The tale as old of time

There is no fairy tale that resolves the suffering of women but there is another side to their stories of violence and anonymity, Claire Williams reflects.

Claire Williams

Claire Williams is a theologian investigating women’s spirituality and practice. She lecturers at Regents Theological College.

A woman stand beside a busy road with her back to the camera. There is a red sky behind her.

Florian Kurrasch on Unsplash.

From accusations of assault by celebrities to the murder of a teenage girl on her way to school, and the discussion on television about feminists and their lack of sexual appeal - we have had our fill recently of stories of trauma and violence done to women. These events are brutal interruptions to the lives of women whose futures have been changed, or even stopped, by these terrible acts. It is a story that we read in the news over and over again. It is also an ancient story, of women who are mistreated by men in power over them. It is the tale as old as time. When we tell these tales we anonymise women, for their own safety and privacy, but also lock them in their story. They are, to those of us who read or hear about it, only the tale of violence, we see nothing else about them.

We feel our past in our bodies, we know ourselves in our bodies and these feelings and knowings are part of the story that remains untold, that isn’t understood by anyone.

In one ancient telling in the bible, there is a story of a woman who is cast out, loses position, hope for the future, agency and bodily autonomy. Hagar was a servant in the household of Abraham. She was an Egyptian and therefore of a different ethnicity to her master and his wife, Sarah. Hagar, as a servant, had no choices in life and would do what she was told and when she was told. So, when she was commanded to become Abraham’s wife in order that he might have a child with him, she had no choice at all. In the bible there are stories of Abraham and his quest to have a son and heir when Sarah had been unable to conceive. It was indeed Sarah’s idea. Hagar underwent what could be described as a rape and a forced pregnancy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarah and Hagar fell out. Hagar ran, she ran away from the cruel treatment of her mistress and the violence perpetrated unto her and into the wilderness. Hagar’s story is out of time with our own stories yet has resonance none the less because of her subjugation, the violence done to her and the consequential fear and fleeing. I wonder as I read about Hagar, what she looked like, or what her other stories are. What did she like to do? What had her hopes been for the future? But Hagar, is unseen by us, apart from the stories of violence done to her. She is unseen like the women who are raped, stabbed, assaulted, followed, catcalled, touched and upskirted. For these unseen women, stories are all that remain.

Telling of the stories isn’t enough. With violent, or emotional, trauma, words are only some of the message. We feel our past in our bodies, we know ourselves in our bodies and these feelings and knowings are part of the story that remains untold, that isn’t understood by anyone. The loneliness from being unknown is bone deep. That nobody understands is part of the horror of the traumatic injury. Hagar’s story does help us here. Twice Hagar runs into the wilderness to escape from Sarah and Abraham. When she is there, she expects to die. After her child is born, she puts him away, under a bush, so that she doesn’t have to watch him die. Both times in the wilderness, where she is away and hidden there is one who sees her and acts. The first time, so the bible tells us, Hagar is met by an angel in the wilderness who speaks to her and promises her the future we assume she has lost, Hagar identifies her visitor as from God – the first person to do so. In response to God seeing her, she sees God. She is not anonymous to God. The second time, as she lays down to die, God provides not only hope but water and we learn that she has a future with her son.

The story of Hagar is told still, as a reminder that God sees. This does not mitigate the harm that is done to women, nor use it for higher purposes. However, we only know a small part of these stories, these terrible accounts of horrors, God holds their entire stories together.

There is no fairy tale that resolves the suffering of these women in the stories, either the ancient story or the most recent ones. Male violence against women is repetitive and so far, little abating it. I do not offer a solution to why these terrible things happen to women, why they continue to happen even though millennia separate Hagar from today. Nonetheless, despite the uncertainty that surrounds the traumas wrought upon women in situations such as above there is another side to the story of violence and anonymity, that is of a hope in God who sees the women and offers a future.

That future we discover does not retreat from the misery of the past but moves on through it.

These women are not unknown, their stories, which are acts of resistance to the violence that was perpetrated upon them, are known to God. With telling and retelling of the stories of women we testify to their story and acknowledge it. There is hope in this situation, a promise that those who come to Jesus can find rest, that they will not feel condemned or ashamed in his presence and that there is the possibility of hope and wholeness in the face of such devastating actions of humanity. This can seem trite and it does not offer a sticking plaster solution to the problems of great trauma, but rather a God who, in Jesus, is a witness to the pain and the hurt and one who offers peace, who sees the women at the heart of these stories of terrible violence and who knows them. The promise of the future is that every tear will be wiped away, that when the final plans of God are enacted on earth there will be a world where there is no longer violence and the long-lasting pain, injury and horror will be removed.

