Douceline of Digne, sometimes referred to as Douceline of Marseilles, was born just after the death of Mary of Oignies in 1215/16. In many ways, the trajectory of Douceline’s life and spirituality was directly affected by Mary who came before her. Mary founded the first community of Beguines – the religious order for laywomen who lived in community and adopted a life of poverty and charity – and Douceline continued this, establishing three houses of Beguines in her lifetime.
The only biographical details we know about her life come from La vida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina written by Philippa de Porcellet, one of the sisters in Douceline’s community at Marseilles, as well as texts written about her brother, Hugh of Digne, a Franciscan author and theologian.
Douceline was born and raised in Provence, in the south of France. She came from a family of wealthy merchants and reflected this status in their lifestyle and piety. Douceline’s childhood was filled with religious teachings and practices from day-to-day rituals, to big events like feast days and celebrations. As mentioned above, Douceline’s brother, Hugh, was a brother at the local Franciscan monastery and so such teachings and religious lifestyles were not unfamiliar to Douceline but were embedded in her culture.
Douceline’s mother died when she was around 14/15. What effect this had on Douceline’s understanding and relationship with God is hard to tell, but her teenage years were filled with acts of charity, making use of her father’s house and wealth to provide care for the poor and sick. However, to what extent Douceline was doing this as a spiritual practice, informed and driven by her faith in a loving God, is impossible to say. Given her social status and the religious culture in which she grew up, it’s possible Douceline was simply going through the motions of what was expected of her and these actions have been given greater significance given her later life.
Nevertheless, when Douceline was 20 she recorded having some kind of conversion experience. Not the type of conversion where she came to know Christ as her Saviour, but rather one in which she was converted from one type of life to another. Here Douceline was called to the ascetic life. At 27, Douceline made this official by taking vows of poverty and service in front of her brother Hugh. Then, receiving constant spiritual help and guidance from Hugh, Douceline left to establish a community of like-minded women near the town of Hyères in 1241. Hugh writes a rule for the women here – a list of instructions to direct their days in a way that encouraged spiritual growth and reinforced their vows of poverty and charity. As a Franciscan ascetic, Hugh’s rule reflected many of these ideas.
By 1250, Douceline had founded another house of Beguines in the town of Hyères. This time close to their Franciscan brothers whose church they attended – strengthening the bond between these two communities. Before, founding her last house outside of Marseilles, where she lived until her death in 1274.
Douceline, therefore, was not only part of the lay-religious movement, but a key player who helped provide the opportunity for other women to live religious lives outside of the traditional monastic communities. These women could be both religious women and live within the wider secular community providing spiritual and practical help.
But the Life of Douceline also paints an image of a woman with a deep, personal, relationship with God. Douceline, like all the women we have looked at so far in our Medieval series, was a mystic.
Mystical experiences, like Douceline’s, more typical amongst women in the 13th century, obviously drew some sceptics. A common theme in hagiographic writing is the testing of the validity of these experiences from onlookers. We see that mystical revelations were often coupled with some type of ‘sceptical’ made by the body of the mystic – Christina the Astonishing is perhaps an extreme example of this what with her flying, rolling around like a hedgehog and emitting a high-pitched sound. Thus, it is perhaps understandable that onlookers might want to test the authenticity of this experience. Most of the time, this was some gentle shaking from a friend, however, in the case of Douceline, Charles of Anjou ordered molten lead to be poured over her feet. She did not react until her rapture was over.
However, there were those who simply wanted to witness a genuine ecstatic experience. Like other mystics of the 13th century, in Douceline’s life, we see a relationship between receiving the eucharist and experiencing some kind of ecstatic or mystical revelation. Mostly that, whenever they received the eucharist, some kind of ecstasy was expected to follow. This was so with Douceline who often snuck to church on holy days so that she could receive the eucharist, and experience whatever followed, away from crowds who would gather specifically to watch her. Indeed, her biographer records that Douceline’s eucharist-ecstasy pattern was so well known, that the countess of Provence once tried to trick Douceline into receiving the eucharist next to her so that she could witness a real ecstatic experience.
However, mystical experiences, while something unfamiliar to us today, held significance for the wider church, as well as the individual and their immediate context. Douceline received visions from God that were not just for her own benefit but designed to be shared. While the content of the visions can be distractingly confusing for us, for the original observers, they spoke directly into the theology being taught (and debated) at the time.
For example, religious thought at the time taught that women were something less than men. That their bodies themselves were something ‘other’ or ‘less’. Therefore, while it was unquestionable to say that men – or more specifically, male bodies or maleness – was created in the image of God, this was not true of women. Women were thought to be ‘corrupted’ male bodies. Eve, being created after Adam and from Adam’s rib was not as close to the likeness of God as him. This belief had obvious repercussions for teaching how men and women related to God. Men were viewed as more theologically capable, whereas women were taught to be their students.
So how then, did so many women rise up as theologians during the Medieval period? Why were so many women mystics when they were theoretically meant to be less theologically capable than men? Well, while some women – like Hildegard for example – addressed this paradox directly, most women just got on with it without really listening to it. This sense of female ‘otherness’ and subsequent exclusion or separation from God, was just not on their radar. We can see this in Douceline’s mystical experiences. For example, in one vision Douceline asks herself:
“What is the soul?” before answering “It is the mirror of divine majesty: in it God has put his seal”.
This would have been the perfect opportunity to directly present a case against her supposed female incapacity. Yet, instead, simply by not eluding to any distinction between the soul of a woman vs the soul of a man, Douceline clearly rejects the theological teaching that men were spiritually superior to women!
Thus, even in a Church context that taught the exclusion of women from teaching positions on all levels, women like Douceline were able to speak into the theological discussions taking place around them, through their mystical experiences. Therefore, though our temptation can be to reject or back away from reading mystical texts by women because they (as a genre and theologically) seem so strange to us, it’s important that we do read them. There have always been female theologians with something unique and valuable to say, sometimes they just had to do it in a sneaky way!
Further Reading: Again, for all Female mystics I’d recommend reading Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. These are the two I reach for and re-read the most. Even if Douceline isn’t mentioned specifically that often, the trends in 13th century female spirituality are wild and excellently explained here. I’d also recommend getting your hands on a copy of The Life of Saint Douceline, a Beguine of Provence: Translated from the Occitan with Introduction, Notes and Interpretive Essay by Kathleen Garay and Madeleine Jeay.
Image shows an icon of Douceline.
Not Just Wives and Mothers: The Women of Church History 