Provides an in-depth introduction to the Christian theosophic tradition that began with Jacob Bo¬hme, bringing us into a startling new world of Christian experiential spirituality that is the Christian equivalent of Sufism and Kabbalism.

This volume of original essays celebrates Barbara Becker-Cantarino, whose prolific publications on German literary culture from 1600 to the twentieth century are major milestones in the field of German cultural studies. The range of topics in the collection reflects the breadth of Becker-Cantarino’s scholarship. Examining literature from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributors explore the intersections of gender, race, and genre, history and gender, and gender and violence. They provide fresh readings of the works of known and lesser-known writers, including Cyriacus Spangenberg, Maria Anna Sagers Luise Gottsched, Heinrich von Kleist, Frank Wedekind, Christa Wolf, Helga Schütz, Terézia Mora, and Martina Hefter. Their discussions explore the possibilities and limitations of theoretical discourses on travel literature, deconstruction, and gender and suggest new avenues of investigation.

This book concerns one of early modern England’s most prolific female authors, Jane Lead (1624–1704). Well-researched and clearly written, these essays focus on aspects of Lead’s thought including her attitudes towards Calvinism, mysticism, androgyny and the apocalypse, her role within the Philadelphian Society, and her transnational legacy - particularly in the German-speaking world and North America. This book suggests that Lead was far more radical than has been supposed. It argues that her religious journey had staging posts, namely an initial Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination wedded to a conventional Protestant understanding of the coming apocalypse, then the introduction of Jacob Boehme’s teachings and accompanying visions of a female personification of divine wisdom and finally, the adoption of the doctrine of the universal restoration of all humanity. It locates Lead within a continuing tradition of puritan pastoral thought, showing how her personalised view of the millennium differed from most of her contemporaries and discussing her influence on Pietists and their conceptions of bodily transmutation. It also discusses strategies available to female authors and manuscript circulation as an alternative to print and examines her initial continental reception, particularly within Pietist and Spiritualist circles. Lastly, it traces her afterlife through the relationship between the Philadelphians and the French Prophets, the interest in Lead among the followers of Joanna Southcott and her successors, and the appropriation of Lead’s prophecies by two twentieth century movements: Mary’s City of David and the Latter Rain movement.

DIVDIVThis illuminating book reveals the surprising extent to which great and lesser knownthinkers of the Age of Enlightenment embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult./div/div