Besides, the valorization of the physical is built into standard Christian theology thanks to the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. For precisely this reason, as feminist readers of Mechthild have pointed out, she gives a central place to the Eucharist in her thought. In the thirteenth century this tendency may have been congenial to the interests of the Church, given worries about the Cathar heresy which blossomed in southern France. Since the twelfth century the Cathars had been promoting a kind of renewed Manicheanism, which disdained the body and even denied that Christ had
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