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Document Details : Title: Van geleefd visioen naar voorgeschreven visualisatie Subtitle: Jhesus collacien als exponent van de domesticatie van de visionaire ervaring in de late Middeleeuwen Author(s): FRAETERS, Veerle Journal: Ons Geestelijk Erf Volume: 92 Issue: 3-4 Date: 2022 Pages: 253-278 DOI: 10.2143/OGE.92.3.3291678 Abstract : The little-studied Jhesus collacien [Jesus’ Sermons] is a Middle Dutch collection of revelatory sermons delivered by Jesus and the Holy Ghost through the medium of an anonymous Franciscan tertiary to her convent. The work dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, a time in which the Church held an antagonistic stance towards visionary experience. This article sheds light on the visionary features of this generically hybrid work in which homiletic and visionary poetics are curiously mixed. It does so through a comparative analysis in which Jesus’ Sermons are juxtaposed with the Visions of Hadewijch (c. 1240), a collection which dates from the thirteenth century, the heyday of medieval female visionary literature. The analysis shows that the ecstatic and theological qualities that are at the heart of thirteenth century visions are absent in Jhesus collacien while the affective and imaging qualities as well as the authoritative bonus of the visionary genre are intact albeit transformed. What remains are revelatory visualization exercises or ‘scripted visions’ as Barbara Newman has called the late medieval domesticated version of religious visionary literature. We can safely assume that to the tertiaries, who lived under ecclesiastical control in an era hostile to visionary experience, such pared-down version of what was once a medium for creative theological thinking by women, was the only form of ‘vision’ left available. |
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