Dr. Minji Lee is a medievalist who specializes in the interactions between mysticism and medicine in the Middle Ages. Her Ph.D. thesis, “Bodies of Medieval Women as Dangerous, Liminal, and Holy: Medical and Religious Representations of Female Bodies in Hildegard of Bingen’s Causae et curae and Scivias” (Rice University 2018), explores how Hildegard of Bingen defended the female sexual/reproductive body as positive in the images of re-creation and salvation against the misogynic medieval and religious culture of her age. After completing a visiting scholarship in the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Dr. Lee is now teaching in the Department of Religion and Medical Humanities Program at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Currently, she is researching the ways in which medieval European medical theories and modern Korean…
SAINT ANGELA OF FOLIGNO TIMELINE 1248/1249: Angela of Foligno was born at Foligno in Umbria, a few miles from Assisi, of a possibly noble and wealthy family. 1270 (?): Angela got married. From this marriage, she might have had several sons. 1285: At age thirty seven, Angela of Foligno received a vision of St. Francis of Assisi and converted to Christianity. 1288 (?): All of Angela’s family members had died. 1291 (June 28): Angela took the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis and became a tertiary. 1291 (early autumn): Angela met Friar Arnaldo on a pilgrimage to Assisi. 1292 (March 26): Friar Arnaldo, Angela’s scribe, suspected that Angela was captured by evil spirits; she began dictating her book, the Memorial, to him. 1296: Angela finished the Memorial. 1296…
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN TIMELINE 1098: Hildegard of Bingen was born at Bermersheim, 45 km south of Mainz, Germany. 1106 (?): At the age of eight, Hildegard was put in the care of Jutta of Sponheim, a pious noblewoman. 1112 (November 1): With Jutta, Hildegard entered an enclosure belonging to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, 60 km southwest of Mainz, Germany. At an unknown date, Hildegard took formal vows to become a nun. 1136: Jutta died, and Hildegard was appointed leader of the women’s convent at Disibodenberg. The convent was part of a double monastery, housing both men and women in separate quarters, under the direction of Abbot Burchard. 1141: Having undergone a major mystical experience, and encouraged by the monastery schoolmaster Volmar, Hildegard began writing her first book, Scivias, in…