"Who does she think she is?" Christian women's mysticism

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Hollywood, Amy

2 Hadewijch, The Complete Works (New York: Paulist, 1980), vision 11, 290-1.

3 Ibid., 291.

4 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead (New York: Paulist, 1998), I.44, 60-1.

5 Ibid., 61. In Book VI, Mechthild responds to an unnamed critic of this earlier passage. "I said in one passage in this book that the Godhead is my father by nature. You do not understand this, and say, 'Everything that God has done with us is completely a matter of grace and not of nature.' You are right, but I am right, too." Ibid., VI.31, 256.

6 Ibid., 61-2.

7 Ibid., I.prologue, 39.

8 Ibid. II.26, 97.

9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1952), 743.

10 Ibid., 747-8.

11 Ibid., 751.

12 Ibid., 752. For the historical problems with Beauvoir's distinction and more on her views of mysticism, see my Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 120-45.

13 Ibid., 693.

14 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (New York: Paulist, 1993), ch. 81, 156.

15 On the fall into nothingness as a subversion of traditional language about the fall, see Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 127-31.

16 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, ch. 131, 213-4.

17 Ibid. 214.

I8 Ibid, ch. 121, 197.

19 For the elitism of Porete's texts read within the context of her time, see Joanne Maguire Robinson, Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

Amy Hollywood is Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. Her most recent book is Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (2001).