SOURCE: Hollywood, Amy. “‘Beautiful as a Wasp’: Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille.” Harvard Theological Review 92, no. 2 (April 1999): 219-36.

In the following essay, Hollywood finds parallels in the thought of Bataille and the thirteenth-century Umbrian mystic Angela of Foligno.

Toward a New Mystical Community

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a central figure within twentieth-century French avant-garde circles, yet the importance of his work for the study of religion is only beginning to be recognized.¹ Between the First and Second World Wars, he not only edited journals (Documents, Acéphale) and engaged in literary and political movements, but also organized (together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) the College of Sociology, which attempted to bring the sociological methods of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss to bear on the study and pursuit of the sacred. Throughout his work of the 1930s, Bataille sought to reintroduce the sacred into modern industrial, secular...