Ebook: Model, mirror and memorial: Imitation of the passion and the annihilation of the imagination in Angela da Foligno’s “Liber” and Marguerite Porete’s “Mirouer des simples âmes”

My dissertation examines the role of mystical writings in the education of women religious in high medieval Italy and France. In this project, I look at Angela of Foligno's Liber and Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples âmes—two important texts representative of the “women's religious movement” of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—to show how these treatises complete and extend the moral, theological and rhetorical education offered to women in the practice of meditation. To demonstrate these claims, I divide my dissertation into two sections. In the first half, I examine meditation primers, devotional art, and other sources documenting the practices of women religious in northern France and central Italy to show how women learned not only to construct a religious “self,” but also to think and speak about God through the building and training of a contemplative imagination in meditation. By tracing the kinship between these practices and those associated with monastic lectio divina, I demonstrate how meditation acts as a moral, theological, and rhetorical education specific to the needs and status of these new groups of women religious in northern and southern Europe. In the second half of the project, I turn to a comparison of the Liber and the Mirouer to discuss how each text develops out of this culture to provide a set of contemplative practices designed to teach its audience to surpass (or “annihilate”) the imagination to know God without images. Although scholars often underscore the autobiographical nature of women's mystical writings, I argue that Angela's Liber and Marguerite's Mirouer serve a didactic function specific to the ideals, practices, and social organization of the women's religious movement as manuals written for religious seeking advanced teachings regarding the training of the religious imagination. My dissertation makes a new contribution to the study of medieval religious, social, and cultural history by demonstrating that these texts provide evidence for the coming-of-age of an epistemological, theological, and rhetorical tradition evolved from the practice of meditation in informally organized women's religious communities in the thirteenth century.