Unintended Bigamies: Holy Widowhood, Marriage, andSponsa Christiin Erasmus'sDe Vidua Christiana

Abstract

Christ's brides were hell bound by the end of the Middle Ages, when women—in the figure of the witch—were increasingly seen as Satan's spouses. Such is the narrative arc of Dyan Elliott's significant recent study of sponsa Christi (bride of Christ), The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. Elliott points toward the incarnational logic of Christianity in general and the type of physically immanent bridal mysticism that flourished among late medieval women in particular to locate some of the dynamic forces that helped make possible the theological ideas about witches that flourished from the fifteenth century onward. Elliott has done much to enrich our understanding of the development of an embodied version of the bride of Christ. Medieval and early modern Christianity held out an option, for women at least, to marry Jesus—to become a sponsa Christi—in a literal sense, a form of marriage sustained by such things as legal mechanisms, theological visions, particular emotions, religious rituals, and spiritual practices. But Elliott's argument, stopping as it does right before the tumultuous sixteenth century, lends itself to a reading that the literalized sponsa Christi was bound henceforth to the early modern witch craze. Desiderius Erasmus's 1529 treatise De vidua christiana provides us evidence that the literalized sponsa Christi developed in alternative ways in the early modern period, including the creation of a distinctive vision of the Christian widow who is, at times, bigamous. De vidua, then, can serve as the basis for expanding upon an alternative historical trajectory for the bride of Christ that Elliott mentions in passing in her study.