"Reading Your Way to the Divine" explores how religious women of the 13th and 14th centuries turned reading and writing into acts of devotion that reshaped how they and their communities perceived the world. Centering on the works of Margarete Ebner, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch of Antwerp, and Angela of Foligno, this project traces how established devotional practices—reading, singing, praying, and meditating—became extraordinary means of encountering the divine. These women’s writings do not simply describe mystical experiences; they create them through rhythm, repetition, and affective language. In their hands, reading became a bodily practice, an aesthetic performance capable of moving readers to joy, pain, and wonder. Scenes of communal and private reading in their texts collapse the boundaries between self and community, reader and writer, contemplation and expression. Drawing on medieval understandings of practice from Hugh of St. Victor and Ignatius of Loyola, alongside modern theories of reading and affect from Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, Sarah McNamer, and Niklaus Largier, the project connects medieval devotional life to enduring questions about how textual practices shape human experience. Rather than seeking hidden meanings, the project attends to how these women’s words work—how they act upon the senses, emotions, and imagination to train perception itself. In doing so, it reveals a vibrant culture of female devotion in which the page became a site of transformation, where reading was both a spiritual exercise and a way of making the divine felt and visible in the world.