The Mystic Fable, Volume Two: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

It has been twenty-two years since the Press published the first volume of "The Mystic Fable" in the Religion and Postmodernism series. The first volume quickly became influential across a wide range of humanistic disciplines and helped to make the tools of poststructuralist thought available to religious studies and theological contexts, especially in the areas of late medieval and early modern mysticism. Volume two has long been anticipated, but it had to wait for Certeau's literary executor to gather the fragments after Certeau's death, and compile them into a coherent book. Together, both volumes solidify Certeau's place in French literary and philosophical circles, and continue his exploration of several interrelated areas, including the paradoxes of historiography, the construction of social reality through practice, testimony, and belief, the theorization of speech in angelology and glossalalia, and the interplay of prose and poetry in discourses of the ineffable. The book will be eagerly read and used by scholars in religious studies, theology, philosophy, history, and literary studies.