Lauds

The Laudes are Latin praise-poems that come down to us from Umiltà of Faenza (1226–1310), the Vallombrosan foundress who began life as Rosanese Negusanti, spent twelve years walled into a cell beside the church of Sant'Apollinare in Faenza, and afterward founded monasteries at Faenza and Florence. Umiltà had no formal schooling in Latin and said so plainly; the texts attributed to her were dictated aloud to her sisters, who wrote them down. That circumstance is not incidental background. It is the situation the poems themselves keep returning to: an unlettered woman speaking a learned language she did not learn, and treating that fact as evidence rather than embarrassment.

What the Laudes do is praise, and praise is their whole method. They do not argue toward a conclusion or lay out stages of ascent. They address — the Virgin, John the Evangelist, the angels, above all Umiltà's two guardian angels, Sapiel and Emmanuel, who appear throughout her dictated corpus as companions, messengers, and instructors rather than as abstractions. The heavenly court in these texts is populated and conversational. Umiltà speaks to it directly, asks it for things, thanks it, and reports what it has told her. Alongside this runs a persistent contrast between the sweetness and light of that court and the poverty of the speaker: she is small, unlearned, enclosed, and precisely for that reason a fit vessel. The claim embedded in the form is that praise is itself a mode of knowing, that the language given to the mouth in prayer carries authority the schools cannot confer, and that a woman who cannot construe a text may still speak Latin theology because the source of both speech and doctrine is the same.

The Laudes matter now chiefly as evidence of a theological voice that operated entirely outside the university and the sermon-license, and that never apologized for it. They belong beside Hildegard's songs and the vernacular writing of the beguines as an instance of women claiming a hearing on the ground of infused rather than acquired learning. They also preserve a devotional world in which angels are neighbors, which is worth encountering for its sheer strangeness to modern habits.

Who should read this: readers drawn to medieval women's visionary and liturgical writing, to praise and address as theological genres, and to the question of who gets to speak about God. Not for readers seeking argument, spiritual technique, or a systematic account of prayer — the Laudes offer none, and will frustrate anyone who wants them to.