Abstract Teresa de Cartagena (ca. 1425 – after 1478) was a disabled nun who faced a tripartite predicament as an author: deafness, gender, and her lineage within a Jewish convert family in medieval Spain. Regrettably, scholarship has tended to encapsulate her in a three-walled box (literature, affectivity, mysticism) in which medieval women’s spiritual writings in the vernacular are siloed....
Recent studies have emphasized the centrality of late medieval mysticism to Martin Luther’s theology of faith. Building upon such research, I argue that Luther’s Freedom of a Christian (1520) preserves a characteristic tension within medieval mysticism: the cohabitation of human agency alongside divine operation. Whereas external agency (good works) is rejected, Luther reintroduces internal...
Abstract On July 16, 1919, the Holy Office issued a decree declaring the teachings of the Theosophical Society incompatible with Catholic doctrine and forbidding the faithful from participating in its activities. Drawing on previously unexamined Vatican archival materials, this article reconstructs the five-year investigation that led to the decree and situates it within a longer institutional...
This article adds to our understanding of late medieval women's religious writing by examining the role of the Virgin Mary in Mechthild of Magdeburg's thirteenth-century mystical text The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fließende Licht der Gottheit). The Virgin Mary was ubiquitous in late medieval religious writing, but she played different roles and modeled different ways of life, reflecting...