Berkeley Professor Niklaus Largier... of German and Comparative Literature—joins forces with Professors Mayanthi Fernando and Michael Warner—of UC Santa Cruz and Yale, respectively—for one of a series of Sawyer Seminars orbiting “religious objects, rituals, and encounters" in a presentation on February 6th, 2019. From the podium, Largier discusses Mechthild of Magdeburg’s 13th century, The Flowing Light of the Godhead—a text widely received as (and perhaps reduced to) a testament to religious experience. Indeed, Godhead is, says Largier, estranged from established boundaries of theological and literary writing; a text whose arc sees transgression of, and oscillation between, literary genres. Magdeburg’s brainchild is “invested not so much in forms of symbolic representation,” says Largier, “but in the shaping of sensation, affect, and concept through linguistic means.” A work with an “intense interest in variation … as a principle.”