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Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death investigates the tension between death as necessary for bringing about union with God and as the end of life on earth.
For medieval Christians, only death could offer complete union with God. For medieval women in particular, death was figured as a desirable end to their embodied lives; at least, this is the story told by the clergymen who typically wrote their biographies. Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death questions this assumption and studies visionary narratives, treatises, and spiritual reflections by and about medieval Christian women from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries to reveal how these women understood their own deaths and how their depictions conformed to or departed from the stories told about them.
Rather than focusing on externalities like rituals, revenants, or miracles, Jessica Barr instead tackles the desire for death from the inside, seeking to elucidate the ways in which medieval people anticipated or experienced biological death on a personal level. In narrating their spiritual lives within the framework of deeply held Christian beliefs, these medieval women mystics illustrate how theology and experience converge—and, not infrequently, diverge.
"Through this book, the dead whisper to the living. Jessica Barr's artful and effective scholarship shows us that medieval Christianity offered no simple answers, and that medieval Christians’ relationship with death could be as fraught with anxiety, pain, uncertainty, longing, and hope as our own." —Karen A. Winstead, author of Fifteenth-Century Lives
"This erudite book bridges the centuries that separate the modern reader from these women's lives, addressing something that we still have in common despite that distance: We all will die. How do we approach that death? Where is the meaning therein?" —Jennifer N. Brown, author of Fruit of the Orchard
Jessica Barr is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Willing to Know God and Intimate Reading and co-editor of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. Why Die? The Ethical Value of Death in Medieval Christianity
2. The Girls’ Guide to Loving Death: Scripting Desire in Anchoritic Guides and Women’s Spiritual Treatises
3. Living Death from the Outside: Christina Mirabilis, Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Beatrice of Nazareth
4. Living Death from the Inside: Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich
5. Touching Absence: Relics, Scholarship, and the Academic Pilgrim
Coda
Bibliography