Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XI

FLESH

1300: M

ILAN

When the Dominicans and their agents arrived at the abbey of Chiaravalle, they headed straight for the final resting place of Guglielma. Almost twenty years had passed since her death, and in that time there had been a steady stream of pilgrims to her tomb. Although she was not a native of Milan – and indeed had only come to Italy in 1260, when she was fifty – the aura of mystery that clung to her had done much to enhance her fame. She was said to have had royal blood; to have been the daughter of the king of Bohemia; to have spent time in England married to a prince. True or not, it was certain that in Milan Guglielma had lived a life of spotless poverty. And so it was, after her death, that people had come to leave candles and offerings before her tomb. Twice a year, the monks of Chiaravalle would publicly celebrate her memory. Crowds would flock to pay their respects. Like Elizabeth of Hungary, a woman of similar miracle-working power, and quite possibly her cousin, Guglielma was hailed as a saint.

The inquisitors knew better. They had not come to light candles. Instead, taking crowbars to Guglielma’s tomb, they levered it open, and scooped out the mouldering corpse. A great fire was lit. The bones were burned to ashes, and scattered on the winds. Guglielma’s tomb was smashed to pieces. Her images were crushed underfoot. Brutal though these measures might have seemed, they were urgently required. Shocking revelations had come to light. All that summer, inquisitors had been catching on their nostrils the stench of a truly monstrous heresy. Following where it led, they had tracked it to the very summit of Milanese society. The ringleader, a nun named Maifreda da Pirovano, was the cousin of Mateo Visconti, the effective lord of the city. But once the truth was out no one – not even her cousin – had been able to save her. She was burned at the stake. Fitting punishment for a woman whose ambition could not possibly have been more subversive, more arrogant, more grotesque. In any heretic it would have been shocking – but in a woman especially so. Maifreda had taught her followers that she was destined to rule all Christendom: that she would be elected pope.

Incubating in Milan had been a cult of rare and awful daring. Guglielma, so it was reported a year after Maifreda’s execution, had come to the city ‘saying that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women; and she baptised women in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of herself’.¹ This conviction, that Christendom stood on the brink of a radical new beginning, was not original to her. Back in the time of Innocent III, a monk named Joachim, brooding over the Bible in the abbey of Fiore, deep in the wilds of southern Italy, had fathomed in its pages a prophetic message. The ages of the world, so he had taught, were threefold. First, spanning the aeons that separated the Creation from the coming of Christ, had been the Age of the Father; then had come the Age of the Son. Now that too was drawing to a close. In its place was dawning the Age of the Spirit. Such a prospect was one that many found thrillingly seductive. Large numbers of Franciscans assumed that it referred to them. No one, though, had given it quite so distinctive a gloss as Guglielma: 1260, the year of her arrival in Milan, was the very date foretold by Joachim as the beginning of the new age. Whether sanctioned by Guglielma herself or not, her followers had come to believe that she was ‘the Holy Spirit and the true God’.² Her death had done nothing to dampen this conviction. Her disciples, under the charismatic leadership of Maifreda, claimed to have seen her risen again. The Church, in the new age of the Spirit, would be scoured of its corruption. Boniface VIII, the reigning pope, and a man notorious for his cruelty, greed and corruption, would be deposed and replaced by Maifreda. The cardinals – senior officials in the Church who, from 1179 onwards, had been granted exclusive voting rights in papal elections – would all be women as well. The Age of the Spirit was to be a feminine one.

Here was a heresy that was bound to seem, to any inquisitor, almost a personal affront. Talk of female priests, let alone a female pope, was laughable. God, expelling Eve from Eden, had sentenced her not just to suffer the pains of childbirth, but to be ruled over by her husband. It was a judgement that numerous Church Fathers had upheld: ‘Do you not know that you are each an Eve?’³ Augustine especially, by embedding in his works the doctrine of original sin, had bequeathed a sombre sense of the muscle and blood of every womb as infected by the ineradicable taint of disobedience to God. Formidably though women had served as patrons of the Church – as queens, as regents, as abbesses – they had rarely thought to aspire to the priesthood. The great convulsion of reformatio, by enshrining chastity as the supreme proof of a man’s closeness to God, had only confirmed priests in their dread of women as temptresses. The monk freed from his lusts after dreaming that a man ‘ran at him with a terrible swiftness, and cruelly mutilated him with a knife’,⁴ was typical in his yearning to be spared any sense of dependence on women. Friars, who did not immure themselves in monasteries, but instead walked streets crowded with the opposite sex, observing their hair, their breasts, their hips, had to be even more sternly on their guard. Woman, so one Dominican thundered, was ‘the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest, a hindrance to devotion’.⁵ What were priests to do, confronted by such a menace, but maintain the opposite sex in its divinely sanctioned state of subordination?

