DOCSLIB.ORG

Women's Speech in Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Women's Speech in Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends Flesh Made Word: Women’s Speech in Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends Brigit C. McGuire Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Brigit C. McGuire All Rights Reserved Flesh Made Word: Women’s Speech in Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends Brigit C. McGuire This study examines the relationship of women’s bodies to their speech in English virgin martyr legends of the tenth to fifteenth centuries. It identifies and traces a long tradition connecting women’s virginal bodies to powerful, fruitful speech that begins with late classical writers. This tradition gives rise to the eloquent virgin martyrs of Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, the Katherine Group, and Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale , and is one the fifteenth century mystic and contemplative Margery Kempe draws upon to authorize her unconventional performance of sanctity in her Book. Far from portraying them as a source of sin or pollution, English virgin martyr legends portray women’s bodies as enabling their speech by serving as a dwelling place for God’s Word, providing access to his revelation, and becoming the text the virgin martyr interprets for her audience in a lesson in spiritual reading practice. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………..ii Dedication…………………………………………………………….....iii Introduction……………………………………………………………....1 Chapter 1…………………………………….......…………………….....9 Embodied Speech and Teaching in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints Chapter 2……….……………………….……………………………...62 The Boundaries of the Body in the Katherine Group Chapter 3…….………………………….……………………………119 Scribe of Mary: Privacy and Preaching in the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale Chapter 4……….…..………………………………………………...162 Like a Virgin Martyr: Reading the Book of Margery Kempe as Virgin Martyr Legend Conclusion…………………………………………………………… 217 Bibliography…………….....………………………………………… .221 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All three of the original members of my committee have shaped this dissertation in unique and important ways. I am grateful to Susan Crane for her keen eye for organization and refusal to let a dangling modifier dangle; to Stacy Klein for telling me when I was insightful, but also for telling me I was just plain wrong; and to Patricia Dailey for guiding me to the big-picture insights with every chapter. The fourth chapter, on Margery Kempe, began in a seminar with Carolyn Dinshaw, whose deep familiarity with the literary and theological contexts for the Book has influenced my reading. And finally, I have relied on my colleagues in Columbia’s medievalist community for support both scholarly and social, but most of all on Sara Murphy, who keeps me sane, keeps me thinking, and always tells it like it is. ii DEDICATION To my father, who refused to let me give up, and made sure I didn’t have to, To my little family, Ricardo and Oliver, who provided a soft landing from the tower every day, And to my mother, who gave birth to this dissertation on the day she made a promise to buy her daughters “books where the hero is a girl.” iii INTRODUCTION In 415 A.D., Jerome pens a letter to Ctesiphon, who had asked Jerome for his opinion on some points of Pelagianism. In the course of that letter, between tracing the origins of Pelagianism and condemning it as heresy, Jerome criticizes “silly women laden with sins, carried about with every wind of doctrine, ever leaning and never able to come to knowledge of the truth.” 1 Jerome follows his condemnation with a long list of women who have helped men to spread heresy: It was with the help of the harlot Helena that Simon Magus founded his sect. Bands of women accompanied Nicolas of Antioch that deviser of all uncleanness. Marcion sent a woman before him to Rome to prepare men's minds to fall into his snares. Apelles possessed in Philumena an associate in his false doctrines. Montanus, that mouthpiece of an unclean spirit, used two rich and high born ladies Prisca and Maximilla first to bribe and then to pervert many churches. (Letter 133, Paragraph 4) Jerome’s list of women heretics associates false teaching with sexual sin and pollution: Helena is a “harlot;” bands of women help spread “uncleanness.” And the Church Fathers’ association with women’s teaching with sexual sin is intact roughly 800 years later, when Thomas Aquinas levels as an objection against women teaching publicly: “this is not permitted to women . lest men’s minds be enticed to lust, for it is written ‘her conversation burneth as fire.’” 2 Jerome and Aquinas’s quick leap from women’s public teaching to sexual temptation binds women’s bodies and their pedagogical speech, implying that the latter will always be contaminated by the dangerous seductiveness of the former. 1Jerome, “Letter to Ctesiphon” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6, ed. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893). Jerome is collocating 2 Timothy 4:3 and Ephesians 4:14. Ironically, the larger context of 2 Timothy 4:3 is condemning sinful men, for “ex his enim sunt qui penetrant domos et captivas ducunt mulierculas” – of these sort are they who creep into houses and lead captive silly women.” 