Table Of ContentMYSTICISM AND METAPHOR:
VISIONARY LITERATURE IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger
Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Departments of English and Religious Studies
Indiana University
January 2015
UMI Number: 3680820
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
UMI 3680820
Published by ProQuest LLC (2015). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346
Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Doctoral Committee
________________________________
Patricia Clare Ingham, Ph.D., Co-Chair
________________________________
Constance M. Furey, Ph.D., Co-Chair
________________________________
Karma Lochrie, Ph.D.
________________________________
Shaul Magid, Ph.D.
December 17, 2014
ii
Copyright © 2015
Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My parents imparted to me a love of reading and a love of God that are now deeply intertwined
in my life. I have felt their love and support in all my years in higher education, and I have
known, as all children long to, that they are proud of me. They also imparted to me a quietness of
mind that, in my opinion, makes academic work possible. They first taught me the meaning of
home.
My mother-in-law, Joanne Krieger, has welcomed me into the family, loved me like a
daughter, and been unstintingly generous with her time, money, and, most importantly,
Trefzger’s danishes. The only thing better than having her as a mother-in-law is having her as
my son’s grandmother.
I came to do graduate work at Indiana on the hunch that I might find the kind of
mentoring that I desired here, and my advisors Patty Ingham and Constance Furey have
exceeded my expectations. If I ever shape an inchoate idea into anything resembling an
insightful argument, it is because they have labored so long to teach me how to think and write
clearly. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Patty’s incredibly generous spirit and
generative reading—her gift for opening up ideas and finding new perspectives is remarkable.
Constance has taught me so much about how hard it is to write, but also how significant and
fulfilling it is to craft a sentence that says exactly what you mean to say (and also, that you only
know what it is you are saying when you write that sentence!). Both women model for me what
it means to do scholarship that is both rigorous to the highest standards and humble in its search
for new ideas and explanations. It has been a privilege to be their student.
I also want to acknowledge the ongoing role of my undergraduate education and my first
real teacher of the liberal arts, Curtis Gruenler. While in many different classrooms at Hope
iv
College, I began to realize that there were uncharted waters to be explored, but Curtis helped me
to see more than any other teacher “the beauty of the infinite” in medieval literature and
theology.
Many thanks to Heidi Torres and Laura Clapper for cups of tea and great conversations.
Their constant encouragement helped me to believe that I could be a good scholar and a good
mother at the same time.
My friends have made my graduate school experience, and my dissertation, all that they
are, but above all two friends—Corey Taylor Sparks and Elise Lonich Ryan. We started our time
at IU reading Žižek and Badiou together, and we ended it reading one another’s dissertations.
Each chapter has benefited from their insights and criticisms multiple times over, and my life has
benefited from the deep camaraderie of our friendship. I feel about them as Tolkien felt about
C.S. Lewis: “friendship with Lewis compensates for much.” Thanks goodness for video chats.
Finally, to my husband Joshua Krieger, who is and always will be, if I may, “heaven’s
last best gift.” Somehow after eight years, I find it hard to know what to say, when the words of
gratitude flow for all others so easily, but I think this is because I already can’t tell in this
mystery of our shared life where I leave off and he begins. He has made many sacrifices for me
to pursue my PhD, and it has been my joy to watch him find himself as an engineer, a craftsman,
and a father. What a privilege to share your life with someone so interesting, so gifted, so kind
and loving. This dissertation owes much to him, not in its argumentative nuances and close
readings, but in the very fact that it exists, that there is something rather than nothing in these
pages.
And to William Eugene Krieger—“I am your way home, you are my new path.” What a
joy it is to be your mother.
v
Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger
MYSTICISM AND METAPHOR:
VISIONARY LITERATURE IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
My dissertation demonstrates how the materiality of literary and poetic form, particularly
metaphor, is crucial to the study of late-medieval mysticism. Dream visions and mystical visions
share an as-yet-unnoticed preoccupation with key features of language: 1) the materiality of
language at the level of the word, and 2) a focus on metaphor’s particularly paradoxical modes of
signification. Drawing our attention to language, medieval visionary literature reveals the diverse
ways that linguistic form radically shapes the understanding of reality and of the divine. Middle
English dream visions Pearl and Piers Plowman highlight an intense materiality of poetic
language (specifically within poetic devices such as puns and alliteration), so as to elucidate the
mystical. Mystical texts—Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love and the anonymously
authored Cloud of Unknowing—link mystical experience to metaphor, attending carefully to
what both authors call the “bodily” and “goostly” aspects of language (Middle English
equivalents for “literal” and “metaphoric”). The formal features of these visionary texts, I argue,
cross oppositions of “letter” and “spirit” or “content” and “form,” and ultimately display the
metaphorical surface as a place for engaging the ineffable.
