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The Soul as Virgin Wife presents the first book-length study to give a detailed account of the theological and mystical teachings written by women themselves, especially by those known as beguines, which have been especially neglected. Hollywood explicates the difference between the erotic and imagistic mysticism, arguing that Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart challenge the sexual ideologies prevalent in their culture and claim a union without distinction between the soul and the divine.
The beguines' emphasis in the later Middle Ages on spiritual poverty has long been recognized as an important influence on subsequent German and Flemish mystical writers, in particular the great German Dominican preacher and apophatic theologian Meister Eckhart. In The Soul as Virgin Wife, Amy Hollywood presents the first book-length study to give a detailed textual account of these debts. Through an analysis of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, and the Latin commentaries and vernacular sermons of Eckhart, Hollywood uncovers the intricate web of influence and divergence between the beguinal spiritualities and Eckhart.
“Since the publication of Caroline Bynum’s pathbreaking study of religious women in medieval Europe, female mystical writing has been all too easily characterized in essentialist and universalizing terms, especially in terms of the primary roles that the body and somatic visionary experience are assumed to have played in such women’s writings. Hollywood sets out to complicate this trend in her detailed study of the theological underpinnings of three mystical writers: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. She warns critics that women’s visionary experience has too often been characterized through prescriptive works often written by men for women (such as hagiography) rather than through works by women themselves and first suggests that we pay more careful attention to the latter. Second, she urges critics not to universalize the somatic character of women’s writing; her constellation of these three figures shows that while the body was of concern to all three thinkers, for Mechthild it was not central, and for Marguerite Porete and Eckhart it was to be overcome entirely. By bringing together two female mystical writers and one male writer she demonstrates the commonality, rather than the distinction, between many male and female mystical writers’ concerns and the ways in which Eckhart was particularly influenced by beguine (female lay religious) thought. Furthermore, she shows how Eckhart, perhaps because of his privileged position as a male in terms of institutional authority and education, was able to crystallize and extend the thought of his beguine predecessors, producing a utopian theology of union with God more coherent and ultimately with more radical potential than that of Mechthild or Marguerite Porete.” —Speculum
Amy Hollywood is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, and is the author of the forthcoming Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History.