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The Mystic Fable, Volume One

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The culmination of de Certeau’s lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar’s transdisciplinary historiography.

384 pages | 2 halftones, 2 maps | 6 x 9 | © 1995

Religion and Postmodernism

History: European History

Medieval Studies

Religion: Comparative Studies and History of Religion

Table of Contents

Translator’s Note
Introduction
Squaring the Mystic Circle
A Historic Formation
I. A Place to Lose Oneself
1. The Monastery and the Public Square: Madness in the Crowd
The Idiot Woman (Fourth Century)
Laughters of Madmen (Sixth Century)
2. The Garden: Delirium and Delights of Hieronymous Bosch
A Paradise Withdrawn
Encyclopedias That Create Absences
Paths Leading Nowhere
Calligraphies of Bodies
II. A Topics
3. The New Science
"Corpus Mysticum," or the Missing Body
"Mystical" as the Adjective of a Secret
The Substantive of a Science
4. Manners of Speaking
Presuppositions: A Linguistic Pragmatics
"Mystic Phrases": Diego de Jesús, Introducer of John of the Cross
III. The Circumstances of the Mystic Utterance
5. The "Conversar"
The "Dialogue"
A Preliminary: The Volo (From Meister Eckhart to Madame Guyon)
6. The Institution of Speech
Whence to Speak?
The "J" Prefacing The Experimental Science (Jean-Joseph Surin)
The Fiction of the Soul, Foundation of The Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila)
IV. Figures of the Wildman
7. The Enlightened Illiterate
Textual Histories (1630-90)
The Angel in the Wilderness
The Legend of the Pauper
8. The "Little Saints" of Aquitaine
The "Deficiencies" of the Science (1606)
The Persecution of "Extraordinary Devotions" (1615-45)
"A Kind of Illuminati"
9. Labadie the Nomad
A Spirit in Search of a Place
The Invention of Extension
Overture to a Poetics of the Body
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

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