Movement and Containment: Using Social Network Analysis to Map How an Anchoress’s Ideas Traveled When She Could Not

My Social Network Analysis map presents how the medieval English mystics Julian of Norwich (1343-1413 C.E.) and Margery Kempe (1379-1429 C.E.) can be represented as nodes in a social network of ideas about female affective piety/mysticism for the classroom. Students can sometimes find it difficult to conceive of how ideas travelled in the Middle Ages despite the lack of modern technologies. This is especially the case when the ideas are related to women, who travelled less than men did, and who did not normally have access to Latin as a means of communication. Julian and Margery had numerous mystical visions of an emotional nature normally classified as “affective piety.” An SNA map can make clear how their religious practices travelled, even when they did not. At first glance, the lives and affective strategies of each woman could hardly appear to be more different: After leaving her mother’s home at the age of thirty, Dame Julianna (as she is referred to in Middle English) was an anchoress, so she spent the majority of her life literally and figuratively enclosed within her cell under the male authority of the Church. Her walled-up cell was attached to the Church of St. Julian and had only a small window as an opening through which she could observe Mass, speak to visitors, and to receive nourishment. We do not know if Julianna was her name given at birth or if she assumed it as part of her vows to enter (literally and figuratively) the Church of St. Julian. In contrast, Margery Kempe was a married woman and mother of 14 children who journeyed widely on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Rome, Santiago De Compostelo, Cologne, to Eastern European territories only recently conquered by the Teutonic Knights, and throughout the German territories, France, and, of course, England. In or around 1413, Margery visited Julian to discuss her own visions and to receive Julian’s assurances that they were divine and not demonic in origin. Margery likewise visited pilgrimage locations in Rome associated with Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373 C.E.), founder of the Brigittine Order. Birgitta’s affective revelations were translated into a number of vernacular languages, including Middle English, which is likely why Margery visited Brigittine hostels in Rome. St. Birgitta shared a spiritual advisor, Bishop Alfonso of Jaen, with St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380 C.E.). St. Catherine was another affective mystic. Her hagiography and visions were translated into Italian. These influenced Blessed Chiara Gambacorta of Pisa (1362-1419 C.E.), who had visons of both St. Catherine and of St. Birgitta. Once vernacular hagiographies are added as connections/paths along the social network map, Julian and Margery’s new form of affective piety branches out across Europe to reach other mystical women of the era. The visual representation of how ideas and practices of affective piety travelled makes clear for students how the Middle Ages was a vibrant and “connected” era, much like our own.