This book showcases the best in modern medieval and religious scholarship, deploying spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion. The volume explores excessive forms of desire and eroticism at play within Christian mystical texts and the historiographical, theological, and philosophical problems bound up in the interrogation of extraordinary experiences of the divine. Amy Hollywood examines how feminist and queer studies have changed the history of mysticism and how the study of religion in general has altered our understanding of what is true, what is real, and what it means to research a historical subject. Ideal for novices and experienced scholars alike, this volume models cutting-edge methods for the ethical study of divine embodiment and religious experience in the Middle Ages. It makes a forceful case for thinking about religion as both belief and practice, in which traditions marked by change are passed down through generations, laying the groundwork for their own critique. Through a provocative integration of medieval sources and texts by Derrida, Butler, Asad, and Chakrabarty this book redefines what it means to engage critically with history and those embedded within it. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Amy Hollywood is the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History and the award-winning The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. She is the coeditor, with Patricia Z. Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism. CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: A Triptych On the True, the Real, and Critique; By Way of an Introduction Henry Adams, Clover Adams, and the Death of the Real The Unspeakability of Trauma, the Unspeakability of Joy Part I 1. Acute Melancholia Part II. History 2. Feminist Studies in Christian Spirituality 3. On Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography 4. Reading as Self-Annihilation: On Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls Part III. Sexuality 5. Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; Or, Queering the Beguines 6. The Normal, the Queer, and the Middle Ages 7. "That Glorious Slit": Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ's Side Wound Part IV. Practice 8. Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer 9. Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization 10. Practice, Belief, and Feminist Philosophy of Religion Part V 11. Love of Neighbor and Love of God: Martha and Mary in the Christian Middle Ages Notes Index REVIEWS "Acute Melancholia and Other Essays will be an essential resource for teachers, students, and all sorts of readers inside and outside of religious studies. Hollywood carefully and meticulously occupies the arguments of so many different thinkers from a wide variety of fields. She invites everyone to her seminar table, and suddenly whole avenues of inquiry unfold tantalizingly before you. Her work, in other words, is not only excellent and exciting—it's inspiring and provoking." — Michael Cobb, Professor of English, University of Toronto "Amy Hollywood is the rare scholar who is equally at home with medieval spiritual texts and modern critical theory. These seven essays that span her career show her virtuosic reading of complex religious and philosophical texts from the Middle Ages in the light of contemporary theories of reading, history, and sexuality. This collection offers delightful and informative reading for anyone interested in medieval Christianity." — E. Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania "Hollywood's essays deftly navigate and bring into fruitful connection an astounding range of literatures—from Medieval Christianity, anthropology, historiography, feminist theory, and philosophy of religion. They demonstrate what philosophy of religion can learn from careful historical work and why historical work requires critical self-consciousness of a sort that philosophical analysis brings. The prose is learned, sensitive, elegant, and precise; and the result is a major contribution to theorizing central topics in the study of religion as well as the humanities more generally—from practice to experience to sexuality. Acute Melancholia and Other Essays deserves broad and repeated reading." — Thomas A. Lewis, Brown University "Amy Hollywood makes far-reaching interventions into medieval studies, philosophy, theology, religious studies, feminist and queer studies, and psychoanalysis in this bracing collection of essays written over a brilliantly productive twenty-year period. But in my view her most profound thinking concerns critique itself: her insistence that its sources include not only sorrow and anger but also joy is a proposition that could, indeed, lead to lives more fully lived." — Carolyn Dinshaw, Silver Professor, Departments of Social and Cultural Analysis and English, New York University |