NEW SEEDS, NEW HARVESTS THIRTY YEARS OF TILLING THE MYSTIC FIELD

Abstract

This article offers a retrospective on the last thirty years of scholarship on medieval mystics. After surveying some recent resources, such as Bernard McGinn's multivolume history, the Companions to Christian Mysticism, and the journal Spiritus, it discusses the varied approaches of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century work, notably the material turn and the linguistic turn. The former, embracing studies of the body and gender, emotions and eroticism, art and material objects, reacts against earlier conceptions of mysticism as concerned exclusively with the timeless, invisible, and transcendent dimension of human existence. Feminist scholarship, queer theory, history of the emotions, and the study of visual culture have all figured prominently, while the relationship between mysticism and political activism is identified as an area ripe for further study. Complementing the material turn, the linguistic turn has brought new interest in apophatic theology in the wake of Derridean deconstruction, but also entails fresh work on vernacular mystics and the role of vernacularity in disseminating spiritual wisdom. The essay closes with an account of imaginative theology and a call for more reading across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as the artificial boundary between sacred and secular writing.