Intersexual Persons and Theology of the Body offers an interpretation of John Paul II’s theology of the body that demonstrates how it can encompass intersexual bodies. Intersexuality has been used to challenge binary anthropologies, such as the late pope’s. Beth Zagrobelny Lofgren theorizes that John Paul II’s anthropology answers the “frequency dilemma,” by learning from male and female bodies while respecting the humanity of people with ambiguous bodies. To argue this, Intersexual Persons and Theology of the Body offers biological, psychological, and theological literature on intersexuality (focusing on the anthropologies of Susannah Cornwall and Megan DeFranza), followed by the late pope’s anthropology (focusing on original solitude, the spousal meaning of the body, and the semiotic meanings of the body). This volume demonstrate that intersexual bodies have a spousal meaning, although obscured, and use original solitude to show that John Paul II attributes to the human body meaning not dependent on sexual difference: the first man learns from his solitary body that he is relational. This relationality is fundamental to the imago Dei and undergirds the imago Dei found in communion. Intersexual bodies share human nature and thus the bodily call to relationship. Finally, Lofgren argues that John Paul II’s eschatology involves a transformation of humankind that fulfills the semiotic value of the body. The sign gives way to the mystery: the person fully realized as self-gift. Because the mystery does not depend on the sign, this vision includes intersexual bodies. This discussion leads to a brief consideration of celibacy and marriage for persons with intersexual conditions. This is currently the only application of John Paul II’s theology of the body to these complex situations.

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective.
This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.