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Boon, Jessica

Jessica A. Boon

Associate Professor

[gem_icon icon_material=”f159″ color=”#13294B”] Carolina Hall 113
[gem_icon icon_material=”f477″ color=”#13294B”] 919-843-3094
[gem_icon icon_material=”f2ad” color=”#13294B”] jboon@email.unc.edu
[gem_icon icon_material=”f3c2″ color=”#13294B”] Website

I study medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, particularly spirituality and mysticism in Spain 1450-1550 during its transition from a pluri-religious society to a Catholic global empire. My theoretical interests focus on the study of embodiment in mystical texts and guides to meditation, including the body’s physiological and cognitive elements as understood in premodern medical theory, the impact of embodied emotion on mystical methods, the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and disability in visionary texts, and the body’s configuration through material culture in the process of spiritual practices.

My first book, The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Mysticism, The University of Toronto Press, 2012, examines the intersection of medical and mystical discourses in Spanish “recollection” mysticism in order to reposition the medical body and the embodied soul as critical elements of sixteenth century spirituality.

My current book project focuses on Passion meditation, the suffering and death of Christ, as the principal spiritual practice promoted by Spanish reformers in the late medieval and early modern period. I thus examine the role of violence and torture in the Christian imagination. I also work on premodern visionaries, including co-editing a translation of six “visionary sermons” by the early sixteenth century mystic Juana de la Cruz, publishing studies of Juana’s Christology, Mariology, and angelology, and writing articles on gender, sexuality, and theology in the poetry of the medieval Flemish visionary Hadewijch of Antwerp.

The vast majority of my courses fulfill the Christianity and Culture minor, as they attend to the social location of the individuals and practices studied, particularly considering gender, race, sexuality, and disability. Since I specialize in Spain, the only location in medieval Europe that had Muslim kingdoms as well as Christian ones, I understand the study of Christianity to require attention to the other religious discourses with and against which it constitutes itself. My courses therefore frequently introduce students to religions beyond Christianity, particularly Judaism and Islam, but also indigenous religions in colonial Latin America and Buddhisms in premodern Asia.

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