Yggdrasil fellow (Guest Researcher), Centre for gender research
Fellow of FCT (Portuguese Government)
Graduate School of Theology and Religious studies
Thesis Title: Mysticism and Philosophy in the vita of Joana de Jesus (1620-1681)
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Mirjam de Baar
Paulo Borges Mathilde van Dijk Yme Kuyper |
About
This dissertation aims to present from a historical, theological, and a feminist perspective, the work Joana de Jesus, a Portuguese Cistercians Nun who lived from 1620 to 1681. Special focus will be given to the notion of “anxiousness” (ansias) reitereited throughout her Life-writing.
Based on her vita and other manuscripts as the foundation of recollection, this study intends to show how Joana’s work appeared in the context of “mysticism of recollection” (Andres Martin 1979) indebt to a Spanish and Northern Tradition (Pacho 2005). Besides its psychological meaning-as the faculty of memory -, mystical recollection in Joana presupposes a social and reformatorial movement of observance that was characteristic to the wider devotionalist trend in Early Modern Catholicism. Furthermore, Joana’s mystical experience, in the subtle difference between recollected orthodoxy and heterodoxy of alumbradism, or even quietism, can also be seen as another Portuguese expression of the social and national resistance to the Spanish invasion.
The mystical, literary, philosophical and historical endeavours in Joana’s vita conflate into a wider genre that is that of Life-writing (Blinkoff 2000, 2005). The making of an author/ authority addresses the question of the formation of the feminist subject in the mystical discourse. (Beauvoir 1949; Irigaray 1974, 1987; Hollywood 2001, 2002). Teresa of Avila and Madame Guyon serve as models and exempla of an agency constituted on the mystical experience and the abasement of their own will. Joana de Jesus’ discourse will be inscribed in a genetically comparison to Teresa, and in a typological comparison to Madame Guyon.
Moreover, Joana’s work, in the spectrum of many other “absents of history” (De Certeau 1973) or parler-femmes (Irigaray 1977), contributes to the theoretical scene with the concept of “anxiousness”. By unveiling the “situations of anxiousness” in her life-writing, Joana enters into the existentialist discussion of Angst/Anguish/Anxiety which brings some consequences to a philosophy of subject and its correlated anthropological and sacramental theology. Anxiousness is galvanized by the (imperfect) attrition and the (perfect) contrition as well as the sorrowfulness and sense of loss within both moments of the catholic confession. Notwithstanding, anxiousness is a driving force upon the writing considered as a subjectivity enterprise. Furthermore, Joana’s concept of anxiousness brings out the Portuguese philosophical and literary discussion on “saudade” and “homesickness”; and, together with mourning (Boym, 2001 Hollywood forthcoming) these themes have been crucial to the rethinking of the feminist subject in the contemporary historiography, theology and philosophy.