2 The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas , trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Christian Classics, [1920], 198, Question 177, Article II, Objection 3. 1 Aquinas’s and Jerome’s writings are representative of a long tradition of medieval clerical writings portraying women’s bodies as dangerous, polluting, and in need of strict enclosure, and therefore particularly unsuited for public teaching or preaching. Yet roughly contemporaneous tradition had produced hagiography in which female virgin martyrs defend their faith before pagan persecutors in highly public preaching roles. This is a tradition in which a virgin responds to her persecutor’s request for her silence by asserting that “the living God’s words [can] not be stopped or silenced”—and she speaks them. 3 It is one in which a virgin martyr’s prayers bring down rain that quenches the fire surrounding her, after which she praises the Lord “with the loudest of voices.” 4 This is a tradition that portrays women’s bodies as generative of learned, divinely-inspired speech through a mystical marriage to Christ though which the virgin body gives birth to words in a symbolic mirror of the Marian birth of the Word. It coexists uneasily with the medieval misogynist tradition associating women’s speech with dangerous bodily pollution. The critical response to this seeming contradiction has been to minimize the importance of the women’s public teaching in medieval saints’ lives, particularly when it comes to the question of their exemplarity for female readers. On the question of the exemplarity of the militant virgin of the Katherine Group for anchoresses, for example, critics tend to downplay the saint’s public speaking in favor of the virgins’ steadfast response to adversity, and her role as the author of private prayer, as the primary locus of her exemplarity. 5 This critical thread accepts the hagiographic hermeneutic of the Church Fathers 3Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Walter Skeat (EETS and Oxford University Press, 1881), Lucy , ll. 70 – 75. 4 þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne (London: EETS, 1961), l. 672. 5 Gail Ashton writes that the virgin martyr finds authorization as a model of prayer, which “posits woman as a vessel containing the power of the divine. Woman acts as intercessor.” Similarly, Karen Winstead argues that the exemplarity of these tales is to be found in “the long prayers that would have been appropriate for religious 2 themselves, who responded to the proliferation of virgin martyr hagiography by cautioning that female saint was to be venerated, but not imitated—certainly not when it came to her outspoken public speaking. Alternatively, critics have attempted to reconcile the misogynist and hagiographic traditions by reading saints’ lives as themselves misogynist—as seeking to torture a dangerous female body into submission. In other words, these critics argue, virgin martyr hagiography dramatizes the transformation of a dangerous, polluting female body into something less “dangerous,” because purely spiritual. 6 However, the representation of female virginity in late classical to late medieval theology provides a corrective to both of these approaches. This tradition portrays the female body as generative of divinely-inspired and theologically-correct speech. By foreclosing the possibility of an earthly bridegroom, the virgin creates space within herself for the Bridegroom Christ. Her intimacy with him gives her special access to his words and provides protection from the supposedly inevitable bodily and spiritual rupture that attends any act of women’s preaching. The chapters that follow read this tradition “back” into virgin martyr hagiography. Inspired by Anne Clark Bartlett’s characterization of saints’ lives as “heteroglossic—sites of competing genres, registers, and traditions,” they seek to uncover an alternative reading of virgin martyrology that emphasizes the potential of the female body as generative of learned women, especially anchoresses,” theorizing that “their thirteenth-century hagiographers may have chosen to translate the lives of Margaret, Katherine, and Juliana precisely because their legends pay special attention to the saints’ activities in prison—praying, being comforted by angels, and combating demons.” See Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint . (London: Routledge, 2000), 106. and Karen Winstead, “Saintly Exemplarity,” in Middle English , ed. Paul Strohm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 337. 6 For examples of this argument see Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, “Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.1 (1998): 35 – 36; Helene Scheck, Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture (Albany: Suny Press, 2008), 87; and Andrew P.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Friars' Bookshelf 385
