Nuns, Saints, and Mystics

Early Christianity had a tremendous appeal to women and slaves. Early Christian spirituality and practices of devotion were part of a broader cultural revolution aimed at subverting both Jewish and pagan Roman patriarchal family structures, slavery, and the political structures in which they were embedded. The high numbers of female converts, martyrs, and donors testify to the extent to which the church in its formative phase relied on women -- slaves as well as high-ranking Roman ladies -- and their spiritual and material contributions. In medieval Catholicism, women mystics formulated a theology according to which Christ in his human nature could be thought of as entirely female. In the early modern period, female religious rallied to withstand the onslaught of the tridentine movement, which was aimed at purging the religious "public sphere" from its many female protagonists. Female imagery, and the orchestration of cults devoted to the Virgin Mary, for example, played a key role in converting Native Americans. In this course, we will be reading original sources written by our about women in their roles as followers of the apostles, founders of convents, mystics, nuns, "real" as well as "fake" saints, but also secondary literature in this rapidly expanding field of historial studies. MCP, PRJ, REA, WRI