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Women Mystics Confront the Modern World

Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1672) and Madame Guyon (1648-1717)

Women Mystics Confront the Modern World

Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1672) and Madame Guyon (1648-1717)

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£25.50

Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 9780791436622
Number of Pages: 279
Published: 29/01/1998

Situates the female mystical tradition within the context of the epistemological shift which occurred at the dawn of the modern world.

Women Mystics Confront the Modern World situates the female mystical tradition within the context of the epistemological shift which affected religious sentiments and the perception of the self at the dawn of the modern world. Anchored in a comprehensive knowledge of the religious history of seventeenth-century France, this book offers a vivid account of the fascinating lives and work of two exceptional women. Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1672) and Madame Guyon (1648-1717) continue a literary and spiritual tradition that had begun in the thirteenth century. Yet, because they were at a crucial point in the history of Western mysticism, when this movement was at once at its apogee and in the first stages of decline, their writings show indications of a changing mentality. These transformations shed light on the social significance of female mysticism in the Western tradition. The opportunities the two women seized or shunned highlight their maneuvering for validation and autonomy. But their choices also highlight many contradictions, compromises, and limits imposed upon their self-expression.

At the confluence of French and American scholarship on mysticism, this work joins these two schools of thought by introducing gender as a viable category of inquiry into the one and by tempering the overly-optimistic interpretation of female mysticism of the other.

Acknowledgments

Introduction


Chapter 1. Female Mysticism: A Historical Perspective


Part 1 Marie de l'Incarnation


Chapter 2. The Female Mystical Body in Transition: From the Rhetoric of Suffering to the Rhetoric of Health


Chapter 3. From France to Canada / From Motherhood to Subjecthood: Mystical Writing as Distancing


Chapter 4. The Double Bind—The Invisible Historical Subject as Historiographer


Chapter 5. The Confrontation between "Civilized" and "Savage" Femininity in the New World


Part 2 Madame Guyon


Chapter 6. A Figure of Transition: Madame Guyon between the Female Mystical Tradition and the Emergence of a New Era


Chapter 7. The Quarrel of Quietism and the Construction of Modern Femininity


Chapter 8. Guyon's Autobiography at the Crossroads of History


Conclusion


Notes


Bibliography


Index

Marie-Florine Bruneau

Marie-Florine Bruneau is Professor of French at the University of Southern California. Her previous work includes Racine, le Jansenisme et la modernite.

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