    The Lie About the West. A Response to Professor Toynbee's challenge. By Douglas Jerrold. New York, Sheed and Ward, 1954. pp. 85. $1.75. Will the civilization of Europe and the \.Vestern Hemisphere decline and die like all others of the past, or will it rally and live? Professor Arnold Toynbee, the eminent British historian, proponent of the theory of challenge and response as the key to history, has proposed a possible answer in a recent book, The World and the T~ est. He views the present world crisis as the result of a "response" by the rest of the world (Russia and the Orient) to the "challenge" of continued Western aggression, both military and technological. Draw­ ing a parallel with the declining Roman Empire, which after numerous aggressions was converted to eastern religions-principally and finally to Christianity, he thinks it probable that the West will be converted to a new religion coming from the Orient. This will not be Commun­ ism, he adds in a letter to The Times Literary Su.pplement (April 16, 1954), but an entirely new religion which he hopes will retain the Christian belief in God as Love but will discard the notion of a jealous God and a chosen people in favor of a more universal view, borrowed perhaps from Indian Buddhism. Mr. Douglas Jerrold, another English historian, has called this doctrine a lie in his "response to Professor Toynbee "s challenge." It is a lie against fact, against reason, and against faith. It is against fact because the West was not an aggressor but was on the defensive for a thousand years against the Northmen, Magyars, and Turks; because Christianity was not and is not one of many "oriental re­ ligions" but an historical one which arose within the Roman Empire and was spread by Roman citizens; because Roman civilization was not spread merely by force of arms.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes Introduction 1. ‘Medicine’, in William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976); ‘medicine n.’, in The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English, Oxford Reference Online (Oxford University Press, 1999), University of Toronto Libraries, http://www.oxfordreference.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t21.e19038 [accessed 22 August 2008]. 2. The term doctor was derived from the Latin docere, to teach. See Vern Bullough, ‘The Term Doctor’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 18 (1963): 284–7. 3. Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 11. 4. I am indebted to many previous scholars who have worked on popular healers. See particularly work by scholars such as Margaret Pelling, Roy Porter, Monica Green, Andrew Weir, Doreen Nagy, Danielle Jacquart, Nancy Siraisi, Luis García Ballester, Matthew Ramsey, Colin Jones and Lawrence Brockliss. Mary Lindemann, Merry Weisner, Katharine Park, Carole Rawcliffe and Joseph Shatzmiller have brought to light the importance of both the multiplicity of medical practitioners that have existed throughout history, and the fact that most of these were not university trained. This is in no way a complete list of the authors I have consulted in prepa- ration of this book; however, their studies have been ground-breaking in terms of stressing the importance of popular healers. 5. This collection contains excellent specialized articles on different aspects of female health-care and midwifery in medieval Iberia, and Early Modern Germany, England and France. The articles are not comparative in nature.
    [Show full text]
  • Resistance to Christianity. the Heresies at the Origins of the 18<Sup
    Library.Anarhija.Net The Resistance to Christianity. The Heresies at the Origins of the 18th Century Raoul Vaneigem Raoul Vaneigem The Resistance to Christianity. The Heresies at the Origins ofthe 18th Century 1993 Retrieved on December 21, 2009 from www.notbored.org Published by Editions Artheme Fayard in 1993. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! All footnotes by the author, except where noted. March 2007. Thanks to Christopher Gray and Kim Paice for material support and encouragement. To Contact NOT BORED! [email protected] ISSN 1084–7340. Snail mail: POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009–9998 lib.anarhija.net 1993 Contents Translator’s Introduction 10 Foreword 20 Chapter 1: A Nation Sacrificed to History 33 Chapter 2: Diaspora and Anti-Semitism 54 Jewish Proselytism and Anti-Semitism . 57 Chapter 3: The Judean Sects 65 The Sadduceans ....................... 65 The Pharisians ........................ 68 The Zealot Movement .................... 72 Chapter 4: The Men of the Community, or the Essenes 82 History of the Sect ...................... 83 Monachism and Ecclesiastic Organization . 87 Essenism is the True Original Christianity . 91 The Messiah ......................... 92 The Essene Churches .................... 97 A Dualist Tendency . 100 Towards a Judeo-Christian Syncretism . 102 Chapter 5: The Baptist Movement of the Samaritan Messiah Dusis/Dosithea 105 Shadow and Light from Samaria . 105 The Messiah Dusis/Dunstan/Dosithea . 107 2 • Wiesel, W., “Bibliography of Spiritual Libertines,” in Religion Chapter 6: Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicality 113 in Geschicte und Gegenwort. The So-Called Disciples of Simon . 126 • Wilker, R.-L., Le Mythe des Origines Chretiennes, Paris, 1971. Chapter 7: The phallic and fusional cults 129 The Naassenes or Ophites .
