THE SYMPOSIUM also received brief reports on some work in progress. Barbara Zimbalist (University of California Davis) is developing an argument that, through the representation of Christ's apocryphal speech in the vernacular, women's visionary texts reflect a growing desire for access to the Word of God among lay readers. Through the development of Christ's voice as a mode of devotional discourse, women's visionary texts make a distinct contribution to the increasingly varied modes of vernacular devotion, and offer readers opportunity for textual processes of imitatio Christi founded on Christ's identity as speaker and evangelist - an alternative to the more widely acknowledged tradition of passion-based, corporeally realised modes of affective piety offen attributed to women. By reading the long tradition of Christ's extra-biblical speech as texts that evoked specific interpretative hermeneutics, she is arguing for a more nuanced understanding of vernacular devotion within late-medieval literacy and a more inclusive view of the varied textual traditions - including women's visionary texts - that contributed to the changing literary landscape of vernacular devotional in the later Middle Ages.

Laura Kalas Williams (University of Exeter) is working on a project examining conceptualisations of pain in the writings of Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and their relationship with paradigms of physiology and illness in medieval medical writing. Noting that the internal, esoteric and ineffable qualities of both physical pain and visionary experience mark an ontological correlation that has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, Williams is conducting the first detailed examination of maternalised pain in these texts, with a particular consideration of the perception of surrogate or adoptive pain.