The Power of Books and the Practice of Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century: Heinrich of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner on Mechthild's Flowing Light of the Godhead
In 1345 a manuscript accompanied by a letter arrived at the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen in southern Germany. The sender, a secular priest named Heinrich of Nördlingen, and the primary recipient, the Dominican visionary nun Margaret Ebner, had already enjoyed an extended correspondence, inter...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2007
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| In: |
Church history
Year: 2007, Volume: 76, Issue: 1, Pages: 61-83 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In 1345 a manuscript accompanied by a letter arrived at the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen in southern Germany. The sender, a secular priest named Heinrich of Nördlingen, and the primary recipient, the Dominican visionary nun Margaret Ebner, had already enjoyed an extended correspondence, interspersed with a few intense face-to-face visits in the convent. Because the manuscript arriving that day was a thirteenth-century woman's mystical treatise (the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead), and because Margaret and her sisters in the convent Maria Medingen used this woman's text in what could initially seem peculiar and dynamic ways, this manuscript and these letters can tell us much about the authority and performance of women's mysticism in medieval religion. Mechthild's and Heinrich's texts serve as key examples, which reveal how women's mystical texts were authoritative in the history of Christianity. Namely, medieval audiences assessed mystical authority on the basis of the text's ability to produce the experience in them, and mystical texts required proper performance in order to unleash their generative power. |
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| ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640700101416 |