The Catholic mystic women of the medieval and early modern era—such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Theresa of Ávila—can seem unknowable to us now. How did they nurture their fiery love of Christ within the rigid patriarchal (indeed, misogynistic) structure of medieval and early modern European Christianity? How did they find the strength and bravery to write about Jesus as husband, mother, lover? The writing of these mystic women can strike us even now as shocking, given that they often described Christ as their husband, their lover, or even their mother.
In Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Theresa of Ávila (Bilingual Edition), poet and professor Dana Delibovi gives us the words of the sixteenth-century proto-feminist in a timbre close enough to our own to help close this gap. As Delibovi notes in her perceptive and illuminating Introduction, she centers Theresa’s balance of the mystical and the practical in her translations. Indeed, Delibovi admits that, “I had to fight the temptation to pretty-up her words and make them seem, well, more saintly.” And yet, it is this precisely this direct language that, paradoxically, heightens the divine fervor behind the writing, as when a shepherd speaks of Mary in “It’s Dawn Already”:
Continue reading “Book Review by Kristen Holt-Browning: Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Theresa of Ávila (Bilingual Edition), translated and with commentary by Dana Delibovi”
Feminism and Religion 