This, of course, was to flatter prejudices that had always come naturally to men. Theologians who justified the masculinity of the priesthood by pointing out that neither Jesus nor any of his apostles had been women could cite an authority even older than the gospels. ‘The female,’ Aristotle had written, ‘is, as it were, an inadequate male.’⁶ Just as the great philosopher had provided inquisitors with a model of how to conduct an interrogation, so had his writings on biology swung the immense weight of his prestige behind a perspective on female inferiority that many clerics were all too ready to embrace. Steeled as they were to see in their own virginity the proof of an almost angelic fortitude, they found in the model of physiology taught by the ancients confirmation of all their darkest, their most festering fears. Women oozed; they bled; like bogs at their most treacherous, they were wet, and soft, and swallowed up men entire. Increasingly, wherever Aristotle was taught, Eve’s daughters were being measured by standards that were less biblical than Greek.

Women, physically the weaker sex and formed by nature for pregnancies, could never be reckoned the equals of men. If Guglielma’s was the most radical protest against this assumption, then it was not the only one. Scholars who cited Aristotle as justification for viewing women as biologically inferior had to reckon with profound ambiv-alences within the Bible itself. The sanction given husbands to rule over their wives was not the only perspective provided by scripture on relations between the two sexes. Thomas Aquinas – great admirer of Aristotle though he was – had struggled to square the assumption that a woman was merely a defective version of a man with the insistence in Genesis that both had been divinely crafted for precise and specific purposes. Eve’s body, ‘ordained as it was by nature for the purposes of generation’, was no less the creation of God, ‘who is the universal author of nature’, than Adam’s had been.⁷ The implications of this for the understanding of the divine were too glaring to be ignored. ‘But you, Jesus, good lord, are you not also a mother?’ Anselm had asked. ‘Are you not that mother who, like a hen, collects her chickens under wings? Truly, master, you are a mother.’⁸ Abbots, even as they lived their lives in chastity, might not hesitate to compare themselves to a nursing woman, breasts filled with ‘the milk of doctrine’.⁹ It was no shame for a priest to talk of himself in such a manner – for the feminine as well as the masculine was a reflection of the divine. God the Father was also a mother.

But what did such teaching mean for women themselves? Paul, writing to the Galatians, had insisted that there was no longer either male or female, for all were one in Christ Jesus. Yet even he, on occasion, had felt unsettled by the sheer subversiveness of this message. The equality of men and women before God was a concept that he had often flinched from putting into practice. Hence his prevarications over the vexed issue of whether women should be permitted to lead prayers and to prophesy, one moment insisting that they should not, and another that they might – but only if veiled. Letters written in his name after his death, and incorporated into the canon of scripture, had provided an altogether more emphatic resolution. ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.’¹⁰ Here, in this single verse, was all the justification that the inquisitors had needed to suppress Guglielma’s cult: to haul her corpse from out of its tomb, and to consign Maifreda to the flames.

Yet the Dominicans, great scholars that they were, and thoroughly steeped in Paul’s teachings, were not blind to the value that the apostle had placed on the role of women in his churches. Dominic himself, only two years after the establishment of his order, had founded a convent in Madrid. His successor as Master General, a Saxon nobleman by the name of Jordan, had been a great sponsor of Dominican nuns. Writing regularly to one of these, the prioress of a convent in Bologna, he had done so not merely as her spiritual director, but as an admirer of her often imperious charisma. The pattern set by this relationship was one that many Dominicans had followed. Priests though they were, they readily stood in awe of the closeness their female correspondents seemed to have to God. They knew that their Lord, risen from the dead, had first revealed himself, not to his disciples, but to a woman. In John’s gospel, it was told how Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus cured by him of possession by demons, had initially mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener – but then had recognised him. ‘I have seen the Lord!’¹¹ The Dominicans, while they never doubted their own authority as clerics, knew that authority had its limits. Power – even that of a man over a woman – was of necessity an ambivalent and treacherous thing. It was those without it who were most surely the favourites of God.

