Thinking with Mysticism (from medieval to early modern)

This symposium will explore how the mystical, the prophetic, enthusiastic or the apophatic were deployed, to political, scientific or artistic purposes. It will look at what thinkers did with mysticism (broadly defined), the strategies of thought or the practices they developed, and the ways in which they then used these strategies to animate, to energise, to trouble their world.

Our keynote speaker, Dr Sarah Apetrei (Keble College, Oxford), is the author of Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 2010) and co-editor of An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (Routledge, 2014).

Draft programme: 

1.00-2.30 (Treehouse)

Medieval Mysticisms

• Michael Hahn, Monastic dissemination of mystical illumination: Bonaventure’s practical advice and his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
• Jack Ford, Moral anthropology: affectus, sense perception, and the cosmos in 12th-century Cistercian De anima texts
• Hossein Salimian Rizi, (Un)Gendered Self–Annihilation in Hafiz’s Ghazals 10 and 15

2.30-3.00 Coffee

3.00-4.00 (Treehouse)

Early Modern mysticism

• Liam Temple, “Fellow Waiters…of the first Resurrection”: Philadelphian mystics and their networks
• Jessica Hamel-Akré, Voilà mon appétit: Dr. George Cheyne’s Mystic Diets

4.15 (Bowland Theatre)

• Shazia Jagot, From Baghdad to Canterbury: Sufism, Alchemy and Middle English Poetry

5.00 (Bowland Theatre)

• Keynote: Dr Sarah Apetrei, The Reformation of the heart: the seventeenth century and the making of 'mysticism

This symposium is part of the lax and diffuse Thomas Browne Seminar series.