Translator’s Note
Introduction
Squaring the Mystic Circle
A Historic Formation
I. A Place to Lose Oneself
1. The Monastery and the Public Square: Madness in the Crowd
The Idiot Woman (Fourth Century)
Laughters of Madmen (Sixth Century)
2. The Garden: Delirium and Delights of Hieronymous Bosch
A Paradise Withdrawn
Encyclopedias That Create Absences
Paths Leading Nowhere
Calligraphies of Bodies
II. A Topics
3. The New Science
"Corpus Mysticum," or the Missing Body
"Mystical" as the Adjective of a Secret
The Substantive of a Science
4. Manners of Speaking
Presuppositions: A Linguistic Pragmatics
"Mystic Phrases": Diego de Jesús, Introducer of John of the Cross
III. The Circumstances of the Mystic Utterance
5. The "Conversar"
The "Dialogue"
A Preliminary: The Volo (From Meister Eckhart to Madame Guyon)
6. The Institution of Speech
Whence to Speak?
The "J" Prefacing The Experimental Science (Jean-Joseph Surin)
The Fiction of the Soul, Foundation of The Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila)
IV. Figures of the Wildman
7. The Enlightened Illiterate
Textual Histories (1630-90)
The Angel in the Wilderness
The Legend of the Pauper
8. The "Little Saints" of Aquitaine
The "Deficiencies" of the Science (1606)
The Persecution of "Extraordinary Devotions" (1615-45)
"A Kind of Illuminati"
9. Labadie the Nomad
A Spirit in Search of a Place
The Invention of Extension
Overture to a Poetics of the Body
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index