Passionate imaginings: The mystical remythologies of Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe.

Abstract

Nothing is more central to the medieval construction of private devotion than contemplating the Passion, and nothing is more vital to Passion meditations than imagination. The revisualizing of the Passion by mystics within the tradition of affective piety provides a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between cultural images and narratives and their individual representations. This study focuses on the religious visualization expressed in the works of the late medieval English mystics Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. The authority of the Passion as a dominant cultural myth allows Rolle, Julian, and Kempe to counter possible social sanction by framing self-aggrandizement, questionable theology, and inappropriate desire within the culturally sanctified discourse of affective piety. These mystics share a concern about the interrelationship of subjectivity and culture with postmodern theoretical approaches--Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist film theory. By pairing the writings of Richard Rolle with Derridean ecriture, chapter I shows that his textual manipulations depend upon the process of differance. In turn, Derridean play is shown to create a bid for cultural authority when readers are encouraged to equate the sign of the author with the text's transcendental term. Chapter II argues that Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love outlines a dyadic relationship with Christ that rectifies the polarization of the saved and the damned. Her visions counter Lacan's hierarchy of the symbolic over the dyadic imaginary. In chapter III, Margery Kempe's casting of Christ as the savior of her desire provides a model for a desiring female gaze that moves beyond the limited range of possibilities offered by feminist film theory. I conclude with the contributions that the Passionate imaginings of Rolle, Julian, and Kempe offer to the postmodernist dilemma of agency. Remythologizing--the process by which an individual appropriates a cultural myth--may redeem postmodernism from its internal conflict over agency by offering imagination as a mediator between the politically unsatisfying stasis of structuralism and the overzealous celebration of the individual's autonomy.