Magnificat

My sermon today centres on medieval women, Mary and the Magnificat.

The Magnificat is a song of praise by the Virgin Mary. It is one of the eight most ancient Christian hymns, and the earliest known hymn focused on a woman. In it we hear Mary's voice.

The event is recorded in Luke's Gospel on the occasion known as the Visitation.

The two pregnant cousins - Elizabeth and Mary - meet and praise one another. The baby John the Baptist leaps inside Elizabeth, recognising the child inside Mary as the Messiah. Elizabeth celebrates Mary, and she replies: 'My soul magnifies the lord'.

A woman has become the vessel for God's incarnation on earth. She is the 'theotokos' - the Mother of God. The God-bearer.

The Magnificat continues: 'For he hath regarded the lowliest of his handmaiden; For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.'

It's easy to forget that there is a woman at the very heart of Christianity. As generations of 'Fathers' have reinforced the hierarchies of the Church, it has seemed a largely male edifice. Like female suffrage, the developments that have led to female bishops within the Church of England appear a modern phenomenon - a sign of progress - moving steadily towards a more equal and tolerant future.

But I'm a medieval historian and I see time as far from linear. History is not simply a case of later generations building and improving upon those that have come before.

There are moments of great change and development, but there are also periods when societies enforce less progressive approaches that stifle the rights of the many in favour of the few.

History is more like a spiral than a straight line.

The medieval period has been cast by later Reformers as a time of superstition, ignorance and darkness. Like peasants piling up muck in Monty Python's muddy field, life is 'nasty, brutish and short'. The lights went out during the Dark Ages, and humanity bade its time in the shadows, waiting for the bright hope of the Renaissance to return us to civilisation.

This attitude towards the vast stretch of over eight centuries termed 'medieval' is reductive. Sure - looking back through the technological, scientific and industrial revolutions of the past three centuries, the medieval period could seem of little consequence to our modern lives. The impact of the mobile phone, computer and aeroplane are far more important than anything that emerged from the medieval world.

But there's another argument to counter this celebration of the 'new'. Some of the most fundamental advances in science and technology were made during the medieval period. Clocks, compasses, eyeglasses, gunpowder, the printing press, the number 0 - we would not have any of these without our medieval forebears.

What's more, some of our most problematic deep-rooted issues of racism, classism, ableism and misogyny, are arguably the product of the last few centuries, rather than the millennium beforehand.

The move towards urbanisation, the impact of colonialism, empire-building and slavery, as well as the rise of national agendas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have impacted our shared identities in profound and often negative ways.

It is with the Reformation that Martin Luther declared: 'A woman's place is in the home'. And with the Victorians that strict divisions in English society based on class, race and background were entrenched and spread across the globe.

It began from the bottom up, with primary schools celebrating 'so-called' historic tales of great men, heroes, explorers, adventurers. From childhood, Victorian girls were taught the female sphere has always been domestic, while boys learnt it was men that could go out into the world. So has it always been. History would be written to reflect that, and in the process trail-blazing medieval women would be written out and side-lined.

Recently we've celebrated a hundred years of women having the right to vote. But it is interesting to see where the early suffragettes themselves turned for inspiration. They turned to the women of the medieval period. In pageants, on posters and in propaganda, the Suffragettes celebrated the famous female warrior Joan of Arc.

Emily Wilding Davison, who died after throwing herself in front of the king's horse at the 1913 Derby, was a medievalist who saw in the women of the past exemplars of the sort of rights they wanted access to. She called herself 'Fayre Emylye' after Chaucer's character, and in reaching up to tie a suffragette's banner to a moving horse, she was performing the medieval act of petitioning the king.

Because most medieval women have been written out of texts over the past few centuries - their books burned, their reputations transformed and their words over-written - it is hard to hear their voices across time. But it is not impossible. Developments in archaeology, technology and interdisciplinary studies means we can find the women 'hidden in plain sight'. Putting the frame on them reveals quite how much agency they had.

