ITAL 6420

Mysticism in Medieval Europe

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2021-2022.

This course begins with a word - mysticism - that doesn't work, and for good reason: for the authors variously associated with the mythical traditions of medieval Christianity, words are necessary failures.  They snap at the point where they endure the greatest tension.  We'll witness together the limits of language in some of the most provocative so-called mystics of the medieval West, including Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas, and the roots of their extraordinary speech in earlier thinkers such as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Bernard of Clairvaux.  Along the way, we'll ask what language has to do with love, and what each of these might have to do with God, whose name (for these writers) is never one.

When Offered Spring.

Comments Conducted in English.

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