She felt that the most holy sacrament was changed in her mouth into the form of an infant which, descending into her heart, made it languish with pure delight, and then shifted its position in such a way that the head lay under her left armpit, while its feet were extended to her right side. In this way it was enthroned, as it were, upon her very heart and took possession of it. Domenica herself, meanwhile, rapt and enthralled, was sweetly crushed under the weight of this divine burden, nor could she make any movement until, with the help of her guardian angel, she was able to clasp her arm around the infant form within her, as a nurse carries a child at the breast.[65]

Still, even if we allow that Christina’s negative thoughts may have been manifestations of an overworked sensibility (she was in her early twenties at the time), we are also faced with her experience of a number of poltergeist-like phenomena which cannot so readily be ascribed to a vivid imagination. The Devil used to beat her, she told her parish priest, and did it so hard that the blows could almost be heard in the local market place. ‘Afterwards the demon would suddenly pull away whatever she had under her head as she lay in bed, so that her head bumped on to a box which stood below. Sometimes he got inside the pillow and there made such a disturbance that she could not sleep. Sometimes he put a stone under her head, and lifted the bedclothes off her, and if she replaced them, he again pulled them away’; and on another occasion he ‘tore her feet with his fine claws, so that one day the whole parish crowded there to see the great sore places with their own eyes’. ‘He gnaws at her flesh like a dog’, wrote Father Maurice from the monastery at Köln, ‘and bites out great pieces. He burns her clothes next to her skin while she is wearing them, and shows himself to her in horrible forms.’[66]

A little later, when Christina was twenty-six, she and a number of others were praying in church when a filthy, stinking bag flew the length of the nave and landed at their feet. Inside, and apparently unblemished by the ordure which had tainted the bag, was Christina’s prayer book, stolen from her three months previously, she said, by the Devil. Nor was this the only episode involving filth. During the winter of 1268/69, as Peter of Dacia witnessed and recorded, Christina and her visitors were subjected time and time again to assaults by some hostile entity which spattered both them and the room with faecal matter. Many (but not all) of these attacks took place at night. On each occasion, however, there were witnesses and sufficient light for them to see what was happening, and when a Swedish Dominican attempted to exorcise the spirit, those present heard a violent explosive bang in the room, the candles were extinguished, and the exorcist was covered in filth. A similar drenching in faeces once took place even in the parish church, although this time Christina herself was spared the deluge. But at the beginning of Advent 1269, the entity (which Christina and others clearly identified as the Devil) turned to even greater violence. It burst down the door of her room with immense force, threw stones which hit several people present, and began to bite a number of priests – ‘I saw the scar’, said Christina of her parish priest. ‘It was three inches long, just above the wrist’ – as well as subjecting Christina herself to a barrage of stones and bones and bites. It thrust the head of a flayed cat into her mouth, ripped off parts of her clothes, and brought in a skull through which it spoke to her and the others. ‘The [parish priest] told me’, reported Peter of Dacia, ‘that the demon sometimes placed the skull upon the ground, but sometimes lifted it up higher than the grating of the house, just as it pleased him.’[67] This violence rapidly worsened. The entity dragged Christina out of bed by her hair, wounding her sister, who tried to come to her aid, by stabbing her in the back with a sword, while all the onlookers saw, apart from the wound and the slash in her sister’s dress, was Christina pinned against the canopy of the bed and the sword itself being waved about in the air by an invisible hand. When the parish priest arrived he was struck several times on the head with the blade; an attendant friar was bodily thrown out of the room; and dresses, along with household linen, which were kept not in the house itself but in a box in a church, were completely destroyed. Not long after, something ripped off Christina’s shoes, along with half the skin of her feet while she knelt in prayer in the church, and cut them to pieces.

Now, if these instances constituted the whole of Christina’s experiences, we should be justified in seeking to classify them as poltergeist, on the grounds that they come near to fulfilling the usual criteria for such an identification. But things are never that simple and we must add to their number various other episodes which took place alongside or in between them. When Peter of Dacia met Christina for the first time on 20 December 1267 in the house of her parish priest, she stood up to greet him and was immediately hurled backwards so forcibly that she hit her head on the wall and made the building shake.[68] There were several people present, other than the two priests, and they were also witness to Christina’s being thrown into the furniture while she tried to talk to her confessor. It was on this occasion, too, that they examined her feet and discovered fresh, bleeding wounds which multiplied during the course of the afternoon. Seven people, including Peter, stayed in the house overnight, sitting in chairs to keep themselves awake so that they could observe what might happen next. Christina, too, was sitting with them and at one point gave evidence of pain near her knee. ‘I have been wounded,’ she said and pulled from inside her sleeve (per manicam) a nail covered in blood. Some time later, while the two priests were saying Mass they were interrupted by a commotion and found that Christina had produced another nail. This one was twisted and had both blood and flesh adhering to it.

