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The Strange case of Ermine de Reims:  A Medieval woman between Demons and Saints – Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski

For Ermine the heavens opened.  The Virgin Mary appeared in a grand celestial vision clothed in gold with a golden crown… after addressing Ermine in a teacher lie fashion, the Virgin vanishes, the heavens close and, after a vision that lasted five hours, Ermine is left on her knees in front of her window, without getting up, without her shoes, in her hair shirt …. Just as she had left her bed at the beginning of the vision ….

 [she also had] a particularly detailed vision of Christ tied to a column and being scourged, his hair and beard were somewhat red and not at all black as the painters make them when they paint their crucifixes………..

Ascetic practises of different types and of different degrees of severity were part and parcel of medieval religious life.  What one could call the ascetic model comprised along with fasting, prohibition of sexual pleasure, deprivation of sleep, restriction of speech, poverty, mortification of the flesh, self mutilation and compulsive weeping.  Some of the practises, such as fasting or the wearing of a hair short cold be constants in a penitent’s life…………

It seems that Mary’s lesson brought forth one last burst of Eucharistic visions, followed only by another celestial vision of stars and sweet melodies, just a day before her final and fatal malady grips her.