Colors and Books in Marguerite d’Oingt’s "Speculum". Images for Meditation and Vision

Sergi Sancho Fibla (1)

1 UPF - Universitat Pompeu Fabra [Barcelona]

This article seeks an interdisciplinary approach for a better understanding of medieval mystical texts. Many scholars have lately stressed the importance of applying the recent studies in the fields of Image, Art History and the so called “Art of memory” (or mnemonics) in medieval monastic works. This hermeneutic method can help us to abandon, as much as possible, our contemporary ideas about the literary process, and can also bring us nearer to the historical context in which the texts were born. In this way, we may find out some of its characteristic proceedings of writing and reading practices. After reviewing the most recent studies that support this complex conception of the medieval text, this study illustrates why it is particularly appropriate to mystical literature. On the one hand, this kind of works has an eminent meditational nature, so it is suitable to be studied from a mnemonic point of view. On the other hand, this sort of literature has also a visionary backbone, which could be appropriate to be analyzed by recent theories that, going beyond the traditional ekfrasis, have stressed the relevance of visualization (the visual reconstruction in the mind) in rhetoric and in the different devices of creation in medieval texts. In order to exemplify all these precepts, this paper proposes an example, found in Marguerite d’Oingt’s († 1310) works, that would behave in this way.

Mots clés: Mnemonic; Mysticism; Female Spirituality; Medieval Literature; Memory

Domaines: Histoire

Sergi Sancho Fibla. Colors and Books in Marguerite d’Oingt’s "Speculum". Images for Meditation and Vision. Commitments to Medieval Mysticism within Contemporary Contexts, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, Peeters, pp.255-271., 2017. ⟨hal-01449962⟩