the mortifications which “were a staple of the hagiographies of the time…[and] served the readers’ need for superhuman heroes.”[214] While Catherine of Siena’s asceticism is mediated to us through those who considered her a saint, Henry Suso publicises his own ascetic feats in what seems to be a conscious attempt to demonstrate to others his sanctity, including widely publicising his self-inflicted “IHS” scar in illustrations which he may have had created.[215] By describing his mortifications in detail, Suso seems to be presenting himself as a successor to the Desert Fathers, and as a faithful follower of Christ,[216] with the expectation that others would see him as saintly, and, indeed, his depiction of his mortifications gave him “spiritual authority beyond that of scripture or Church.”[217]

Catherine of Siena chose to mortify her flesh by food restriction and fasting, while Henry Suso chose to wound his body as part of his mortificatory practice, but both perceived there to be distinct benefits which led them to practice corporal mortification despite the pain and suffering it caused them. In hurting and damaging their bodies they believed that they purified themselves from sin, fought temptation to sin, and assisted themselves to lead lives of virtue while, above all, becoming more like Christ in imitating the pain that he had had to endure. Mortifying the flesh was common, but Suso and Catherine went beyond what was normal in their practice, and in so doing, were perceived to be ascetic athletes, holier than the norm, granted a voice and an influence they may not otherwise have had.

Chapter Three: Knowing When to Stop

While both Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso saw distinct advantages in corporal mortification, Henry Suso gave up his mortificatory practice at the age of forty, while in Catherine’s own writings the details of her life, and her mortifications, are only ever of marginal importance.[218] In her lifetime, Catherine faced considerable criticism for her asceticism, something the Legenda was in part written to rebut,[219] and both Suso and Catherine describe disadvantages in the practice of corporal mortification. In this chapter, I will investigate the more negative aspects of corporal mortification which, while it was sometimes seen as a sign of sanctity, could also be seen as suspicious and inappropriate,[220] first looking at the narrative surrounding Suso’s decision to cease his mortifications and the relative absence of discussion of mortification in Catherine of Siena’s thought, before moving on to discuss what dangers were perceived to lie in corporal mortification as identified in the writings of both figures, as well as in the Legenda of Raymond of Capua.

Henry Suso: The Higher School

Henry Suso’s Life of the Servant describes a journey of spiritual maturation in which his corporal mortifications belong only to his life as a beginner. In his Life, Suso describes the extreme mortifications he practised for twenty-two years; from the age of eighteen until he was forty, before abandoning them as he moved “from an ascetical self-rule to suffering abandonment to the divine will.”[221] He describes himself as realising, via a vision, that his asceticism was “nothing more than a good beginning”, and that he had broken his health, risking death if he continued his mortifications. He received a vision of a young man who invited him to leave the “lower school” of self-inflicted suffering, and move to “the highest school that exists on earth,” which would bring him divine peace and fulfilment,[222] and which involved complete self-abandonment, “aim[ing] alone at God’s praise and honour” in both joy and in sufferings, in imitation of Christ.[223] Suso describes himself as initially believing he could now live a life of enjoyment, without any mortifications, only to find that his transition really meant a life of suffering that was now not self-inflicted, but given at the hands of others.[224] He was informed by God that instead of hurting his own flesh, he would now suffer from spiritual dryness, disloyalty, the ruin of his good name, have no joy or comfort, and “everything that you undertake…will go awry, and whatever is suffering or repulsive to you will prosper.”[225]

Following this vision, Suso spent ten years in seclusion in his friary,[226] suffered from theological doubts for nine years, and depression for eight years, fearing for his salvation, until pushed by God to focus his life on service to others.[227] As he had been informed that it would, this service to others caused Suso considerable suffering, because he was accused of stealing from and faking miracles at shrines, and had to defend himself against accusations of false teaching.[228] Suso also endured the embarrassment of his sister running away from her convent,[229] accusations of theft and well-poisoning,[230] threats from a murderer,[231] difficulties in travelling,[232] and a false accusation that he had fathered a child.[233] He became prior of his monastery, and found that this, too, brought more suffering at the hands of others.[234] In the Life of the Servant, Suso describes a decisive move away from corporal mortification, while still embracing suffering, and he would also advise others away from the corporal mortifications for which he was famous.

Catherine of Siena: A Different Emphasis

Catherine of Siena moved from a life of contemplation in her own home, to wider ministry to the sick people of Siena, and, from around 1370, to the “wider and wider affairs of civil and ecclesiastical life”,[235] until her death in 1380. It was during this later, active apostolate that Catherine dictated her Dialogue and her letters, which do not show the same preoccupation with corporal mortification that Raymond of Capua’s Legenda does. Suzanne Noffke writes that this, more mature Catherine, may have grown “somewhat to practice gentleness to self,”[236] further suggesting that “the violence with which Catherine had tortured her own body and spirit in her early search for union with God and identification with the crucified Jesus was, as her insight deepened, transformed into a sense of urgency in the pursuit of truth and love.”[237] While it seems that Catherine’s own emphasis was on the salvation of souls and the reform of the Church, it should be noted that the Legenda portrays her asceticism as lifelong, and indeed, suggests that it only “deepened further when she began her public life.”[238] Unlike Henry Suso, Catherine of Siena never seems to have decisively rejected corporal mortification, and it is difficult to say whether she did in fact reduce her asceticism, but it is possible to contrast the Legenda’s florid descriptions of Catherine’s asceticism with her own writings, which are not preoccupied with corporal mortification. In Catherine’s letters and her Dialogue, “self-mortification is a central topic, but its implications are mental rather than physical”,[239] and she warns about the negatives associated with mortificatory practice,[240] which suggests that her mature thought was focussed on working actively for her ecclesiastical aims and her teaching of a positive view of suffering in a general sense in the Dialogue rather than on the acts of mortification which are described in the Legenda.

