Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death

Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death investigates the tension between death as necessary for bringing about union with God and as the end of life on earth.

For medieval Christians, only death could offer complete union with God. For medieval women in particular, death was figured as a desirable end to their embodied lives; at least, this is the story told by the clergymen who typically wrote their biographies. Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death questions this assumption and studies visionary narratives, treatises, and spiritual reflections by and about medieval Christian women from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries to reveal how these women understood their own deaths and how their depictions conformed to or departed from the stories told about them.

Rather than focusing on externalities like rituals, revenants, or miracles, Jessica Barr instead tackles the desire for death from the inside, seeking to elucidate the ways in which medieval people anticipated or experienced biological death on a personal level. In narrating their spiritual lives within the framework of deeply held Christian beliefs, these medieval women mystics illustrate how theology and experience converge-and, not infrequently, diverge.

Jessica Barr is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Willing to Know God and Intimate Reading and co-editor of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.