Introduction

The most obvious resource for this type of discussion, medieval mystical texts are, again, addressed in new ways throughout the volume. Like Barratt' s re-thinking of the erotic in Gertrud of Relfta, Julie Fromer re-thinks and re-categorizes the language and focus of the mystical/hagiographical Lijlade and the Passion of Seinte Margarete. Fromer re-situates the gaze of the text from the suffering of the saint to her physically inscribed suffering body. David Salomon questions the categories of the mystic and the body by asserting that "by the end of the sixteenth century . . . the corpus mysticum was no longer used to denote the physical body of Christ or the mystic" ( 135), but rather the body of mystical works and treatises which had become so much a part of the medieval and Renaissance culture by that period.