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Abstract
This study examines striking similarities between Emily Dickinson's life and poetry and those of medieval visionary women that explain repeated use of terms like mystical, cloistered, eremitic, and ascetic in reference to her. It places her into a tradition of women's visionary writing of the late Middle Ages that suggests her adoption of these ways and themes as an avenue to express the spiritually transcendent. The study does not argue influence, because Dickinson had no access to documents by or about these predecessors. Similar circumstances, rather, produce similar approaches to the same themes. Ignored and restricted by their societies, these women had to seek the authority of Divine connection.
Chapter One defines the tradition of medieval women's mystical writing, differentiating it in significant ways from men's mysticism. Only women can insist upon an actual sexual and marital union with a male God. Chapter Two begins the comparison of life choices. Confinement of women's lives and decreased serious attention to their writing drove gifted medieval women and Dickinson to seek a mystical connection, to borrow Divine authority to permit their strong opinions on many subjects. Dickinson uses white dresses, reclusion and chastity to signal her exceptionalism, and to permit her freedom from duties and societal rules that controlled her expression.
Chapter Three addresses the mystic's view of herself. Medieval women's contact with God required their extreme enclosure, asceticism and humility. Through immediate contact with God, though, those attributes are transformed to their opposites: freedom, bliss and spiritual greatness. Dickinson adopts this alchemy to invert her position as well. Chapter Four details how Dickinson follows medieval women in describing the Divine in terms of worldly love relationships, to explore erotic love themes, Bride-of-Christ and God-the-Father concepts, as well as Mother Nature mysticism. It also compares Dickinson's descriptions of ecstasy with those of her predecessors.
Chapter Five tallies the remaining gaps between the position of the Amherst poet and that of medieval women religious, especially dealing with Dickinson's distance from orthodox religion. It argues that Dickinson left the Church in order to carve out her own mystical connection to God.
