Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

“We have been told that certain women commonly called Beguines, afflicted by a kind of madness, discuss the Holy Trinity and the divine essence, and express opinions on matters of faith and sacraments contrary to the catholic faith, deceiving many simple people,” a church council concluded in 1312. “We have therefore decided and decreed that their way of life is to be permanently forbidden and altogether excluded from the Church of God.” 44

Among the women who fell afoul of the Inquisition was Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), author of The Mirror of the Simple Soul— an ironic title, as it turned out. She is reputed to have been a Beguine, but she apparently lived and worked as a wandering preacher, “solitary and itinerary” and “essentially homeless.” 45Inevitably, she came to the attention of the church authorities, and when she defied their warnings to silence herself, Marguerite was turned over to the Inquisition, imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months, and finally brought before a tribunal consisting of twenty-one theologians on the faculty of the University of Paris. Her sole defender was a man styled as the “Angel of Philadelphia” after a figure from Revelation—“Behold, I have set before thee an open door,” John writes of the angel, “and no man can shut it” 46—but he was rewarded for his efforts on her behalf with his own charge of heresy. Marguerite’s advocate recanted in order to save his own life, but she was convicted and burned at the stake.

The same fate befell a mystic called Na Prous Boneta (1290–1325), who assured her followers that Jesus had carried her to heaven “in spirit” on Good Friday in 1321. According to her visions, Francis of Assisi is the angel described in Revelation as “having the seal of the Living God,” and Peter John Olivi is the angel with a “face like the sun” who declares that “there should be time no longer.” 47Jesus had sent these two holy men as apocalyptic witnesses, she asserted, but his divine will was foiled by the Antichrist in his incarnation as Pope John XXII. Na Prous Boneta insisted that the third and final age of human history was imminent: the Antichrist would be defeated, and the papacy itself would be “annulled for perpetuity” along with all sacraments except holy matrimony. 48

Significantly, everything we know about Na Prous Boneta is preserved in the meticulous minutes of her interrogation and trial. Like so many other readers of Revelation about whose lives we can only speculate, she would have slipped through the cracks of history if she had escaped the attention of the Inquisition. “Having been warned, called, and urged many times in court and elsewhere, to revoke and adjure all the aforesaid things as erroneous and heretical,” the inquisitors concluded, “she persevered in them, claiming that in the aforesaid, as in the truth, she wishes to live and die.” Her final wish, so principled and so courageous, was granted, and Na Prous Boneta was burned at the stake along with her sister, Alisette, and one of their companions. 49

The tragic fate of these women offers an example of the price that more than a few true believers have been called upon to pay for their idiosyncratic readings of Revelation. Long after they were dead and gone, many others would also literally go down in flames because they were inspired by Revelation to act out their own end-time fantasies. But they also remind us that Revelation has always seemed to exert an especially powerful attraction for the female reader, ranging from the prophetesses Prisca and Maximilla through the visionary nun Hildegard of Bingen and not excluding the female Bible scholars who figure so importantly in the modern study of Revelation. Here is yet another irony that has attached itself to Revelation, a book whose author seems to regard all fleshly women with fear and loathing.

Women do not fare well in the book of Revelation itself. Its author, as we have already noted, is appalled by all human sexuality and betrays a distinct “hatred and fear” of women in particular. 50Among the most vivid figures in Revelation—and an all-purpose symbol of satanic evil among sermonizers and propagandists over the last twenty centuries—is the Great Whore of Babylon. By contrast, the only flesh-and-blood woman whom the author actually identifies by name in the book of Revelation, the prophetess he calls Jezebel, is singled out for condemnation “for beguiling my servants to practice immorality.” 51And yet flesh-and-blood women were among the most ardent readers of Revelation at a time when it was rare for women to read at all.

Unlike Hildegard—or her less fortunate sisters such as Marguerite Porete and Na Prous Boneta—most of the medieval women who opened the book of Revelation were seeking spiritual self-improvement or entertainment of the chills-and-thrills variety rather than revelations of their own. Deluxe editions of the text, richly illuminated and lavishly illustrated, were specially commissioned by wealthy women for their private contemplation. Thus, for example, The Birth and Time of the Antichrist, a treatise on the end-times, was composed in the tenth century by a monk especially for a woman called Gerberga, the wife of the Frankish king Louis IV. And the book was yet another medieval best seller, copied out and circulated throughout western Europe over the next several centuries.

The story line of Revelation, such as it is, can be approached as a romantic tale, full of intrigue and suspense, or so scholars have suggested. Many of the same characters and incidents that are found in medieval accounts of chivalrous knights and damsels in distress can also be found in Revelation. The woman clothed with the sun is stalked by a bloodthirsty dragon who seeks to devour her newborn son, and she is ultimately rescued by a dragon-slaying champion. Jesus Christ is presented as a crowned prince on a white charger who rides into battle to defend her honor. And the happy ending of Revelation includes the wedding feast of the King of Kings and his bride, an occasion that marks the founding of a kingdom that will, quite literally, last forever.

Even more popular than the challenging biblical text itself were abridged, simplified, and illustrated versions of Revelation, the medieval version of a Classics Illustrated comic book. Picture books were especially appealing to Christians who could not actually read the Bible in its original Greek text or in its Latin translation, the only versions of the Christian scriptures generally available in the Middle Ages, or who could not read at all, a category that included a great many women. Above all, the book of Revelation, with its angels and demons, monsters and marvels, signs and wonders, was an early and enduring favorite of artists ranging from Albrecht Dürer to Hieronymus Bosch. The strange visions that the author of Revelation saw in his mind’s eye were readily and repeatedly transferred to canvas, fresco, or woodcut, where they came to define the Christian imagination of the end-times down to our own times.

Apocalyptic speculation, then, was never confined to the musings of cloistered monks or the disputations among contesting theologians. Augustine’s call for a sober reading of Revelation, as it turned out, was mostly ignored by the preachers and pamphleteers, artists and scribes, who addressed a far larger and noisier audience than the clerical insiders ever managed to reach. And they borrowed freely from the legend and lore that appear nowhere in the Bible but had come to be attached to the book of Revelation in the popular imagination. As rich and strange as Revelation may be, still richer and stranger ideas and images boiled up out of the apocalyptic imagination of these “dreamers and diviners,” whose sermons and tracts passed into the popular culture of medieval Europe.