Negatives of Corporal Mortification

Henry Suso ceased to mortify his flesh from the age of forty, while Catherine continued to mortify hers until her death at the age of thirty-three. Both of them embraced corporal mortification, but also qualified their support for it in several ways. Both Catherine and Henry had a definite purpose behind the castigation of their flesh, and both of them were extremely wary of seeing mortification as an end in itself. Mortification was recognised, by them and by others, as hazardous to health, and they were keenly aware that heroic levels of asceticism could become a source of pride, a worry that recurs in the criticism that Catherine of Siena faced. Both Catherine and Henry affirmed that corporal mortification was but one way to become closer to God, and both of them ultimately affirmed that the suffering from illness and disease, or from other people, is of more value than corporal mortification.

            While mortificatory practices were not uncommon in the Middle Ages, extreme mortifications, especially in women, often met with suspicion and vocal criticism. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that the efflorescence of corporal mortification from the eleventh century was met with “repeated exhortations to moderation” from theologians and clergy,[241] and that there was a suspicion that the impulse towards mortification might come from “despair, pride, exhibitionism, or illness” rather than piety.[242] Catherine of Siena faced considerable criticism, including suggestions of heresy,[243] and the extent of her mortifications were part of what made her a controversial figure to her contemporaries.[244]

In the Legenda, Raymond of Capua records some of the criticisms Catherine faced from others for her practice of corporal mortification. She was accused of suicidal tendencies,[245] and of trying to outdo Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Apostles in her fasting.[246] Some “saw in her unusual way of life a vainglorious craving to be exceptional”,[247] some more kindly people thought her simply deluded,[248] while others thought she was just an attention-seeker, and merely pretending to fast.[249] As Ann Astell writes, Catherine’s critics “found her chronic fasting a scandalous, self-willed excess,”[250] and her hagiographer records her attempt to rebut the criticism by eating normally, only to fail in her attempt.[251] Catherine herself, in one of her few references to her own asceticism, records that she was accused of being deceived by the devil, defending herself to her critic by simultaneously asking him to pray for her ‘weakness’ while stating that her inedia is a gift from God.[252] The Legenda itself was written to promote Catherine’s canonisation, and to, somewhat ironically, prove her to be an exceptional woman[253] whose extreme mortification of her flesh showed only that her “body was maintained in life by God in a supernatural manner.”[254] Dyan Elliott notes that while asceticism could bring a woman “visibility and power allegedly supported by divine warrant”,[255] Catherine was one of a number of women who were accused of fraudulent asceticism, including the pretence of extreme fasting, stigmata, and mystical deaths.[256] In order to rebut any suggestion of fraud, Raymond of Capua describes himself as having been sceptical of her until convinced of her sanctity,[257] and includes within the Legenda a letter from one of her disciples, Etienne Maconi, describing in detail how little she was ever able to eat in order “to confound the incredulous who calumniated her” by suggesting she was only pretending to fast.[258]

Catherine’s asceticism seems to have caused, or at least hastened her early death (as Rudolph Bell remarks, “she must have known that the refusal to drink water would kill her” during her fast at the end of her life[259]), although her Legenda does not state this, as that would imply that she had died in mortal sin.[260] Her hagiography does describe how her fasting had weakened her,[261] and perhaps the most obvious negative effect of corporal mortification is its danger to health and to life itself. Henry Suso seems to have had a keen awareness of the hazards to health found in corporal mortification, saying that at the end of his twenty two years of asceticism, he was weakened and wasted, suffering with sores, wounds, and scars on his body, as well as swollen legs and hands,[262] concluding that “his whole physical being had been so devastated that the only choice open to him was to die or to give up such exercises”[263] and that he “had endangered his life” with his extreme asceticism.[264] Perhaps because they knew of the damage they had caused to their own bodies, both Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso advised others to be moderate in their practice, or not to do it at all. In a letter, Catherine advised against strict mortifications, saying that “when the body is feeble, or sick,…one must not only cease fasting: he must eat meat, and if once a day is not enough, let him have it four times”,[265] while Henry Suso advised his ‘spiritual daughter’, Elsbeth Stagel not to imitate him “because it is out of keeping with your weakness as a woman and your physical well-being”[266] later stressing that, “I am not demanding something terribly severe of you. You should eat, drink and sleep as needed, and be allowed dispensation that your frail physical constitution requires.”[267] Suso’s words may suggest that he saw extreme asceticism as gendered, suitable for men, but questionable in their weaker, female counterparts,[268] but it also seems possible that, as Frank Tobin writes, his advice “may well have been the result of wisdom gained through sad experience.”[269]

The extremity of the corporal mortifications practised by Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena could arouse criticism from others, and raise fears for the health of the practitioner, but perhaps the most significant criticism of the practice is revealed in Catherine and Henry’s discussion of the purpose that lay behind their asceticism, in their advocacy of differing paths to God (and their warnings about the pride that would try to force everyone to approach God in the same way), and their conception that the sufferings which are most valuable are those which are inflicted by other hands than their own.

