Mystical traditions are not apolitical. In this context, I understand medieval politics in a broad sense, encompassing policies of the church (secular and regular) and the monarchy (government and court) that did not always align. I will refer to mysticism as a personal religious experience in which the subject seeks to encounter God and to unite with the divinity whether or not that end is achieved. There are many possible ways of addressing the connection between politics and mysticism using examples from my main geographic area of expertise, the Iberian Peninsula, which—borrowing from Sharon Kinoshita—is where I put the foot of my compass while studying the Mediterranean. In this brief piece, I will argue not only that medieval and early modern mystical traditions are political but that those politics were gendered. Medieval virtue was as performative and as constructed as gender, and it was based on a “stylized repetition” of...

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