The God who knew Hagar and the anonymous women who report sexual violence today, also knows the end of their story, and that end is hopeful, even if it doesn’t feel that way yet. Ultimately, God intervenes for Hagar. She is cast out, she expects she will die and potentially see her son lost too. Hagar, who names God is in return named by God, ‘Hagar’ he says as he ushers her into a future,

‘get up, hold your boy, I will make him into a great nation’.

That future we discover does not retreat from the misery of the past but moves on through it. We leave Hagar with her fully grown son, both thriving in the wilderness with Hagar arranging his marriage. I picture her, a matriarch in her own right, with her son, not overcome by violence anymore.

This reading of Hagar is from the work of Dr Eve R Parker in her forthcoming contribution to ‘Theologies from the Inside Out: Critical Conceptions of Pregnancy and Birth’ ed. Karen O’Donnell and Claire Williams, SCM forthcoming 2024.

Column

Creed

Feminism

Monastic life

29 May 2025

4 min read

Cancelled but not forgotten, the medieval heretic who still intrigues today

Despite erasure and desecration, Guglielma was a trailblazer.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Seth Johnston on Unsplash.

Is it possible to be martyred years after dying a natural death? The question occurs to me under the Alps between Lyon and Milan and arises from a late thirteenth century story of Guglielma, a spirited 50-year-old to say the least.

She arrived in Milan in 1260 like Ruby Tuesday. No one knew where she came from and yesterday didn’t matter, because it was gone. She lived in poverty, but gathered quite a following. Some said she was the daughter of the King of Bohemia (she was certainly bohemian in the cultic sense), others that she was the cousin of Elizabeth of Hungary or had been married to an English prince.

Guglielma (we have no surname) claimed equality with God, a new dawn for womanhood, and according to a contemporary account stated she was “the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women” whom she baptised “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of herself.”

Some 20 years after she died, Dominican agents of the Inquisition arrived in Milan and burned a top nun, Maifreda da Pirovano of the local ruling family, at the stake, for claiming that she would be made Pope. Then they pitched up at the Abbey of Chiaravalle, desecrated Guglielma’s tomb, dragged her mouldering remains to a field and burned her bones to dust, scattering her ashes to the winds.

I resolved to embark on a little pilgrimage to Chiaravalle when I arrived in Milan, to pay my respects to Guglielma, my kind of heretic. I’d never heard of her before a short account from the podcasting historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion, on “the making of the western mind”, I was finishing as I crossed the Italian border.

Pilgrims used to visit her tomb twice a year in the Middle Ages before she was violently exhumed. But you’ll find no record of her at Chiaravalle now. Bizarrely, there were Italian supercars being photographed outside of the abbey when I arrived, but it’s peaceful and original, nonetheless. And Guglielma is, of course, missing.

Speak to one of the Cistercian monks there and they will affect not to have heard of her, then murmur “heretic” and “Bohemian.” But a gentle monk called Davide sweetly told me he would show me her former tomb, in the private grounds out of bounds to visitors, if I returned in 20 minutes.

We walked through the brothers’ vegetable garden and cemetery, where hares were nibbling around a statue of St Francis and the trees grew unruly. There, under a twelfth century arch, was her former grave, now marked with the names of local Milanese benefactors of the abbey. I wondered if they had known they would be laid to rest in heretical soil. The birds sang on.

As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

There are lessons to learn from the Gugliema cult. The first is that, as the author of Ecclesiastes has it, there really is nothing new under the sun. Women have been fighting the patriarchy perhaps since Mary Magdalene encountered “the gardener” outside an empty tomb.

There was no word for “deaconess” in the early church, only deacons. The Gugliemites were heralding the dawn of a new age for the Christian Church run by women. That may not be wholly the ambition of today’s women priests, but let’s note in passing that it’s taken more than another 700 years for women to be consecrated as bishops.

The second point is that she really might have had a point about the Holy Spirit. Claiming the third person of the Trinity as herself may have gone a bit far, even by today’s standards, but for a God who holds within “himself” all gender, there is a venerable tradition of considering the Spirit as female.

The Hebrew bible often casts this spirit as female, as in the book Proverbs, where Wisdom is a woman who “shouts in the streets” and “cries out in the public square.” It was St Paul, much later, who said she must keep quiet in church.

Guglielma is a saint only in Folk Catholicism, but women like her and Maifreda were authentic witnesses and trailblazers for women’s apostleship. We can still be too sniffy, even afraid, of heresy and we do well to remember the main charge against the Nazarene at his arrest and execution was precisely that. As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

As I left Guglielma’s last grave, I knew it was empty of her, not unlike that other empty tomb. Her violators had liberated her into the world. She’d gone before me.

It was fitting that her ashes had been thrown to the wind, like the wind that had moved across the waters in the act of creation; like the wind that had blown over other disciples at Pentecost. And like the wind that was now gently rustling the trees in this quiet monastic back garden.

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