‘My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.’¹² So the Virgin Mary, after learning that she was to bear the Son of God, had sung. No human being had been so honoured; no human being raised so high. Even as the bones of Guglielma were being reduced to ashes, even as the legal and political status of women across Christendom was steadily deteriorating, even as the female body was being excoriated in ever more abusive terms by preachers and moralists as a vessel of corruption, so the radiance of the Queen of Heaven, full of grace, blessed among women, blazed with the brightness of the brightest star. ‘O womb, O flesh, in whom and from whom the creator was created, and God was made incarnate.’¹³ The virgin mother who had redeemed the fault of Eve, the mortal who had conceived within her uterus the timeless infinitude of the divine, Mary could embody for even the humblest and most unlettered peasant all the numerous paradoxes that lay at the heart of the Christian faith. It needed no years of study in a university, no familiarity with the works of Aristotle, to comprehend the devotion that a mother might feel to her son. Perhaps this was why, the more that scholars laboured to elucidate in vast and intimidating works of theology the subtleties of God’s purpose, fusing revelation and logic in profound and learned ways, so the more, in works of art, were Mary and her son portrayed as joined in simple joy. So too, in scenes of Christ’s death, was the Virgin increasingly represented as the equal in suffering and dignity of her son. No longer was the gaze of the Queen of Heaven as serene as once it had been. Emotions common to all were being rendered that much more Christian. Enshrined at the very heart of the great mysteries elucidated by Christianity, of birth and death, of happiness and suffering, of communion and loss, was the love of a woman for her child.

Here, to Christians fearful of where the world might be heading, was a precious reassurance: one that did not depend upon any policing of heresy, any demands for reformatio. Maifreda, teaching her followers that she was destined to be pope, had stood in the line of a thoroughly familiar tradition: one that aimed at setting all of Christendom on the correct foundations, and scouring it clean of corruption. Confident that the papacy remained the surest vehicle of reform, she had dreamed of doing as Gregory VII had done, and seizing the commanding heights of the Roman Church. Her ambition had always been a vain one, of course; but even popes themselves, amid all the gathering challenges and upheavals of the age, were discovering the limits of their authority. Two years after Maifreda’s execution, Boniface VIII was prompted by the open defiance of Philip IV, the king of France, to issue the most ringing statement of papal supremacy ever made: ‘We declare, state and define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’ What, though, from the lips of Innocent III might have sounded intimidating, from the lips of Boniface was merely shrill. In September 1303, Philip’s agents seized the pope at his summer retreat outside Rome. Even though he was freed after three days of captivity, the shock of it all proved too much for him, and within a month he was dead. The new pope, a Frenchman, was altogether more securely under Philip’s thumb. In 1309, he settled in Avignon. Decades passed, popes came and went, but none returned to Rome. An immense palace, complete with banqueting halls, gardens and a private steam-room for the pope, came to sprawl above the Rhône. Moralists appalled by its display of luxury and wealth began to speak of a Babylonian captivity. Hopes for the dawning of an age of the Holy Spirit seemed bitterly disappointed.

Still worse shocks were to come – and Christians, amid the struggle to cope with them, would be obliged to negotiate in new and momentous ways the relationship between spirit and flesh.

Brides of Christ

When workmen digging the foundations of a new house uncovered the statue, experts from across Siena flocked to admire the find. It did not take them long to identify the nude woman as Venus, the goddess of love. Buried and forgotten for centuries, she constituted a rare trophy for the city: an authentic masterpiece of ancient sculpture. Few people were better qualified to appreciate it than the Sienese. Renowned across Italy and far beyond for the brilliance of their artists, they knew beauty when they saw it. Everyone agreed that it would be a scandal for such a prize to be hidden away. Instead, the statue was taken to the Campo, the city’s great central piazza, and placed on top of a fountain. ‘And she was paid great honour.’¹⁴

