This essay was presented as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History, 6 January 1996.

1. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica 3.1, in LeClercq, Jean et al. , eds., Sancti Bernardi Opera (Rome, 1957–1977), 1:14: “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae.”Google Scholar

2. McGinn, Bernard, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York, 1991);Google Scholarand The Growth of Mysticism: From Gregory the Great to the Twelfth Century (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

3. For Ambrose and Augustine on the universality of the call to mystical contact with God, see The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 211–213, 255–257; for Gregory's views on the matter, see The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 74–76.Google Scholar

4. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica 83.1 (Sancti Bernardi Opera 2:298): “sed etiam unde audeat adspirare ad nuptias Verbi.”Google Scholar

5. Obviously, flight from the world was always a highly ambiguous notion. Many of the great monastic mystics, such as Bernard, were deeply engaged in activities outside the cloister. My point is that they saw such activity as a barrier to the mystical quest.Google Scholar

6. For a brief review of this debate, see The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 277–281, 288–290.Google Scholar

7. Sacrum Commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, ed. Brufani, Stefano (Assisi, Italy, 1990), cap. 30 (ed. 173): “Illa vero, quietissimo somno ac sobria dormiens, surrexit festinanter, petens sibi claustrum ostendi. Adducentes eam in quodam colle ostenderunt ei totum orbem quem respicere poterant, dicentes: ‘Hoc est claustrum nostrum, domina.’”Google Scholar

8. Sacrum Commercium, cap. 31 (ed. 174): “ut visum sit mihi hodie esse vobiscum tamquam in paradiso Dei…. quoniam illis sum coniuncta in terris, qui mihi imaginem representant eius cui sum desponsata in celis.”Google Scholar

9. Eckhart, Meister, Predigt 5b, in Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart, Germany, 1936–), Die deutsche Werke 1:91. 10–16.Google ScholarThe translation is from Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Colledge, Edmund O.S.A., and McGinn, Bernard (New York, 1981), p. 183.Google Scholar

10. Eckhart, Meister, Predigt 66, in Die deutsche Werke 3:113–114.Google ScholarThe translation is from Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, trans. and ed. Walshe, M. O'C. (London, 1981), 2:91.Google Scholar

11. Schürmann, Reiner, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), pp. 15, 47, 109–110.Google Scholar

12. Scott, Karen, “St. Catherine of Siena, ‘Apostola,’” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 61 (1992): 34–46;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand “Urban Spaces, Women's Networks, and the Lay Apostolate in the Siena of Catherine Benincasa,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. Matter, E. Anne and Coakley, John (Philadelphia, Pa., 1994), pp. 105–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Raymond of Capua, Legenda Major Sanctae Catherinae 2.6 (Acta Sanctorum Aprilis 3:898D): “Coepit enim Dominus ex tune non tantum in locis secretis, ut prius consueverat, sed etiam in patentibus, palam & familiariter se ostendere sponsae suae, tam eunti quam stanti.”Google Scholar

14. See the entry “Contemplation (contemplation and action)” in the subject indices in The Foundations of Mysticism and The Growth of Mysticism.Google Scholar

15. See the discussion of Hildegard of Bingen and A Teaching of the Loving Knowledge of God (often called The “Trudperter” Hohelied) in The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 333–336, 347–352.Google Scholar

16. Many recent studies and anthologies have uncovered much about the role of women writers in the Christian tradition; see especially Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge, U.K., 1984);Google ScholarPetroff, Elizabeth Alvida, Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (New York, 1986);Google Scholarand Clark, Elizabeth A., trans., Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, Minn., 1990).Google ScholarFor a bibliographical survey, see Kadel, Andrew, Matrology: A Bibliography of Writings by Christian Women from the First to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

17. The large and constantly growing literature on women's spirituality and mysticism in the later Middle Ages cannot be surveyed here. For the German-language realm, there is a helpful bibliography, though only of works up to 1980:Google ScholarLewis, Gertrud Jaron, Willaert, Frank, and Govers, Marie-José, eds., Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters: Mit ein Anhang zu Beatrijs van Nazareth und Hadewijch (Berlin, 1989).Google ScholarFor Italy, see the bibliography in Scrittrici mistiche italiane, ed. Pozzi, Giovanni and Leonardi, Claudio (Genoa, Italy, 1988), pp. 701–738. There is no comparable bibliography in English.Google Scholar

18. Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Calif., 1987).Google Scholar

