The Discovery of Anxiousness: Philosophy and Mysticism in Baroque Portugal

Are anxiety or dread negative stages before freedom, a confrontation with humans’ own mortality and finitude? Joana Serrado inaugurates anxiousness as a category of mystical knowledge in this innovative historical and philosophical study. Based on the life and mystical writings of Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun, intellectual disciple of Teresa of Avila, this study shows the cultural embeddedness of anxiousness: a feeling akin to the Portuguese term saudade (yearning, Sehnsucht). A mystical project that reshapes feminist principles of autonomy, agency and desire.

Joana Serrado, born in 1979, works at Technische Universität Chemnitz as an assistant professor at the Chair of Iberian Cultural Studies. After studying philosophy, medieval studies and religion in Coimbra, Porto, Berlin and Groningen, she held fellowships at Harvard as Fulbrighter, Oslo as Ygdrasyl, Gordon Miulburn Junior Research fellow in Mysticism and Leibniz Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz Institut IEG Mainz.