At once, everything began to go wrong. A financial crash was followed by a rout of the Sienese army. Then, some five years after the discovery of the Venus, horror almost beyond comprehension brought devastation to the city. A plague, arriving from the east, and spreading with such lethal virulence across the whole of Christendom that it came to be known simply as the Great Dying, reached Siena in May 1348. For months it raged. ‘The infected perished almost immediately, swelling beneath the armpits and in the groin, and dropping down while talking.’¹⁵ Pits were filled to overflowing with the dead. Work on the city’s cathedral was abandoned for ever. By the time the plague finally eased, over half of Siena’s population had been wiped out. But still disasters kept coming. An army of mercenaries extorted a massive bribe from the government. There was a coup. A humiliating military defeat was inflicted on the city by its nearest and bitterest rival, Florence. Leaders in the new governing council, looking from the Palazzo Pubblico to the statue in the Campo outside, knew what to blame. ‘From the moment we found the statue, evils have been ceaseless.’¹⁶ This paranoia was hardly surprising. Admiration for ancient sculpture could not outweigh the devastating evidence for divine anger. Almost eight hundred years before, during the pontificate of Gregory the Great, it was cries of repentance that had halted the plague. It was told how Saint Michael, standing above the Tiber, had held aloft a blazing sword – and then, accepting the Romans’ prayers, had sheathed it, and at once the plague had stopped. Now, overwhelmed by calamity, the Sienese scrabbled to show repentance. On 7 November 1357, workmen pulled down the statue of Venus. Hauling it away from the piazza, they smashed it into pieces. Chunks of it were buried just beyond the border with Florence.

The insult offered by the honouring of Venus had been very great. Siena was the city of the Virgin. Her tutelary presence was everywhere. In the Palazzo Pubblico, an immense fresco of her dominated the room where the governing council did its business; in the Campo, the fan-shaped design of the piazza evoked the folds of her protective cloak. Those who had demanded the destruction of the Venus were right to see in its delectable and unapologetic nudity a challenge to everything that Mary represented. A thousand years had passed since the original toppling of the statue. In that time, the understanding of the erotic had been transfigured to a degree that would have been unimaginable to those who, in cities across the Roman world, had offered sacrifice to the goddess of love. Convulsive though the experience of reformatio had certainly been, it was merely the aftershock of a far more seismic event: the coming of Christianity itself. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more evident than in the dimensions of desire. It was not just Venus who had been banished. So too had gods fêted for their rapes. A sexual order rooted in the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors, to use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal, had been ended. Paul’s insistence that the body of every human being was a holy vessel had triumphed. Instincts taken for granted by the Romans had been recast as sin. Generations of monks and bishops, of emperors and kings, looking to tame the violent currents of human desire, had laboured to erect great dams and dykes, to redirect their flood-tide, to channel their flow. Never before had an attempt to recalibrate sexual morality been attempted on such a scale. Never before had one enjoyed such total success.

‘We say with the dear apostle Paul: “Through Christ crucified, who is within me and strengthens me, I can do anything.” When we do this, the Devil is left defeated.’¹⁷ Three decades after the coming of the plague to Siena, a young woman from the city by the name of Catherine wrote to a monk much troubled by how chill and inscrutable the workings of the universe appeared. Nothing, she reassured him – not disease, not despair – could snuff out a gift that was given in love to every mortal by God: free will. The phrase was one with an ancient pedigree. First coined by Justin, the great apologist of the generation before Irenaeus, it had offered to Christians a transformative reassurance: that they were not the slaves of the stars, nor of fate, nor of demons, but were instead their own masters. No surer way existed to demonstrate this, to stand free and autonomous in defiance of all the manifold evils of the fallen world, than to exercise continence. Catherine herself, by 1377, had become Christendom’s most celebrated exemplar of this. From childhood, she had made a sacrifice of her appetites. She fasted for days at a time; her diet, on those rare occasions when she did eat, would consist exclusively of raw herbs and the eucharist; she wore a chain tightly bound around her waist. Naturally, it was with sexual yearnings that the Devil most tempted her. ‘He brought vile pictures of men and women behaving loosely before her mind, and foul figures before her eyes, and obscene words to her ears, shameless crowds dancing around her, howling and sniggering and inviting her to join them.’¹⁸ But join them she never did.

Yet virginity, to Catherine, was not an end in itself. Rather, it was an active and heroic state. Proof against the touches of a man, her body was a vessel of the Holy Spirit, radiant with power. Catherine, the illiterate daughter of a dyer, was acknowledged by all as a donna, a ‘free woman’: ‘the owner and mistress of herself’. On ‘the tempestuous sea that is this life of shadows’,¹⁹ her virgin body was her vessel. Navigating the tides and currents of a cruelly troubled age, she came to offer to great multitudes of Christians a precious reassurance: that holiness might indeed be manifest on earth. Even the greatest were not immune to her charisma. In June 1376, she arrived in Avignon, where she set to urging the pope, Gregory XI, that he should signal his commitment to God’s purpose by returning to Rome. Three months later, he was on his way. The venture, to Catherine’s bitter disappointment, proved a disaster. Barely a year after arriving in Rome, Gregory XI was dead. Two rival popes, one an Italian and one an aristocrat from Geneva, were elected in his place. At stake was the issue of where the papacy should be based: the Lateran or Avignon. Catherine, loyally rallying to the Italian pope, Urban VI, hurried to his side. Her presence in Rome proved a key factor in shoring up his base. At one point, Urban even summoned his cardinals to one of the city’s churches, there to hear Catherine lecture them on the rights and wrongs of the schism. ‘This weak woman,’ he declared admiringly, ‘puts us all to shame.’²⁰

