ABSTRACT
This afterword responds to the chapters collected together in this book and its comparative approaches to women’s mysticism by focusing on issues of perspective, temporal imbrication, and palimpsest, particularly those connected with recently formulated ideas of “noncontemporaneous contemporaneity” and the “bidirectional gaze.” It argues that such new, more globally inflected perspectives not only offer new ways of understanding the motivation and direction of the texts and their authors focused on in this present volume but also provide the means for a myriad of visionary women from different cultures, geographies, and temporalities to enter into dialogue with one another – and ourselves, as twenty-first-century readers.
