Wrapping up the trying year that was 2025, endeavouring to remember what was good amidst the many tragedies and horrors of the year is definitely a challenge. Negotiating many losses, including the practical one of employment, which in its peculiarly American context means also health care [as Lady Catherine would doubtless find reasonable] and yet reluctant to take up just any yoke as sacrifice, I continue to survive on my wits and a small legacy (thanks Dad) like an Austen heroine. As Mrs [Fanny] Dashwood would exclaim,
They will live so cheap! Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servants; they will keep no company, and can have no expenses of any kind! Only conceive how comfortable they will be!
And after all, where there is life there is hope, eh? So I offer this piece I wrote for Parabola magazine’s call for pieces on Cosmic Law just before they closed their doors, alas. It is a story that is much on my mind and maybe in the works for something more, but I have given up prognosticating or even making goals beyond the most general sort, so as we are told as children, we shall see. In any case, Happy Hogmanay, folks.
The Devil’s Paramour: Cosmic Law in Mary of Nijmegen
We often use ‘making a deal with the devil’ to describe a complicated bargain struck in this imperfect world. In the past it was often meant literally. Most people are familiar with the name Faustus, whether from Christopher Marlowe’s play, Goethe’s novel or even Gounod’s opera, and know the tragedy of his tale of damnation for bargaining his soul to obtain wealth and power.
Before Faustus, there was a woman who made a deal with a devil—not for magic or power, but for learning. Mary of Nijmegen (or in the medieval Dutch, Mariken van Nieumeghen) sold her soul and lived seven years with a demon from hell in order to learn the seven liberal arts. With all the politicising of education in recent years, it’s worth remembering that the seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) plus arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (the quadrivium).
The tale of Mary fascinates not only for its philosophical explorations, but also for its dramatic form and style. The text is a strange hybrid of prose and play script. It feels as if someone wrote down a live production describing everything they could see and hear between the dialogue. The story also features a play within a play, anticipating Shakespeare’s later use of the motif in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is key because Mary’s tale shows how the arts work, not just with words but with actions to arouse our emotions. She is saved thanks to seeing a play.
Mary is an obedient young woman who tends house for her uncle, a learned cleric who does not think to share his education with his clever niece. On the fated day, he sends her to the market in Nijmegen too late in the day to return, waving away her concerns by telling her to stay with her aunt in the town.
His learning has allowed him to remain isolated, so he does not know that his sister has fallen prey to a political mania, quarrelling with ‘four or five’ other women that day and becoming completely deranged in an angry fury, which she turns on her niece. Many of us who have seen people ‘lost’ to political manias in recent years can well understand receiving an avalanche of accusations inspired by wild conspiracy theories. She refuses to give Mary sanctuary.
While independence is much prized in our time, in the Middle Ages everyone knew that community was essential. No one would go it alone. For a young woman of no means to be alone and friendless was to be vulnerable indeed. The only protector to come along, alas, was a devil. He disguised himself as a man but imperfectly, for no devil can fully embody the divine creation that is a human being. One-Eyed Moenen, he calls himself, claiming to be a Master of Arts. He agrees to teach her the seven liberal arts if she will be ‘joined in friendship’ with him.
They run into problems right away as Mary asks to learn necromancy, a skill her uncle practises so well that he can make devils crawl through the eye of a needle, she tells her would-be saviour. This alarms Moenen and may surprise modern readers. By the early modern era, the conflation of necromancy (practised by clerics) with folk magic is what leads to the worst of the witch hunt crazes. But here it’s seen as a difficult but worthwhile art.
Moenen convinces Mary that it’s far too dangerous to try necromancy; she might break her neck! But he does agree to teach her all the languages of the world as well as the seven liberal arts. He asks one thing of her though: she must change her name because a Mary once ‘did a great harm to me and my friends’ of course referring to the Queen of Heaven. They compromise on Emma and she agrees not to make the sign of the cross or call on her namesake.
They travel throughout the lowlands for some time, causing havoc. Meanwhile the author tells us, her uncle misses her after a couple days and visits his sister, who lies about her niece shamelessly. Her uncle is upset to find that no one knows where Mary is. The author gives us a vivid account of how the venomous woman is so bursting with anger brought on by political wrangling that she cuts her own throat in fury—prompted by the devil of course, who warns the reader that many end up the same way.
Emma and Moenen travel around from tavern to tavern, tempting people into sin with her accomplishments. They urge people to bet on how many drops of wine can be in a pot, which Emma carefully calculates. She performs feats of rhetoric for pub audiences that seem to be cries from the heart of the author. We’re accustomed to rhetoric only in its most base forms: advertising and politics. It’s easy to forget that it was once prized as a noble skill. As Emma laments before a drunken audience, ‘Ignorant men are the destruction of art.’ Moenen so riles up the audience awed by her skill that fights and killings occur.
How is it possible to come back from such a descent? Faustus never believes such a thing is possible. At the end of his adventures, the one thing he cannot contemplate is forgiveness. How can he balance the cosmic scales? Though his friends counsel contrition and repentance, Faustus believes the scales to be broken.
