IMC 2025: Sessions
Session 1325: Worlds of Mystical Learning: Texts, Ideas, and Impact, IV - Art, Music, and Mysticism, Intersecting Worlds of Learning
Wednesday 9 July 2025, 16:30-18:00
| Sponsor: | Mystical Theology Network |
|---|---|
| Organisers: | Louise Nelstrop, Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, Amsterdam / St John's College, University of Oxford Lydia Shahan, Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University |
| Moderator/Chair: | Michael Hahn, Sarum College |
| Respondent: | John Arblaster, Ruusbroecgenootschap, Universiteit Antwerpen |
| Paper 1325-a | Libro Vivo: Teresa of Avila and Carmelite Sonic Epistemology (Language: English) Index terms: Music; Religious Life; Monasticism |
| Paper 1325-b | Soft Authority: Humility, Vision, and Prophetic Voice in the Digital Reframing of Hildegard von Bingen’s Religious Authority (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin; Theology; Women's Studies |
| Abstract | The final session in this strand explores the epistemic intersections of mystical texts with art and music. The first paper offers a fresh understanding of the later developments in medieval and early modern mysticism by listening to the texts of the Carmelite foundress Teresa of Avila, and revealing how the mystical discourse she developed highlighted individual sensory experience—in particular, auditory—over the learned scholasticism promoted by male Church authorities. Using an original theoretical framework called acoustemopoetics—defined as ‘the literary expression of knowing-through-sound’—and drawing on the interdisciplinary discourse of historical sound studies, the study shows how Teresa and her nuns made sense of the world through voices and hearing. Through the analysis of acoustemopoetic motifs—literary representations of auditory experiences in the Teresian corpus—the Carmelite sonic universe emerges, and with it, a new method of studying the Spanish mystical corpus. The second paper in this session departs from an artistic research project conducted between 2022-2024, and explores the writings of Hadewijch of Brabant and Mechtild of Magdeburg, re-reading them as study guides for intimate and contaminated forms of knowing, and an inter-subjective epistemic. The paper interrogates how these texts could have inspired their intended readers to connect and move between three relational vectors (their interior world, their peer community of beguines, and their larger world), and in these relational movements, weave a kind of entangled intellectuality that pours beyond the sovereign body and their means of knowing. The third speaker in this session will act as a respondent, both to the two papers in this session, and (since this is the final session in this strand), to the topics raised throughout the day within the overarching theme "Worlds of Mystical Learning." The response will also consider the organizing body of these sessions, the Mystical Theology Network (an international network of scholars studying mystical texts and traditions founded in 2011) as itself a "world of learning." |