This project examines mystical discourse in medieval India and medieval England as a site for the construction of new images of women and the feminine. I study the poems of three women mystics from western India, Muktabai (c. 1279-1297), Janabai (c. 1270-1350) and Bahinabai (c. 1628-1700) in conjunction with the prose accounts of the two most celebrated women mystics of late medieval England, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-after 1413) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373-after 1438). My principal areas of inquiry are: self-authorizing strategies, conceptions of divinity, and the treatment of the domestic. I find that the three Hindu mystics deploy a single figure, the guru, as their primary source of spiritual authority. In contrast, the self-authorization of Julian and Margery is more diffuse, for the two mystics record testimony from a variety of sources, including Christ himself, to prove their spiritual credentials. The texts under scrutiny offer variously gendered models of the divine; three of the five mystics show preference for a feminized god. Julian and Bahinabai invest their deities with physical and mental attributes that were labelled feminine, such as feeding and nurturing. However, both women accept God’s sexed body as fundamentally male. Janabai is the most innovative of the mystics in her gendering of the divine; her deity Vitthal’s sexed body can be either male or female, although (s)he typically undertakes chores that were the province of women. Janabai is not the only mystic to attempt a reconciliation of the domestic and the spiritual. As narrated in the Booke, Christ expresses willingness to help Margery with her baby, although the text is silent about whether this offer was accepted or not. In addition, Margery undertakes domestic tasks for God and his family, thus investing them with a new dignity. My study demonstrates that as the mystics address questions of women’s relationship with the divine, they go beyond binary frameworks, positing fluid boundaries between male and female, body and spirit, and mundane and spiritual. Thus, these texts can be harnessed to engage creatively with the model of inclusive feminine spirituality expounded by feminist thinker Luce Irigaray, particularly in Between East and West (2002). / text

La thèse présente une typologie raisonnée des personnages féminins qui apparaissent dans un corpus de quatre œuvres littéraires rédigées en sanskrit au Cachemire entre le VIIIe et le XIIe siècles : le Kuṭṭanī-mata de Dāmodaragupta, la Samaya-mātṛkā de Kṣemendra, le Kathā-sarit-sāgara de Somadeva et la Rāja-taraṅgiṇī de Kalhaṇa. Les représentations littéraires donnent à voir un large spectre de comportements et de statuts féminins. Si la conduite de certaines femmes correspond aux attentes des textes normatifs, d’autres sont tout à fait inattendues et atypiques, des aventurières parfois pittoresques déviant parfois franchement de la norme. Entre ces deux extrêmes, les personnages féminins font plus ou moins preuve d’initiative et usent à des degrés divers de leurs marges de manœuvre et de leur pouvoir de décision. Si les auteurs sont des hommes, qui souscrivent à l’essentiel des normes sociales brahmaniques, leur point de vue sur les femmes n’est pourtant pas univoque. Non seulement le traitement des personnages féminins peut varier en fonction des auteurs mais il varie aussi au sein d’une même œuvre en fonction du contexte. La lecture des œuvres du corpus permet de délimiter ce qui, dans les textes normatifs, apparaît comme essentiel concernant le mariage et le rapport entre époux. Elle conduit également à pondérer certaines des assertions des textes normatifs au sujet des femmes, tandis que la lecture croisée des sources permet d’apprécier l’intégration dans les textes normatifs de certaines pratiques que leurs auteurs ont été amenés à prendre en compte. Enfin, la question se pose de savoir dans quelle mesure les belles lettres du Cachemire de l’époque dépeignent la société contemporaine de leur rédaction. La critique des pratiques tantriques notamment dans les œuvres satiriques de Kṣemendra – mais aussi dans la Rāja-taraṅgiṇī – est bien la preuve que la réalité contemporaine trouve sa place dans les œuvres littéraires du corpus. L’étude d’un ensemble d’œuvres dont on sait qu’elles ont été rédigées dans une région et une époque donnée – chose suffisamment rare dans le cas des lettres indiennes pour être appréciée – présente un grand avantage. Elle souligne la différence de traitement des personnages féminins en fonction des auteurs, du type de texte littéraire (satires, recueil de contes, chroniques) et de l’auditoire auquel le texte était destiné, ces différences au sein du corpus ne pouvant s’expliquer par des différences régionales. / This thesis presents an explanatory typology of the female characters who feature in the corpus of four Sanskrit literary works written in Kashmir between the 8th and 12th centuries : Dāmodaragupta’s Kuṭṭanī-mata, Kṣemendra’s Samaya-mātṛkā, Somadeva’s Kathā-sarit-sāgara, and Kalhaṇa’s Rāja-taraṅgiṇī. A large spectrum of female behaviors and status appears here in literary representation. While the behavior of some female characters corresponds to the expectations of the legal texts, that of others can seem surprising and atypical: risk-taking women, sometimes pittoresque, clearly deviate from the norm. Between these two extremes, the female characters are more or less prone to take the initiative and to various degrees to take advantage of whatever space they have to manoeuver in, and to take benefit of whatever decision-making power they might have. While the authors are men who subscribe to the essential core of Brahmanic social norms, their point of view on women is, however, ambiguous. Not only does the treatment of the female characters vary according to the authors, but it varies also within the same work, depending on context. Reading the works of this corpus helps to define what appears as essential concerning marriage and spouse relations in the legal texts. This study also allows for the evaluation of some of the legal texts’ assertions about women. In fact, the comparison of these sources shows how the legal texts integrated certain practices that the authors of these texts had to take into consideration. In the end, one has to ask the question of to what degree the Kashmirian literature of this time described contemporaneous society. The critical view of Tantric practices especially in the satirical works of Kṣemendra, but also in the Rāja-taraṅgiṇī, is indeed proof that contemporary reality has a place in this literature. It is of an immense advantage to study works from a well-defined region and time – something so rare in Indian Studies that it can be easily appreciated. This advantage allows us to emphasize the difference in treatment of female characters among different authors, and among different genres (satires, story collections, chronicles), as well as according to the different audiences, since we know that these differences cannot be explained as being simply regional.