The first paper in the panel examines the intermedial devotional creativity of a scarcely studied early modern women author from Strasbourg through an examination of the unique illuminated prayer book she made. The second paper is on Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. It goes beyond existing scholarship on Christocentric devotion in the work to consider how the poet constituted a female devotional community through poetry. The third paper examines the transformation of visionary nun Juana de la Cruz Vázquez y Gutiérrez into Saint Santa Juana, revealing sanctity to be a relational phenomenon shaped by gendered devotional communal life. The fourth paper is on the Italian mystic Angela da Foligno. It examines her writing and experiences of demonic possession and spiritual ecstasy, revealing how devotional creativity (evident in her Memoriale) served an instrument of personal and spiritual self-shaping and negotiation.
The centuries-old practice of vernacular theology is a form of incarnate theology that found expression in a variety of written, oral, and embodied forms (Eliana Corbari, “Lost and Found in Translation: The Heart of Vernacular Theology in Late Medieval Italy,” Franciscan Studies 71 (2013): 263–78, and Eliana Corbari, Vernacular Theology: Dominican Sermons and Audience in Late Medieval Italy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), esp. 7–8 and 62–65). Vernacular theology is understood as a third medieval theological tradition after scholasticism and monasticism (Bernard McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” Church History 65, no. 2 (1996), 206; Corbari, “Lost,” 263). A collection of practices shaped by the latter, it emphasized orality, dialogue, and interpersonal exchange (Corbari, “Lost,” 268). It reflected lay yearning to engage with theological matters, by women in particular (Corbari, “Lost,” 266 and 270). While practitioners included members of the clergy and of the laity, and men as well as women, vernacular theology was an area well suited to women and well represented by them: women historically described as “mystical,” and more recently as “visionary” or “prophetic,” including such figures as Angela da Foligno (1248–1309) and Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73) (Corbari, “Lost,” 277). “Incarnate, temporal, and transformative,” vernacular theology focused on embodied experience of the divine and on the relationship between humans and God (Corbari, “Lost,” 277).
A contemporary discipline and a practice of writing about embodied experience reminiscent of medieval and early modern vernacular theology, theopoetics is an emerging field shaped by process philosophy and postmodern theology that similarly investigates the relational and the processual in both creative activity and the human-divine encounter. It offers a unique and complementary perspective to that of vernacular theology for considering the phenomenology of spiritual experience. This panel on women and devotional life will address such questions as: How did women spiritually self-fashion? What were their contributions to devotional innovation in early modernity? To what degree were their contributions theopoetic versus theological? What do such considerations lend our understanding of early modern conceptions of the sacred, saintliness, sanctity, spiritual mediation, and female community?
This panel will take the form of four thirteen-minute paper presentations followed by a discussion.