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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
This paper deals with the physical as well as spiritual dimension of pilgrimage on the basis of the life of Dorothea of Montau as recounted by John of Marienwerder. Dorothea's extensive traveling, her marital problems, her visions and the ultimate enclosure make her a typical example of late medieval female saint. Yet, it is not only her visionary experiences but the political situation in late medieval Prussia that made John of Marienwerder perceive and construct her life as a pilgrimage which culminates with internal exile, the exile within herself, the anchoress cell in the cathedral at Marienwerder.
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I never met Margaret Schlauch but her book scared the first year students who, as part of their course on the History of English literature, were studying texts and their contexts of the then, quite "alien", English medieval culture. Her student (Jacek Fisiak) was also an almost mythical and equally scary figure, terrifying third year students with the most difficult subject on the curriculum, the history of the English language. For a Polish student, Schlauch's English medieval literature and its social foundations (and subsequently her book on the English language) was a book full of the unfamiliar things such as Anglo-Saxon literature and mystical writings.
Margeret Schlauch wrote only a short sub-chapter on the reformers and mystics (Schlauch 1959: 208-213) out of which a page is devoted to the three mystics, Rolle, Hilton and Julian of Norwich. Julian's Revelations of divine love is characterized as "the emotional outpouring" (1956: 212). Schlauch writes that "her [Julian's] visions and meditations on sin and redemption are expressed in an artless language, often confused, but also at times gruesomely concrete. With her Revelations, mystical writing becomes what we should today call hysterical. Her brooding on the physical anguish connected with redemption reminds us of the art of certain early Flemish painters who concentrated on details of blood and suffering against grotesque backgrounds of dreamlike horror" (1956: 212-213). I wonder what she would say about The book of Margery Kempe as it is was too much of "brooding and gruesome concreteness" to be included in a history of medieval literature. Given the contemporary re-definition of hysteria as well as a n entirely different perspective on the mystics, Dorothea of Montau's (1347-1394) confessions, her Liber de festis and her later liturgically-related visions included in Septilium or Seven graces are placed in a different light. Are they emotional? Yes, they are, very much so, but at the same time similarly to Margery Kempe and other religious women, Dorothea should be seen in the context of late medieval affective piety which oscillates between outwardness of expression (or to quote Schlauch again "emotional outpourings") and inwardness of experience. Dorothea of Montau is still a relatively unknown figure, as most of the materials on her are in German and Latin. The case of Dorothea, whose life was recorded by John of Marienwerder (Jan z Kwidzyna) and is therefore known to us (unlike the life of Julian of Norwich prior to the enclosure), is a very good example of such oscillation. (1) As a mystic and pilgrim (to borrow an expression from Clarissa Atkinson's book on Margery Kempe) Dorothea went out into the world only to return to the enclosure, the anchorage at Kwidzyn. (2) Her symbolic inward joumey foregrounds the pilgrimages she undertook with her husband and by herself. As such it is both the physical and the metaphysical aspects of her journeys as well as the spiritual and indeed transformative nature of medieval journeys themselves which provides the subject of my paper.
Let me add one more personal note. In the spring of 2001 my family and I decided to go on a "pilgrimage" to Kwidzyn. I had never seen the cathedral and we all wanted to see if the remains of Dorothea's cell were still there. It took us about three hours to get there from Inowroclaw, where we had started, and we travelled through the old Teutonic Order Knights' territory (Torun and upwards into the north eastern part of Poland). Then, I recalled that it took us the whole day to get to Aachen by car, which was one of the first places Dorothea visited with her husband. When they began in Gdansk, they reached Aachen after nine weeks. Contemporary people do not think about the physicality of distance rather we think of places we want to get to, and not of the journeys themselves. For Dorothea, as for Margery Kempe later, the pilgrimage comprised the physicality of experience and was also a meditative journey of the mind.
The trope of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages signifies a journey of one's life within the framework of the metaphorical pilgrimage of Manhood, one of the most popular Christian motifs of the Middle Ages. In the earlier Middle Ages, this trope also re-iterates the dramatization...
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