Women Mystics: Hadewijch of Antwerp, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Edith Stein

The great theologian and spiritual writer, Louis Bouyer, focusing on the lives and writings of five women mystics, shows that, contrary to the modern idea that the supposed inferiority of women is an inheritance from Christianity, women have played a fundamntal role in the Church. If the Church was able to pass beyond the collapse of medieval Scholasticism and the errors of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, it was especially due to a succession of exceptional feminine personalities.

Bouyer establishes this by studying those whose influence and sustained tradition, continually renewed, have been decisive in working an interior renaissance of which the Church has need of today as yesterday. He concentrates on Hadewijch of Antwerp, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein, showing the striking, ever-creative continuity from one to the other. This book portrays how the prayer and interior life of each of these women has led modern Christians from idle speculations to the reality of the Christian experience in its purity and fecundity.

"An ideal book for those whose intellectual acumen might wrongly deep them from the wonderful fountain of wisdom of the women mystics. Bouyer's own scholarly mastery of the field of spirituality can provide an entree to a world as enriching to Catholic men as to women. Fascinating and rewarding."