NESTLED in the British Library there is a medieval manuscript that looks as if it has been dipped in blood. Its first pages are painted black and spattered with thick, crimson drops. Those that follow are entirely red, covered in row on row of dripping wounds, and they culminate in two woodcuts of the Passion of Christ, a grisly visual finale.
In the first, Jesus is drenched in blood and surrounded by arma Christi (instruments of his torture), including the nails for his hands and feet, and a scourge for his back. In the second, blood seems to rain down from the top of the very page itself. Under the sorrowful scene are the words, “The greatest comfort in all temptation is the remembrance of Christ’s Passion.”
This manuscript (catalogued as BL MS Egerton 1821) is a compilation of devotional writings dated to 1421, which was most probably designed for a female reader. It has marks on the parchment which, experts believe, were caused by touching, scratching, and even kissing. These marks indicate a visceral, physical response to the illustrations of Christ’s suffering body, as if the woman holding the manuscript was trying to reach through the pages and grab him.
The blood-soaked leaves of Egerton are unique, but its iconography of a suffering Christ and its evidence of an intense readerly response are not. Many women, including the mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, used meditation on the Passion of Christ to develop and strengthen their relationship with God. At the very thought of God’s suffering, devoted Christian women might dissolve into tears, self-flagellate, fast, or even drink the bathwater of lepers, all in an endeavour to bring their own experience closer to God’s own.
“I want to feel his pains as if they were my own,” the mystic Julian of Norwich writes. She believed that if she could experience Christ’s suffering first-hand, then she might be able to achieve a greater intimacy with him.
In the Gospels, narration of Christ’s Passion is sparse and matter-of-fact. We are told that Pilate took Jesus and flogged him, that a crown of thorns was placed on his head, and that he was nailed to the cross. But none of the Evangelists labours the details of these acts or draws particular attention to the discomfort that they caused. While early medieval imaginings of the event are more expressive, the focus tends to be on Christ as a warrior rather than Christ as a suffering victim.
In The Dream of the Rood, an early English poem in which a talking tree turns out to be the cross on which Christ was crucified, Christ leaps on to the instrument of his execution without hesitation or apparent pain and embraces it fearlessly.
By the later Middle Ages, however, something had changed. Suddenly, there was blood everywhere. The brave warrior laughing at his fate is replaced by the stoic Man of Sorrows, a tormented body, bleeding and broken, suffering for the sins of humanity. Christ is no longer a distant figure, removed from the experience of the everyday; he has become someone who suffers, just like us.
At a time when the average parishioner was unable to understand the Latin words of a church service, and was forbidden from tasting the eucharistic cup, such imagery, gracing the walls of the church and adorning the pages of prayer books, became a crucial vehicle for making everyday Christians feel closer to God.
It was a new kind of devotion, something that we term affective piety because of its sensitivity to emotion and feeling. Affective piety turned a spotlight on the humanity of Christ, focusing in particular on his infancy and his death, and it exploded in popularity in the 14th and 15th centuries, becoming widespread among men and women. We know, however, that one of its offshoots had an especial resonance for women.
Close your eyes, clear your mind, and imagine that you have been transported back in time. You open your eyes to find yourself in the middle of an angry crowd, jostled on every side, struggling to find your footing. Through the throng, you see a man, bruised and bleeding, but still beautiful, stooped under the weight of a cross that will later be used to kill him. You hear the jeers and taunts of those around you, feel their breath close and hot on your face. You smell sweat, baked earth, fear.
Later, when the man has been manoeuvred into position, you hear nail splintering bone, see how the blood that gushes from his wounds soaks into the dusty ground beneath your feet. You hear his mother cry.
This is Passion meditation: a devotional practice that encouraged participants to imagine themselves present at the scenes of Christ’s torture and death. There were guide books that instructed readers how to perform this meditation as successfully as possible, usually written by religious men, and directed at a female readership; the authors are candid about the liberty that they take with the Gospels, adding in poignant or grisly details that are designed to stir as much emotion and compassion as possible.
One such author, a translator and cleric known as Nicholas Love, believed that Passion meditation was especially useful for women and illiterate men. While the most educated Christians could aspire to the “meat of contemplation” (a theological and intellectual practice far too challenging for most), ordinary men and women should be content with Passion meditation, a substitute that he describes as “the milk of light doctrine”, easier to consume and to digest.
It is hard nowadays not to read Love’s words as condescension. He seems to offer Passion meditation as something second best, a “theology lite” for the uneducated masses. But it’s clear that Love really did believe in the power of this practice, and that he genuinely wanted his readers to be moved to a higher form of devotion through their engagement with it. Moreover, evidence suggests that Passion meditation gained significant traction, especially with women, even allowing some of them to gain a foothold in the male-dominated power-structure of the medieval Christian church.
ONE of the first and most energetic Passion meditations was penned by the Yorkshire Cistercian abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx, for his sister. She was an anchoress, which meant that she had committed her life entirely to God by enclosing herself in a small cell where she would live out her days in prayer and solitude.
