Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death

Jessica Barr is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Willing to Know God and Intimate Reading and co-editor of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceIntroduction1. Why Die? The Ethical Value of Death in Medieval Christianity2. The Girls' Guide to Loving Death: Scripting Desire in Anchoritic Guides and Women's Spiritual Treatises3. Living Death from the Outside: Christina Mirabilis, Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Beatrice of Nazareth4. Living Death from the Inside: Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich5. Touching Absence: Relics, Scholarship, and the Academic PilgrimCodaBibliography

"Through this book, the dead whisper to the living. Jessica Barr's artful and effective scholarship shows us that medieval Christianity offered no simple answers, and that medieval Christians' relationship with death could be as fraught with anxiety, pain, uncertainty, longing, and hope as our own." —Karen A. Winstead, author of Fifteenth-Century Lives"This erudite book bridges the centuries that separate the modern reader from these women's lives, addressing something that we still have in common despite that distance: We all will die. How do we approach that death? Where is the meaning therein?" —Jennifer N. Brown, author of Fruit of the Orchard