Mysticism, like literature, is an invention of modernity. This may be more than a coincidence. Like literature, mysticism coheres around an absence, an evanescent quality that its defenders can never concretely summon; like literature, it owes its coherence to institutional structures that have built canons around it and made it the object of critical scrutiny since the rise of the human sciences in the nineteenth century. Mysticism is nothing if not written: it is crucially, if paradoxically, a textual practice that documents, constructs, and frequently seeks to produce other lived or ‘experienced’ practices. In other words, mysticism is not just like literature; mysticism is literary.

Georges Bataille implicitly says as much in his later writings, in which mystical ‘eroticism’ (think, paradigmatically, of the swooning Saint Teresa) and literature are bound up with death and sacrifice, which is to say, with the limits of experience in every sense. This is not unimportant for medieval French mysticism, given that its pre-eminent figure, Marguerite Porete, was ultimately burned at the stake. Still, the fact remains that none of the so-called medieval mystics described themselves as such: as we shall see below, Marguerite d'Oingt calls herself, charmingly and tellingly, ‘una persona’: a person but also a character and, etymologically, a mask. Marguerite Porete's text, an allegorical dialogue, refuses to speak in a single voice. Their grouping under the rubric of mysticism is as foreign to them as their grouping under the rubric of literature; or, for that matter, of France.