From the British Library archiveA coloured print showing a Carthusian adoring Christ as the Man of Sorrows. The picture is pasted to a page painted in red to look as if it is covered with streaming blood. From a 15th-century Psalter and Rosary of the Virgin
Anchoresses were declared dead to this world so that they could turn their attention wholeheartedly to the next; Aelred’s sister may even have had a quasi-funeral before entering her new home. We do not know her name, but we know that she asked her esteemed brother for some spiritual direction, which he eventually provided (some years later, and accompanied by an apology for its belatedness), in the form of a guidebook.
In A Rule of Life for a Recluse, Aelred invites his sister to purge her heart of any unsavoury thoughts and cast a clear eye back to the life and death of Christ, paying particular attention to his arrest and subsequent torture and execution. As part of his guided meditation, she should imagine herself as an active participant of these scenes, retrospectively alleviating Christ’s suffering by licking the dust from his feet or proffering soothing ointment when he is dragged through the streets by Roman soldiers.
Aelred uses rhetorical questions to direct his sister’s actions and to chastise her when she is not performing her part passionately enough. Why are your eyes dry? Why aren’t you sobbing? How many bitter tears will run out of your eyes when you imagine the suffering of Christ’s mother, Mary? His questions are relentless, and so too is his desire to elicit an emotional response.
He encourages his sister to imagine that she is washing Christ’s feet with her hot tears, just as Mary Magdalene did. More strikingly, he instructs her to run to Christ’s breasts, from which she can suck nourishing milk. When Christ dies and his side is pierced with a lance by the soldiers, Aelred urges his sister to run up to him so that she can drink the life-giving blood that gushes from the wound until her lips become as red as scarlet ribbons.
If she took her brother’s advice seriously, then Passion meditation must have become a huge part of her devotional life; he tells her to return to these bloody scenes as often as she can, to recall them every time she closes her eyes.
Aelred’s sister was not the only reader of this text: it was translated at least twice from Latin into English during the Middle Ages. While there is evidence to suggest that both men and women encountered it, the translations are careful to preserve the female addressee and foreground female “characters”, such as the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, for the reader to identify with.
It is not difficult to imagine, when reading Passion meditations such as Aelred’s, how women might have found a mirror for their own experience within their pages. A prevailing view of the medieval West was that women were biologically wet, cold, and weak. According to Aristotle, whose medical writings dominated medieval Europe, nature always wants to create the most perfect animal (the male). If a foetus does not receive enough heat during gestation (because of adverse reproductive conditions), however, then its development can be impeded. Unable to become a man, such a foetus will become a woman instead — a necessary (but nevertheless still unfortunate) second best.
This model of thinking suggests that women are by their very nature deficient — a half-formed version of the superior sex. Moreover, women’s lack of heat continues to affect them negatively throughout their lives. Women are too cold properly process the excess moisture in their bodies properly, and so they menstruate, a bodily function that provoked disgust and horror in many male writers.
Isidore of Seville, a prominent and well-educated encyclopaedist of the period, warned readers that, in the presence of a menstruating women, crops would wither, and plants would die. An anonymous medical treatise, dated to the late 13th century, Women’s Secrets, warns readers that old women who no longer menstruate can transmit venom to babies in their cradles through their eyes: all that pent-up blood, no longer able to escape their body through the usual channels, ferments in potency, and innocent bystanders can be poisoned with simply a look.
Alongside menstrual blood, excessive tears were deemed to be “feminine” and problematic. Women’s Secrets goes on to tell us that women cry more often because they need to purge the excess moisture from their bodies. “Weeping is indicative of women’s ignorance,” the male author writes, “for dampness coarsens the women’s brains and hinders their ability to learn; it points to their excessive wickedness, for it is by way of abundant tears that evil humours leave the body through the eyes.”
In such writings, liquids such as blood and water become a sign of women’s sin and their stupidity, both of which are hard-wired into their biological make-up. Coupled with the religious understanding that women felt pain in childbirth and menstruation thanks to the original sin of Eve, a damning picture starts to emerge. Women’s bodies are deficient, porous, and excessive, something they must struggle to contain and control throughout their lives.
PASSION meditation, however, offers women a vehicle for reclaiming this misogynistic rhetoric, transforming it into something far more positive and triumphant. Call to your mind, for a moment, an artistic representation of Christ’s body during his torture and death. It is likely that you are imagining a body that is suffering, but, more than that, a body that is leaking — blood and water pouring from the gaping gash in his side, or blood trickling down from the crown of thorns. In such imagery, which saturated the later Middle Ages, women may well have seen a mirror for their own bodies, which had been delineated as deficient, suffering, and excessively liquid.
From the British Library archiveFrom a Rosary of the Passion, 15th century
In the pages of many medieval manuscripts, we can find images of the wound in Christ’s side that look remarkably like a vulva. Etched on to birth girdles (strips of parchment or cloth which would be wound round the stomach of a woman in labour to offer her spiritual protection and solace), we discover illustrations of Christ’s blood and his wounds, encouraging the mother to relieve her own pain by meditating on the suffering of God.
