A Room for Herself: The Semiotics of the Interior and Exterior Space in the Mystical Imagery of the Cell

In the writings of Christian mystics from the Middle Ages up to our days, there is a recurring need for a room intended as a place of intimacy and independence, of loneliness and freedom, in which to build one own’s subjectivity, especially thanks to the construction of a relation to a transcendent Other. As the 20th-century culture has shown, this need of a space of oneself is particularly connected to the affirmation of feminine subjectivity: if Virginia Wolf wrote that a woman needs «a room of one’s own» to write fiction, a similar concept seems to apply to female mystics across the centuries. This theme is analyzed through different concepts, such as the oppositions, and the related tensions, between inside and outside, proximity and distance, immanence and transcendence, which are in turn connected to the dynamic relationship between a limited possibility of perception and an unlimited potentiality of imagination and knowledge.