Such a set of episodes is, of course, suspicious, and there can be no doubt that Christina, whose sense of personal theatre was highly developed as we can tell from her almost excessive austerities as a teenager and her extraordinary visions or pseudo-visions of the Host, may have thrown herself round the room and stabbed herself with a couple of nails she had secreted about her person. There were, indeed, witnesses and we may have expected that at least one of them would have noticed anything untoward; but we do not know whether these witnesses, or any one of them, were prepared to be hostile or sceptical (or even whether they were fully awake at the time of the nail incidents) or had stayed with Christina in the hope or expectation of seeing something unusual. Certainly Peter, who was sitting next to her when the first nail was produced, kept both nails thereafter and treated them almost as though they were holy relics. There were other episodes, too, which may draw the attention of the sceptic. In July 1268, Christina was found buried to her chin in the mud of a disused reservoir. Just before Christmas that year she complained of being burned with hot stones, and indeed one was discovered immovably lodged in her left side, although it was not hot enough to prevent others from touching it and yet sufficiently hot, along with others, to leave a good many wounds on her body. One night (she said) the Devil also thrust two sizeable willow twigs through her ankles, dragged her out of the house, and tied her to a tree, repeating the assault three days later at midday. What are we to make of these?                                         

It is always possible, of course, that she was telling lies about the stones and burned herself in private to give the impression that, however others might find them, they had in fact been hot enough to leave wounds ‘so deep that you could have hidden a prunum [sloe] in them’.[69] She could also have taken herself to the reservoir and tied herself to the trees after mutilating her ankles.

An emotionally unstable woman eager for a certain type of attention and willing to manufacture signs of diabolic hostility towards her: it is not difficult to dismiss almost any of these particular episodes and thus taint with suspicion of fraud everything else which happened to her. But, as we have seen in the case of the Boxley Rood, an apparently simple case of deception may look somewhat different when viewed from a contemporary, rather than a modern, angle. Were the hurling backwards, the wounds on the foot, and the piercing with nails outwards demonstrations of an inward reality? In other words, if – and one should perhaps note this ‘if’ – Christina was inflicting these pains on herself, was she doing so with guilty intention to deceive, or was she acting out in the flesh those torments and afflictions she sincerely believed the Devil or some other hostile entity was making her suffer?

Pious enactment or intentional fraud? In view of the different psychology of our Mediaeval forebears, the former must at least be considered rather than the latter automatically assumed, for these particular events took place as part of a continuous context, a context in which, for example, during February and March 1268, Christina fell into ecstatic trances and was found to have stigmatic signs on her hands, feet, and head. These appeared with fresh vigour on Holy Saturday that year and, after lasting for about eight days, stopped bleeding, only to break out afresh each succeeding Easter until 1286 and possibly beyond. Far from displaying these stigmata or drawing attention to them, Christina sought to conceal them and was annoyed if anyone referred to them. She therefore joins company, as it were, with several other women and men – St Francis of Assisi, Blessed Angela of Foligno, St Catherine of Siena, and so on down to St Gemma Galgani in the nineteenth century and St Pio of Petrelcina in the twentieth – who have exhibited in their flesh the wounds and marks of Christ’s suffering and death.[70] Now, it is well known that the mind can exercise a quite extraordinary control over the body and that hypnosis in particular can be employed to induce stigmatic phenomena in a sensitive subject. A German psychiatrist, Alfred Lechler, for example, did this with a patient of his, Elizabeth K. Elizabeth, like Christina, was in many ways emotionally disturbed to a notable extent and, again like Christina, was in her mid-twenties when she exhibited severe physical symptoms of an inner turbulence. On Good Friday 1932 she attended an illustrated lecture on the Crucifixion and this gave Dr Lechler the idea of hypnotising her with a view to reproducing Christ’s stigmata in her body. By Holy Saturday his experiment had worked and Elizabeth’s palms and feet showed red, swollen marks the size of a large coin with torn, weeping skin around them. On another occasion Lechler suggested she cry bloody tears, which she did; and on a third, after saying to her that a crown of thorns was being placed on her head, she winced in pain when he lightly touched her forehead. By the following morning, there were irregularly shaped puncture marks where the crown would have rested, which seeped blood within an hour.[71]

There are two points worth noting from this. First, as Ian Wilson points out, Lechler’s experiments show that ‘spontaneous bleedings of the type attributed to stigmatics during the last seven centuries really do happen’, and secondly, that while Elizabeth K manifested her signs and symptoms under hypnosis, Christina (and her companion Mediaeval stigmatics) did not. Constant meditation by a sensitive subject upon the suffering and death of Christ may, of course, produce a condition akin to self-hypnosis, but there have been many who have meditated long upon Christ’s agonies – the followers of St Ignatius Loyola, for example, encouraged to train their spiritualities by means of his highly emotive Exercises which lay great stress upon imagination and empathy – who have not developed stigmata at all.[72] So while there can be no doubt that Christina was – or at least had been as a teenager – emotionally unstable, and that she had a constant and intense devotion to Christ and a highly developed awareness of personifications of evil, episodes involving apparent physical attacks upon her need to be regarded with care rather than dismissed out of hand, while one bears in mind that there may be more than one explanation of extraordinary or bizarre happenings other than fraud or self-induced hysteria.