Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts

Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts PDF Author: Kathryn Maude
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.From the tenth to the twelfth centuries in England and Scotland we have scant evidence of women's writing. How, then, can we access these women's experiences? This book argues that by analysing texts deliberately written for and addressed directly to women we gain an insight into the horizons of possibility for their lives. It examines religious texts addressed to women, bringing together works that are more widely studied with others that are less well known, and demonstrates continuities across Old English and Latin texts written for female readers and patrons across the Conquest period. Case studies, ranging from Ælfric's sermons to Aelred's De institutione inclusarum, from the Life of Christina of Markyate to Goscelin's saints' lives for Wilton and Barking Abbeys, attend to the intimate scripts women were encouraged to inhabit through a close focus on the form of the textual address. By concentrating on address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.n address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.n address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.n address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.

Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts

Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts PDF Author: Kathryn Maude
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.From the tenth to the twelfth centuries in England and Scotland we have scant evidence of women's writing. How, then, can we access these women's experiences? This book argues that by analysing texts deliberately written for and addressed directly to women we gain an insight into the horizons of possibility for their lives. It examines religious texts addressed to women, bringing together works that are more widely studied with others that are less well known, and demonstrates continuities across Old English and Latin texts written for female readers and patrons across the Conquest period. Case studies, ranging from Ælfric's sermons to Aelred's De institutione inclusarum, from the Life of Christina of Markyate to Goscelin's saints' lives for Wilton and Barking Abbeys, attend to the intimate scripts women were encouraged to inhabit through a close focus on the form of the textual address. By concentrating on address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.n address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.n address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.n address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation PDF Author: Laura Saetveit Miles
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.

Creating Cistercian Nuns

Creating Cistercian Nuns PDF Author: Anne E. Lester
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women’s religious movement and its institutionalization within the Cistercian order. The common picture of the early Cistercian order is that it was unreceptive to religious women. Male Cistercian leaders often avoided institutional oversight of communities of nuns, preferring instead to cultivate informal relationships of spiritual advice and guidance with religious women. As a result, scholars believed that women who wished to live a life of service and poverty were more likely to join one of the other reforming orders rather than the Cistercians. As Lester shows, however, this picture is deeply flawed. Between 1220 and 1240 the Cistercian order incorporated small independent communities of religious women in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, the order not only accommodated women but also responded to their interpretations of apostolic piety, even as it defined and determined what constituted Cistercian nuns in terms of dress, privileges, and liturgical practice. Lester reconstructs the lived experiences of these women, integrating their ideals and practices into the broader religious and social developments of the thirteenth century—including the crusade movement, penitential piety, the care of lepers, and the reform agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council. The book closes by addressing the reasons for the subsequent decline of Cistercian convents in the fourteenth century. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished archives, Creating Cistercian Nuns will force scholars to revise their understanding of the women’s religious movement as it unfolded during the thirteenth century.

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Cate Gunn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846624
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker. Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.

Medieval Women's Writing

Medieval Women's Writing PDF Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745632556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Medieval Women's Writing is a major new contribution to our understanding of women's writing in England, 1100-1500. The most comprehensive account to date, it includes writings in Latin and French as well as English, and works for as well as by women. Marie de France, Clemence of Barking, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and the Paston women are discussed alongside the Old English lives of women saints, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the St Albans Psalter, and the legends of women saints by Osbern Bokenham. Medieval Women's Writing addresses these key questions: Who were the first women authors in the English canon? What do we mean by women's writing in the Middle Ages? What do we mean by authorship? How can studying medieval writing contribute to our understanding of women's literary history? Diane Watt argues that female patrons, audiences, readers, and even subjects contributed to the production of texts and their meanings, whether written by men or women. Only an understanding of textual production as collaborative enables us to grasp fully women's engagement with literary culture. This radical rethinking of early womens literary history has major implications for all scholars working on medieval literature, on ideas of authorship, and on women's writing in later periods. The book will become standard reading for all students of these debates.

Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages

Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages PDF Author: Kathryn Loveridge
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384656X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.

Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature

Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature PDF Author: Hetta Elizabeth Howes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846128
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.

Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature

Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Anna McKay
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843847132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Uncovers the female voices, lived experiences, and spiritual insights encoded by the imagery of textiles in the Middle Ages.For millennia, women have spoken and read through cloth. The literature and art of the Middle Ages are replete with images of women working cloth, wielding spindles, distaffs, and needles, or sitting at their looms. Yet they have been little explored. Drawing upon the burgeoning field of medieval textile studies, as well as contemporary theories of gender, materiality, and eco-criticism, this study illustrates how textiles provide a hermeneutical alternative to the patriarchally-dominated written word. It puts forward the argument that women's devotion during this period was a "fabricated" phenomenon, a mode of spirituality and religious exegesis expressed, devised, and practised through cloth. Centred on four icons of female devotion (Eve, Mary, St Veronica, and - of course - Christ), the book explores a broad range of narratives from across the rich tapestry of medieval English literature, from the fields of Piers Plowman to the late medieval Morte D'arthur; the devotions of Margery Kempe to the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich; Gervase of Tilbury's fabulous Otia Imperialia to the anchoritic guidance literature of the Middle Ages; and the innumerable (and oft-forgotten) lives of Christ, prayers, legends, and miracle tales in between.ture, from the fields of Piers Plowman to the late medieval Morte D'arthur; the devotions of Margery Kempe to the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich; Gervase of Tilbury's fabulous Otia Imperialia to the anchoritic guidance literature of the Middle Ages; and the innumerable (and oft-forgotten) lives of Christ, prayers, legends, and miracle tales in between.ture, from the fields of Piers Plowman to the late medieval Morte D'arthur; the devotions of Margery Kempe to the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich; Gervase of Tilbury's fabulous Otia Imperialia to the anchoritic guidance literature of the Middle Ages; and the innumerable (and oft-forgotten) lives of Christ, prayers, legends, and miracle tales in between.ture, from the fields of Piers Plowman to the late medieval Morte D'arthur; the devotions of Margery Kempe to the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich; Gervase of Tilbury's fabulous Otia Imperialia to the anchoritic guidance literature of the Middle Ages; and the innumerable (and oft-forgotten) lives of Christ, prayers, legends, and miracle tales in between.

Conceiving bodies

Conceiving bodies PDF Author: Dana Oswald
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526176874
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for women’s medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of women’s medicine, but sustained examination of language reveals important distinctions: remedies for menstruation indicate social concerns about fertility, where remedies for ‘cleansing’ do not provide a clear path to conception, but rather foreclose it. Rarest of all are the remedies for childbirth, but their rarity is compounded by the practices of translators who conflate the language for women’s reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philology—the combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologies—this book situates itself in the historical treatment of reproductive people as both objects and subjects of medical practice, and gestures forward in time to the contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy.

Gender and Medieval Mysticism from India to Europe

Gender and Medieval Mysticism from India to Europe PDF Author: Alexandra Verini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000928608
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book opens up a dialogue between pre-modern women identified as mystics in diverse locations from South Asia to Europe. It considers how women from the disparate religious traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity expressed devotion in parallel ways. The argument is that women’s mysticism demands to be compared not because of any essential "female" experience of the divine but because the parallel positions of marginalization that pre-modern women experienced led them to deploy intimate encounters with the divine to speak publicly and claim authority. The topics covered range from the Sufi devotional tradition of Sidis (Indians of African ancestry) to the Bhakti poet Mīrābaī and the nuns of Barking Abbey. Collectively the chapters show how mysticism allowed premodern women to speak and act by unsettling traditional gender roles and expectations for religious behavior. At the same time as uncovering connections, the juxtaposition of women from different traditions serves to highlight distinctive features. The book draws on a range of disciplinary expertise and will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval religion and theology as well as history and literary studies.