While there were laborers in the vineyard before the 1980s, perhaps two happenings more than anything else have served to bring to light the enormous contributions that medieval women made to fashioning and refashioning Christian spirituality. In any event, it is of fairly recent vintage. ![]() ![]() It is difficult to locate precisely the moment when scholarly reflection on medieval Christian women mystics went from by-the-way comment to being an established area of study within medieval studies, but perhaps also in religious and theological studies more broadly. Discovering and Recovering Medieval Women Mystics Yet this example functions as a synecdoche for an inflation of theory that goes well beyond this particularly medieval subfield and is illustrated far more broadly in the historiography of Christian thought, practice, and forms of life in both the first centuries of the common era and in the medieval period. My example of over-saturation by theory concerns the medieval sub-field of the study of women mystics and more particularly the extraordinarily interesting work of Amy Hollywood who, by any accounting, is a major luminary in this subfield. If in my first historiographical piece I dealt with the denial of the reality of “Gnosticism” as a category as an example of the latter, here I would like to give an example of the former. ![]() Simply put, there can be too much as well as too little theory. An adequate historiography of Christian thought, practice, and form of life can just as easily fail from having a surfeit of theory as operating under the illusion that historical reality simply reveals itself without the aid of filters and interpretive schemes.
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