Mysticism And Gender

Author : Adelaide Baracco Colombo,Sigriður Guðmarsdóttir,Silvia Martínez Cano,Stefanie Knauss,Rita Perintfalvi
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Mysticism
ISBN : 9042933011

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Mysticism and Gender by Adelaide Baracco Colombo,Sigriður Guðmarsdóttir,Silvia Martínez Cano,Stefanie Knauss,Rita Perintfalvi Pdf

2015 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila. This volume of the Journal of ESWTR is therefore dedicated to the issue of mysticism and gender. The mystical experience is a radical confrontation with oneself, where one recognizes one's boundaries and is at the same time called to transgress them; it is a mystical transformation of the self that then will be able to transform unjust structures. Can mysticism today still unfold these capacities of transformation of self and societies, given the problems we are faced with? Using gender as a category of analysis, and adopting a gender-sensitive stand, the articles in this volume explore questions such as: How do issues of gender shape the relationship between mysticism and power? How have women mystics contributed to the field of mysticism? How can mysticism unfold a transformative power, both for individuals and societies? In short, what do we mean by mysticism today?

Author : Grace Jantzen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 1995-11-16
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 0521479266

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Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism by Grace Jantzen Pdf

In the western Christian tradition, the mystic was seen as having direct access to God, and therefore great authority. In this study, Dr Jantzen discusses how men of power defined and controlled who should count as a mystic, and thus who would have power: women were pointedly excluded. This makes her book of special interest to those in gender studies and medieval history. Its main argument, however, is philosophical. Because the mystical has gone through many social constructions, the modern philosophical assumption that mysticism is essentially about intense subjective experiences is misguided. This view is historically inaccurate, and perpetuates the same gendered struggle for authority which characterises the history of western christendom. This book is the first on the subject to take issues of gender seriously, and to use these as a point of entry for a deconstructive approach to Christian mysticism.

Author : Cristina Mazzoni
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Christian women saints
ISBN : 0801432294

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Saint Hysteria by Cristina Mazzoni Pdf

Saint Hysteria examines scientific, literary, and religious texts that share a fascination with the otherness of the female body, whether in ecstatic pleasure or in neurotic pain. Cristina Mazzoni focuses on material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly in Italy and France. Her approach uses the methodologies of cultural studies and feminism but also benefits from the insights of psychoanalytic criticism. She asks how the identification of mysticism with hysteria became prevalent, and explores the continuing dialogue between a historicizing view of hysteria and a view of hysteria as repressed religious mysticism. According to Mazzoni, this dialogue is discernible at various levels and in a variety of discourses. The medical history of hysteria, she maintains, is often linked to the religious history of supernatural phenomena, and the medical discourse of positivism depends on the religious-feminine element that it attempts to repress. Similarly, she finds a continuity between the literature of naturalism and that of decadence in their representations of the interdependence of neurosis and religion. Finally, the religious writings of women mystics and the discourses they inspired reveal an unresolved tension between nature and supernature, body and soul (or psyche) which, Mazzoni suggests, mirrors and complicates the very issues raised by hysterical conversion. Among those whose views she considers are the writers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Gabriele d?Annunzio, and Antonio Fogazzaro, as well as Graham Greene and Simone Weil; the mystics Angela of Foligno, Gemma Galgani, and Teresa of Avila; and the theorists Jean-Martin Charcot, Cesare Lombroso, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray.

Author : Alexandra Verini,Abir Bazaz
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2023-09-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781000928600

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Gender and Medieval Mysticism from India to Europe by Alexandra Verini,Abir Bazaz Pdf

This book opens up a dialogue between pre-modern women identified as mystics in diverse locations from South Asia to Europe. It considers how women from the disparate religious traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity expressed devotion in parallel ways. The argument is that women’s mysticism demands to be compared not because of any essential "female" experience of the divine but because the parallel positions of marginalization that pre-modern women experienced led them to deploy intimate encounters with the divine to speak publicly and claim authority. The topics covered range from the Sufi devotional tradition of Sidis (Indians of African ancestry) to the Bhakti poet Mīrābaī and the nuns of Barking Abbey. Collectively the chapters show how mysticism allowed premodern women to speak and act by unsettling traditional gender roles and expectations for religious behavior. At the same time as uncovering connections, the juxtaposition of women from different traditions serves to highlight distinctive features. The book draws on a range of disciplinary expertise and will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval religion and theology as well as history and literary studies.

Author : Yvonne Petry
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004138018

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Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation by Yvonne Petry Pdf

This study examines the thought of Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), a French religious thinker who relied on Jewish Kabbalah and its mystical understanding of gender to argue that a female messiah had arrived who would heal the political and religious conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe.

Author : Marie-Florine Bruneau
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 1998-01-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780791497845

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Women Mystics Confront the Modern World by Marie-Florine Bruneau Pdf

Women Mystics Confront the Modern World situates the female mystical tradition within the context of the epistemological shift which affected religious sentiments and the perception of the self at the dawn of the modern world. Anchored in a comprehensive knowledge of the religious history of seventeenth-century France, this book offers a vivid account of the fascinating lives and work of two exceptional women. Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1672) and Madame Guyon (1648-1717) continue a literary and spiritual tradition that had begun in the thirteenth century. Yet, because they were at a crucial point in the history of Western mysticism, when this movement was at once at its apogee and in the first stages of decline, their writings show indications of a changing mentality. These transformations shed light on the social significance of female mysticism in the Western tradition. The opportunities the two women seized or shunned highlight their maneuvering for validation and autonomy. But their choices also highlight many contradictions, compromises, and limits imposed upon their self-expression. At the confluence of French and American scholarship on mysticism, this work joins these two schools of thought by introducing gender as a viable category of inquiry into the one and by tempering the overly-optimistic interpretation of female mysticism of the other.

