Engaging with this year’s conference theme, “Violence, Non-Violence, and the Margin,” this panel interrogates representations of violence and bodily mortification in mystical writing and art. We invite papers that consider what happens when we refuse to separate the injury, pain, and mortification found in mystical texts from the concept or category of violence. While attending to the spiritualization and narrativization of bodily pain, we ask how violence is imagined and described by the art and literature produced in traditions and communities understood as mystical. Furthermore, how do we understand the difference between representations of violence and embodied experiences of violence, especially in mystical texts that blur the line between representation and reality? We also invite papers that consider how violence and nonviolence affect our understanding of the category of mysticism. And how reconfiguring the nature of violence and nonviolence might shift the relationship between the margin and the center.
Medieval imaginative meditation on the Passion required devotees to visualize the narrative scenes of Jesus’ tortures and Mary’s grieving response. However, in Passion texts composed in the Castilian vernacular during the first decades of an Inquisition whose primary remit was to police judaizing converts, the authors scripted for their readers meditations centering on violent anger and physical anguish, rather than compassionate sorrow. Castilian Christians extended the medieval anti-Semitic “Christ-killing” accusation to include scenes of malicious violence against not only Jesus but also Mary. This rendering of Jews as violent against women definitively shaped mystical experience in sixteenth century Spain: Juana de la Cruz’ visionary sermons included scenes of Mary beaten and knocked down by her fellow Jews, while the influential mystical teacher Francisco de Osuna recommended a visualization of Mary’s crucifixion to aspiring mystics. Mystical practice was thus not divorced from Castilian anti-Semitism, but rather reinforced it.
Scholars of mysticism are well-attuned to how mystical texts intersperse descriptions of intense bodily mortification and the ecstasy of divine love. Queer scholarship exposes how mystical texts transgress conventional gender and heteronormative categories. Postmodern psychodynamic scholarship insists that even distant medieval texts have something powerful to say today about how abjection and jouissance might intersect in the soul’s union with God. Against the backdrop of these approaches, this essay investigates one of Christianity’s most cryptic mystical figures: Rebecca Cox Jackson. A Methodist-raised 19th-century black woman who lived among white Shakers, Jackson fits in no one’s box. Unlocking the possible meaning of her erotic and violent dreams and visions requires a special hermeneutical lens. This essay offers an intertextual reading of Jackson’s spiritual autobiography Gifts of Power using the writings of the late-20th-century lesbian French feminist thinker, Monique Wittig.
The question of how to interpret the rhetoric of violence and eroticism—and in particular, masochism—in the words of women medieval mystics has been the center of scholarly analysis for many decades. In my paper, I will briefly review this history then suggest an analysis that need neither dismiss this rhetoric as inherently pathological nor must it ignore or seriously downplay its existence. By taking seriously the interpretations of sexual masochism and its positive attributes as discussed by people who actually practice it today, we can make an argument that yes, medieval women mystics were masochistic and as such, they reflected the very characteristics of body-soul unity, empowerment, healing, and agency that practitioners say are positive results of their experiences. Only then will we be able to start seriously questioning what this masochistic tendency in mystical writing and contemporary sexuality means.