19. For all its many merits, Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast seems at times to move from perceptive analysis of particular patterns to questionable generalizations of the differences between male and female spirituality and mysticism. See especially pp. 238–244 and 290–294Google Scholar, as discussed in my review in History of Religions 28 (1988): 90–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Bynum, Caroline Walker, “Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages,” Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Raitt, Jill in collaboration with McGinn, Bernard and Meyendorff, John (New York, 1987), p. 137.Google Scholar

21. For an overview of thirteenth-century lives of female saints, see Goodich, Michael, “The Contours of Female Piety in Later Medieval Hagiography,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 50 (1981): 20–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. See, for example, Bynum, , “Religious Women,” pp. 136–137;Google Scholarand Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 1991), p. 169.Google Scholar

23. For two overviews of the role of women in thirteenth-century religious movements, see Leclercq, Jean, “Women's Monasticism in the 12th and 13th Centuries,” Greyfriars Review 7 (1993): 167–192 (a paper first published in Italian in 1980, and one that deliberately excludes the Franciscan women);Google Scholarand Manselli, Raoul, “La donna nella vita della chiesa tra duecento e trecento,” II movimento religiose femminile in Umbria nei secoli XIII–XIV, ed. Rusconi, Roberto (Florence, Italy, 1984), pp. 243–255.Google Scholar

24. Ruh, Kurt, Geschichte der abendlandische Mystik, Band 2, Frauenmystik und Franziskanische Mystik der Frühzeit (Munich, Germany, 1993), p. 66, claims that the cooperation between Elizabeth of Schonau and her brother Ekbert in the 1160s provides the earliest example of the interchange between a female visionary and a male theologian that marks the new Frauenmystik. This is certainly true of the mode of interaction, though I do not consider their joint product, the Libri Visionum, to be a mystical text, at least in the same sense as the thirteenth-century examples cited above; see The Growth of Mysticism, p. 337.Google Scholar

25. Yourcenar, Marguerite, That Mighty Sculptor, Time (New York, 1992), p. 4.Google Scholar

26. Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, “Literary and Mystical Voices,” in A History of Women, vol. 2, Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 447–448.Google ScholarRégnier-Bohler, , of course, does not deny the specific character of women's voices. As she puts it, women “aspired not to speak the language of men but a language that was at once less and more” (p. 466).Google Scholar

27. A number of recent studies have illustrated aspects of this conversation in diverse linguistic and historical contexts. For France, for example, Nicole Bériou has shown how the sermons that Pierre Limoges gave to the Paris Beguines were worked out together with the magistra of the house;Google Scholarsee her “Le prédication au béguinage de Paris pendant l'année liturgique 1272–1273,” Recherches augustiniennes 13 (1978): 105–229, esp. 121–122, 194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarIn the Low Countries, Rubin, Miri has given a good description of the roles of women and men in Liége in fostering the feast of Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi, pp. 164–176).Google ScholarWith regard to Germany, Coakley, John has published two important studies on the cooperation between the friars and the mulieres sanctae: “Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Dominican Hagiography,” Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate and Szell, Timea (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 222–246;Google Scholarand “Gender and the Authority of the Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 60 (1991): 445–460.CrossRefGoogle ScholarFor Italy, see Gill, Katherine, “Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300–1500,” in Creative Women, ed. Matter, and Coakley, , pp. 64–104.Google Scholar

28. On “reading” a picture as an essential part of medieval literacy, see Camille, Michael, “Seeing and Reading: Some Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8 (1985): 26–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. The importance of vernacularization, and especially the role of women in this, is no new discovery. Among the first to stress its significance was Grundmann, Herbert, both in his noted book, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1935), chap. 7Google Scholar, and his paper “Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 26 (1936): 129–161.Google Scholar

30. I am happy to acknowledge a debt here to the contrast suggested by Barbara Newman in her review article of The Growth of Mysticism, published as “The Mozartian Moment: Reflections on Medieval Mysticism,” Christian Spirituality Bulletin 3 (Spring 1995): 1–5.Google Scholar

31. McGinn, Bernard, “Meister Eckhart and the Beguines in the Context of Vernacular Theology,” Meister Eckhart and the Beguines: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. McGinn, Bernard (New York, 1994), pp. 4–14.Google Scholar

32. See esp. Leclercq, Jean, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

33. Auerbach, Erich, “The Western Public and Its Language,” Literary Language & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (New York, 1965), pp. 312–313.Google Scholar

34. Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Garden City, N.J., 1957), p. 134; see also pp. 63–66.Google ScholarOn the sermo humilis as characteristic of the Christian Middle Ages, see esp. the essay “Sermo Humilis“ in Literary Language and Its Public, pp. 27–81.Google Scholar