“Mysticism and Metaphor” contributes to our understanding of the formal linguistic and
literary features through which mystical discourse operates. The constellation of questions that
mystical texts raise about language and experience are relevant to the analysis of the formal
features of literariness, both poetry and prose. Attending to the mysticism of language as a
feature (paradoxically) of its materiality, my work argues that metaphor is key to how these late
medieval genres construct the experience and language of transcendence. By examining these
vi
two genres’ reliance on both materiality and metaphor, my dissertation contributes to emerging
conversations about the similarities between the textual phenomena of dreams and religious, or
mystical, experience. My analysis makes clear that records of religious visions and literary
depictions of dreaming share certain linguistic features. An investigation of these shared features
situates my dissertation between the disciplines of Religious Studies and English, and my
interdisciplinary scholarship draws on both critical analyses of religious experience and mystical
texts from a range of religious traditions, and from important recent work on medieval literary
language and form.
________________________________
Patricia Clare Ingham, Ph.D., Co-Chair
________________________________
Constance M. Furey, Ph.D., Co-Chair
________________________________
Karma Lochrie, Ph.D.
________________________________
Shaul Magid, Ph.D.
vii
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Mysticism of Language .................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1 Pearl and the Apophatic Poetic .................................................................................................. 27
Chapter 2 The Cloud of Unknowing and the Uses of Negation .................................................................. 64
Chapter 3 The Concealed of the Revealed: Julian of Norwich as Exegete ............................................... 114
Chapter 4 Piers Plowman and the Indeterminacy of Allegory ................................................................. 167
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 232
Curriculum Vitae
viii
INTRODUCTION
THE MYSTICISM OF LANGUAGE
The dream, as metaphor, is a transference that presupposes a gap continuously crossed but never
collapsed, an opening that begets the merger of dissimilar entities without resolution of their
difference. Rendered metaphorically, the metaphor is the bridge that spans the breach between
literal and figurative, truth and fiction, the verbal leap that propels one across the space of an
irreducible reducibility. Metaphor, on this score, is a form of language that materializes in the
fissure that connects by keeping apart.
- Elliot R. Wolfson, The Dream Interpreted Within a Dream1
If we attend to the Greek etymology of the word theology, then a curious state of linguistic
affairs results from its combination with the word apophatic. For theology means ‘discourse
about God’ or ‘divine discourse,’ so the expression ‘apophatic theology’ ought to mean
something like: ‘that speech about God which is the failure of speech….’
What, then, of the ‘cataphatic’? The cataphatic is, we might say, the verbose element in
theology, it is the Christian mind deploying all the resources of language in the effort to express
something about God, and in that straining to speak, theology uses as many voices as it can. It is
the cataphatic in theology which causes its metaphor-ridden characters, causes it to borrow
vocabularies by analogy from many another discourse, whether of science, literature, art, sex,
politics, the law, the economy, family life, warfare, play, teaching, physiology, or whatever. It is
the cataphatic tendencies which account for the sheer heaviness of theological language, its
character of being overburdened…. For in its cataphatic mode, theology is, we might say, a kind
of verbal riot, an anarchy of discourse in which anything goes.”2
- Denys Turner, The Darkness of God
This dissertation began as a project defined largely by genre. Based on my argument that Pearl,
fourteenth-century English dream vision, was deeply mystical, I wrote a proposal that examined
similarities between religious dream visions (Pearl and Piers Plowman) and mystical texts (The
Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations). The point of connection was to be
form—the mystical “content” was not content at all, but was rather embedded within the texts’
1 Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York:
Zone Books, 2011), 202.
2 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 20.
1
