After the Mystics: An Interview with Lauren Kane
“There’s nothing quite like the captivating feeling of coming upon, say, a faded relief on a stone wall in some unassuming place, and finding that the work is so much better than it should be.”
Earlier this spring, Lauren Kane journeyed up to the Cloisters—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s outpost on the northern tip of Manhattan, which houses European art inside a complex of buildings cobbled together from the ruins of several medieval cloisters brought over from France and Catalonia in the early twentieth century—to visit “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages.” As Kane writes in the NYR Online, the exhibition was rife with “transgressive delight”: “saddles rowdy with double entendre, demure coin purses,” “a painting of the Madonna nestled within a yonic wound-shaped frame,” “a large plate embossed with a scene of a wife paddling her husband’s ass,” “a copper aquamanile…in the shape of a woman riding a man,” and many more objets d’art, both secular and devotional, that would raise eyebrows even today, never mind six hundred years ago. But, she notes, it is precisely that projection of prudishness onto the past that can prevent us from understanding it, “a time when something as physiologically routine as arousal could be—and often was—understood as an experience of the divinely miraculous.”
Kane’s writing, often on art, medieval and otherwise, has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Commonweal, and Apollo magazine. She is also the managing editor of The New York Review, where she frequently pitches in to help me with this column—since 2022, she has interviewed twenty-two writers, from Marilynne Robinson to Jacob Weisberg.
This week I wrote to Kane to ask her about divinity, mysticism, the ineffability of the inaccessible, and editing.
Daniel Drake: Was there an exhibit or piece of religious art—medieval, Renaissance, or otherwise—that you encountered at some point in your life that started you writing about the subject? Where did your interest in religious art begin?
Lauren Kane: Like many people, a good number of my enthusiasms were planted in graduate school. I went for a master’s in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, a wonky little degree where I worked on Reformation history and the poetry of John Milton—the seventeenth century, which falls into that “early modern” period just after the medieval. I guess I started writing about the medieval period through a lingering interest in historical methodology, lethally boring as that sounds. There was an exhibition some years ago, also at the Cloisters, about merchants and the emerging middle class in the late Middle Ages. What I found really interesting was how the curator used everyday objects to assemble a biography of a man about whom she knew very little, a merchant in sixteenth-century Exeter. It was like the so-called microhistories by Natalie Zemon Davis or Carlo Ginzburg that I’d loved reading in graduate school, but in a museum gallery. Doing that sort of history by placing objects in vitrines was a fascinating method of curation, a sometimes imperfect, sometimes brilliant way of staging a thesis.
The same thing interested me about the exhibition at the Cloisters, and the religious aspect of the period: we can read these objects aesthetically, as works of art, while also trying to understand what they tell us about the people who once held and beheld them, and the fact that they had a purpose beyond their craftsmanship. This whole period in history is largely—though not entirely, as was very evident at “Spectrum of Desire”—represented to us through religious art. Such work was not made only for veneration or worship, but for education, teaching those who couldn’t read the Bible not so much about Scripture, but about Christian theology, as it developed. Iconoclasts weren’t wrong that these were not strictly Scriptural images or objects, and that’s kind of their point. I’m not trained as a medievalist, I’m really writing about these things from the position of a lay person looking at and thinking about a museum exhibition, but there is a germ of religious history from my time at div school that still tends to guide my interests.
You note that, in appreciating medieval art, in this case medieval art that evinces a perhaps surprisingly erotic charge, one must attempt to lift the “imaginary veil of propriety” that we moderns presume exists between us and the “prudish” people of the past. Such empathy makes it possible to see across the chasm of time and understand our ancestors in all their carnal humanity, but I wonder also about the opposite case: Do you ever encounter work from the past that seems impossibly strange, that seems to embody a way of being that is inaccessible to us now?
