This panel engages with the continuities and discontinuities between the experiences of prophetic and shamanic women around the globe. Among the themes which arise in these presentations are the role of the Virgin Mary, shifting understandings of the female body, women's subjectivity and individuality, and suffering and illness in prophetic claims.
I will consider the role of prophecy in the vita of late medieval women such as Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Elisabeth of Reute, and Colette of Corbie. This presentation will examine why prophetic gifts were especially emphasized in the discussion of saintly women in the Late Middle Ages. I will discuss the increasing public activism of saintly and prophetic women. Finally, I will ask how prophecy was used as a legitimation strategy for these women and on the other hand how somatic experiences legitimated their prophecies.
In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions.
In this article I will try to survey both secondary and primary sources, providing a simple historical overview of female shamans, diviners and spirit mediums in China. The terminology, both in Chinese and in English, can be confusing. The term ‘divination’, as used in secondary literature, mostly describes the activities of prognostication of elite males. Women are present, but are a minority, and understood to be fairly irrelevant. In spirit-inspired forms of divination, like shamanism and spirit mediumship, on the other hand, women are not only present but widely disseminated across several practices and audiences, and actively engaged. My approach is broad and tries to encompass all of the above practices, foregrounding women’s activities, highlighting similarities over time but also differences.