Her death in the spring of 1380 did nothing to shake this conviction. Catherine’s emaciated body, witness as it was to her spectacular feats of fasting, served as a salutary reminder to the pope and his court of what the Church itself should properly be. Not merely a virgin, she had been a bride. As a young girl pledging herself to Christ, she had defied her parents’ plans to marry her by hacking off all her hair. She was, so she had told them, already betrothed. Their fury and consternation could not make her change her mind. Sure enough, in 1367, when she was twenty years old, and Siena was celebrating the end of carnival, her reward had arrived. In the small room in her parents’ house where she would fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin and various saints, Paul and Dominic included, had served as witnesses. King David had played his harp. The wedding ring was Christ’s own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.* Invisible though it was to others, Catherine had worn it from that moment on. Intimacy of this order with the divine was beyond the reach of any man. True, there were some who mocked Catherine’s claims. In Avignon, when she went into one of her states of ecstasy, a cardinal’s mistress had pricked her foot with a pin to see if she was faking. Gregory XI and Urban VI, though, had both known better than to doubt. They understood the mystery revealed to them by Catherine. The Church, too, was a bride of Christ. ‘Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.’ So a letter attributed to Paul, and included in the canon of scripture, had instructed. ‘For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.’²¹ In Catherine’s devotion to her Lord – a devotion that she had not hesitated to define in burning and exultant tones as desire – was both a reproach and an inspiration to all the Church.

Here, in this sacral understanding of marriage, was another marker of the revolution that Christianity had brought to the erotic. The insistence of scripture that a man and a woman, whenever they took to the marital bed, were joined as Christ and his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity. If the wife was instructed to submit to her husband, then so equally was the husband instructed to be faithful to his wife. Here, by the standards of the age into which Christianity had been born, was an obligation that demanded an almost heroic degree of self-denial. That Roman law – unlike the Talmud, and unlike the customs of most other ancient peoples – defined marriage as a monogamous institution had not for a moment meant that it required men to display life-long fidelity. Husbands had enjoyed a legal right to divorce – and, of course, to forcing themselves on their inferiors – pretty much as they pleased. This was why, in its long and arduous struggle to trammel the sexual appetites of Christians, the Church had made marriage the particular focus of its attentions. The double standards that for so long had been a feature of marital ethics had come to be sternly patrolled. Joined together under the watchful eye of Christ, men were commanded to be as faithful to their wives as their wives were to them. Divorce – except in the very rarest of circumstances – was prohibited. To cast off a wife was to ‘render her an adulteress’.²² So Jesus himself had declared. The bonds of a Christian marriage, mutual and indissoluble as they were, served to join man and woman together as they had never been joined before.

Christ, placing his ring on Catherine’s finger, had defined salvation as an ‘everlasting wedding-feast in heaven’.²³ That marriage was a sacrament, a visible symbol of God’s grace, was a doctrine that it had taken the Church many centuries to bring Christians to accept. The assumption that marriage existed to cement alliances between two families – an assumption as universal as it was primordial – had not easily been undermined. Only once the great apparatus of canon law was in place had the Church at last been in a position to bring the institution firmly under its control. Catherine, refusing her parents’ demands that she marry their choice of husband, insisting that she was pledged to another man, had been entirely within her rights as a Christian. No couple could be forced into a betrothal, nor into wedlock, nor into a physical coupling. Priests were authorised to join couples without the knowledge of their parents – or even their permission. It was consent, not coercion, that constituted the only proper foundation of a marriage. The Church, by pledging itself to this conviction, and putting it into law, was treading on the toes of patriarchs everywhere. Here was a development pregnant with implications for the future. Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family. God’s authority was being identified, not with the venerable authority of a father to impose his will on his children, but with an altogether more subversive principle: freedom of choice.

