SPAN 597 Mystics, Ascetics, and Visionaries: Religious Writings and the Visual and Material Culture of Counter-Reformation Spain

This seminar explores works of poetry and prose by religious writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century--San Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Ávila, Luis de Granada, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza--and the role that pictorial images and artifacts played in the mystical experience, the materializing of visions, and questions of piety, identity, and politics. Art works will include paintings and statuary, psalter illuminations, altar pieces, and relics. Objects of Christological significance like polychrome sculptures of the crucifixion and Christ at the column of flagellation take center stage. We will pay special attention to the interweaving of vision, cultural memory, and sacred spaces. Carvajal will be privileged in this course, as we follow her from her early years living next to the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales in Madrid, as much a museum as a convent, to her final days as an activist in Jacobean England. We will study her letters and autobiography alongside her mystical poems. The course will be conducted in English. Readings will be in Spanish and English. Papers may be written in either Spanish or English.