IMC 2025: Sessions

The second session in this strand focuses both on the impact of mystical texts and their later reception, but also on the worlds of learning within the texts themselves. The first paper surveys the 15th-century influence of the Limburg Sermons, a collection of mystical sermons translated into Middle Dutch and compiled c. 1300. The paper aims to shed light on the sermons’ transmission by and for religious women in the fifteenth-century Low Countries, focusing specifically on two corpus manuscripts found in the Royal Library, Brussels: one a Marian devotional miscellany, the other a compendium of sermons. Drawing on Thom Mertens’ framework suggesting a “mystical culture” in the fifteenth-century Low Countries, this paper will argue that the late medieval transmission of these texts both sustained a tradition and developed new relevance for these later, largely female audiences.

The second paper turns to mystical texts and pedagogy in the Cloud-corpus, arguing that community and relationality are at the heart of the Cloud-author’s pedagogy. When teaching a solitary and potentially isolating contemplative practice, the Cloud-author actively cultivates a sense of camaraderie through the methodologies he deploys. Many of his rhetorical strategies—dialogues, classroom structures, and epistolary connection—are also relational acts, and thus function as gestures of friendship and even solidarity to keep the practitioner afloat and supported in their independent endeavour. Much of the Cloud-author’s pedagogic practice is therefore an effort to foster connection, and a sense of sociality, even and especially when that cannot take the form of face-to-face interaction. The paper suggests that solitary practice cannot occur without the foundation of collective support in the Cloud. Moreover, in the later reception of the author's texts, we see readers using his work in acts of contemplative outreach in their own communities, thus continuing to foster that same foundation for others.

Writing from a South African Reformed perspective, the third paper aims to deconstruct a caricature of mystical experience as an individual event that sets a person apart from the community. In her poetic writings in the vernacular Hadewijch engages with the concepts of fruition and compassion as the product of the intimate encounter of the soul and Christ’s humanity which plays out in the active life of bodies. Her poems and visions became the vehicle for theological teaching that formed the mind and being of the literate communities of her time. This led her audience to be able to engage in profound theological formulations but also active deeds of compassion.