So strange was the Christian conception of marriage that it had always raised eyebrows in the lands beyond Christendom. From the very earliest days of Islamic scholarship, Muslims – whose licence to enjoy a variety of wives and slaves was sanctioned directly by the Qur’an itself – had viewed the Church’s insistence on monogamy with amused bewilderment. Yet Christians, far from feeling nonplussed by such contempt, had only been confirmed in their determination to bring proper order to pagan appetites. Saint Boniface, acknowledging the appeal of polygamy to fallen man, had shuddered in revulsion at the bestiality it represented: ‘a base defilement of everything, as though it were whinnying horses or braying asses mixing it up with their adulterous lusts’.²⁴ His disgust, at the entanglement of limbs that should never have been permitted to intertwine, at the joining of flesh that should for ever have been kept apart, had run very deep. Most repellent of all, a constant menace among those ignorant of Christ’s love and of his laws, was the proclivity for incest. Again and again, writing to Rome, Boniface had demanded reassurance on a particularly pressing point: the degree of relationship within which a couple might legitimately be permitted to marry. The pope, in his replies, had made a great show of liberality. ‘Since moderation is better than strictness of discipline, especially toward so uncivilised a people, they may contract marriage after the fourth degree.’²⁵ Almost half a millennium on, and the canons of the great council summoned by Innocent III to the Lateran had ordained the same. This as well had been advertised as a liberalising measure. After all, as a canon of the council served notice, the degrees within which marriages were forbidden had for a long while been seven.

Of all the measures taken by the Church to shape and mould the Christian people, few were to prove more enduring in their consequences. Back in ancient times, when the statue of Venus retrieved from a building site in Siena had been worshipped as a portrait of a living goddess, the word familia had signified a vast and sprawling household. Clans, dependents, slaves: all were family. But that had changed. The Church, in its determination to place married couples, and not ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanctioned by canons were classed as legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church: ‘in-laws’. The hold of clans, as a result, had begun to slip. Ties between kin had progressively weakened. Households had shrunk. The fabric of Christendom had come to possess a thoroughly distinctive weave.

Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family.

Casting the First Stone

On one occasion, when Christ appeared to Catherine of Siena, he did so accompanied by Mary Magdalene. Catherine, weeping with an excess of love, remembered how Mary, kneeling before the feet of her Lord, had once wet his feet with her own tears, and then wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, and anointed them with perfume. ‘Sweetest daughter,’ Christ told her, ‘for your comfort I give you Mary Magdalene for your mother.’ Gratefully, Catherine accepted the offer. ‘And from that moment on,’ so her confessor reported, ‘she felt entirely at one with the Magdalene.’²⁶

To be paired with the woman who had first beheld the risen Christ was, of course, a rare mark of divine favour. From childhood, Catherine had taken the Magdalene as a particular role model. Far from betraying complacency, though, this had borne witness to the opposite: Catherine’s own gnawing sense of sin. As reported by Luke, the woman who wept before Jesus, and anointed his feet, had ‘lived a sinful life’.²⁷ Although she was never named, the identification of her with the Magdalene was one that had enjoyed wide currency ever since Gregory the Great, back in 591, had first made it in a sermon. Over time – and despite the lack of any actual evidence for it in the gospels – the precise character of her ‘sinful life’ had become part of the fabric of common knowledge. Kneeling before Jesus, seeking his forgiveness, she had done so as a penitent whore. Catherine, by accepting the Magdalene as her mother, was embracing the full startling radicalism of a warning given by Christ: that prostitutes would enter the kingdom of God before priests.

Here, for a Church that demanded celibacy of its priesthood and preached the sanctity of marriage, was an unsettling reminder that its Saviour had been quite as ready to forgive sins of the flesh as to condemn them. The lesson was one that many moralists understandably struggled to take on board. Women who made their living by tempting men into transgression seemed the ultimate manifestation of everything that the Church Fathers had condemned in Eve. The more attractive a whore, so one of Abelard’s students had argued, the less onerous should be the penance for buying her services. The quickening pulse of reformatio had only intensified this characterisation of a prostitute’s embraces as a cess-pit into which men might not help but fall. Keeping pace with the escalating campaign against heresy, a series of initiatives had aimed at draining the swamp. In Paris, for instance, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of prostitution be expelled from the city – just as though they were lepers. Then, in 1254, a notably pious king had sought to banish them from the whole of France. The predictable failure of this measure had only confirmed the Church authorities in their anxiety to have sex-work quarantined. Just like Jews, prostitutes were commanded to advertise their own infamy. It was forbidden them to wear a veil; on their dresses, falling from their shoulders, they were obliged to sport a knotted cord. So dreaded was their touch that, in cities as far afield as London and Avignon, they were banned altogether from handling goods on market stalls.