Remembering the Magnificat and Mary's central role within the Church, I want to introduce you to our first 'lost medieval woman'. The Loftus Princess. In 2007 archaeologist Stephen Sherlock was excavating a farm in Street House, just a few miles from Whitby in Yorkshire. Here he discovered a bed buried in the ground some one thousand four hundred years ago. The skeleton is lost, but an echo of the woman interred remained. Her jewellery showed she was powerful, influential and, surprisingly for the time, Christian.

The sixth century was revolutionary - not in terms of war, but in terms of ideological change. For two centuries what we today call England was governed by settlers from across the seas.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes from modern-day Germany and Denmark, brought their language, culture and religion to Britain. When we see place names like Wednesbury or Tiw, these are echoes of the Germanic pagan religion practiced from the fifth to seventh centuries in England which honoured Odinn, Thor, Freya and more. Women did have some agency in this world, but as it was governed by a male military elite, their power was secondary to strong men.

A tantalising new option arrived, however, in 597 with St Augustine on the Isle of Thanet in Kent.

Now, Christianity has several USPs. Eternal life in a paradisical heaven. Forgiveness from sin. And probably most important when considering women - inclusivity for ALL in the body of the Faithful. The early Christian church appealed to the poor, the excluded, and women, because, unlike the Roman state religion, everyone was included in the ceremonies, and everyone could be saved.

From the very beginning women made huge contributions to the Christian Church. Some of the earliest church buildings in Rome, like Santa Pudenziana, get their name from the female donors who bequeathed the land. The Church fathers, like St Jerome, appealed regularly to aristocratic women for their devotion and their donations. And it was through women that Christianity spread.

When Augustine was reluctantly getting off his ship to meet the pagan King Aethelberht of Kent, his wife, Bertha, had already been practicing Christianity in her own custom-built church with her own Christian bishop. She was a Frankish princess and had stipulated when marrying her pagan spouse that she was to be free to practice her religion when she came to England.

So while we remember that Christianity 'arrived' with Augustine, in fact a woman had brought it here decades earlier.

It was her daughters that then continued the spread of Christianity. They were married to the most influential rulers across the country, and wherever they went, they took their religion with them. Aristocratic women across the country started to realise in the early seventh century that this new religion provided them with new opportunities.

By setting up convents, and often double monasteries with monks and nuns living together, they could create spaces where women were released from the hardships of enforced marriage and the dangers of childbirth. In these spaces they could learn, sing, celebrate and live in luxury.

Finds from the remarkable St Hilda's seventh-century monastery in Whitby, including bone combs, elaborate hair pins and jewellery, remind us that the medieval concept of a 'convent' was far from our modern understanding of this term. These were not places of silence, contemplation and seclusion. These were palaces run by rich women - lavish and vibrant places where creativity and learning thrived. The Loftus Princess was embracing Christianity in this very first wave, and may have led a community like this.

She was buried with great honour. Her grave is the focus of the whole cemetery, with a burial mound on top and a small wooden chapel next to it. Clearly several other rich women were also buried at Street House, as fascinating finds were discovered across the site.

But the Loftus Princess's grave was special. Just to bury a full-sized wooden bed in the ground was a huge enterprise. Hung around her neck were a set of jewels. The central one is unique - a gold cloisonne pendant with a large garnet shell at the centre.

For anyone that has walked the route to Santiago di Compostela, the shell's significance would be instantly recognisable. It became the symbol of St James, leading pilgrims to his burial site. More broadly, the shell was a Christian symbol connected to resurrection after death. What better image to accompany this early Christian woman to the afterlife?

Whether she ran a convent like her near neighbour St Hilda, or she was one of the first converts to this new religion in the North we cannot know for sure. But she reminds us of the role women played in spreading Christianity. St Bridget, St Hilda, Bertha of Kent - these early medieval women were powerful, influential, respected and admired within the Christian church.

And exceptional women continued to have an impact on religious thought throughout the medieval period. While most medieval women have been ignored, forgotten or written out, one has maintained her reputation down the ages - Hildegard of Bingen. A polymath to rival Leonardo da Vinci, she lived an unusually long life in the twelfth-century Rhineland.

