The Mystical Presence of Christ - (Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures) by Richard Kieckhefer (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Explores the connections between exceptional experience of Christ's presence and ordinary Christocentric devotion and argues that for both exceptional and ordinary piety it was crucially important that Christ be seen as divine. Subjects examined in the book include German nuns of Helfta and later Dominicans, Margery Kempe, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Dorothea of Montau"--

Book Synopsis

The Mystical Presence of Christ investigates the connections between exceptional experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of ordinary, everyday devotional culture.

Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the "how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations--during prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example--with attention to gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century (Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience.

Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.

Review Quotes

The surest sign of the book's success is that it left me wanting for more, --not nesessarily more details, but further exploration of some findings. I would recommend The Mystical Presence of Christ wholeheartedly as a work full of fascinating insights.

-- "Church History"

Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.

-- "AmericaReads Blogspot"

About the Author

Richard Kieckhefer is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies with a joint appointment in the Department of History at Northwestern University. Among his ten books are Unquiet Souls, Magic in the Middle Ages, Theology in Stone, and European Witch Trials.