            Mortification of the flesh is a tool, not an end in itself for Catherine of Siena, who was aware that focussing on corporal mortification risks “mistaking the instrument for the goal”.[270] She is careful to place limits on the power of mortification to remit sin, and in her Dialogue, God asserts that no suffering can suffice to punish any sin at all, “for an offense against me, infinite Good, demands infinite satisfaction.” For Catherine, as for other medieval thinkers,[271] bodily penance can make satisfaction for sin, but only when it is accompanied with the most important element of all: contrition, because “true contrition satisfies for sin and its penalty not by virtue of any finite suffering you may bear, but by virtue of your infinite desire.” It is the individual’s desire to make satisfaction for sin that means that “every suffering they bear from any source at all…is of infinite worth, and so satisfies for the offence that deserved an infinite penalty.”[272] Catherine shares in the general inclination “toward contrition and grief rather than punishment” of medieval thought about penitence,[273] and, for her, it is not the suffering, but the love for God which makes the person prepared to suffer which is valuable, and so, in the Dialogue, God says that “in this life guilt is not atoned for by any suffering simply as suffering, but rather by suffering borne with desire, love, and contrition of heart. The value is not in the suffering but in the soul’s desire” which itself only has value because of the individual’s love of Christ, and “in this way and in no other is suffering of value.”[274]

            For Catherine, while mortification is good, it is the orientation of the heart which causes an individual to embrace suffering which is better. In contrast to the picture painted of her in the Legenda, Catherine counsels against a focus on corporal mortification, stating that those who embrace bodily asceticism should use their discernment, and concentrate more on the virtue they hope to acquire than the mortification with which they hope to acquire it, “for penance ought to be undertaken as a means to growth in virtue.”[275] For Catherine, “the essential effort had to be the destruction of self-will”,[276] and in her Dialogue, God states that he is not pleased “with one who wishes to kill the body with great penances without slaying the selfish will…I want works of penance and other bodily practices to be undertaken as means, not your chief goal.”[277] She finds that focussing on corporal mortification may ultimately be destructive to the aim that should underlie the practice, arguing that souls who are perfect have “set their minds more on slaying their selfish will than on mortifying and killing their bodies. They have, it is true, mortified their bodies, but not as their chief concern…they have used mortification as the instrument it is to help them slay their self-will…and this is what you should do.”[278] Corporal mortification is useful, for Catherine of Siena; but only insofar as it advances the aims of destroying the selfish will and acquiring virtue.

            The goal of Catherine of Siena’s mysticism was the destruction of “slavish fear and of all worldly love and attachments” in favour of being “clothed only in Christ crucified.”[279] Suso’s theology was also focussed on detachment from all that is not God[280] and the “annihilation of the self in divinity”[281] in order to “return…to the apophatic divine.”[282] Like Catherine, he saw destruction of self-will as vital, and saw “humility, passivity, suffering, and patience” as indispensable in this aim.[283] Suso describes his focus in life as being the contemplation of God, saying that everything he does is directed to that goal, and used only insofar as they help him reach that goal. He warns those who see mortifications as anything other than a means to an end,[284] and further warns against those who have missed the point behind corporal mortification, and who imitate Christ’s Passion by “engag[ing] in harsh practices, living carefully and presenting in public a respectable and holy manner of life” but who have neglected to imitate Christ’s generosity and gentleness, becoming judgemental of those around them.[285] In concentrating on the purpose behind his mortifications, that of focus on God and not himself, Suso came to understand that “self-made suffering, no matter how severe, cannot accomplish the goal of self-annihilation, because the self is still following its own designs and will.”[286]

For Catherine and Henry, the focus of mortification should not be mortification itself but the purpose behind it. Where asceticism could assist them in destroying self-will and promoting focus solely on God, it was a useful tool, but both warn against overstating the importance of mortification itself. Mortification which did not seek to negate self-will and focus on God was valueless, and rather than denying the self, could serve instead to promote the sin of pride. Henry Suso suggested that those who have missed the point of mortification can become prideful and judgemental, a source of vanity,[287] and Catherine of Siena also warns about this in her writing. In the Dialogue, Catherine describes people who become “displeased and scandalized” when others do not engage in the same practice of mortification as they do,[288] as well as those who have become judgemental “because they have invested more effort and desire in mortifying their bodies than in slaying their selfish wills.” These people may be mortifying their flesh, but they are, ultimately, acting out of selfishness, “wanting to choose times and places and spiritual consolations in their own way, and even earthly troubles and conflict with the devil.”[289] Both Catherine and Henry express concern that asceticism, when misused, could serve to heighten pride, and could even cause the practitioner to despise those who do not follow the path of extreme mortification; as a counterpoint to this, both figures assert there is not one, but many paths towards a deeper relationship with God.

            Although Catherine of Siena clearly chose to spend much of her life engaging in corporal mortification, she did not advocate this as a universal path, either in kind or in degree. She wrote that mortifications ought to be “according to the measure of one’s need as well as one’s capability”,[290] and to engage in mortification when ordered to desist, or to do so in the wrong circumstances would offend God.[291] She also cautions against seeing mortification as the best path, pointing out that mortification is not the goal but a means to the goal, and saying “let no one, therefore, make the judgment of considering those great penitents who put much effort into killing their bodies more perfect than those who do less.”[292] God warns her not to try to impose mortification on everyone, “for all bodies are not the same, nor do all have the same strong constitution…also, it often happens that any number of circumstances may make it right to abandon the penance one has begun.”[293] She is told to “give [people] penance as an instrument but not as their chief concern – not equally to everyone but according to their capacity for it and what their situation will allow, this one more and this one less, depending on their ability to manage these external instruments.”[294]

