In the passionate poetry of a bride to her bridegroom, this thirteenth-century German mystic recorded thirty years of her most intimate conversations with God. The selections in this edition offer a powerful glimpse into Mechthild's vision of God and her constant longing to be in his heart. This eloquent female ascetic recounts her mystical union with God in an unusual combination of literary genres ranging from rich allegory to lyrical poetry and prose. At age twenty, Mechthild left her home to begin a life of intense prayer as a beguine under the direction of the Dominicans. Continually speaking out against abuses in the Church, Mechthild incurred a lifelong conflict with the religious authorities of her time, making the survival of her writings all the more remarkable.

The author argues that 'The Book of Margery Kempe' unfolds a creative experience of memory as spiritual progress, and explores Margery's meditational experience in the context of visual and verbal iconography.

Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp's Libellus to the Meditationes Vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love's Mirror and a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.

aspirations, the rise of western monasticism was the most note worthy event of the early centuries. The importance of monasteries cannot be overstressed as sources of spirituality, learning and auto nomy in the intensely masculinized, militarized feudal period. Drawing their members from the highest levels of society, women's monasteries provided an outlet for the energy and ambition of strong-willed women, as well as positions of considerable authority. Even from periods relatively inhospitable to learning of all kinds, the memory has been preserved of a good number of women of education. Their often considerable achievements and influence, however, generally lie outside even an expanded definition of philo sophy. Among the most notable foremothers of this early period were several whose efforts signal the possibility of later philosophical work. Radegund, in the sixth century, established one of the first Frankish convents, thereby laying the foundations for women's spiritual and intellectual development. From these beginnings, women's monasteries increased rapidly in both number and in fluence both on the continent and in Anglo-Saxon England. Hilda (d. 680) is well known as the powerful abbsess of the double monastery of Whitby. She was eager for knowledge, and five Eng lish bishops were educated under her tutelage. She is also accounted the patron of Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon poet of religious verse. The Anglo-Saxon nun Lioba was versed in the liberal arts as well as Scripture and canon law.

Introduces an English translation of the Book of Special Grace, a Latin mystical work composed by Mechthild of Hackeborn and her sisters at the convent of Helfta in the 1290s.

The first accessible beginner's guide to Rinzai Zen practice. The recognition of the true nature of oneself and the universe is the aim of Rinzai Zen—but that experience, known as kensho, is really just the beginning of a life of refining that discovery and putting it into practice in the world. Rinzai, with its famed discipline and its emphasis on koan practice, is one of two main forms of Zen practiced in the West, but it is less familiar than the more prominent Soto school. Meido Moore here remedies that situation by providing this compact and complete introduction to Zen philosophy and practice from the Rinzai perspective. It’s an excellent entrée to a venerable tradition that goes back through the renowned Hakuin Ekaku in eighteenth-century Japan to its origins in Tang dynasty China—and that offers a path to living with insight and compassion for people today.

The history of this period in German literature is told through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, a comprehensive bibliography, and over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries on poetry, novels, historical narrative, philosophical musings, drama, and the exceptional writers who emerged and shaped German literature over the centuries.