About

Jessica A. Boon is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, with a particular focus on spirituality and mysticism in Spain between 1450 and 1550, during its transition from a pluri-religious society to a Catholic global empire. Her research explores embodiment in mystical texts, including physiological and cognitive aspects of the body as understood through premodern medical theory, and examines how embodied emotion influences mystical practices. Boon also investigates intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and disability in visionary texts, as well as the material culture associated with spiritual practices. Her scholarly work includes a book titled 'The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Mysticism,' which analyzes the relationship between medical and mystical discourses in Spanish recollection mysticism. Her current project, 'Spanish Passion,' examines Passion meditation as a spiritual practice promoted by Spanish reformers, focusing on themes of pain, torture, gender, and religion-racial hatred in the construction of imperial Spanish Christianity. Boon has also contributed to the study of premodern visionaries, editing translations and publishing studies on figures such as Juana de la Cruz and Hadewijch of Antwerp. Her courses often address the social and cultural contexts of religious practices, emphasizing gender, race, sexuality, and disability, and she incorporates comparative religious perspectives beyond Christianity, including Judaism, Islam, indigenous religions, and Buddhisms.

Research topics

• Art
• Humanities
• History
• Art history
• Classics
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Religious studies
• Visual arts
• Law

Selected publications

• Mourning and anger at the foot of the cross: Mary’s pain in thirteenth-century Castile and León

  Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies · 2024-02-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Latin Marian lament "Quis dabit" (literally "Who will give") began circulating in thirteenth-century Castile and León at a time when devotion to the Virgin Mary was principally associated with miracles and conquest. A central theme of this popular text was Mary's physical pain rather than her disembodied mental distress at the foot of the cross. I argue that the reception of "Quis dabit" in Castile and León was twofold. In his Duelo de la virgen, Gonzalo de Berceo (c. 1196 – c. 1260) incorporated medieval mourning traditions to emphasize Mary's rage (rabia) over the loss of her son, highlighting her military might as queen during an age of conquest. While the illustrators of the Cantigas de Santa María were directly informed by passages from the "Quis dabit" in two unusual representations of Mary grasping Jesus's crucified feet and gazing up at him, these images echoed only her painful, active sorrow in the "Quis dabit," rather than her rage. The contrasting treatment of the "Quis dabit" in thirteenth-century Castile and León sheds light on how spiritual practices concentrating on Mary's pain could be incorporated into devotion to a powerful, conquering queen of heaven.

  PublisherDOI

• 10 Trans-figura-d in Joy: The Sensuality of Celestial Feasts in the Pageants of Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2024-06-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Flying, Fighting, and Forgiving. The Materiality of the Living Cross in the Visionary Sermons of Juana de la Cruz

  Revista de Poética Medieval · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Art
  • Humanities

  Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534), abbess of a beaterio turned Clarisan convent, was known as a «living saint» for her Marian visions and for the weekly sermones during which Jesus reportedly spoke through her enraptured body to extend the biblical narratives and describe celestial festivities. Juana’s Passion spirituality led her to contemplate the materiality of the arma Christi; in particular, the physicality of the cross as splintery yet living wood influenced Juana’s images of the cross as at once instrument of torture leading to death, while also as triumphant, animate, and even violent. In her visionary sermons, Juana takes the animate materiality of this «holy matter» to its logical extreme, presenting the cross as able to mutate, feed others, enact the liturgy, and subdue the seraphim in a heavenly battle, all actions that helped justify the ultimate action of the living cross participating in the Last Judgment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender and Materiality: Caroline Walker Bynum

  2023-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Immaculate conceptions: the power of the religious imagination in early modern Spain

  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies · 2021-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this rich study, Rosilie Hernandez explores the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as a nexus for spiritual, political and social developments in early modern Spain. The doctrine, developed t...

  PublisherDOI

• The Magdalene in the Reformation

  Common Knowledge · 2021-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great fashioned a single, polymorphous character out of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany (Martha's sister who sat listening to Jesus's teachings instead of cooking for him), and the unnamed sinner of the Gospels who used her long locks to clean Jesus's feet with unguent. Medieval thinkers quickly identified the sin of this composite Magdalene as sexual, thus developing a paradoxical figure who was at the same time a revirginized prostitute, a contemplative, and the first witness to the Resurrection. They also gave her a history, with dramatic hagiographical descriptions of a Mary Magdalene who had spread the Gospel throughout Gaul and ended her days as a hermit in a cave outside Marseilles. This virgin/whore/apostle had been among the most popular medieval saints, but her legacy was challenged by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in the same year that Luther published the Ninety-Five Theses. Heated discussion of the “Three Maries” continued for several years, and Erasmus was a key figure in the debate, by the end of which only the Mary specifically called “the Magdalene” in the Gospels remained, shorn of her sexual history, her mission to Gaul, and her life as a hermit.Arnold's contribution to the intellectual history of Christianity traces how, although the composite Magdalene unraveled just as the Reformation began, the three women continued to provide food for thought for the most famous Protestant and Catholic reformers. Instead of three figures sharing a history ranging from the depths of sin to the height of apostolic fervor, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations produced a multiplicity of Magdalenes, Maries of Bethany, and unnamed female sinners who served a wide range of exegetical purposes. The ambiguity inherent to the medieval Magdalene, while rejected in almost every detail, returned as a result of sola Scriptura, with figures as wide-ranging as Luther, Calvin, Theodore Beza, Katharina Schütz Zell, Marie Dentière, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Margaret Fell, and George Fox offering intensive readings of the individual episodes about the three women that, surprisingly, supported mutually exclusive expectations for female comportment, female devotion, and female power.Although Arnold asserts in closing that the early modern rendition of the three women “loses some of its flexibility” in comparison with the medieval Magdalene, the thoroughness of Arnold's research suggests otherwise. The difference may be that the flexibility no longer was available to an individual devotee, as each author's or preacher's theological predilections forced each of the three women into a static role. But on a broad scale, since none of the interpretations definitively foreclosed any other, the Magdalene retained her status as the premier “woman good to think with” in Christian devotion, despite Reformation polemics and the early modern querelle des femmes.

  PublisherDOI

• Sacred Skin: The Legend of St. Bartholomew in Spanish Art and Literature by Andrew M. Beresford

  ˜La œcorónica/˜La œCorónica · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Classics
  • History
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Incarnate Body and Blood in Christianity

  2020-04-17

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Her Father's Daughter

  Medieval Feminist Forum · 2020-05-26

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? The Sacred Heart in the Art, Religion, and Politics of New Spain</i>

  Sixteenth Century Journal · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art history
  • Classics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nora Weinerth

  Université du Québec à Montréal

  9 shared

• Juana De la Cruz

  3 shared

• Ronald E. Surtz

  3 shared

• Sarah T. Nalle

  3 shared

• J Colin

  1 shared

• Colin Faverjon

  institut Camille-Jordan

  1 shared

• R Desmedt

  1 shared

• G Mylle

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Senior faculty scholarship and research leave award, UNC, sp…
• Institute for Arts and Humanities fellowship, UNC, fall 2023
• Charles Julian Bishko Memorial Prize, Association for Spanis…
• Best Article Prize, Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship…
• Schwab Academic Excellence Award for teaching and scholarshi…