In the Life of the Servant Henry Suso gives a “detailed argument for moderation” in his advice to his ‘spiritual daughter,’ Elsbeth Stagel.[295] Elsbeth was an eager disciple of Suso, and had written the first iteration of the Life of the Servant.[296] Suso encouraged her to read sayings from the Desert Fathers,[297] and she then decided to “chastise her body in the severe manner of the desert fathers…tortur[ing] herself with hair shirts, ropes and terrible bonds, with pointed iron nails and many other things.” Suso’s reaction to Stagel’s imitation of him in mortification was to tell her to stop, because of her woman’s weakness and health, saying that “Dear Christ did not say, ‘Take up My cross,’ He said ‘Everyone should take up his own cross’” and advised her to do only what her “frail constitution” allowed.[298] Stagel questioned him because she was merely trying to imitate what Suso himself had done, provoking the response that “we are all different. What is good for one person is not good for another.”[299] Although Suso had created his fictional alter ego of the Servant to be a model for emulation, his concern seems to have been that “the asceticism to be emulated, however exemplary, must still be appropriately-matched to the capabilities of each devotee,”[300] and he informs Stagel that softer natures should not practice such mortifications, but neither should they despise those who do, while those who do practice them should not look down on those who do not. Suso’s final advice to her about mortification is that “in general, austerity practiced in moderation is better than immoderate practices” because although “a severe way of life…can be useful for people who are too easy on themselves and arbitrarily give in to their insubordinate natures…this does not apply to you or people like you.”[301]

            Like Catherine of Siena, Henry Suso affirms that mortification is not the only path, or even the best path for some to grow closer to God. He describes a variety of paths people may take, saying that, while “one will race forward with great austerity; another speeds onward with great detachment; another soars in lofty contemplation…what is special for each person and the most important for each one’s particular self no one can say for sure” adding that “corporeal penances help some if there are not too many of them,” but argues that detachment is best of all.[302] Both Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena chose mortification for at least part of their lives, but both seem acutely aware that not everyone can, or should follow the path they took, and are very conscious of the danger of seeing their choices as the only ones worth following. Suso told Elsbeth Stagel that “God has many kinds of crosses with which he chastens his friends.” In Stagel’s case, her cross, or path to God, was not to be self-inflicted mortifications but an illness which lasted until her death.[303]       

Henry Suso had moved from the ‘lower school’ of self-imposed suffering, and into a higher one whose sufferings were not chosen. Rather than concentrating on hurting himself, Suso came to see the sufferings he experienced, but did not cause “as something to be accepted as God’s will and as a sign of his special love”, and developed the view that they were a better form of suffering,[304] telling the chronically-ill Stagel that she could “put aside your practices of mortification and physical penances, your wasting away and fasting, since suffering can bring us such a great benefit.”[305] For Suso, the highest stage of mysticism involves “’Christ-formed’ suffering throughout the full range of human pain and affliction,” as only external sufferings borne in imitation of Christ can “yield the final, ‘transforming’ move into the Godhead.”[306]

For Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso, mortification was a useful, but limited tool.  Catherine was heavily criticised for her fasting, accused of fraud, attention-seeking, and even diabolic influence, something which may lie behind Raymond’s concentration on her mortifications in the Legenda. Both figures were aware that extreme mortification could damage or kill the body and, most significantly, both had a clear view that destruction of self-will and worldly attachments formed the purpose that lay behind their mortificatory practice and how, if forgotten, that same practice could instead lead to pride and judgement of others. Both Catherine and Henry affirmed that their path of extreme mortification was not the only way to deeper faith, and, while both affirmed the value of non-mortificatory pain and suffering, Henry Suso came to argue specifically that unchosen suffering was of greater value than corporal mortification.

Conclusion

Extreme forms of corporal mortification like self-starvation, carving letters into the skin and piercing the skin with nails and needles can seem incomprehensible, perhaps a sign of mental illness rather than sanctity. Yet, while Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso were unusually severe in their asceticism, they were far from alone in choosing to mortify their flesh. The aim of this essay has been to investigate the positives and the negatives that were seen in corporal mortification during the later medieval period by examining the lives and writings of Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena.

In my first chapter, I looked at the concept of imitating Christ as it moved from the focus on suffering and dying like Christ in martyrdom, to the quasi-martyrdom of monastic life, and into the medieval focus on imitating the example of Christ’s life and, particularly, in imitating his suffering. The focus on the human, suffering Christ was reflected in an increasing emphasis on the Passion, with books of meditations like that of Henry Suso produced to help people understand, and in some sense to join with Christ in his suffering. The focus on Christ’s pain expanded so that the entirety of his life was seen as suffering, and a stress was laid upon his free choice to suffer in order to bring about the salvation of mankind. This emphasis on the suffering of the Saviour allowed for an interpretation of all human pain as ultimately salvific, an opportunity or even a blessing from God which was the best way a sufferer could approach God, and live a Godly life by suffering like Christ.

All suffering could be seen as having positive effects, including the freely chosen pains of corporal mortification. In my second chapter, I covered the reasons behind the mortifications practised by Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena where their focus was respectively on wounding the body and on food restriction and starvation. From their writings, and the Legenda of Catherine of Siena, I have shown that emulating Christ was a primary concern behind their asceticism, alongside training the body toward virtue and away from sin, expiating sins they had committed and, although this was not guaranteed, their reception of divine rewards for their suffering. I also discussed the positive views that others held of both figures, but perhaps particularly of Catherine of Siena, whose “ascetic denial and the adjoining mystical experiences…[granted her] a voice and unofficial position of charismatic authority,”[307] which enabled her to carry out her work as “an itinerant preacher and peacemaker, as a female apostle or apostola.”[308]

Both Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso found numerous rewards in the practice of corporal mortification, but Suso gave up the practice in midlife, and Catherine does not dwell upon her asceticism in her own writings. Both of them saw limitations in the usefulness of mortification of the flesh, including the obvious danger to health that it presented. Catherine was heavily criticised for her fasting, and it seems that the focus on it in the Legenda, written after her death, was an attempt to argue that she was able to mortify herself as much as she did only because she was supernaturally supported by God. In her own writings Catherine, like Henry, focusses on the purpose behind corporal mortification: the destruction of the selfish will that would lead the practitioner away from God, asserting that mortification is merely one tool used in this endeavour. Both figures warn against seeing mortification as an end in itself, where instead of dispensing with self-will, the practitioner comes to take pride in what they are doing, judging those who do not practice asceticism as severe as they do. Both Catherine and Henry firmly assert that there are many paths to grow closer to God, and that corporal mortification is just one of them, and both affirm the value of suffering which is not self-inflicted, with Henry Suso describing this as a higher and better way.