You may have noticed, when reading the extracts from Aelred’s Passion meditation, how liquid the imagery is. The anchoress is invited to weep excessively: the more tears she sheds the better, to use her saliva to clean the dust from Christ’s body, to run to his breasts and drink the milk that flows forth from them (the kind of imagery that probably inspired Julian of Norwich to describe God as a mother).
These traces, in literature, art, and the material culture of the time, reveal a symbiotic and meaningful relationship between Christ’s body and the bodies of medieval women. He sacrificed his suffering and fluid body for her sins, and now she, in return, can offer up her own suffering and fluid body — not as something deficient, but as something reflective of the divine.
Margery Kempe, a mystic from the 14th century who was famous for dissolving into tears whenever she thought of Christ’s Passion, was a woman who took remembrance of Christ’s suffering extremely seriously. Margery claimed to have visions that were sent directly from God. These could take the form of conversations between herself and Jesus, or they could manifest themselves in heavenly sights, smells, and sounds. One time, she remembers seeing the eucharistic sacrament fluttering like a dove. Frequently, however, Margery describes being transported back in time, to emotive scenes from Christ’s torture and death.
In her spiritual autobiography (the first autobiography written in English), these particular visions feel like the logical extreme of Passion meditation. Margery was mindful, throughout her religious life, of the advice from religious authorities (like Aelred) that she should keep Christ’s suffering constantly in her mind’s eye. All it took was a horse being whipped or a child being beaten by their father, and she found herself immediately present at the moment of Christ’s suffering, overcome by weeping and desperate to alleviate his suffering.
But, when she travelled the world on pilgrimage and visited Jerusalem in 1413, her visions became especially vivid. On holy ground, she sees Christ’s wounds bleeding as freshly as if he had been whipped in front of her very eyes. Margery is so swept up in remembering Christ’s suffering that she feels as though she is really there — which is exactly how Passion meditation was supposed to make you feel.
FIRST-HAND accounts like Margery’s, as well as guidebooks like Aelred’s, make clear how vivid and immersive Passion meditation was supposed to be. Such literature does not hold Christ and his suffering at a remove, but brings him close enough to touch. In the Doctrine of the Heart, a religious tract roughly contemporary with Margery and addressed to nuns, the female readers are encouraged to imagine taking a bath in the blood and water of Christ, to immerse themselves fully in the salvific fluid.
Time and again, we find written records of devoted Christians who were not satisfied with simply thinking about or remembering Christ’s Passion, but who wanted to bring it to life — to taste and smell his blood, to ingest it, to immerse themselves in it, and to mark themselves with it. In this context, in the bloodied pages of Egerton 1821, its traces of kisses and caresses start to make much more sense. They reveal a desire to cross not only the bridge of the page, but the bridge between past and present, human and divine.
This context sheds light, too, on Christ’s wounds in Egerton 1821, those rows upon rows of lesions and suppurations, dripping with blood, which can become a portal into Christ’s suffering. Julian of Norwich famously saw the crucifix that she was meditating on come to life. She saw Christ, his blood trickling down like a river, his body dehydrating before her very eyes. She also saw him (slowly, gently) stretch open the wound in his side, until it was wide enough for her to crawl inside — wide enough, she tells us, to accommodate everyone. Through meditation on the Passion, God’s wounds become a means for ordinary people to enter a world of suffering with their God.
Margery Kempe never received as much fame and reverence in her own time as (I suspect) she would have liked. But many prominent female mystics of the time, from Catherine of Siena to Bridget of Sweden, made remembrance of the Passion central to their devotional practice. Even some of the more bizarre behaviour recorded from medieval mystics, such as Catherine of Siena’s drinking the pus from the cancerous wound of a nun, or Angela of Foligno’s drinking the bathwater of lepers, can be related to the Passion. In overcoming their own revulsion, and offering extreme compassion to the suffering bodies of the suffering, these women could imagine that they were tending to the suffering body of Christ.
Male religious writers might have considered Passion meditation to be a more lightweight substitute to contemplative and intellectual theological engagement with God, but history suggests that many women harnessed the emotional power of the practice to foster an intimate relationship with the divine that was the envy of other Christians, and could enable them to establish themselves as religious authorities — even saints.
We don’t know who the first reader of Egerton was, but the marks on the pages of the manuscript are a testament to the power that Passion meditation must have held for her. The bloody pages may seem macabre and gruesome, but, for her, they were a gateway to Christ’s suffering — and to his love.
Dr Hetta Howes is a lecturer in medieval literature at City University of London and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
She is the author of Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The extraordinary lives of medieval women, published by Bloomsbury Continuum at £22 (Church Times Bookshop £17.60); 978-1-3994-0873-8.
She will be speaking at the Festival of Faith and Literature in February 2025. Tickets can be purchased from faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk, with a discount for Church Times subscribers.