Yet always, lurking at the back of even the sternest preacher’s mind, was the example of Christ himself. In John’s gospel, it was recorded that a woman taken in adultery had been brought before him by the Pharisees. Looking to trap him, they had asked if, in accordance with the Law of Moses, she should be stoned. Jesus had responded by bending down and writing in the dust with his finger; but then, when the Pharisees persisted in questioning him, he had straightened up again. ‘If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ The crowd, shamed by these words, had hesitated – and then melted away. Finally, only the woman had been left. ‘Has no one condemned you?’ Jesus had asked. ‘No one, Sir,’ she had answered. ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.’

Contempt, then, was not the only response that women who had succumbed to sexual temptation might provoke among dutiful Christians. There was sympathy for them too, and compassion. Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the low: tax-collectors and whores. Endowing a hospital in Rome, he specified that it offer a refuge to sex-workers from walking the streets. To marry one, he preached, was a work of the sublimest piety. Friars – although prevented by their vows from going quite as far as that – felt themselves charged with a particular mission to do as Christ had done, and welcome fallen women into the kingdom of God. The French nickname for Dominicans – jacobins – had soon become a nickname for prostitutes too. Prostitutes themselves, perfectly aware of the example offered them by the Magdalene, veered between tearful displays of repentance and the conviction that God loved them just as much as any other sinner. Catherine, certainly, whenever she met with a sex-worker, would never fail to assure her of Christ’s mercy. ‘Turn to the Virgin. She will lead you straight into the presence of her son.’²⁸

Yet there were some sins that could not be forgiven. In the decades that followed Catherine’s death, the Christian people continued to look with dread to the heavens, and shudder before the divine anger that was so plainly brewing. Plague; war; the papal schism: evils of such an order could only be God’s judgement on Christendom. Moralists versed in the Old Testament knew all too well what might follow. In Genesis, the annihilation was recorded of two cities: Sodom and Gomorrah. Because they had become rotten through with sin, God had condemned them to a terrible collective punishment. Burning sulphur had rained down from the heavens; smoke like that from a furnace had risen up from the plain on which the two cities stood; everything living, even the very weeds, had been destroyed. Only melted rock had been left to mark the spot. From that moment on, the memory of Sodom and Gomorrah had served God’s people as a terrible warning of what might happen to them, were their own society to become similarly cancerous with evil. Old Testament prophets, arraigning their countrymen of sin, were forever prophesying their ruin. ‘They are all like Sodom to me.’²⁹

But what precisely had been the sin of Sodom? The key to understanding that lay not in Genesis, but in Paul’s letters. Writing to the Christians of Rome, the apostle had identified as the surest and most terrifying measure of humanity’s alienation from God’s love the sexual depravity of gentile society. One aspect of it more than any other had disgusted him. ‘Men committed indecent acts with other men.’³⁰ Here, in Paul’s formulation, was a perspective on sexual relations that Roman men would barely have recognised. The key to their erotic sense of themselves was not the gender of the people they slept with, but whether, in the course of having sex they took the active or the passive role. Deviancy, to the Romans, was pre-eminently a male allowing himself to be used as though he were a female. Paul, by condemning the master who casually spent himself inside a slaveboy no less than the man who offered himself up to oral or anal penetration, had imposed on the patterns of Roman sexuality a thoroughly alien paradigm: one derived, in large part, from his upbringing as a Jew. Paul had been steeped in Torah. Twice the Law of Moses prohibited the lying of men with other men ‘as one lies with a woman’.³¹ Paul, though, in his letter to the Romans, had given this prohibition a novel twist. Among the gentiles, he warned, it was not only men who committed indecent acts with others of their own sex. ‘Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.’³² A momentous denunciation. By mapping women who slept with women onto men who slept with men, Paul had effectively created an entire new category of sexual behaviour. The consequence was yet another ramping-up of the revolution brought by Christianity to the dimension of the erotic. Just as the concept of paganism would never have come into existence without the furious condemnation of it by the Church, so the notion that men and women who slept with people of their own sex were sharing in the same sin, one that obscenely parodied the natural order of things, was a purely Christian one.