The high value placed on suffering in the later medieval period, and in the writings of Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena may be seen as an answer to the question of the purpose of suffering.[309] Framing it as God’s gift to humanity to enable them to become more like his Son enabled sufferers to take control of their pain, “embracing it freely and using their sensations to reach new levels of spirituality,”[310] and just a short step from there to proactively using the body in asceticism in order to emulate Christ more closely, and in so doing, to be seen as saintly.[311] Despite the many advantages Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso saw in mortification, they also expressed an ambivalence. Their practice was extraordinary, and they did not recommend that anyone emulate their mortifications. The acts of living saints were not intended for others to copy,[312] and tales of extreme asceticism were used as “points of contemplation and encouragement” for those who were suffering, rather than as models of expected behaviour.[313] For Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso, there were many paths which could be taken in order to become more like Christ, and to increase in sanctity, and corporal mortification (especially of the extreme variety) was just one way, to be used cautiously, as a means to an end. The lives and writings of Catherine of Siena and Henry Suso reveal that, alongside the significant advantages they saw in corporal mortification, they were also careful to note the limitations of their practice.

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Footnotes

[1] In Galatians 5:24; Romans 8:13; and others.

[2] E.g. in Lenten fasting.

[3] Esther Cohen. “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility – Pain in the Later-Middle-Ages.” Science In Context 8, no. 1 (1995): 47-74, 59.

[4] Suzanne Noffke. Catherine of Siena: Vision through a Distant Eye. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996), 1, 3.

[5] Noffke, 3-4.

[6] Noffke, 7.

[7] Sometimes cited as Heinrich Seuse.

[8] Frank J. Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, by Heinrich Seuse. (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 19, 25.

[9] Ingrid Falque. “’Daz Man Bild Mit Bilde Us Tribe’: Imagery and Knowledge of God in Henry Suso’s Exemplar.” Speculum 92, no. 2 (2017): 447-492, 452.

[10] Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, 24-25.

[11] Tobin, introduction, 36.

[12] Heinrich Seuse. “The Life of the Servant” in The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons. Tr. and ed. Frank J. Tobin. (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 132. Hereafter abbreviated as Servant.

[13] Tobin notes that scholars, including Kurt Ruh, have argued that little if anything in the Servant actually came from Stagel. (Frank J. Tobin. “Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel: Was the Vita a Cooperative Effort?” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Ed. Catherine M. Mooney. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 125.)

[14] Suso, quoted in Falque. “Daz Man”, 447.

[15] Suso, quoted in Falque, 461.

[16] Steven Peter Rozenski. “Henry Suso and Richard Rolle: Devotional Mobility and Translation in Late-Medieval England and Germany.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012. ProQuest (Order No. 3543088), 61.

[17] Falque, “Daz Man”, 448.

[18] Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, 19.

[19] Karen Scott, “Mystical Death, Bodily Death: Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua on the Mystic’s Encounter with God” in Mooney, Gendered Voices, 139.

[20] Rudolph Bell writes that Raymond “left out stories he could not verify…or that to him seemed exaggerated or fanciful.” (Holy Anorexia. [Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 24).

[21] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 137.

[22] As noted in Raymond of Capua. Life of Saint Catherine of Siena: by the blessed Raymond of Capua, her confessor. Tr. by Mother Regis Hamilton. (New York: PJ Kennedy and Sons, 1862. https://archive.org/details/lifeofsaintcatha00raym/page/1), 117-118. Hereafter abbreviated as Legenda.

[23] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 165.

[24] Ann W. Astell. “Heroic Virtue in Blessed Raymond of Capua’s Life of Catherine of Siena.(Virtue, Identity, and Agency: Ethical Formation from Medieval to Early Modern).” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 1 (2012): 35-57, 36.

[25] F. Thomas Luongo. “The Historical Reception of Catherine of Siena”, in A Companion to Catherine of Siena. Eds. Carolyn Muessig, George Ferzoco, & Beverly Kienzle. (Leiden: BRILL, 2011), 26.

[26] André Vauchez. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143.

[27] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 139.

[28] Vauchez, Sainthood, 192.

[29] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 146.

[30] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 143. Scott particularly notes that Raymond presents a linear narrative of progressive supernatural events in Catherine’s life leading up to her active engagement with the world, something which is not obvious from Catherine’s own writing. (“Mystical Death”, 165-166).

[31] Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Denial as Action – Penance and its Place in the Life of Catherine of Siena”, in Muessig, Ferzoco & Kienzle, A Companion to Catherine of Siena, 116.

[32] Notably in Letter T92/G305/DT19 to an unnamed critic. (Catherine of Siena, and Suzanne Noffke. The Letters of Catherine of Siena, 2 vols.[Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000], 1:160-161). Hereafter abbreviated as Letters.

[33] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 145.

[34] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 147.

[35] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 147.

[36] Cohen, “European Physical Sensibility”, 52.

[37] Giles Constable argues that, in the New Testament, the concepts of “to follow” and “to imitate” are not identical, and that the amalgamation of the two is a later development. (“The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ” in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha, the Ideal of the Imitation of Christ, the Orders of Society. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 145-147). For an alternative viewpoint discussing the New Testament texts, see Candida Moss (The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom. Oxford University Press, 2010, 23-39).

