The Mystical Presence of Christ

Abstract

This book investigates the connections between exceptional experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, the book reveals the entanglements between these experiences and those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of ordinary, everyday devotional culture. The book begins by reconsidering the “who” and the “how” of Christ's mystical presence. It argues that Christ's humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which the author proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. The author then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations—during prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example—with attention to gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century, the book shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience. The book rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.