    [Show full text]
  • Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno
    Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37925649 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno A dissertation presented By Travis A. Stevens To The Faculty of Harvard Divinity School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology In the Subject of History of Christianity Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2017 © 2017 Travis A. Stevens All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Amy Hollywood Travis A. Stevens Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno Abstract This dissertation examines four medieval Christian texts that describe the love between the soul and Christ in violent terms and demonstrates how images of violence, such as wounding, striking, and beating, illustrate the reciprocal suffering of the Christian who is lovesick for Christ and of Christ, lovesick for the soul. These texts challenge the normative account of suffering in Christian theology as always rooted in sin and uncover an underappreciated historical moment when Christian thinkers conceptualize suffering as intrinsic to loving God. Through my readings of Richard of St Victor (d.
    [Show full text]
  • MYSTICISM Christina Van Dyke
    P1: SJT Trim: 6in 9in Top: 0.625in Gutter: 0.875in × CUUK851-52 CUUK618/Pasnau ISBN: 978 0 521 86672 9 May 20, 2009 20:18 52 MYSTICISM christina van dyke Current scholars generally behave as though the medieval traditions of mysticism and philosophy in the Latin West have nothing to do with each other; in large part, this appears to be the result of the common perception that mysticism has as its ultimate goal an ecstatic, selfless union with the divine that intellectual pursuits such as philosophy inhibit rather than support. There are, however, at least two central problems with this assumption. First, mysticism in the Middle Ages – even just within the Christian tradition1 – was not a uniform movement with a single goal: it took different forms in different parts of Europe, and those forms changed substantially from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, particularly with the increased emphasis on personal piety and the feminization of religious imagery that emerges in the later centuries.2 The belief that mysticism entails the rejection or abandonment of reason in order to merge with the divine, for instance, represents only one strain of the medieval tradition. Although this view is explicitly advocated in the Christian West by such influential figures as Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete, the prevalent identification of the allegorical figure of Wisdom with Christ provides the grounds for equally prominent figures such as Hildegard of 1 In several respects, mysticism played a more integral role in Arabic and Jewish philosophy than in Christian philosophy from late antiquity through the Middle Ages.
    [Show full text]
  • "There Is a Threeness About You": Trinitarian Images of God, Self, and Community Among Medieval Women Visionaries Donna E
    University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-31-2011 "There is a Threeness About You": Trinitarian Images of God, Self, and Community Among Medieval Women Visionaries Donna E. Ray Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds Recommended Citation Ray, Donna E.. ""There is a Threeness About You": Trinitarian Images of God, Self, and Community Among Medieval Women Visionaries." (2011). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/65 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “THERE IS A THREENESS ABOUT YOU”: TRINITARIAN IMAGES OF GOD, SELF, AND COMMUNITY AMONG MEDIEVAL WOMEN VISIONARIES BY DONNA E. RAY B.A., English and Biblical Studies, Wheaton College (Ill.), 1988 M.A., English, Northwestern University, 1992 M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995 S.T.M., Yale University, 1999 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2011 ©2011, Donna E. Ray iii DEDICATION For Harry iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Timothy Graham, Dr. Nancy McLoughlin, Dr. Anita Obermeier, and Dr. Jane Slaughter, for their valuable recommendations pertaining to this study and assistance in my professional development. I am also grateful to fellow members of the Medieval Latin Reading Group at the UNM Institute for Medieval Studies (Yulia Mikhailova, Kate Meyers, and James Dory-Garduño, under the direction of Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Noble Freedom: the Importance of Freedom in the Theology of Beatrice of Nazareth and Hadewijch
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2016 Noble Freedom: The Importance of Freedom in the Theology of Beatrice of Nazareth and Hadewijch Seth Alexander Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Alexander, Seth, "Noble Freedom: The Importance of Freedom in the Theology of Beatrice of Nazareth and Hadewijch" (2016). Dissertations. 2579. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2579 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2016 Seth Alexander LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO NOBLE FREEDOM: THE IMPORTANCE OF FREEDOM IN THE THEOLOGY OF BEATRICE OF NAZARETH AND HADEWIJCH A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN THEOLOGY BY SETH J. A. ALEXANDER CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2017 Copyright by Seth J. A. AlexaNder, 2017 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I must thank my parents, who have encouraged and believed in me throughout my life, but particularly during the long composition of this present work. My father did not live to see the completion of this work, so I dedicate it to him and his unshakeable, loving support. His love of history spurred on the inception of this work.