35. For a survey of these genres, see The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 367–374.Google Scholar

36. Of the large literature regarding hagiography, especially in the later Middle Ages, I cite only a few classic studies. See esp. Vauchez, André, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge d'aprés les procés de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome, 1981).Google ScholarAlso useful are Weinstein, Donald and Bell, Rudolph M., Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago, 1982);Google Scholarand Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate and Szell, Timea (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991).Google ScholarFor the investigation of mystical saints, see Kieckhefer, Richard, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984);Google ScholarKleinberg, Aviad M., Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago, 1992);Google Scholarand Dinzelbacher, Peter, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffälliger Frauen in mittelalter und Frühneuzeit (Zurich, 1995).Google Scholar

37. I borrow the term from Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 6.Google ScholarSee also Tobin, Frank, “Introduction,” Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons (Mahwah, N.J., 1989), pp. 38–50.Google Scholar

38. For the influence of courtly motifs on the thirteenth-century women, see Schwietering, Julius, Mystik und Höfische Dichtung im Mittelalter (Tübingen, Germany, 1960);Google ScholarWainwright-deKadt, Elizabeth, “Courtly Literature and Mysticism: Some Aspects of Their Interaction,” Acta Germanica 12 (1980): 41–60;Google Scholarand the perceptive analysis of Newman, Barbara, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, Pa., 1995), pp. 137–167.Google Scholar

39. On the sacral character of medieval Latin, especially liturgical Latin, see Mohrmann, Christian, Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character (Washington, D.C., 1957).Google Scholar

40. For the interaction between Latin and the vernacular literatures in the medieval period, a still unsurpassed sketch is Auerbach's, Erich “The Western Public and Its Language,” in Literary Language and Its Public, pp. 237–338.Google Scholar

41. On the importance of the religious element in the rise of the vernaculars to literary status, see Auerbach, “The Western Public and Its Language,” pp. 281–287.Google Scholar

42. This tradition had been given legal force in Gratian's Decretum, dist. 23, can. 29 (edition Friedburg 1:86): “Mulier quamvis docta et sancta, viros in conventu docere non praesumat. Laicus autem praesentibus clericis (nisi ipsis rogantibus) docere non audeat.”Google Scholar

43. Henry of Ghent, Summa Quaestionum Ordinarium, vol. 1 (Paris, 1520; repr. St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1953), art. XI, q. 11, fol. 78r: “Loquendo autem de docere ex beneficio et charitatis fervore, bene licet mulierem docere sicut & quemlibet alium si sanam doctrinam habeat.”Google Scholar

44. “Parla per caritàe parlerai per teologia. Sensa grammatica se intende la Scriptura, cioè per uno certo lume di Dio. La grammatica non è altro se no uno lenguaggio.”Google ScholarI cite from the text and translation found in Gill, Katherine, “Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300–1500,” Creative Women, ed. Matter, and Coakley, , pp. 77, 100.Google Scholar

45. Watson, Nicholas, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, U.K., 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Francis's works have been edited by Esser, Kajetan, Opuscula Sancti Patris Francisci Assisiensis (Grottaferrata, Italy, 1978).Google ScholarSee the analysis of Francis's style by Auerbach, Erich in Mimesis, pp. 141–151, which concludes: “It would perhaps be rash to maintain that Italian literature owed this freedom of dramatic expression to Saint Francis, for it was doubtless implicit in the character of the people; but it cannot be denied that, a great poet, an instinctive master of the art of acting out his own being, he was the first to awaken the dramatic powers of the Italian feeling and of the Italian language.”Google Scholar

47. Il Libro delta Beata Angela da Foligno (Edizione critica), ed. Thier, Ludger and Calufetti, Abele (Grottaferrata, Italy, 1985).Google ScholarSee the discussion by Mooney, Catherine M., “The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno's Revelations,” Creative Women, ed. Matter, and Coakley, , pp. 34–63.Google Scholar

48. The Middle High German text was edited by Bihlmeyer, Karl, Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften (Stuttgart, Germany, 1907);Google Scholarthe Latin by Känzle, Pius, Heinrich Senses Horologium Sapientiae (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1977).Google Scholar

49. Marguerite Porete: Le Mirouer des Simples Ames, ed. Guarnieri, Romana and Verdeyen, Paul (Turnhout, Belgium, 1986).Google Scholar

50. See Bindschedler, Maria, Der lateinische Kommentar zum Granum Sinapis (Basel, Switzerland, 1949).Google ScholarFor a discussion of the Granum sinapis, see Haas, Alois M., “Granum sinapis—An den Grenzen der Sprache,” Sermo mysticus: Studien zu Theologie und Sprache der deutschen Mystik (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1979), pp. 301–329.Google Scholar

