IMC 2025: Sessions

The second session in this strand addresses questions concerning epistemology and phenomenology in medieval women's philosophical texts. The first paper focuses on Hildegard of Bingen and interrogates the central role of light in her spiritual world. The paper explores the concept of light in Hildegard's visionary works, focusing on her three major texts—Scivias, The Book of Divine Works, and The Letter to Guibert of Gembloux. Light will be examined across three crucial dimensions: existential, epistemological, and symbolic.

The second paper explores the concept of 'pure love' as it emerged in the writings of late medieval mystical women, and particularly Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510). Though she left no writings of her own, her teachings were written down by her followers in the form of a Spiritual Dialogue, a treatise on Purgatory, and a Life. By no means works of systematic theology, these texts do reveal a coherent concept of pure love, as well as address some of its philosophical (epistemological, ontological and anthropological) implications.

This paper considers the pursuit of pain as a major aspect of the female mystic experience by bringing medieval Christian female mystics in direct dialogue with the French phenomenological tradition. In reading the writings of Christian female mystics, i.e., Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila, various modes of self-denial are practiced and function either as instrumental to the mystic experience or as outgrowths of it (or both). Writers associated with the “theological turn” in French phenomenology (including Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) offer a way of reading the female mystic experience as paradigmatic of revelatory phenomena. The paper grapples with identifying the source of pain and the desire for it while also acknowledging the complexities associated with analysing the experience of pain as given in personal testimony.