This essay collection is gathered on the occasion of the retirement of Denise N. Baker, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature draws together the work of young and early career scholars who have worked with Baker as students as well as peers who have published her work, contributed to collections Baker has edited, and have been inspired and influenced by her wide-ranging and important scholarship over the past four decades. This collection includes studies of the wide variety of the texts and topics that have been the subject of Baker’s scholarly work, from the importance of philosophical and intellectual history in Julian of Norwich’s Showings and Langland’s Piers Plowman, to the gendered nature of martyrdom in medieval hagiography, to the preoccupation of architectural memorialization in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These essays bridge the often wide gap between scholarship on medieval mystical texts, such as the writings of Julian of Norwich and the Cloud of Unknowing author, and scholarship on the work of major medieval vernacular authors such William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.