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Prophecy plays an important role in the Old Testament. This importance does not end but continues throughout early Judaism, albeit under different forms and genres such as apocalyptic literature, eschatological prophecy, clerical prophecy, and sapiental prophecy. It equally continues in the history and writings of the early church. The New Testament portrays Christ as the supreme prophet in not merely forwarding words of God to God's people, but being the word of God. Prophecy continued to mutate in the history of Christianity but kept its vigor. It re-emerged in the monastic movements, medieval visionary mysticism, passion mysticism, the great Marian apparitions, augmenting in the 19th century, and in possible contemporary prophetic personalities such as the Greek-Orthodox Vassula Rydén.

This chapter focuses on Catherine of Siena. It criticizes Jacques Lacan’s romanticization of female mysticism, arguing that Catherine’s Dialogue is a carefully crafted exercise in vernacular theology. In critical engagement with Luce Irigaray, and informed by the work of Amy Hollywood, Karen Scott, Suzanne Noffke, and Jane Tylus, it explores Catherine’s Dialogue in terms of gender, language, and desire. It argues that, while sharing the same theological principles as Thomas, Catherine uses the mystical body of Christ as an analogical resource which offers a cataphatic incarnational Thomism. Her rejection of Thomas’s privileging of the contemplative life offers a radical theology of neighbourly love which provides a response to Freud, and her appropriation of a corporeal language of rapture constitutes a bold defiance of the castrating cut of language and ruptures the boundaries of Thomist apophaticism. The chapter concludes with Catherine’s letter to Raymond of Capua where she describes accompanying a dying man to the scaffold.

Chapter 1 examines the hagiography of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús who migrated to Guatemala’s capital in the late seventeenth century. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor abandoned wife and mother. And although Church decrees clearly required actively religious laywomen to live in cloistered communities, Anna became an independent beata (laywoman who took informal vows) and Jesuit tertiary. This chapter explores Anna’s lived religious experience as a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female mysticism and devotional networks, and her alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. It also places Anna’s story within the context of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety.

This chapter focuses on Lacan’s Seminar XX, which explores the meaning of being, monotheism, and the soul from the perspective of Étienne Gilson’s Thomism. It explores Lacan’s claim that Christianity is the ‘true religion’ because creation ex nihilo eliminates the sexual copula of Greek ontology, positing the perfect simplicity of the divine creative unity over and against all qualitative or cumulative concepts of the Platonic One. This entails a reappraisal of lack, beyond Aristotelianism, to recognize it as the primordial condition of any being coming to be as other than God. The sexual relationship ceases to be a futile quest for union, and a new possibility of love opens up in the acceptance of mutual lack. The chapter considers Lacan’s account of female mysticism and hysteria as a language of bodily otherness associated with the desire for an unknowable Other associated with God and the mother.