Female Mystical Literature and History Writing in the Western Late Middle Ages

Between Biography, Memory and Social Report

Abstract

Mystic language is classified by Michel de Certeau as “fable”, that is, as something that must be said and that constitutes a special form of enunciation of historical experience; as enunciation, mysticism constitutes a “writing practice” that seeks to redefine the limits what is sayable, real,and true. During the Middle Ages, female mystical writing inserted women in the field of historiography, which used to be completely composed of males. Through mystical works, they fabricated a specific language of enunciation of the inner life, one that presents itself in the form of biographical narratives. This paper examines Li Vida de la Benaurada Sancta Doucelina and Il Memoriale di Angela da Foligno, documents produced by women of the Late Middle Ages, from the perspective of narrative memory to understand if and how mystical language creates new ways of narrating history and whether these forms indicate new ways of understanding the notions of objectivity, subjectivity and otherness in Western History and Historiography.