Download or read book Translating Christ in Medieval Women's Visionary Texts written by Barbara Erin Zimbalist and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Translating Christ in Medieval Women's Visionary Texts" argues that by translating Christ's visionary speech, female authors created new discursive positions from which to instruct a growing audience of vernacular readers during the later Middle Ages. Translating Christ's visionary speech meant transforming divine speech into human language; aural event into textual artifact; visionary experience into linguistic record; and individual encounter into communal repetition. Chapter one analyzes Christ's speech through the theoretical intersection of gender, vision, and voice. Chapter two unpacks the hermeneutics of Christ's collaborative speech within twelfth- and thirteenth-century Liégeois hagiography, focusing on male-female collaborative authorship. The third chapter surveys vernacular visionary texts in the Low Countries, demonstrating how Flemish Beguines and members of the devotio moderna used Christ's voice to instruct devotional readers in reformist communities from the mid-thirteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. The fourth and fifth chapters turn to the texts of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, respectively, arguing that a more participatory conception of "the Word" emerged within the rapidly shifting vernacular reading cultures of late-medieval England. These diverse visionary texts share common literary and spiritual goals: the desire to hear Christ speak in their own language and to provide their communities with the immediately accessible Word of God. These acts of translation constituted the location of fundamental changes in late-medieval culture: a re-imagining of the role of lay women in the religious sphere; of the spiritual function of vernacular texts; of the meaning and identity of the Word of God; of the constitution of the devotional canon; and the re-conceptualization of the Christian reading community.