Notes

1. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Legatus 2.10.  All references to the Legatus are taken from the English translation by Margaret Winkworth, The Herald of Divine Love (New York, 1993); scriptural citations are also provided by Winkworth.  Future references to the Legatus will be cited internally.

2. Other notable early devotees of Christ's heart include William of St. Thierry, Richard of St. Victor, and St. Francis of Assisi.  For succinct histories of the devotion up until Gertrude, see Alexandra Barratt, "Introduction" to the Herald of God's Loving-Kindness (Kalamazoo, 1991), pp. 19-20; Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens, GA, 1991), pp. 131-32; Marion Morgan, "The Sacred Heart of Jesus in Roman Catholic Tradition," One in Christ 24 (1988), 223-36.

3. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), p. 193.

4. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Exercitia spiritualia, ch. 7, lines 380-84, trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis (Kalamazoo, 1989), p. 135.

5. For Pseudo-Dionysius, of course, all language about God necessarily takes on the status of metaphor; he goes so far as to say "we must not then dare to speak, or indeed to form any conception, of the hidden super-essential Godhead, except those things that are revealed to us from the Holy Scriptures."  See Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (London, 1920).  A helpful study of medieval negative theology and apophatic language is Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, 1994).  Jacques Derrida's "How to Avoid Speaking"(1989) is also rather spectacular if by definition not entirely enlightening.  A succinct discussion of the problem in relation to medieval women's mysticism can be found in the introductory chapter of Elizabeth Petroff's Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York, 1994), esp. p. 4.  For a variety of approaches, see also the essays in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York, 1992).

6. Cited by Ulrike Wiethaus, Ecstatic Transformation: Transpersonal Psychology in the Work of Mechthild of Magdeburg (Syracuse, 1996), p. 127.

7. Cited in the introduction to Hildegard's works in Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, trans. Sheila Hughes (New York, 1989), p. 7.

8. The reasons for this must also be conjectural.  I might put forth the suggestion that Gertrude's unusual degree of learnedness in Latin may have afforded her a surer foothold and authority in a male-dominated intellectual discourse; but that is only part of an explanation.

9. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, pp. xxxi-xxxii.

10. Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky (New York, 1993), pp. 194-95.

11. Hadewijch of Brabant, Vision 7, trans. Mother Columba Hart in Hadewijch: The Complete Works (New York, 1980), p. 280.

12. This idea is fascinatingly and complexly laid out in fuller detail by Karma Lochrie in Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, 1991), esp. ch. 1, "The Body as Text and the Semiotics of Suffering."

13. Editor Margaret Winkworth suggests that the words translated here as "repeated inspiration"—alternatis vicibus, "by alternating times"—refer to Christ's heartbeats.

14. Elizabeth Petroff ascribes "the idea that the visionary is not a vessel but a text, a body in whom or on whom a text is inscribed" to Marguerite d'Oingt (d. 1310), calling this idea a "new perspective" which she in fact specifically contrasts with Gertrude's.  See Petroff, Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (New York, 1986), p. 278.  However, the heart-to-heart mode of transmission in Marguerite d'Oingt's writings appears to me more similar to Gertrude's than contrasting.  Further comparison between the two mystics seems called for.

15. For a parallel to this idea, see Karma Lochrie's discussion of the Monk of Farne (Margery Kempe, pp. 56-57, 69).  One should note, however, that the Monk eventually confesses imprinting on the reader's heart to be an impossibility, whereas Gertrude seems more optimistic about this point.