51. For an example of this form of analysis, see Hollywood, Amy M., Soul as Virgin Wife (Notre Dame, Ind., 1996), chap. 1.Google Scholar

52. On these two forms of Latin and their revival in the twelfth century, see Auerbach, , “The Western Public and Its Language,” pp. 72–77.Google Scholar

53. Dante Alighieri: II Convivio, ed. Simonelli, Maria (Bologna, Italy, 1966).Google ScholarSee the English version, Dante's II Convivo (The Banquet), trans. Lansing, Richard H. (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

54. De vulgari eloquentia, book 1, especially chaps, xvi–xix. See Welliver, Warman, Dante in Hell: The ‘De Vulgari Eloquentia’: Introduction, Text, Translation, Commentary (Ravenna, Italy, 1981), pp. 78–87.Google ScholarWelliver's “Appendix A: Latin and Italian” (pp. 237–242) discusses the “complementary contradictions“ (p. 238) of Dante's view of the relations between Latin and Italian.Google Scholar

55. Welliver, , noting how in the De vulgare eloquentia Dante shades his language toward a “vulgar” Latin, while in the Convivio he adapts a latinizing form of Italian, asks: “Has not Dante balanced his sharp separation of the two languages in the argument and his consistent use of the wrong one by writing in a blend of both? A favorite theme and technique of the stilnuovo poet of love is the subtle combination and reconciliation of opposites” (p. 240).Google Scholar

56. Ruh's, Kurt claim that “Mystik … kommt erst in den Volkssprachen eigentlich zu sich selbst” (Geschkhte der abendländische Mystik 1:17; see also 2:18–20)Google Scholaroveremphasizes the role of the vernacular; see my review in Journal of Religion 74 (1994): 94–96.Google ScholarI also question Dinzelbacher's, Peter use of the distinction (however attractive in the abstract) between Mystologie, or reflection on mysticism, and the Erlebnismystik that represents the core of mysticism, as set forth in his Christliche Mystik im Abendland: Ihrer Geschkhte von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters (Paderborn, Germany, 1994), pp. 9–22. Dinzelbacher's use of the distinction leads to unnecessary exclusion of key mystics, as well as to confusion about the difference between mystical consciousness and visionary experience in general (see my forthcoming review in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale).Google Scholar

57. The dynamics of this second form of mystical text have been studied by Peters, Ursula, Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum: Zur Vorgeschkhte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, Germany, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Here we might note Seamus Heaney's remarks about tradition and change in poetry: “Writers have to start out as readers, and before they put pen to paper, even the most disaffected of them will have internalized the norms and forms of the tradition from which they wish to secede” (The Redress of Poetry [New York, 1995], p. 6).Google Scholar

59. For an overview of some recent German discussion, see Dinzelbacher, Peter, “Zur Interpretation erlebnismysticher Texte des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum und Deutsche Literatur 117 (1988): 1–23.Google Scholar

60. See the discussion in The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 166, 185–190, 192–193, 207–210, and so forth.Google Scholar

61. See the treatments of Rupert and Joachim in The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 328–333, 337–341.Google Scholar

62. The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 333–336.Google Scholar

63. See The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse, ed. Talbot, C. H., 2d ed. (Oxford, 1987), especially the visions of the Christ found on pp. 118, 154, and 168–170.Google Scholar

64. The Growth of Mysticism, esp. pp. 325–328.Google Scholar

65. Haas, Alois M., “Mystik als Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 116 (1994): 48, writes: “Es ist nicht Unsorgfalt, wenn die christlichen Mystiker die Unterscheidung zwischen mystischer Erfahrung und Deutung oder Lehre von dieser Erfahrung nicht machen wollen, sondern Absicht.”Google Scholar

66. Vergote, Antoine, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological Derivative (New Haven, Conn., 1988), p. 180.Google ScholarVergote begins his treatment of mystical visions with a reminder (so often forgotten): “It is not an accident that visions, which are properly speaking ecstatic phenomena, and mystical ecstasies are frequently confused.” He also recognizes the necessity for the transformation of desire as key to the mystical quest (p. 187).Google Scholar

67. See I1 Libro delta Beata Angela da Foligno, for example, Instructiones XIV and XXXI (pp. 564, 660);Google Scholarand Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Colledge, Edmund and Walsh, James, 2 vols. (Toronto, Ont., 1978), Long Text, chap. 9 (2:321–322).Google Scholar

