Holy bathwater
Angela of Foligno ate a leper’s scab in a bid to experience the suffering of the sick and the poor
Angela of Foligno, in central Italy, was an unlikely mystic. Before dedicating herself to God, she was a wife, a mother and a social climber, pursuing wealth and status rather than mystical experience. But at the age of 40, something changed. Following the death of her husband and children towards the end of the 13th century, she dedicated her life to poverty and hardship in imitation of Christ.
We know from an account of her visions that many of Angela’s mystical experiences were a direct result of interaction with the sick and the poor. One of the most famous of these involves Angela’s care of local lepers. She would bathe their suffering bodies as part of her penitential practice – and then she would drink their bathwater. When a scab from this water got caught in her throat, she imagined that it was the Holy Communion, the body and blood of Christ. She forced herself to swallow it, and as a result experienced a moment of mystical union with Christ. By imagining that the suffering flesh was the same as Christ’s flesh, she turned her bodily revulsion into religious ecstasy.
This sensory act offers another clue as to what made mysticism attractive to women. In medieval Europe, reason and intellect were a man’s domain. Women were associated with the flesh; intellectual contemplation, it was believed, was beyond them. But, at the same time, more attention was being paid to the suffering body of Christ, as well as the physical practices that could spark a mystical state. This allowed women to use their connection with the physical to access something previously denied to them. They could now speak to God using their bodies and their senses as well as their minds.