[38] Constable, 146-148.

[39] Moss, Other Christs, 44.

[40] Constable, “Imitation”, 149.

[41] See Maureen Tilley for a discussion of asceticism as training to endure torture and martyrdom (“The Ascetic Body and the (Un)making of the World of the Martyr.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 3 (1991): 467-80).

[42] Originally meaning “athletic training, exercise, practice, or discipline” In later Christian thought the definition was expanded to mean “ruling the impulses of the flesh by the power of the mind or spirit” (Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity. [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998], 5-6).

[43] Varying from ordinary to heroic extremes (Shaw, Burden, 1).

[44] Esther Cohen. The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 236.

[45] Shaw, Burden, 6.

[46] Shaw, 10.

[47] Servant, 137.

[48] Legenda, 45-46.

[49] Constable, “Imitation”, 169. Nor was there a point at which Christ’s earthly life was not offered for emulation (Constable, 150-153).

[50] Constable, 169. See also Candida Moss’ discussion on the “unnatural dichotomy” expressed in scholarship on the concept of imitatio Christi in Christian history (Other Christs, 21ff).

[51] Constable, “Imitation” 179.

[52] Ewert Cousins, “The Humanity and the Passion of Christ” in Christian Spirituality. [2], High Middle Ages and Reformation. Ed. Jill Raitt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 377.

[53] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 209.

[54] Letter T168/G206/DT55 in Letters, 1:40.

[55] Letter T29/G319/DT18 in Letters, 1:205.

[56] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 28.

[57] Caroline Walker Bynum. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1987), 65.

[58] Ronald K. Rittgers. “Suffering and Consolation in Late Medieval Mysticism.” In The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. (Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2012. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199795086.003.0003), 65.

[59] Constable, “Imitation”, 230.

[60] Richard Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion”, in Raitt, Christian Spirituality. [2], 88-89.

[61] Constable, “Imitation”, 211.

[62] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 198.

[63] Kieckhefer, “Major Currents”, 75.

[64] Alois Maria Haas, “Schools of Late Medieval Mysticism”, in Raitt, Christian Spirituality [2], 154.

[65] Servant, 42-44.

[66] To the point that some scholars have identified a progressive diminishing of the pain suffered by martyrs in hagiographical accounts in order to express the uniqueness of Christ’s suffering (see Donna Trembinski. “Narratives of (Non) Suffering in Dominican Legendaries: Exploration and Explanations.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. ProQuest. Order No. NQ94370), in contrast to Esther Cohen, who argues that medieval legendaries show an increase in depictions of pain (Modulated Scream, 236).

[67] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 221.

[68] Legenda, 146.

[69] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 223.

[70] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 225.

[71] Donald Mowbray. Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology: Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century. (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), 3.

[72] Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering. Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), x.

[73] Jon McGinnis. Avicenna. (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 250.

[74] Mowbray, Pain and Suffering, 23.

[75] Mowbray, 160.

[76] Mowbray, 161.

[77] J. Giles G. Milhaven. “A Medieval Lesson on Bodily Knowing: Women’s Experience and Men’s Thought.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (1989): 341-72, 343.

[78] Mowbray, Pain and Suffering, 79.

[79] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 206.

[80] Legenda, 146.

[81] Legenda, 148.

[82] Rittgers, “Suffering and Consolation”, 71.

[83] Henry Suso, “The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom”, inSeuse and Tobin, The Exemplar, 247. Hereafter abbreviated as Wisdom.

[84] Max Scheler, “On the Meaning of Suffering” in Daniel Leiderbach. Max Scheler’s Vom Sinn Des Leides Introduction, Translation, and Notes, MA diss., Institute of Christian Thought,1973. ProQuest (Order No. 302705381), 1.

[85] Rittgers, “Suffering and Consolation”, 64.

[86] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 19.

[87] Wisdom, 248.

[88] Wisdom, 247.

[89] Wisdom, 247.

[90] Servant, 110.

[91] Legenda, 244.

[92] Letter T30/G150/DT1 in Letters, 1:50-52.

[93] Wisdom, 248.

[94] Wisdom, 245.

[95] Servant, 159.

[96] Wisdom, 247.

[97] Wisdom, 247-248.

[98] Letter T32/G79 in Letters, 1:120.

[99] Wisdom, 245.

[100] Letter T31/G333/DT12 in Letters, 1:28.

[101] Letter T18/G250/DT14 in Letters, 1:32.

[102] Servant, 160.

[103] Servant, 131.

[104] Servant, 169.

[105] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 9.

[106] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 32.

[107] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 27.

[108] M. Furth. (1994). Holy Alliance: Saint Catherine of Siena and the Paradox of Flesh. Carte Italiane, 1(14), retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2768w4js, 87.

[109] Rittgers, “Suffering and Consolation”, 76.

[110] Bynum. Holy Feast, 166.

[111] Legenda, 17.

[112] Legenda, 43.

[113] Legenda, 116

[114] Giuliana Cavallini. Catherine of Siena. (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998), xxi.

[115] Legenda, 44.

[116] Legenda, 46-47.

[117] Legenda, 35

[118] Legenda, 113.

[119] She accused Raymond of trying to kill her when he surreptitiously introduced sugar into the water she was drinking. (Legenda, 43).

[120] Legenda, 121-122.

[121] Bynum, Holy Feast, 168.

[122] Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Denial as Action”, 114.

[123] Bell, Holy Anorexia, 50.

[124] Lehmijoki-Gardner, 114.

[125] Legenda, 44.

[126] Legenda, 47-48.

[127] Legenda, 35.