    [Show full text]
  • NYUPRESS Women in Christian Traditions
    Women in Christian Traditions BY REBECCA MOORE Instructor’s Guide Women in Christian Traditions offers a concise and accessible examination of the roles women have played in the construction and practice of Christian traditions, revealing the enormous debt that this major world religion owes to its female followers. It recovers forgotten and obscured moments in church history to provide a richer and fuller understanding of Christianity. This text provides an overview of the complete sweep of Christian history through the lens of feminist scholarship. Yet it also departs from some of the assumptions of that scholarship, raising questions that challenge our thinking about how women have shaped beliefs and practices during two thousand years of church history. Did the emphasis on virginity in the early church empower Christian women? Did the emphasis on marriage during the Reformations of the sixteenth century improve their status? Must all churches ordain women to the pastorate? These questions and others have important implications for women in Christianity in particular, and for women in religion in general, since they go to the heart of the human condition. This work examines themes, movements, and events in their historical contexts and locates churchwomen within the broader developments that have been pivotal in the evolution of Christianity. From the earliest disciples to the latest theologians, 224 pages | Paper | 978-1-4798-2175-4 Religion | Gender & Women’s Studies from the missionaries to the martyrs, women have been instrumental
    [Show full text]
  • The Mystical Fulfilment of a Spiritual Ideal Common Love in Baldwin of Forde, Beatrice of Nazareth, and the Vita Beatricis
    JOHN ARBLASTER The Mystical Fulfilment of a Spiritual Ideal Common Love in Baldwin of Forde, Beatrice of Nazareth, and the Vita Beatricis Throughout the centuries, numerous theologians and church officials have been hostile towards the bold claims of intimacy and union of mystical writers, not only due to the perceived dangers of heterodoxy, but also out of ‘social’ concerns. In some quarters, this suspicion continues up to this day. Indeed, while reading mystical texts, one might be tempted to think that mystics are solitaries who are disconnected from the world (and the Church) in the best case, and in the worst, solipsistic individualists who glory in the self-gratifica- tion of their extraordinary though isolated and isolating ‘spiritual’ abilities. Rob Faesen and I have addressed such questions elsewhere, with reference to John of Ruusbroec’s conflict with the Brussels clergy and his subsequent removal to an isolated spot in the middle of the forest.1 Our argument there centred around Ruusbroec’s doctrine of the common life, which on our reading, is one of the most theologically comprehensive articulations of the combination of contem- plation and action in the Christian mystical tradition.2 But Ruusbroec was not the first vernacular theologian to present such a teaching. Indeed, it is possible that he was inspired directly by Beatrice of Nazareth.3 The present article thus 1 John Arblaster and Rob Faesen, ‘Mysticism With or Without the Church? John of Ruusbroec’s Conflict with the Clergy’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 74 (2013), 18-32. See also the references to the secondary literature there, which deal with the suspicious nature of mysticism.
