At 09:33 AM 12/8/99 -0600, Steve Fanning wrote:
>At 08:34 PM 12/4/99 +0000, you wrote:
>>how did he work that out wrt Margery Kempe? Surely she's the definitive
>>hysteric?
>
>Merton found her mysticism "original if not strange" and saw the
>"peculiar" aspects of her mysticism simply an expression of her age. In
>particular he was against the general view of Dom David Knowles, who did
>dismiss Margery as simply an hysterical woman, in his book on the English
>mystics. He said Knowles' standards were "too rigid and too strict" and
>that the book "suffers from a kind of scholarly compulsion to deny and to
>reject, as if the most important task of the student of mysticism were to
>uncover false mystics." [Mystics and Zen Masters, p. 147]
And given Dom David's own rather densely cluttered emotional landscape, a
bit of the pot calling the kettle black. Or as we used to say in the
seminar, Girls in white dresses shouldn't throw mud.
TL
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