The Secret Chamber of Her Mind: Interpreting Inner Experience in the Vita of Beatrice of Nazareth

Abstract

The author of the thirteenth-century Vita Beatricis seeks to control his audience's response to his text in two ways: first, by articulating within the text a model of a receptive and credulous readership that stands in contrast to Beatrice's misguided and misinterpreting contemporaries; and second, by arguing that Beatrice herself contains a secret, inner "text" of spiritual experiences that he must translate for his audience, in essence fulfilling her revelations by making them available to a broader public. The latter method requires him to create a dialectic between Beatrice's inner experience and outer behavior, which, in turn, implies a view of the medieval holy woman as secret and enclosed, harboring private experiences that are unavailable to those around her. Further, the Vita-author's concern to control his audience's response privileges the meaning-making of the reading audience even as it constrains their interpretive possibilities. Considering how the Vita-author establishes both his interpretation of Beatrice and its legitimacy thus offers insight into methods of hagiographic invention and representation and their relationship to the medieval rhetoric of female religious experience.