Mystic Women come to Television

By Kathy Shaidle

Centuries after they lived and died, mediaeval Christian mystics continue to fascinate. Just look at the popularity of recent CDs celebrating the visionary music of Abbess Hildegard of Bingen.

Now these pioneering women are coming to television. Beginning October 4, VisionTV airs the new six part series, Mystic Women of the Middle Ages (8:30 p.m., ET/PT)

(No doubt this Canadian produced show will make its way to PBS very soon. To find out more about how to view the series, visit http://www.visiontv.ca)

Co-produced with Hamilton, Ontario's McMaster University, each 30-minute episode tells the story of a different woman, through original music, stunning imagery and interviews with modern mediaevalists.

The first episode, "Visions and Voices," introduces the series' themes. Besides presenting each woman's biography, the program looks at her within her historical context. Women's struggle for equality is touched on, as is the puzzling intersection of eroticism, anorexia and religious devotion.

The overarching subtext of Mystic Women is that, paradoxically, these visionaries gained true independence and enlightenment within the seemingly rigid, patriarchal structures of the Church.

On October 11, VisionTV airs "Julian of Norwich." Viewers visit Dame Julian's still-standing East Anglian anchorite, and peer through the windows through which she counseled pilgrims, and watched Mass in the church to which her cell was attached.

An actress reads excerpts from Julian's famous Revelations of Divine Love (complete with a slight Old English accent) thus bringing the mystic's sometimes archaic writing to life.

(Also read aloud are excerpts from an anti-marriage treatise of the times, which proposes religious life to women as an alternative to the "slavery and drudgery" of wedlock. Holy Maidenhood sounds like it was written by the Erma Bombeck of the Middle Ages: husbands are "lazy louts" and home is a filthy, chaotic menagerie of children, cats and dogs...)

St Clare of Assisi is the subject of the next episode, which traces her life from wealthy young woman to founder of a radical religious order (whose Rule she dared to write herself.) Especially notable are this episode's gorgeous footage of Assisi's art treasures and timeless landscape.

Mystic Women also profiles Douceline de Digne (levitating prophet of Provence); plucky pilgrim (and mother of fourteen) Margery Kempe, who wrote the first English language autobiography; and French apocalyptic visionary Constance of Rabastens, who was persecuted by the Inquisition.

Mystic Women of the Middle Ages is one of the projects developed by the McMaster Faculty of the Humanities.

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