Translating Christ in the Middle Ages

Female visionaries experienced a variety of encounters with Christ. A single visionary experience might include multiple modes of perception, and an individual might experience different types of vision at different points in her spiritual career. Many of these women speak and write about seeing Christ as well as speaking with him. Others describe feelings, sensations, smells, sounds, and voices as Christ’s speech. Visionary experience was not always visual, as Christine Cooper-Rompato observes. Moreover, entirely auditory communication with the divine occurred frequently in mystical visions despite the terminological associations of visual imagery. This variety of perception reveals an understanding of visionary experience among women—and in particular the visionary experience of Christ—as diverse and sensorially varied. For this reason, conventional sensory terminology creates difficulty for analyzing visionary texts; one recent attempt to create new language for the diversity of visionary experience, for example, borrows the language of modern psychology to describe Margery Kempe’s “multi-sensory” or “multi-modal” visions as “fused visions,” a term adapted from the “fused hallucinations” of modern clinical discourse. Regardless of sensory mode, however, the process of transforming Christ’s modally disparate visionary communication into text demands textual, linguistic, and interpretive work of the visionary narrator—what I call in this book the “visionary translator.” This narrative work took a wide range of literary forms, but the most important precedent for this interpretive process remained the medieval discourse of translation itself.

In the Middle Ages, the representation of Christ’s speech within human language was always already an act of translation. For medieval Christian thinkers, human speech and language were fundamentally translations of truths, concepts, and realities whose origins lay beyond any system of human signification. As Marcia Colish explains, “language, redeemed through the Incarnation, was both a necessary and an inadequate means to the knowledge of God.” Christ occupied a central role in this epistemology. As the Word made flesh, He mediated between humanity and divinity and, scripturally, transmitted God’s message of love to humanity. In transforming Christ’s speech into text, visionary translation emphasizes the common feature of visionary literature and translation: their difference and distance from, and yet similarity to, their object of representation. Like visionary texts, translation remains distanced from its source, which it imitates and interprets but never exactly mirrors; medieval theories of translatio studii et imperii emphasized this distance. Moreover, medieval translation—like all translation—did not simply replace a source text (often Latin) with a different language (often vernacular). Rather, the concept of translatio functioned metaphorically to signal the broader transformations of ideas and ideologies affected by linguistic translation. The translated text represents multiple transfers of meaning—the transformation of multiple figurative meanings and interpretations over and above the translation of literal meaning—just as the visionary text represents the transfer of multiple modes of perception and interpretations of visionary experience into literature. Ultimately, the translator, like the visionary narrator, engages in authorial activity that mediates, interprets, explicates, and expands the text.

Visionary authors drew on the discourse and narrative techniques of translation to create new positions of rhetorical authority and exemplarity. First, visionary authors share in what Rita Copeland terms the “impulse to yield and receive a formative influence,” or the willingness to be changed, that characterizes medieval translation. For visionary translators, this becomes a willingness to inhabit and subsequently to be altered by the epistemological and rhetorical positions of exemplar and instructor affiliated with Christ. At the same time, the understanding of translation as a constructive, interpretive process suggests how the visionary participates in the narrative and textual construction of Christ’s speech. The practice of making a text more accessible to readers through linguistic translation that incorporated interpretation, exegesis, and commentary remained the norm throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval translators often commented on the scope of their narrative and authorial roles, acknowledging their contributions to the translated text in ways that revealed an understanding of themselves as participants in the creation of meaning and content—a process Andrew Kraebel terms “commentary-translation.” The visionary author and the medieval translator thus shared a similarly constructive narrative role that could range from direct reportage to interpretation to invention. When the subject of translation was Christ’s speech, that role gained new authority.