This unit explores female mystical piety in the Middle Ages, especially through the reading of selected primary texts from Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich and Marguerite Porete. A seminar-based unit, it emphasises the reading of texts and the interpretive processes involved in a receptive and critical reading of medieval sources. It also explores some contemporary approaches to the interpretation of medieval women’s spiritual experience in a social and cultural context.

Undergraduate Prerequisites

Graduate and Postgraduate Prerequisites (DS327)

one unit of Christian Spirituality; e.g., DS350 or DS351

Requirements

3 hours per week

Undergraduate Assessment

Graduate and Postgraduate Assessment (DS327)

Equivalent to 6,000 words
See Coursework Assessment for Graduate and Postgraduate Students.

Advance Reading

Sheldrake, Phillip. Spirituality and History: Questions of Interpretation and Method. London: SPCK, 1991.

Bibliography

• Recommended translations of primary sources: Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist).
• Beer, Frances. Woman and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1992.
• Bell, Rudolph. M. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Bynum, Caroline W. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1992.
• ———. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.
• Coakley, John W. Women, Men and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
• Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Jantzen, Grace M. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• McGinn, Bernard, ed., with the collaboration of Frank Tobin and Eluira Borgstadf. Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechtild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete. New York: Continuum, 1994.
• Nichols, John A., and Lillian T. Shank, eds. Medieval Religious Women. 4 vols. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984–95.
• Petroff, Elizabeth A., ed. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Zum Brunn, Emilie, and Georgette Epincy-Burgard, eds. Women Mystics in Medieval Europe. Translated by Sheila Hughes. New York: Paragon, 1989.