The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Studies in Spirituality and Theology) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

In her work, Amy Hollywood explores the writings of Margueritte Porete, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Meister Johannes Eckhart, all medieval mystical writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further, she attempts to wrestle with a previous work by Herbert Grundmann that the teachings of German mystics were formed by the intellectual underpinnings of the mystical and religious experience of medieval women. It is then Hollywood's hope to demonstrate the influences of the beguine mysticism, as exemplified through Porete and Mechtild, on Eckart's work. In addition, Hollywood explores how these three mystics, "... subvert medieval discourses on, and practices concerned with, gender and subjectivity."

Accordingly, Hollywood brings together Porete, Mechtild, and Eckhart to illustrate several strains found in all of their writings. First, both bodily and spiritual suffering are implicitly and explicitly criticized by Mechtild, Porete, and Eckhart. Scholars, in the past, have tried to define the language of female mystics, and these two are no exception, in terms of erotic and bodily imagery, which historians maintain is the cultural predilection of women towards such imagery. However, Hollywood believes that all of these writers have an apophatic nature to them. It is more explicit in Eckhart, but Hollywood maintains that all three use apophatic means to try to describe God. None of these mystics can properly describe God because of His unknowable nature, so they use terms that were familiar to their intended audience.

These mystics also emphasized the suppression of the will to become one with God. Eckhart stressed the importance of surrender of the self [the soul], "for the divine being is equal to nothing, and in it there is neither image nor form." While the women, Mechthild and Porete, describe divine experiences, thus emphasizing personal authority due to God's intervention, Eckhart conveys "priestly authority" available to men during the period, however, his emphasis upon personal detachment allows the concept of the soul's union with God to be available to all. Thus, to Hollywood, women were forced to seek access to the divine and to public voices by inscribing their souls with suffering and with wounds marking the presence of God and the limits of description. Taken together, the three mystics and their attitude towards the body are similar in that they all stressed the importance of minimizing the body to concentrate on the soul. Medieval society emphasizes asceticism as the path to God, but again, the three mystics emphasize what the soul must do to forge a path to God. Of course, Hollywood does make several assumptions to make her thesis work. First, that the two female mystics attempted to explain God in unknowable terms, and that they used terms that their society could understand, and the second, that Eckhart did read these two female mystic writers.