We often think of the past as regressive, a time when women stayed home to cook and sew while men went out to fight. But starting in about the 8th century CE, women across the world began engaging in daring new forms of writing and oral composition. They wrote moving songs, poems, and prose accounts of ecstatic and often erotic contact with God. They described losing themselves in God and marrying a divine lord. The women who composed these accounts came from a wide variety of cultural and religious backgrounds, and yet their writings share surprising commonalities: from Bhakti and Sufi saints in South Asia to Christian mystics in Europe, these women from the past articulated their special relationships with the divine and announced themselves as speaking subjects.

I first noticed resonances across women’s devotional writing from different cultures when I began teaching in India. Trained as a specialist in medieval English literature, I was teaching a course in which we read the well-known Christian mystic Margery Kempe. Margery, whose life dates roughly from 1373 to after 1438 CE, is a fascinating figure: after 14 children and two failed commercial businesses, she decided to devote herself to God. She experienced intense...

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