    [Show full text]
  • CEDILLO-DISSERTATION.Pdf
    COMMONPLACE DIVINITY: FEMININE TOPOI IN THE RHETORIC OF MEDIEVAL WOMEN MYSTICS A Dissertation by CHRISTINA VICTORIA CEDILLO Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2011 Major Subject: English Commonplace Divinity: Feminine Topoi in the Rhetoric of Medieval Women Mystics Copyright 2011 Christina Victoria Cedillo COMMONPLACE DIVINITY: FEMININE TOPOI IN THE RHETORIC OF MEDIEVAL WOMEN MYSTICS A Dissertation by CHRISTINA VICTORIA CEDILLO Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, C. Jan Swearingen Committee Members, Janet McCann Britt Mize Leah DeVun Head of Department, M. Jimmie Killingsworth August 2011 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT Commonplace Divinity: Feminine Topoi in the Rhetoric of Medieval Women Mystics. (August 2011) Christina Victoria Cedillo, B.A., Texas A&M University; M.A., Texas A&M International University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. C. Jan Swearingen This dissertation examines the works of five medieval women mystics— Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant, Angela of Foligno, Birgitta of Sweden, and Julian of Norwich—to argue that these writers used feminine topoi, commonplace images of women symbolizing complex themes, to convey authority based on embodied experience that could not be claimed by their male associates. The lens used to study their works is rhetorical analysis informed by a feminist recuperative objective, one concerned with identifying effective rhetorical strategies useful to many women and men who have traditionally been denied speech, rather than with women‘s entrance into traditional rhetorical canons.
    [Show full text]
  • Medieval Christianity 600-1300
    History of Christianity Qualifying Exam 2 Medieval Christianity 600-1300 Key themes – 1) conversion and “Christianization” 2) monasticism 3) new religious movements 4) papacy and ecclesiastical structures 5) liturgical and sacramental life 6) paraliturgical and devotional life 7) sainthood and sanctity 8) orthodox Christianity and its others 9) religion and gender Note: More explicitly theological issues are treated on Theology Qualifying Exam 1: The History of Christian Thought, 150-1325. Primary Texts: Beatrice of Nazareth, “On the Seven Manners of Loving God” in Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works (CWS), pp. 173-205, 207-78 Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey Into God (CWS), pp. 53-116 Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts, pp. 1-70, 255-93 John Cassian, Conferences, Books 1, 9-10, 18 John Cassian, Institutes Clunaic charters in Patrick Geary, ed., Readings in Medieval History The Primitive Documents of the Cistercian Order, trans. Chrysogonus Waddell http://www.scourmont.be/exordium/prim_doc.htm Roger deGanck, ed. and trans., The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth Francis and Clare, Collected Works (CWS) Timothy Fry, ed., RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in English Gregory the Great, “The Life of Benedict,” Dialogues, Book 2 in Patrick Geary, ed,, Readings in Medieval History Hadewijch, Complete Works (CWS), pp. 47-121, 165-68, 263-305, 352-58 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Sacraments of the Church James of Vitry, The Life of Marie of Oignies Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head, eds., Soldiers of Christ, lives of Martin of Tours, Germanus, Boniface, Willibald, Willibrord, Benedict of Aniane, and Leoba Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, Sections II-VI, VIII-IX Thomas of Celano, The Life of Francis, in Francis of Assisi: The Saint: Early Documents, pp.
    [Show full text]
  • “Acute Melancholia” Amy Hollywood, Harvard University September 18, 2007
    A Prefatory Note to “Acute Melancholia” Amy Hollywood, Harvard University September 18, 2007 The question posed by the organizers of this symposium is a crucial one, in large part because most people will think the answer is obvious. Yet whether that obvious answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depends entirely on who is answering the question and what they take the terms “critique” and “secular” to mean. Many within the US academy, I think, will find the question redundant, presuming that critique is defined in terms of its secularity and vice versa. For those who presume that critique is always the critique of something, that this something is associated with a putatively unquestioned authority, and that religion is, in its very nature, grounded in an unquestioned and unquestioning appeal to such an authority, critique and secularity are mutually interdependent phenomena. One might even push this a step further and suggest that, for those who would answer the question with an unqualified ‘yes,’ the appeal to any authority other than reason is always, in some way, religious. From this perspective the transmutation of physical force into authority has been called “theological” or “mystical,” and hence has been seen as participating in the irrational logic of the religious. (Whether this is a good, bad, or simply inevitable is currently the subject of heated debate.) There are those, then, who insist – often very loudly – that critique is antithetical to religion, given the putative rationality of the former and irrationality of the later. To these
    [Show full text]