The two hundred or so visions of Agnes which the friar recorded during the early 1290s make a good deal of use of the metaphor of clothing and unclothing to signify her contact with God (there are naked dancing nuns and friars in her Heaven). Her relish in the Feast of the Circumcision, which led her to imagine swallowing the foreskin of Christ, was one of the issues which raised a good deal of worry when the manuscript was first put into print in the eighteenth century. Agnes’s visions were infused with everyday perceptions transformed into symbol; in one of them, Christ appeared to her in
...more
