Subtheme:
Mystic or Monster?: Abjection, Authority, and the Limits of the Sacred

Ascetic practices such as fasting, frugality, celibacy, and the rejection of other physical possessions and pleasures affords the mystic more time for prayer and works of charity and create the conditions for union with the divine. Taken to the extreme, ascetic self-abasement approaches what Julia Kristeva terms abjection: the rejection of the rejection of socially unacceptable corporeal modes that entails the subject’s full entrance into the symbolic order of language and society. Especially for women, whose spiritual practices centered the body, particularly the suffering, leaking, and desiring body, as a site of divine encounter, their acts of radical abjection (drinking pus, swallowing scabs, denying the sacraments, or refusing ecclesiastical judgment) push the boundaries of what could be considered holy. Their devotion holds within it a potentially monstrous form of rebellion, a challenge to the symbolic and sacramental order of the Church, particularly when their mystical experiences threaten to render priests, sacraments, and ecclesiastical authority obsolete. At the same time, mysticism offers refuge: a way to escape worldly hierarchies, social roles, and material attachments through union with the divine. In its most radical form, mysticism promises annihilation of the self, illegibility within worldly categories, and retreat from patriarchal governance. 
 

This session, then, explores how mysticism functioned both as a rebellion against institutional structures of authority and as a refuge for those seeking direct access to the divine beyond clerical mediation. Women such as Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, and Catherine of Siena do not simply offer private visions; they rebel against and expose the fragility of the theological and institutional systems meant to contain the sacred. Pulled back toward the center by male authors and canonized by male popes, mystical narratives exist in the tensional space between the sacred and the abject, remaining on the margins for us modern readers as we are confronted with their abjection, with them as the abject. The Church’s attempt to retrieve the mystic and to offer them assimilative refuge may itself be the instantiation of monstrous resistance, for even when flattened as an ‘encounter with God,’ the abject (disgusting) aspects of mysticism become even more repulsive because they arrive as something wholly unexpected. They persist for us as constant reminders of the monstrous potential in all of us. 

Papers might consider: 

● How mysticism operates as both rebellion against and refuge from ecclesiastical power.

● How embodied abjection and monstrosity function as spiritual tactics that simultaneously threaten and enable access to the sacred or as modes of spiritual rebellion.

● How mysticism is deployed as a form of refuge, not from the world alone, but from the law itself—and what happens when that refuge becomes monstrous. 
● What it means to make the law stretch—to force the holy into contact with the disgusting, and what monsters are made in that joining? 
● How ecclesial, social, political readings of medieval mystics in different time periods participate in or reinscribe monstrosity in new ways.