[128] Legenda, 44-45.

[129] Along with other children whom she encouraged in the practice. (Legenda, 27-28).

[130] Legenda, 47-48.

[131] Legenda, 44.

[132] Legenda, 49.

[133] Perhaps unsurprisingly, Andrea does not seem to have appreciated Catherine’s actions. Her public accusations after the event led to Catherine being investigated and having to defend her virginity. The accusations were later withdrawn. (Legenda, 104).

[134] Legenda, 108.

[135] Servant, 70-71.

[136] Servant, 87.

[137] Servant, 90-91.

[138] Servant, 88-89.

[139] Servant, 92.

[140] It seems possible, given his devotion to the example of the Desert Fathers, that Suso had a similar concern to theirs about nocturnal emissions. (See Shaw on this concern in Cassian and Chrystostom, Burden, 14, 137).

[141] Servant, 88.

[142] Servant, 92.

[143] Bynum, Holy Feast, 102.

[144] Bynum, Holy Feast, 104.

[145] Servant, 76.

[146] Servant, 77.

[147] Servant, 93.

[148] Servant, 94.

[149] Servant, 94.

[150] Servant, 96.

[151] Bynum, Holy Feast, 104.

[152] Legenda, 121-122.

[153] Bell, Holy Anorexia, 29. Bell’s thesis is that Catherine was suffering from anorexia partially driven by guilt after the deaths of her sisters, and a tremendous sense of responsibility for the salvation of her family. (Holy Anorexia, 47-48). While this, and particularly Bell’s argument that Catherine lost control over her fasting, seems to have merit, there are questions as to whether the modern diagnostic category of “anorexia” can be applied to Catherine and other medieval women, as noted by John Howe (Review of Holy Anorexia, by Rudolph M. Bell. The Catholic Historical Review 73, no. 1 (1987): 109-10, 109), and, as Anne K. Fishel notes, Bell is on “shakiest ground” when he also partially attributes Catherine’s anorexia to issues with breastfeeding and weaning. (Review of Holy Anorexia, by Rudolph M. Bell. Social Science and Medicine 24, no. 11 (1987): 991-92, 992).

[154] Letter T92/G305/DT19 in Letters, 1:160-161.

[155] Bynum, Holy Feast, 241; cf. Catherine of Siena. The Dialogue. Tr. and ed. Suzanne Noffke. (London: SPCK, 1980), 315.

[156] Shaw, Burden, 5.

[157] On this, Shaw quotes Pseudo-Athanasius (Burden, 2).

[158] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 33.

[159] Legenda, 296.

[160] Letters, 1:161.

[161] Dialogue, 43.

[162] Legenda, 68-69.

[163] Legenda, 71.

[164] Legenda, 102.

[165] Legenda, 102.

[166] Legenda, 104.

[167] Servant, 71

[168] Servant, 76-77.

[169] Servant, 87.

[170] Servant, 93.

[171] Wisdom, 55-56.

[172] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 28.

[173] Following from Gregory the Great’s dictum that “it is the habit of good minds to see a fault where there is none”, although such scrupulosity was increasingly seen as problematic (Dyan Elliott. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004], 211-216).

[174] Legenda, 34.

[175] Grazia Mangano Ragazzi. Obeying the Truth: Discretion in the Spiritual Writings of Saint Catherine of Siena. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199344512.001.0001), 11.

[176] Legenda, 34.

[177] Letter Gardner I/DT52 in Letter, 1:189.

[178] Letter Dupré Theseider II, in Letters, 1:75.

[179] Legenda, 49-50.

[180] Dialogue, 33.

[181] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 49.

[182] Legenda, 258.

[183] Servant, 90.

[184] Servant, 90-91.

[185] In a similar way to early Christian ascetics (Shaw, Burden, 33).

[186] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 243.

[187] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 49.

[188] Servant, 95-96. Suso adds the curious detail that the Virgin’s milk contained “a small, soft lump” which he kept in his mouth for a time afterwards.

[189] Legenda, 104. Christ presented Catherine with a choice between a crown in heaven alongside a crown of thorns on earth, or vice versa. She chose thorns on earth.

[190] Legenda, 109.

[191] Legenda, 113.

[192] Legenda, 116.

[193] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 5.

[194] Donald Duclow. “Theologies of Suffering: Eckhart, Henry Suso and Ursula Fleming.” Eckhart Review 14, no. 1 (2005): 41-61, 43.

[195] Servant, 88-89.

[196] Servant, 91.

[197] Rittgers, “Suffering and Consolation”, 77.

[198] J. Straubhaar-Jones. “Understanding the Visuality of a Medieval Visionary: Fourteenth-Century Dominican Henry Suso’s Interwoven Concepts of Divine Image, Gendered Identity, and Epistemology.” PhD diss., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015. ProQuest (Order No. 3745978), 17.

[199] Letter T225/G121 in Letters, 1:93-94.

[200] Dialogue, 336.

[201] Letter 283/G104/DT47 in Letters, 1:197.

[202] Servant, 101.

[203] Carolyn Muessig, Introduction to A Companion to Catherine of Siena, 5.

[204] Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Denial as Action”, 115.

[205] Karen Scott, “St. Catherine of Siena, ‘Apostola’.” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 61, no. 1 (1992): 34-46, 35.

[206] Karen Scott, “”Mystical Death”, 136.

[207] Bynum, Holy Feast, 166.

[208] Bynum, Holy Feast, 17. While Bynum is careful to note that men, as well as women, performed extreme mortifications (Holy Feast, 94), it is perhaps worth questioning how far we can authoritatively state that “there is no question…that [experiencing pain] was more prominent in women’s religiosity” (Holy Feast, 209) given that our records of Church-sanctioned holy women are mediated to us via their male followers and that, as Bynum writes, “some of the stories men liked to tell about women reflected not so much what women did as what men admired or abhorred.” (Bynum, “Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages” in Raitt, Christian Spirituality [2], 136).

