Description
Book SynopsisThis study reveals how women's visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion.
From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women's visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devot
Trade Review
“Translating Christ in the Middle Ages breaks new ground in the study of medieval women’s visionary and hagiographical writings.” —Christine F. Cooper-Rompato, author of The Gift of Tongues
"An erudite and carefully constructed book, each chapter building on the preceding one in an ever-widening circle of the significance and scope of visionary translation." —Speculum
"An invaluable contribution to the ever-growing literature on gender, authorship, and visionary text which has sprung up in the past two or three decades." —Medieval Mystical Theology
"Zimbalist's book opens up a new avenue for the study of women's verbal rather than bodily devotion, and for an appreciation of female visionaries as skillful sermonizers and inventors of new forms of verbal devotion."—Studies in the Age of Chaucer
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Accomplished Word
1. The Origins of a Mode: Collaboration, Conversation, and Community in the Diocese of Liège
2. Vernacular Saints’ Lives and Female Community in the High Middle Ages
3. Vernacular Authority and Visionary Authorship in the Low Countries
4. Revisions of Authority: Rhetoric, Participation, and Devotional Reading
5. Vision, Speech, and Textual Community in the Late Middle Ages
Conclusion
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