In 1988 Claudio Leonardi and Giovanni Pozzi published an anthology of around fifty Female Italian mystical writers. The volume offered to scholars textes spanning the 13th to the 20th century, from Chiara d’Assisi to Angela Gavazzi, unknown pieces of works and authors whose intellectual quality had never been analyzed before, thus representing an event in historiography. The work lucidly posed the problem of the language of mystical writers, but also of their ability to interpret and to guide history; it raised the issue concerning the notion of canon by applying it to the mystical literature, and it posed a question of mysticism as a structure generating history.

The 11th edition of the Seminar of history and theology of mysticism makes the point on the work for a collection of known textes contributing to a complete anthology of Female mystical writers from Northern Europe. From the 12th to the 14th century. This meeting will be the occasion for presenting and commenting textes bound to be part of a work whose structure and historiographycal setting are analogous to those of the 1988 anthology, and which is intended to serve as an additional tool for understanding the meaning of Medieval mysticism as a history of consciousness of personal freedom, the maggior dono that Middle Age offered to Europe.