Mysticism and reform, 1400-1750
By: edited by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith
Series: ReFormations: medieval and early modern; Reformations
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Notre Dame, Indiana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9780268038984; 9780268175115
Subjects: 11.63 spirituality and mysticism; Mystik; Christentum; Godsdienstgeschiedenis; Reformation; Mystizismus; Church history; Kirchengeschichte; Mysticism; Middle Ages; History
Description: The apparent disappearance of mysticism in the Protestant world after the Reformation used to be taken as an example of the arrival of modernity. However, as recent studies in history and literary history reveal, the "Reformation" was not experienced in such a drastically transformative manner, not least because the later Middle Ages itself was marked by a series of reform movements within the Catholic Church in which mysticism played a central role. In Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750, contributors show that it is more accurate to characterize the history of early modern mysticism as one in which relationships of continuity within transformations occurred. Rather than focus on the departures of the sixteenth-century Reformation from medieval traditions, the essays in this volume explore one of the most remarkable yet still under-studied chapters in its history: the survival and transformation of mysticism between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. With a focus on central and northern Europe, the essays engage such subjects as the relationship of Luther to mystical writing, the visual representation of mystical experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art, mystical sermons by religious women of the Low Countries, Valentin Weigel's recasting of Eckhartian Gelassenheit for a Lutheran audience, and the mysticism of English figures such as Gertrude More, Jane Lead, Elizabeth Hooten, and John Austin, the German Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, and the German American Marie Christine Sauer. -- Amazon.com.
Notes: Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Ways of knowing in the pre- and post-Reformation worlds  -- Euan K. Cameron; title: Gelassenheit and confessionalization: Valentin Weigel reads Meister Eckhart  -- Alana King; title: The Arnhem Mystical Sermons and the sixteenth-century mystical renaissance in Arnhem and Cologne  -- Kees Schepers; title: "From the very hour that I desire him": refiguring spiritual communion in writings by Maria van Hout (d. 1547) and the Sisters of Saint Agnes in Arnhem  -- Kirsten M. Christensen; title: Saintly idiocy and contemplative empowerment: the example of Dame Gertrude More  -- Arthur F. Marotti; title: Quaker mysticism as the return of the medieval repressed: English women prophets before and after the Reformation  -- Genelle C. Gertz; title: "Between the rational and the mystical": the inner life and the early English enlightenment  -- Sarah Apetrei; title: Seraphic discourse, mystical bodies: John Austin's original psalms  -- Alison Shell; title: Between the Eucharist and eroticism: embodiment in the poetry of Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg (and an edition by Johann Reinhard Hedinger from 1702)  -- Franz M. Eybl; title: Sister Marcella, Marie Christine Sauer (d. 1752), and the chronicle of the sisters at Ephrata  -- Bethany Wiggin; title: A battle for hearts and minds: the heart in Reformation polemic  -- Jeffrey F. Hamburger and -- Hildegard Elisabeth Keller; title: The rhetoric of mysticism: from contemplative practice to aesthetic experiment -- Niklaus Largier.