I have asked you to read two accounts of the life of the thirteenth-century mystic, Christina the Astonishing. While the first was written by a Dominican friar, Thomas de Cantimpr eight years after Christinas death, the second is a work of fiction that was published in the New Yorker magazine by the American short-story writer Kirstin Valdez Quade in 2017.
Both of these accounts aim to describe and make sense of the particularly body-focused devotional life and spirituality of Christina.
In an essay of four to six pages, craft an argument for how the body matters in both of these presentations of Christinas life and spirituality. You are welcome to focus upon one of these texts more than the other, but both need to be featured in your essay.
Your essay should be written in Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced, and free of all grammatical errors and typos. You should document your sources using the MLA in-text citation method. This citation method requires that you cite your sources in the text of your essay (as opposed to using footnotes or endnotes) and that you append a correctly formatted list of Works Cited to your essay.
Please keep in mind that this is NOT A RESEARCH ESSAY. I want you to only use the sources we have consulted in this course (our textbook, our primary sources, and the two named sources above).
As you write, also keep in mind the nature of our two sources. The first is a primary source written shortly after Christinas death by a Dominican friar (or wandering monk), while the second is a piece of fiction that takes as its inspiration that medieval biography. Despite those significant differences, both offer rich accounts of how the body figures in Christian devotional life and spirituality.
