PERFORM AND TRANS THREE DIMENSIONS

This is a volume of essays that pushes the frontiers of interpretation on mystical and ecstatic writings of the later Middle Ages to explore them as particular performances.

The contributors examine mysticism and spirituality from multiple performance perspectives: dramatic, kinesthetic, linguistic, and spatial.

Emerging from work on ritual, performance, mysticism, and the body, the authors offer ways of analyzing these performances and their construction through questioning the various modes through which they were conveyed.

Performance perspectives reveal women's public leadership roles within their communities, the nature of devotional "reading" and "authoring" in manuscript cultures, and women's roles in developing and performing rituals and texts that would transform future generations.