Author : Sigal Samuel
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-10-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780062412188

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The Mystics of Mile End by Sigal Samuel Pdf

Sigal Samuel’s debut novel, in the vein of Nicole Krauss’s bestselling The History of Love, is an imaginative story that delves into the heart of Jewish mysticism, faith, and family. “This is not an ordinary tree I am making. “This,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.” In the half-Hasidic, half-hipster Montreal neighborhood of Mile End, eleven-year-old Lev Meyer is discovering that there may be a place for Judaism in his life. As he learns about science in his day school, Lev begins his own extracurricular study of the Bible’s Tree of Knowledge with neighbor Mr. Katz, who is building his own Tree out of trash. Meanwhile his sister Samara is secretly studying for her Bat Mitzvah with next-door neighbor and Holocaust survivor, Mr. Glassman. All the while his father, David, a professor of Jewish mysticism, is a non-believer. When, years later, David has a heart attack, he begins to believe God is speaking to him. While having an affair with one of his students, he delves into the complexities of Kabbalah. Months later Samara, too, grows obsessed with the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life—hiding her interest from those who love her most–and is overcome with reaching the Tree’s highest heights. The neighbors of Mile End have been there all along, but only one of them can catch her when she falls.

Author : Jennifer Smith
Publisher : Vanderbilt University Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2021-06-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780826501882

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Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain by Jennifer Smith Pdf

Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession. Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism's subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self-realization.

Author : Meri Heinonen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9529220863

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Brides and Knights of Christ by Meri Heinonen Pdf

Author : Brian J. Gibbons
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2003-11-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0521526485

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Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought by Brian J. Gibbons Pdf

An evaluation of the intellectual legacy in England of the ideas of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624).

Author : Amy Hollywood
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2010-01-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226349466

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Sensible Ecstasy by Amy Hollywood Pdf

Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.

Author : Paul Peucker
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2015-06-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780271070711

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A Time of Sifting by Paul Peucker Pdf

At the end of the 1740s, the Moravians, a young and rapidly expanding radical-Pietist movement, experienced a crisis soon labeled the Sifting Time. As Moravian leaders attempted to lead the church away from the abuses of the crisis, they also tried to erase the memory of this controversial and embarrassing period. Archival records were systematically destroyed, and official histories of the church only dealt with this period in general terms. It is not surprising that the Sifting Time became both a taboo and an enigma in Moravian historiography. In A Time of Sifting, Paul Peucker provides the first book-length, in-depth look at the Sifting Time and argues that it did not consist of an extreme form of blood-and-wounds devotion, as is often assumed. Rather, the Sifting Time occurred when Moravians began to believe that the union with Christ could be experienced not only during marital intercourse but during extramarital sex as well. Peucker shows how these events were the logical consequence of Moravian teachings from previous years. As the nature of the crisis became evident, church leaders urged the members to revert to their earlier devotion of the blood and wounds of Christ. By returning to this earlier phase, the Moravians lost their dynamic character and became more conservative. It was at this moment that the radical-Pietist Moravians of the first half of the eighteenth century reinvented themselves as a noncontroversial evangelical denomination.

Author : Amy Hollywood
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 603 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231527439

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Acute Melancholia and Other Essays by Amy Hollywood Pdf

Acute Melancholia and Other Essays deploys spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion. Ideal for novices and experienced scholars alike, the volume makes a forceful case for thinking about religion as both belief and practice, in which traditions marked by change are passed down through generations, laying the groundwork for their own critique. Through a provocative integration of medieval sources and texts by Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Talal Asad, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, this book redefines what it means to engage critically with history and those embedded within it.

Author : Patricia Dailey
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2013-08-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231535526

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Promised Bodies by Patricia Dailey Pdf

In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Crossing linguistic and historical boundaries, Patricia Dailey connects the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions, writings, and letters to the work of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Oingt, and other mystics and visionaries. She establishes new criteria to more consistently understand and assess the singularity of women's mystical texts and, by underscoring the similarities between men's and women's writings of the time, collapses traditional conceptions of gender as they relate to differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality.

Author : Alexandra Cuffel,Ana Echevarria,Georgios T. Halkias
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2018-07-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781351171700

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Religious Boundaries for Sex, Gender, and Corporeality by Alexandra Cuffel,Ana Echevarria,Georgios T. Halkias Pdf

The ambiguity concerning the interpretation of the ‘physical body’ in religious thought is not peculiar to any given religion, but is discernible in the scriptures, practices, and disciplines in most of the world’s major religious traditions. This book seeks to address the nuances of difference within and between religious traditions in the treatment and understanding of what constitutes the body as a carrier of religious meaning and/or vindication of doctrine. Bringing together an international team of contributors from different disciplines, this collection addresses the intersection of religion, gender, corporeality and/or sexuality in various Western and Eastern cultures. The book analyses instances when religious meaning is attributed to the human body’s physicality and its mechanics in contrast to imagined or metaphorical bodies. In other cases, it is shown that the body may function either as a vehicle or a hindrance for mystical knowledge. The chapters are arranged chronologically and across religious orientations, to offer a differentiated view on the body from a global perspective. This collection is an exciting exploration of religion and the human body. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars in religious studies, theology, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, history of religions and gender studies.