Emma comes to repentance gradually, aware that Moenen is using her to cause murderous havoc and lamenting how she once could call on her namesake for help. She worries about her aunt and uncle and asks to visit her old hometown. Moenen agrees, though muttering under his breath how the uncle’s prayers have stopped him from causing any direct harm to the young woman. His ego is such that he hopes to get the better of the old cleric when they return to Nijmegen.
They happen to return on Rogation Day, a day for processions and prayers for protection. Emma is somewhat cowed by the memory of her aunt’s cruelty and Moenen cheerfully tells her that she’s been dead three years. Despite their acrimonious parting, Emma is sorrowful. We can see the cosmic scales beginning to tip away from the evil life she has lead. Her desire for connection with those she loves and her genuine grief for one who wronged her prepare her mind for the connection that will appear dramatically.
They see a crowd and discover they’re watching a pageant on wheels. A lot of medieval drama was presented this way, on elaborate wagons that could rolled away to make room for the next play. The mystery cycles were presented this way; ordinary folks were most likely to know their biblical stories from the plays put on by local guilds.
Emma recognises that they’re presenting the play of Mascaron, the devil’s advocate who faces Mary, the Queen of Heaven in court over the soul of a man. She has fond memories of the drama and of how her uncle loved it. In the play within the play, Mascaron laments the unfairness of cosmic law that ‘shows more mercy and grace to the miserable human race than to us, poor spirits’ who have been everlastingly condemned.
Moved by the complaints of Mascaron, the grace of Jesus and the compassion of his mother, Emma’s heart fills with such remorse that she refuses Moenen’s demands to leave at once. When she calls on divine mercy, the devil loses his temper completely and lifts her up into the air only to dash her body to the cobblestones. Her uncle is in the audience and recognises her, fearing it is too late and her neck is broken.
Moenen rages and lets the audience know that Emma has once more been saved by her uncle’s prayers. The demon is so furious, he says, ‘I could piss on my own tail out of sheer rage’, but ultimately he is impotent. While he wishes for the power to drag his enemy off to hell, her uncle sees that Emma is conscious and fearing that she is damned forever. He is overcome with wonder. Emma tries to tell all that has happened in a wild and confused way, ending once again with the importance of the play inspiring her to contrition.
Her uncle tries to comfort her but Moenen warns that there is no way she can escape the fires of hell now. He threatens the man, but the cleric counters with ‘eight or ten lines written on a piece of paper’ that he has tucked in his breviary. This necromantic spell will make the devil ‘laugh out the other side of [his] face!’ Cursing the cleric, Moenen runs off dreading the punishments he will receive in hell for losing such a prize.
But Emma is not yet returned fully to being Mary. Her uncle takes her to the deacon, then to all the most learned priests in Nijmegen. None dares deal with such a dreadful moral situation. They cower before the task of balancing the cosmic law once more. Her sins are deemed too great. Her uncle will not allow her to admit defeat, though Moenen continues to pursue them. The determined cleric takes a holy sacrament in hand as the pair head to Cologne. The devil hurls trees at them but the uncle’s preparation and Emma’s daily prayers to Mary keep them safe.
Yet even the Bishop in Cologne does not feel equal to the task of assigning penance to the young woman. They head to Rome in the end, where Emma confesses all to the Pope. When he hears how she lived seven years with such a demon, that together they were responsible for the deaths of as many as two hundred, even he quails. Such sins are without precedence. Emma refuses to give up on her quest.
In the end, the Pope has three enormous iron bands fastened around her neck and arms. There is an almost folkloric element to this: iron is usually wielded against the fairy folk. The Pope cannot grant her absolution but it will be left to the divine will to determine when the cosmic balance has been restored.
Emma withdraws to a convent in Maastricht, where her uncle visits her every year while he lives. She remains in humble circumstances feeling the literal weight of her wrongdoings for a couple dozen years. In her sleep one night, the rings loosen and fall from her. Upon waking she expresses joy, once more employing the power of rhetoric to paint a vivid mental image.
‘The long nights are seldom welcome to those whose hearts are oppressed with grief and heaviness. Their sleep is great disquiet or greater sorrow, with grievous dreams terrifying them with further terrors.’ She tells of a dream where she is lifted from the fires of hell to heaven while the wings of white doves strike off her iron bonds. She encourages those with lesser sins to see how even her terrible ones can be forgiven with sufficient sorrow to balance the scales.
The real gift seems to be that while she committed the terrible sin of selling her soul to gain the seven liberal arts, Emma/Mary was not required to relinquish that prize in repudiating the life she led with Moenen. Instead, her knowledge gets redirected to good purpose, demonstrating the power of learning and skill. The scribe amplifies this message by assuring the reader that the three rings can still be seen in Maastricht, her story written beneath them, and ends with a rhetorical flourish of their own: ‘accept this thankfully and without complaint, this poor story, for it was written with love.’ The writer manages to unite the reader with both the author and with Emma/Mary in the hope that they all ‘receive heavenly glory.’
Two translations of the work into English are available:
‘Mary of Nijmeghen’. Trans. Eric Colledge. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Petroff. Oxford University Press, 1986. [From the original Dutch]
‘Mary of Nemmegen: 1518 Translation and the Middle Dutch Analogue, Mariken van Nieumeghen. Trans. Clifford Davidson, Ton J. Broos, and Martin Walsh. Early Drama Art and Music 6: 2016. [The Middle English translation modernised]
