Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women's Visions and Vitae (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780472131693)

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women's Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader's spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics' biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective.
This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Li ge, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works--what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word's capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

Author: Jessica Barr
ISBN-10: 0472131699
ISBN-13: 9780472131693
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Language: English
Published: 04/20/2020
Pages: 260
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2021