Founder of two convents, visionary, scientific and medical expert, linguist, artist, play-write, composer - who alive today could rival her achievements? She was so respected in her own lifetime that she counselled the Pope, Holy Roman Emperor and the kings and queens of Europe. Hildegard was extraordinary in every way, even taking her best-selling work, Scivias, on a book tour.

Yes, she was a nun. But as with the term 'convent', a medieval 'nun' may not align with our modern understanding of the word.

Some of her writings would be considered controversial today - she describes female sexuality and even gave instructions on abortion. She considered that women should not be treated as the 'second sex', since 'women may be made from man, but no man can be made without a woman.'

In her visions the most important concepts are presented as female: Ecclesia, Synagoga, Wisdom, Divine Love, Eve and the Virgin Mary.

Indeed, Mary is central to so much of her writing. She is 'Star of the Sea', 'Most Splendid of Gemstones', 'Author of Life', 'Holy Medicine' and 'The Bright Matter of the World'.

Alongside her sisters at the monastery in Eibingen, they sang together:

'The highest blessing

In all of creation

Lies in the form of a woman,

Since God has become man

In a sweet and blessing Virgin.'

Hildegard spent the 81 years of her life seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, describe the indescribable and explain the inexplicable. For her, Divine Love pulses through all creation with 'viriditas' or 'greeness' - a sign of God in nature.

She left behind a vast body of work, and in these texts we can hear her voice - sometimes prophetic and terror-inducing, sometime gentle and compassionate, sometimes practical and analytical. This is a real medieval woman, and by finding her we also find a different way of seeing the medieval period. She was embraced by the women AND men around her.

Theirs was a society that could honour and respect the words of this remarkable woman and raise her up. Far from 'nasty, brutish and short', Hildegard reveals a time that rivals our own in terms of attitudes towards female sexuality and the rights of women to be heard.

Hildegard set a trend for female mysticism. While theology was for men only, given that women were excluded from university educations, in visions and mystical writings female experiences of spirituality could be recorded. Often using their vernacular language, rather than scholarly Latin, women could speak and write on religious matters because they were experiencing them through their own personal visions.

There was an explosion of female mystics through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with male scribes feverishly recording the words of lay and monastic women, like Bridget of Sweden, Marie of Ogione, and, my personal favourite, Julian of Norwich.

Like Hildegard, Julian lived a long life. But unlike her twelfth-century counterpart, the fourteenth-century Julian led hers in the private, rather than public, sphere. Around the age of forty she had herself walled up in a single room, where she spent the next three decades as an anchoress.

Here she contemplated a set of visions she had received while lying on her death bed. Ruminating on the images of Christ, his passion and the Virgin Mary, Julian developed an extraordinary book - 'Revelations of Divine Love'.

This book was lost for centuries, but copies were carefully made by a group of English nuns in France. Julian's words would eventually come to public attention when another extraordinary woman, Grace Warrack, eventually transcribed her text. She had found a manuscript hidden in the British Library under 'Witchcraft; Revelations to one who could not read a letter, 1373'. She carefully deciphered the Middle English and produced the first full printed edition of 'Revelations of Divine Love' in 1901. It has never been out of print since.

Julian's words resonate down the centuries because of the beauty of her prose, and the careful gaze she fixes on Divine Love. For her, God loves his creation like a mother loves her child. Sins can be forgiven, mistakes will be made, challenges will beset us, and pains will afflict us. But 'All Shall be Well, All Shall be Well, and All Manner of Things shall be well.'

Like the Loftus Princess and Hildegard of Bingen, Julian shows us that medieval women could and did make enormous contributions to Christianity and the Church. That they have been erased, forgotten or ignored is the fault of writers, thinkers and historians over the last two or three centuries. But by searching for them we can find exemplars from the past that can shape our understanding of the present, and perhaps even build a better, more equal future. I leave you with Julian's words:

'And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand…. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the creator and protector and the lover... I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.'