68. Holdsworth, C. J., “Visions and Visionaries in the Middle Ages,” History 48 (1963): 144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69. Dinzelbacher, Peter, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, Germany, 1981), esp. chaps. 12–16.Google ScholarSee also Dinzelbacher's helpful list of both types of vision in a chart of “Erlebte Visionen” on pp. 13–23.Google ScholarAn updated version of this list appears in Dinzelbacher's handbook “Revelationes” (Turnhout, Belgium, 1991), pp. 88–108.Google Scholar

70. In De genesi ad litteram 12, Augustine had distinguished three forms of visions—corporeal, spiritual (that is, imaginative), and intellectual; see the discussion in The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 253–256. In his In Apocalypsim 1.1 (PL 196:686B–87C), Richard of St. Victor distinguished four types of visions: two external (corporeal vision and seeing hidden signification in a corporeal object) and two internal (divine interior illuminations in the likeness of visible things, and anagogic visions which raise one to divine contemplation without such likenesses).Google Scholar

71. For a psychological investigation of such mystical visions and their erotic content, see Vergotte, Guilt and Desire, chaps. 7–9.Google Scholar

72. See, for example, Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), chaps. 3–7, esp. pp. 223–225;Google Scholarand now her The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), pp. 182–183.Google ScholarFor another form of argument, see Milhaven, John Giles, Hadewijch and Her Sisters: Other Ways of Loving and Knowing (Albany, N.Y., 1993).Google Scholar

73. The negative evaluation of the new visionary mysticism associated with women is evident, for example, in Cuthbert Butler's Western Mysticism (New York, 1923), pp. 179–192.Google ScholarFor a collection of similar evaluations in German authors, see Dinzelbacher, , “Zur Interpretation erlebnismystischer Texte,” p. 7.Google ScholarTo say that such texts should not be automatically dismissed as an inferior form of mysticism, of course, does not mean that one need refrain from all forms of judgment about their theological value. On this see Cousins, Ewert, “The Humanity and Passion of Christ,” Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, pp. 386–389.Google Scholar

74. Dinzelbacher, , “Zur Interpretation erlebnismysticher Texte,” p. 5: “Ohne das ihnen zugrundliegende Erleben aber würde diese Textsorte nicht existerieren!”Google Scholar

75. This point has been much discussed in the recent debate between so-called “constructivists” and “perennialists” on the nature of mysticism. It is also admitted by some of the proponents of Erlebnismystik (for example, Dinzelbacher, “Zur Interpretation,” pp. 17–18).Google Scholar

76. Concilium Lateranse IV, Cap. 2: “inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.”Google Scholar

77. Bäuml, Franz H., “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum 55 (1980): 261–264CrossRefGoogle Scholar, notes how the new “realistic” tendency in post-Romanesque art and written vernacular narrative can be seen as “the creation of a fiction that the fiction is not a fiction” (p. 262).Google ScholarThe same is probably true in the case of some visionary mystical texts. In the same vein, note the comments of Chartier, Roger in Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988):Google Scholar“It is clear from the outset that no text, even the most apparently documentary, even the most ‘objective’ … maintains a transparent relationship with the reality that it apprehends…. What is real, in fact, is not (or is not only) the reality that the text aims at, but the very manner in which it aims at it in the historic setting of its own production and the strategy used in its writing” (pp. 43–44).Google Scholar

78. There have been many theoretical discussions of this. Here I note only the classic account of Gadamer, Hans-Georg, “The Concept of Experience and the Essence of the Hermeneutical Experience,” Truth and Method (New York, 1975), pp. 310–325.Google Scholar

79. Helpful in this connection is Vergote's concept of the opposition between successful hysteria and hysterical neurosis and between positive and negative hallucination; see Guilt and Desire, pp. 157, 183–184Google Scholar

80. See The Foundations of Mysticism, esp. pp. 291–326Google Scholar

81. Jantzen, Grace N., “Mysticism and Experience,” Religious Studies 25 (1992): 314.Google Scholar

82. Rahner, Karl, Visions and Prophecies (London, 1963), p. 57.Google ScholarRahner goes on to stress how this is rooted not in a neoplatonic tendency to divide spirit and matter, but in the imperative of negative theology: “God is always greater than any image of himself and wishes to communicate himself as thus greater in mystical experience. Here least of all, then, should man cling to his appearance, because it remains true even in the highest theology of union that the God who can no longer be separated from the world of his appearance still remains unconfused with his appearance” (p. 58).Google Scholar

83. Gadamer, , “Conception and Experience,” p. 324.Google Scholar