The originality of Paul’s conception was manifest, in the early centuries of the Church, by the struggle to find a word for it. Nothing existed in either Greek or Latin, nor in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Conveniently to hand, though, was the story of Sodom. Christian scholars, noting the city’s fate, could not help but wonder what its inhabitants might have been up to, that God had felt called to obliterate them. ‘That we should understand sulphur as signifying the stench of the flesh,’ opined Gregory the Great, ‘the history of the holy Scriptures itself testifies, when it narrates that God rained down fire and sulphur upon Sodom.’³³ Nevertheless, it was only amid the convulsions of that revolutionary period, the age of Gregory VII, that the word ‘sodomy’ itself gained widespread currency³⁴ – and even then its definition remained imprecise. Same-sex intercourse, although its primary meaning, was not its only one. Moralists regularly used the word to describe a broad range of sinister deviancies. Inevitably, perhaps, it was left to Thomas Aquinas to offer clarity. ‘Copulation with a member of the same sex, male with male, or female with female, as stated by the Apostle – this is called the vice of sodomy.’

The effect of this clarification, among those charged with the moral stewardship of the Christian people, was to give a new and sharper definition to their anxieties about angering God. In Italy especially, where cities were both wealthier and more numerous than in the rest of Christendom, the shadow of the doom that had claimed Sodom and Gomorrah lay particularly dark. By 1400, amid recurrent bouts of plague, dread that the failure to cleanse a city of sodomy might risk the annihilation of its entire population was general across the peninsula. In Venice, a succession of spectacular sex scandals saw the establishment in 1418 of the Collegium Sodomitarum: a magistracy specifically charged with the eradication of ‘a crime which threatens the city with ruin’.³⁵ Whether in dancing schools or in fencing classes, its agents sought to sniff out sodomites wherever they might consort. Six years later, in Florence, the greatest preacher of his day was invited to mark the approach of Easter by giving three consecutive sermons on sodomy – a commission which he accepted with alacrity. Bernardino, a Franciscan from Siena, was a master in the art of working a crowd, ‘now sweet and gentle, now sad and grave, with a voice so flexible that he could do with it whatever he wished’³⁶ – and the evils of sodomy were a theme on which he waxed particularly hot.

Walking the streets of his native city, he would sometimes hear the spectral calling-out of unborn infants against the sodomites who were denying them existence. One night, waking with a start, he listened to them make the whole of Siena – the courtyards, the streets, the towers – echo to their cries: ‘To the fire, to the fire, to the fire!’³⁷ Now, preaching in Florence, Bernardino had come to a city so notorious for its depravities that the German word for sodomite was, quite simply, Florenzer. The friar, making play with his listeners’ emotions as only he could, roused them to repeated climaxes of shame, disgust and fear. When he warned his congregation that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah threatened to be theirs, they swayed, and moaned, and sobbed. When he urged them to show what they thought of sodomites by spitting on the floor, the din of expectorations was like that of a thunderstorm. When, in the great square outside the church, he set fire to a massive pile of the fripperies and fashions to which sodomites were notoriously partial, the crowds stood reverently, feeling the heat of the flames against their cheeks, gazing in awe at the bonfire of the vanities.

Seventy years previously, in 1348, as Florence was reeling before the first devastating impact of the plague, and its streets were choked by piles of the dead, a man named Agostino di Ercole had been consigned, like Bernardino’s vanities, to fire. A ‘dedicated sodomite’,³⁸ he had been wallowing in sin for years. Nevertheless, at a time when the most terrifying proof of God’s anger imaginable was devastating Florence, he had refused to show repentance. Indeed, he had barely acknowledged his guilt. It was quite impossible, so Agostino had insisted, for him to extinguish the furnace of his desires. He had been unable to help himself. Naturally, this excuse had cut no ice with his judges. No one committed sin except by choice. The possibility that a man might sleep with other men, not out of any perverse inclination to evil, but simply because it was his nature, was too much of a paradox for any decent Christian to sanction. Even Bernardino, despite his obsession with rooting out sodomy, struggled to keep Aquinas’ definition of it clearly before him. At various times, he might use the word to describe bestiality, or masturbation, or anal sex between a man and his wife. Aquinas and Agostino, the saint and the sinner, the celibate and the sodomite, were both of them ahead of their times. Almost fifteen hundred years after Paul, the notion that men or women might be defined sexually by their attraction to people of the same gender remained too novel, too incomprehensible for most to grasp.

In matters of the flesh – as in so much else – the Christian revolution still had a long way to run.