1st Edition
Medieval Mystical Women in the West Growing in the Height of Love
This book explores the rich and varied mystical writings by and about medieval and early modern women across Western Europe. Women had a profound and lasting impact on the development of medieval and early modern spiritual and mystical literature, both through their own writing and as a result of the hagiographical texts that they inspired. Bringing together contributions by both established and emerging scholars, the volume provides a valuable overview of medieval mystical women with a special focus on the Low Countries and Italy, regions that produced a disproportionately high number of female mystics. The figures discussed range from Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich and Beatrice of Nazareth to lesser-known women such as Agnes Blannbekin, Christina of Hane, and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. The chapters address topics such as the body, pain, desire, ecstasy, stigmata, annihilation, virtue, visions, the tension between exterior and interior experience, and the nature of mystical union itself.
Introduction
1 Mystical Hagiography in the Thirteenth Century: The Low Countries and Italy
Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli
2 Annihilated Women in The Thirteenth Century
Bernard McGinn
3 Hidden Marks of Leadership: Holy Women and Invisible Stigmata in the Late Middle Ages
Carolyn Muessig
4 ‘Enarrabiliter’: the separation of visionary experience and communicable form in Hildegard of Bingen’s vision books
Dinah Wouters
5 Gender and Feminine Virtue in Bernard of Clairvaux and Hadewijch
Kenneth Hoyt
6 Kenotic Christology, Poverty, and Annihilation in Clare of Assisi and Angela of Foligno
Michael S. Hahn
7 Mysticism by the Numbers: Beatrice of Nazareth’s Seven Manners of Love and Ida of Nivelles’ ‘Eight Topics of Contemplation’
Lydia Shahan
8 Spiritual Edifices: Beatrice of Nazareth’s Monastery of the Heart and Agnes Blannbekin’s Urban Stations of Christ
Amanda J. Langley
9 The Mystic as Symbol: Ecstasy as Liturgical Participation in the Vita of Beatrice of Nazareth
Samantha Slaubaugh
10 ‘I Want to Die Living’: The Entanglement of Death and Desire in Mechthild of Magdeburg
Amy Maxey
11 Spiritual Vision in Corporeal Space: The Power of Performative Language in the Mystical Life of Christina of Hane*
Racha Kirakosian, translated by Philip Liston-Kraft
12 Can This Text Still Speak? Reading Julian of Norwich's Prayer for Illness as (Fully a Part of) a ‘Classic Text’ of Embodied Mysticism
Andrew K. Lee
13 The theological virtues, interiorisation, and theological anthropology in The Evangelical Pearl
Rik Van Nieuwenhove
14 The Blood and the Word: The Mystical Speech Acts of Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi
Henry Barrett
Biography
John Arblaster is assistant professor of the history of spirituality in the Low Countries at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp and a research associate at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven.
Rob Faesen holds the Jesuitica Chair at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, the Francis Xavier Chair at the Tilburg School of Catholic Theology, and is also professor at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp.
