ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Christina Rossetti's devotional prose in the context of the Victorian medieval revival, while seeking to understand the place of gender and the body in mysticism. The study of the relationship between her writings and medieval texts may be placed under the general theoretical/thematic rubric of "women writing theology”. Her fierce incarnationalism, locating the Divine in the material world, evokes Hildegard's earlier theology, at the heart of which lies a creation-centered, Sapiential embodiment of God. In analyzing Rossetti's prose, the chapter explains the spiritual lives of nineteenth-century women with respect to hegemonic patriarchal and heterosexist religious frameworks. Through her metaphor, woman's body is sculpted into the trope of the Incarnation. Her singular emphasis upon love, like that of Julian, creates an affective, sentimental piety in harmony with Victorian culture. In Letter and Spirit, she writes of several same-sex affectional pairings that eventually lead to Christ in the New Testament.
