The Arrow and the Ecstasy: The Rhetoric of Rapture in French Carmelite Poetry

Abstract Recently discovered manuscript poems from the archives of French Carmelite convents show that seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Carmelite women recalled, celebrated, aspired to and – by their accounts – achieved religious rapture. The attainment of spiritual ecstasy and the expression of such extraordinary religious experience was not, however, a simple matter for women of this time period. In this study it will be shown that French Carmelite women used a “rhetoric of rapture” established by their spiritual mother, Teresa of Ávila, in order to lend legitimacy to their spiritual experiences and to safeguard those experiences from scrutiny.