Mitt hjärtas fröjd och heliga längtan : Religiösa upplevelser i minnesrunor från senmedeltida Schwesternbücher

Sammanfattning

In the late medieval Dominican monasteries, encounters with the divine were experienced with the whole body; the religious experiences were shaped by sound, sight, taste, smell, touch as well as embodied piety. This master’s thesis examines how religious experience was articulated and understood in four 14th century Schwesternbücher, or ‘Sisterbooks’, from the monasteries of Töss, Engelthal, Kirchberg, and St. Katharinental. While these texts have previously been studied mainly for their mystical visions, less attention has been paid to multisensory perception and the emotional dimension of religious experience. This thesis closes this gap by combining close reading of the Sisterbooks with the theoretical model ”religious experience”, which explains the interaction between bodily practices, sensory stimuli, narrative traditions, and communal norms and memories. The analysis demonstrates how the Dominican monasteries’ religious experiences were multisensory and communal: the senses operated together, the body functioned as an active instrument for encountering God, and experiences were regulated through collective norms. This study additionally explains how, for example, tactile experiences played an important role in marking status and relational proximity to the divine, and how the senses could either prompt or spoil a religious experience. By applying a sensory-oriented model, this thesis offers a new framework for reading the Sisterbooks and expands current understandings of bodily and sensory piety in late medieval nunneries.