4 - Mystical Experience

Summary

This chapter focuses on mystical experience. It considers especially the late medieval mystical accounts of and about women, which are particularly rich in their experiential and affective dimensions. The chapter shows that mystical experience lives within the tension of uniqueness and exemplarity, setting the individual apart from the community while also often arising out of its shared life and perceived to serve and inspire it. Mystical experience is also characterized by the paradox between extensive practices of preparation and recognizable patterns of experience on the one hand and the sense of the givenness of the experience on the other. Mystical experience is frequently abundant and overwhelming, marked by intense affect and emotion, displayed in bodily fashion, full of rich sensory impressions, and combining suffering and ecstasy, sometimes in the same experience. In all these respects, mystical experience displays a phenomenality of excess and saturation.