UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Seminar Series
“A Crisis of Reading”: The Culture of Prophecy in the Long Reformation
This symposium with Dr. Carme Font (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and CMRS Associate) examines the influence of prophetic writing as a constituent element of what has been termed the Long Reformation. It focuses on women’s prophecy as the dominant linguistic culture of Reformed spaces stemming from different practices of Bible reading and interpretation. The symposium will explore the continuities of medieval mysticism as it becomes prophecy in reformed communities of faith, which are as yet largely unexplored.
The ‘Spirit of Prophesie’ became the dominant language of public life and private spirituality in much of seventeenth-century Britain, crafting a discourse of social transformation that conflated religious conscience, political democratization, and gender identity. While the corpus of prophetic writing is identified by early modernists and continues to grow as the result of archival research, this seminar considers prophecy beyond the sectarian genre to include parallel forms of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobiography, and election narratives. It looks at why prophecy flourished in the years of the civil wars in a Puritan context and how it developed into the eighteenth century. It extrapolates the idiosyncrasy of women’s prophetic language, from Katherine Chidley to Jane Lead, as being representative of a form of textually-based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as creators of independent meaning, empowering them as individuals, citizens and believers.
This session will discuss the patterns of continuity and change of mysticism and prophecy as they coalesce in the final years of the Long Reformation. Through the intensive practice of Bible reading fostered by Puritan groups, a form of Reformed mysticism emerged that fostered contemplative reading as a way to God. This session examines the commonalities between medieval and reformed mysticism through a process that can be described as a “quantum leap” of theological sources (from Saint Augustin to Joachim de Fiore and Jakob Boehme) that inform meditative practices of reading, communicating and writing about God.
Carme Font is Lecturer of English Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Research Associate at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. A specialist in seventeenth-century women’s writing, her latest book is Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge).