This may not be exactly what you mean, but perhaps because we’re talking about the Middle Ages what springs to mind is mysticism, a classification of writing and of person—the mystic—that is reiterated again and again over time, in different ways and in different places. The figure of the mystic seems to have access to something that we people more weighed down by the world around us want to understand but can’t. This may have been especially true in the medieval period, or perhaps it’s that there is a distinct tradition that survives, from the writings of Julian of Norwich or the Cloud of Unknowing—both theologically rather good for being the work of amateurs, one of whom had a bad fever—to the barmier stuff by Margery Kempe.
Centuries later there are strains of it in people as different as the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, and Madame Blavatsky and her seances and theosophy. Simone Weil comes along, motivated by the social and moral world of the twentieth century, not a recluse by any means, yet she works in a similar mode and gets labeled a mystic. There’s a rich tradition, and yet there is no one answer to what mysticism is, how to define it or neatly sum it up. It can be all of these things, expressed often through writing. But part of that definition is that it is in pursuit of the inaccessible, whatever that might look like.
What are some of the best exhibits or collections of medieval and religious art you’ve seen?
The Musée de Cluny in Paris is the Cloisters of the continent: originally a fourteenth-century abbey, it was repurposed in the nineteenth century to house a collection of medieval (and Renaissance) artwork, an immersive experience. Like the Cloisters, the Cluny boasts a room of millefleurs (“thousand flowers”) tapestries—that French medieval style where all negative space is jam-packed with floral patterning—featuring not the story of a unicorn hunt, as at the Cloisters, but a unicorn nonetheless, in more static scenes alongside a lady. Five of the scenes are understood to represent the five senses—in one, the lady plays a dainty organ, in another, she beholds the unicorn in a handheld looking glass. In the sixth scene, she receives a box of jewels under a tent with a banner on which is written “À mon seul désir”—“To my only desire.” I gather that lots of scholarly debate has grown up over what this means: a renunciation of the world for God or a betrothal, or a bit of both, or something else lost to time. But its simplicity resonates with poetry to me. I loved it so much I bought a poster of it for ten euros, and I’ll admit I still have it.
I also have to mention a late medieval altarpiece at the National Museum in Warsaw, dated somewhere between 1420–1520 and from the region around Gdańsk (not Hans Memling’s famous Gdańsk altarpiece, The Last Judgment, which is in that city, and which I hope to visit someday). The three panels explode with juicy narrative and visual complexity. Here a medieval hilltop city, there the temptation of Christ by a dragonlike Satan, here two swans bathing, and there Christ the boy king on his throne. The colors are lush and the paint rich. I was there some years ago with my partner while he was a visiting faculty member at the University of Warsaw, and we spent the better part of an hour with it, falling at whim into individual details and moments.
But I find the most moving pieces of religious art, I’m sure from any part of the world, are those still in their original chapels, cathedrals, temples, or ruins. My focus has been on Western Christian religious art, but obviously religions of every variety are the impetus for the creation of beautiful objects, paintings, statues everywhere. There’s nothing quite like the captivating feeling of coming upon, say, a faded relief on a stone wall in some unassuming place, and finding that the work is so much better than it has to be, has a mastery of skill or an originality of thought beyond its purpose. It’s a feeling of elevation I like to believe is akin to what people have sought in those spaces for centuries, and that collapse of space and time is its own kind of mystical sensation.
You are, of course, a writer and an editor. How do you find that those two modes interact with each other? How does facility in one help the other? Or does the editorial impulse ever make it harder to write? Does your writer’s soul ever resist sound editorial judgment?
I edit myself in the back of my mind while I am in the act of writing, and it’s awful. I think it makes my drafts come out in the prose equivalent of standing at a party with a drink in your hand not sure who to talk to—self-conscious and awkward. I’d love to loosen up and relax a bit. But it has certainly clarified to me how the push and pull between writer and editor is necessary. The editor needs someone willing to be a bit unselfconscious and messy and forthcoming, and the writer needs someone doing the work of making them sober up.
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