Liz Herbert McAvoyߣs essay on women visionaries highlights the importance of community in relation to womenߣs literary culture, in particular textual community. McAvoy adopts Karen Baradߣs terminology of dynamic intra-actions to describe the lives and writings of visionaries in the European high and later Middle Ages, taking as her starting point the complex and manifold spiritual female entanglements across space and time that are described in The Book of Margery Kempe. McAvoy traces such intra-actions back through Mechthild of Hackeborn and the nuns of Helfta in the thirteenth century to Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh, and forwards to the later fourteenth century and Julian of Norwich. McAvoy also identifies the influence of Mechthild on A Revelation of Purgatory, written in the early fifteenth century by an anchoress of Winchester, and on the writings of Birgitta of Sweden, with which Kempe was familiar. McAvoy concludes that these interwoven spiritual connections between women are mirrored in knotted patterns of manuscript patronage and ownership.

This chapter characterises visionary experiences of heaven, hell, and purgatory received by medieval religious women.The twelfth-century Benedictines Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau offer detailed representations of a celestial city but fewer specifics regarding the netherworld.Hildegard’s perception of the cosmos informs her view of heaven, whereas for Elisabeth it symbolises a longed-for end to life’s journey.Among the Cistercian women residing at Helfta in the thirteenth century, the graphic descriptions of otherworldly realms described by Mechthild of Magdeburg in The Flowing Light of the Godhead are most remarkable.For her contemporaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, the joyous union with Christ on earth is emphasised equally with the union in heaven.The striking scenes depicting the judgement of sinners in purgatory found in the revelations of the fourteenth-century saint Birgitta of Sweden serve as an admonition to her more secular audience.