Barbara Newman
Professor of English, Classics and History
John Evans Professor of Latin
Northwestern University
Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Classics, and History and John Evans Professor of Latin at Northwestern University, where she has taught since 1981. Known for her work on medieval religious culture, comparative literature, and women's spirituality, she is the author of 12 books, including God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages; Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred; and The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships. She has also translated works by Abelard and Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Thomas of Cantimpré, Frauenlob and Richard Methley. Newman is a fellow and past president of the Medieval Academy of America. She won a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2009 and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“To slip between dimensions”: A Tale of Glory and Tragedy
This lecture relates the experience of Helena N., a professor and close friend of the author. As a fan of the celebrated conductor Kretschmar (name altered to preserve confidentiality), Helena was initiated into a life-changing mystical experience and a profound paranormal friendship when, on shaking hands with him after a concert, she felt a lightning bolt pass through their joined arms. Unfortunately, however, the difficulty of sustaining that relationship over time, along with a growing isolation from skeptical colleagues, led to a precipitous decline in her mental health that ended in suicide. The paper draws on Helena’s unpublished manuscript about Kretschmar’s life and her relationship with him. It explores her story through the concepts of shaktipāt (mystical initiation through touch), coinherence (or mutual indwelling) and spiritual emergency.