Markus Pelzmann

• C3: Precarious Appearance: Aesthetic Discourses in Mystical Texts of the Middle Ages

In the mystical experience of the absolute, the space of different, synesthetic aesthetics opens up. The appearance of the divine in the human, of the transcendent in the immanent – up to the unio mystica – can be accompanied by a profoundly physical experience. The project therefore investigates conceptualizations and forms of representation in Gertrude’s Legatus Divinae Pietatis and Exercitia Spiritualia that are decidedly body- and object-related. The mystic’s Latin writings are to be analyzed in terms of the interplay between mystical insight and its linguistic-medial mediation and with regard to a twofold body-relatedness. First, it is important to ask how and in which way mystical experiences convey themselves on the level of human corporeality and how this is expressed on the level of metaphor and motif. Second, how the taking shape of the absolute and the transcendent is connected with the precarious assumption of a divine body. Thus body- and object-related conceptualizations and forms of representation become a figure of aesthetic reflection in a double sense.

• Gertrud von Helfta
• lateinisch- und deutschsprachige mystische Literatur des Mittelalters
• Kirchen-, Theologie-, Spiritualitäts- und Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters
• Theologien der Mystik
• theologische Anthropologie und Mystik, Mystik und Leib- bzw. Körperlichkeit
• Deutung religiöser Erfahrung, Erfahrung und Transzendenz
• Theologie und Ästhetik, Ästhetik und Offenbarung