Swimming in the Trinity: Mechthild of Magdeburg's Dynamic Play

Abstract

In Flowing Light of the Godhead Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1208-c. 1282) sculpts her German vernacular into an evocative work of mystical art.1 Through prose and poetry, image and movement, this medieval lay woman writes a love story designed to plunge her audience into the source of all love, envisioned as a triune God. She professes that she received her book as a "greeting" directly from the Trinity. She wants to do more than tell about a religious experience, however. She wants to participate in the dynamic creative power of the Trinity by writing about it. By the way in which she writes her theology, she performs it, and draws her audience into full participation of the very doctrines she teaches.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.