The Power of Words in Late Medieval Devotional and Mystical Writing

This volume offers a series of essays focusing on the power of words. Contributors address the centrality of language to devotional and mystical experience as well as the attitudes towards language fostered by devotional and mystical practices. The essays are arranged under four subheadings: (1) “Other Words: Figures and Metaphors,” treating the application of the languages of romantic love, medicine, and travel to descriptions of devotional and mystical experience; (2) “Iconic Words: Images and the Name of Jesus,” considering the deployment of words and the Word (Jesus) as powerful images in devotional practice; (3) “Testing Words: Syntax and Semantics,” exploring the ways in which medieval writers stretch the conventions of language to achieve fresh perspectives on devotional and mystical experiences; and (4) “Beyond Words: The Apophatic and The Senses,” offering novel perspectives on a group of texts that address the difficulty of expressing God and visionary experience with words.

The volume’s global purpose is to demonstrate the attractions of an explicitly philological approach for scholars studying the Christian tradition.

Introduction — RORY G. CRITTEN and JULIETTE VUILLE

Part One. Other Words: Figures and Metaphors

1. Holy Infirmary and Holy Holism in The Conventual Life Of Helfta —NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA
2. Wandering in Late Medieval Devotional Literature — DIANA DENISSEN
3. Imagination, Affects, and the Curative Power of Words in a Fifteenth-Century Adaptation Of William Flete’s De Remediis Contra Temptacione — ANA RITA PARREIRAS REIS
4. Walter Hilton’s Epistola de leccione, intencione, meditacione, oracione et aliis: a translation — MARLEEN CRÉ and FRANCESCO LIVORNO
5. Listening to the Words of Margery Kempe in the Early Printed Texts of A Short Treatise Of Contemplation — ELISABETH DUTTON

Part Two. Iconic Words: Images and the Name of Jesus

6. ‘"Le Nom de Jhesus en la bouche plus doulz que miel": An Overlooked Fifteenth-Century Middle French Treatise — ANNE MOURON
7. Lydgate’s Multimedia Poems and Devotion to the Name of Jesus — MARY C. FLANNERY
8. Blaspheming and Print in Stephen Hawes’s Conversion Of Swearers (1509) — MARCO NIEVERGELT

Part Three. Testing Words: Semantics and Syntax

9. ‘Si Heremita Dicerer’: Richard Rolle and the Status Vite Solitarie — E. A. JONES
10. ‘Privy Tuchyngs of Swete Gostly Syghts’: Reciprocal Longing in Julian Of Norwich — VINCENT GILLESPIE
11. Empty Words: Interjections, Emotions, and Belief in Middle English Religious Literature — DANIEL MCCANN
12. An Order of Words: Language and Prayer in the Wooing Group — ANNIE SUTHERLAND
13. Semantic Austerity in Petrarch’s Description of Time — ALESSANDRA PETRINA

Part Four. Beyond Words: The Apophatic and the Senses

14. Body and Mind, Affect and Cognition: Articulating Vision in The Revelations Of Divine Love of Julian Of Norwich and The Book Of Margery Kempe — CORINNE SAUNDERS
15. The Call to Hear in Late Medieval Mystical Writings from England: Richard Rolle and Richard Methley — TAMÁS KARÁTH
16. Intentio and the One-Syllable Prayer in The Cloud Of Unknowing — KATHERINE ZIEMAN
17. ‘Fer Aboue Alle Creaturis Þouʒt Vnþenkable’: What Reginald Pecock Did with Proving the Existence of God and Divine Infinity — IAN JOHNSON

Denis Renevey, An Annotated Bibliography — CHRISTIANIA WHITEHEAD

Index