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Full Description
Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death investigates the tension between death as necessary for bringing about union with God and as the end of life on earth.
For medieval Christians, only death could offer complete union with God. For medieval women in particular, death was figured as a desirable end to their embodied lives; at least, this is the story told by the clergymen who typically wrote their biographies. Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death questions this assumption and studies visionary narratives, treatises, and spiritual reflections by and about medieval Christian women from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries to reveal how these women understood their own deaths and how their depictions conformed to or departed from the stories told about them.
Rather than focusing on externalities like rituals, revenants, or miracles, Jessica Barr instead tackles the desire for death from the inside, seeking to elucidate the ways in which medieval people anticipated or experienced biological death on a personal level. In narrating their spiritual lives within the framework of deeply held Christian beliefs, these medieval women mystics illustrate how theology and experience converge—and, not infrequently, diverge.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. Why Die? The Ethical Value of Death in Medieval Christianity
2. The Girls' Guide to Loving Death: Scripting Desire in Anchoritic Guides and Women's Spiritual Treatises
3. Living Death from the Outside: Christina Mirabilis, Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Beatrice of Nazareth
4. Living Death from the Inside: Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich
5. Touching Absence: Relics, Scholarship, and the Academic Pilgrim
Coda
Bibliography