[209] Bynum, Holy Feast, 220.

[210] Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Denial as Action”, 118.

[211] Noffke, Vision, 7.

[212] To use Richard Kieckhefer’s phrasing, quoted in Tobin, “Introduction”, 41.

[213] Frank Tobin suggests that the hagiographical nature of the Life is the reason for stressing Stagel’s involvement (Tobin, “Suso and Stagel”, 131).

[214] Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, 49.

[215] Ingrid Falque, “Daz Man”, 450-451.

[216] Rozenski, “Suso and Rolle”, 67.

[217] Rozenski, 2.

[218] Heather Webb. “Catherine of Siena’s Heart.” Speculum 80, no. 3 (2005): 802-17, 802.

[219] Astell, “Heroic Virtue”, 36.

[220] Caroljane B. Roberson. “Wolves in Lamb’s Clothing: Redeeming the Images of Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno.” MA diss., Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 2009: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/14778/Robersoncb_05_2009.pdf, 22.

[221] Haas, “Schools of Medieval Mysticism”, 153.

[222] Servant, 97.

[223] Servant, 98.

[224] Servant, 100.

[225] Servant, 101-102.

[226] Servant, 103.

[227] Servant, 104-105.

[228] Servant, 107-109.

[229] Servant, 110-113.

[230] Servant, 114-116.

[231] Servant, 117-118.

[232] Servant, 119-120.

[233] Servant, 149-152.

[234] Servant, 169.

[235] Noffke, Vision, 55.

[236] Noffke, 65.

[237] Noffke, 70.

[238] Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Denial as Action”, 114.

[239] Lehmijoki-Gardner, 117.

[240] Lehmijoki-Gardner, 117.

[241] Bynum, Holy Feast, 84.

[242] Bynum, Holy Feast, 86.

[243] Webb, “Catherine of Siena’s Heart”, 815.

[244] Astell, “Heroic Virtue”, 36.

[245] Legenda, 69.

[246] Legenda, 117-118.

[247] Astell, “Heroic Virtue”, 36.

[248] Legenda 118.

[249] Legenda, 117-118.

[250] Astell, “Heroic Virtue”, 36.

[251] Legenda, 121.

[252] Letter T92/G305/DT19 in Letters, 1:160-161.

[253] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 136.

[254] Scott, “Mystical Death”, 140.

[255] Elliot, Proving Woman, 194.

[256] Elliott states that, among others, Lucia of Narni, Sibyl of Metz, Magdalena Beutler, and Rixendis of Narbonne were all accused or convicted of fraudulent asceticism. (Proving Woman, 194-203).

[257] Raymond records that his ‘conversion’ to belief in Catherine came when she briefly transformed before his eyes into Christ (Legenda, 62).

[258] Legenda, 387.

[259] Bell, Holy Anorexia, 50.

[260] Elliott, Proving Woman, 65.

[261] Legenda, 47.

[262] Servant, 92.

[263] Servant, 97.

[264] Servant, 99.

[265] Quoted in Giuliana Cavallini. Catherine of Siena. (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998), 48.

[266] Servant, 139-140.

[267] Suso, “The Little Book of Letters”, in The Exemplar, 338.

[268] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 127-128.

[269] Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, 49.

[270] Cavallini, Catherine of Siena, 49.

[271] Mowbray, Pain and Suffering, 66-67.

[272] Dialogue, 28.

[273] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 31.

[274] Dialogue, 29.

[275] Dialogue, 40.

[276] Bell, Holy Anorexia, 28.

[277] Dialogue, 42-43.

[278] Dialogue, 189.

[279] Letter T314/G343 in Letters, 2:487.

[280] Duclow, “Theologies of Suffering”, 42.

[281] Straubhaar-Jones, “Visuality”, 84.

[282] Straubhaar-Jones, 67.

[283] Rittgers, “Suffering and Consolation”, 75.

[284] Wisdom, 275.

[285] Suso, “The Little Book of Truth”, in The Exemplar, 317.

[286] Rittgers, “Suffering and Consolation”, 76.

[287] Christopher Kurpiewski suggests that in Dominican convents of the kind Suso oversaw in this period excessive corporal mortification would also attract charges of vanity. (The Confessor’s Daughters: Women Religious and the Dominican Order in Medieval Germany, PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014. ProQuest [Order No. 3642109], 180).

[288] Dialogue, 196.

[289] Dialogue, 187.

[290] Dialogue, 40.

[291] Dialogue, 43.

[292] Dialogue, 43-44.

[293] Dialogue, 196.

[294] Dialogue, 198.

[295] Duclow, “Theologies of Suffering”, 44.

[296] Servant, 132.

[297] Which he had pasted on the walls of his chapel, and of which he sent copies to her (Servant, 137).

[298] Servant, 139-140.

[299] Servant, 140.

[300] Rozenski, “Suso and Rolle”, 79.

[301] Servant, 140-141.

[302] Suso, “Little Book of Letters”, 357.

[303] Servant, 141.

[304] Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, 43.

[305] Suso, “Little Book of Letters”,341.

[306] Duclow, “Theologies of Suffering”, 46.

[307] Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Denial as Action”, 119.

[308] Scott, “Apostola”, 37.

[309] Cavallini, Catherine of Siena, 133.

[310] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 28.

[311] Vauchez, Sainthood, 191.

[312] Cohen, Modulated Scream, 130.

[313] Kurpiewski, “Confessor’s Daughters”, 185.