This volume offers a series of essays focusing on the power of words. Contributors address the centrality of language to devotional and mystical experience as well as the attitudes towards language fostered by devotional and mystical practices. The essays are arranged under four subheadings: (1) ?Other Words: Figures and Metaphors,? treating the application of the languages of romantic love, medicine, and travel to descriptions of devotional and mystical experience; (2) ?Iconic Words: Images and the Name of Jesus,? considering the deployment of words and the Word (Jesus) as powerful images in devotional practice; (3) ?Testing Words: Syntax and Semantics,? exploring the ways in which medieval writers stretch the conventions of language to achieve fresh perspectives on devotional and mystical experiences; and (4) ?Beyond Words: The Apophatic and The Senses,? offering novel perspectives on a group of texts that address the difficulty of expressing God and visionary experience with words. The volume?s global purpose is to demonstrate the attractions of an explicitly philological approach for scholars studying the Christian tradition. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ? Rory G. Critten and Juliette Vuille Part One. Other Words: Figures and Metaphors 1. Holy Infirmary and Holy Holism in The Conventual Life Of Helfta ? Nao Kukita Yoshikawa 2. Wandering in Late Medieval Devotional Literature ? Diana Denissen 3. Imagination, Affects, and the Curative Power of Words in a Fifteenth-Century Adaptation Of William Flete?s De Remediis Contra Temptacione ? Ana Rita Parreiras Reis 4. Walter Hilton?s Epistola de leccione, intencione, meditacione, oracione et aliis: a translation ? Marleen Cr and Francesco Livorno 5. Listening to the Words of Margery Kempe in the Early Printed Texts of A Short Treatise Of Contemplation ? Elisabeth Dutton Part Two. Iconic Words: Images and the Name of Jesus 6. ?"Le Nom de Jhesus en la bouche plus doulz que miel": An Overlooked Fifteenth-Century Middle French Treatise ? Anne Mouron 7. Lydgate?s Multimedia Poems and Devotion to the Name of Jesus ? Mary C. Flannery 8. Blaspheming and Print in Stephen Hawes?s Conversion Of Swearers (1509) ? Marco Nievergelt Part Three. Testing Words: Semantics and Syntax 9. ?Si Heremita Dicerer?: Richard Rolle and the Status Vite Solitarie ? E. A. Jones 10. ?Privy Tuchyngs of Swete Gostly Syghts?: Reciprocal Longing in Julian Of Norwich ? Vincent Gillespie 11. Empty Words: Interjections, Emotions, and Belief in Middle English Religious Literature ? Daniel McCann 12. An Order of Words: Language and Prayer in the Wooing Group ? Annie Sutherland 13. Semantic Austerity in Petrarch?s Description of Time ? Alessandra Petrina Part Four. Beyond Words: The Apophatic and the Senses 14. Body and Mind, Affect and Cognition: Articulating Vision in The Revelations Of Divine Love of Julian Of Norwich and The Book Of Margery Kempe ? Corinne Saunders 15. The Call to Hear in Late Medieval Mystical Writings from England: Richard Rolle and Richard Methley ? Tam s Kar th 16. Intentio and the One-Syllable Prayer in The Cloud Of Unknowing ? Katherine Zieman 17. ?Fer Aboue Alle Creaturis ou?t Vn enkable?: What Reginald Pecock Did with Proving the Existence of God and Divine Infinity ? Ian Johnson Denis Renevey, An Annotated Bibliography ? Christiania Whitehead Tabula gratulatoria Index