Bride Of Christ Research Articles

Reunion

Reunion Thomas Reiter (bio) My name is Mary Denise Bartholomew of the Sisters of Charity and Mercy. This fiftieth anniversary, men approach me in the Peach Orchard, on Little Round Top, some weeping but all as bent as I am, our backs curved like a colonel’s sword. Because they fell here, because they went on to Cold Harbor, Shenandoah, the Wilderness, they press ribbons and medals into my hand. (They falter at the thought of attaching them.) Do they remember me, or do I serve as a representative angel? I was nineteen when our wagonload of nuns had to stop again and again where Tanneytown Road entered Gettysburg. We pulled the dead to the side as gently as we could. We clutched our rosaries to our smocks, sobbing among the Hail Marys. We arrived wearing black shawls, white smocks, and white habits, colors standing for all my thinking before I saw Gettysburg. I am an old woman living with my vows. We bandaged and sutured; we buried limbs. I had a fancy that no one else had ever breathed air that hot with fumes from wounds. Operating tables and beds? We had pews. We knelt facing those men and boys and not the altar where endless waves of praying and raving broke. I turned my back on the tabernacle in doubt and sorrow. A hundred and sixty-five thousand soldiers [End Page 586] came to Gettysburg, and no God was there but the God each side called down. Was thinking that a sin? If so I keep a secret sin. I have made peace. I refused Mother Superior when she ordered us back to the convent. Fasts and Kyrie, eleisons! These hands had work yet at Gettysburg. We held the hands of the dying, so many sightless, concussion-deaf, deranged from pain. I wondered who they thought we were— mother, wife, lover? There was one young man I found myself returning to. Blue or butternut, his uniform had been cut away—a beautiful boy. Every hour I swathed his head in fresh dressings. Then this I would not have thought possible: he raised himself up and embraced me. I know what I felt. I was a young girl. He left a blood spot on my smock, on my breast where the nipple was. He whispered, “Do you love me?” He died unanswered by this bride of Christ. We nuns shaved one another’s heads to rid them of lice our wounded gave us. Medals and ribbons, such colors and insignias and mottoes— now that I am Mother Superior I am going to have them with me in the winding sheet. [End Page 587] Thomas Reiter Thomas Reiter’s poems have appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, the Hudson Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. His most recent collection is Catchment, published by LSU Press in 2009. Copyright © 2011 University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, 37383

The body broken: medieval Europe, 1300-1520

List of plates. List of maps. List of tables and figures. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction 'Hoc est corpus meum': the transfiguration of Europe's mystical body An anatomy of Europe c. 1300 Late medieval and Renaissance: the tyranny of terminology? Part I: Social and Economic Change 1. The demography of disaster 2. Individuals, families and communities 3. Trade, technology and exploration Part II: Political Developments 4. The theory and ideology of government 5. The lineaments and limits of state power 6. Waging war and keeping the peace 7. Latin Christendom and its neighbours Part III: Religion and Devotion 8. The Bride of Christ: the institutional Church 9. Devotion: Catholic beliefs and practices 10. Dissent and difference Part IV: Cultural Change 11. Schools and schooling 12. Intellectual developments: later scholasticism and humanism 13. Language, literacy, and book production 14. Art, architecture and music Conclusion: A New Europe? Transformations and continuities. Europe and the world. Chronology. Genealogies

Brides of Christ. Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico

Brides of Christ. Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico

Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico

Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico

Remaining Friends: A Reappraisal of a Passage in the <em>St. Trudperter Hohelied</em>

Recent work on the St. Trudperter Hohelied provides a welcome opportunity to revisit a previous attempt at interpreting this early example (from the twelfth century) of the use of friendship in the context of writing about and for women. Petrus W. Tax was kind enough to share with me privately his thoughts about a reading of the St. Trudperter Hohelied that I put forth in these pages a number of years ago (Jeep). Occasion for the following reconsideration was provided, in addition to Tax’s careful look at the passage in question, by the appearance of a long-overdue new edition and translation into modern German of the St. Trudperter Hohelied (Ohly), the Early Middle High German translation and commentary on the Old Testament Song of Songs. Ohly’s commentary on this work represents a singular and masterful accomplishment (see Jaffe 382–83n26). Tax has since published more recent thoughts on the St. Trudperter Hohelied (2006) in its relation to a Latin Pentecost Sequence. In the following, I revisit the relevant passages from my earlier essay in an effort to reassess the early evidence of friendship among women. The passage in question reads in the original German: “die zoch dir din muotir zu gemahelen / unde ze spiln unde ze liebin vriundinnin” (Ohly 16, lines 16–17). Ohly translates this into German as “Die zog dir deine Mutter auf zu Brauten und zu Gespielinnen und zu lieben Freundinnen” (53)—“Your [i.e., Jesus’s] mother raised them for You as brides and [female] companions and dear [female] friends.” Ohly’s commentary on this passage, for which, he concludes, there appears to be no direct source (theological or other), is that the nuns are portrayed as becoming brides of Christ through Mary’s intervention (611). In the larger context (see 9–28), employing typological undertones, a comparison is drawn between women in the Old Testament, educated by Eve, and those of the New Testament, raised in a superior fashion by

Asunción Lavrin . Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press . 2008 . Pp. ix, 496. $65.00.

Brides of Christ is the crown of a series of distinguished works by Asunción Lavrin, a pioneer of Latin American women's history. The culmination of a half century of research, this masterful book is well worth the wait. It began as her 1962 doctoral dissertation, one of the first histories I read when I started my research on Mexican women a decade later. Although Lavrin published more than a dozen articles on Mexican nuns in the years that followed, she set aside the book project—perhaps because it seemed unfashionable in the midst of the social history boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, she went on to edit two landmark collections that shaped the field of Latin American women's studies—Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (1978) and Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (1989)—and wrote numerous works, including her major monograph Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (1995). Fortunately, Lavrin has now returned to her first project and produced a much revised study of conventual life in colonial Mexico that incorporates the insights of decades of new scholarship on female religious as well as the wisdom of a scholar who has spent a lifetime thinking about them.

Asunción LAVRIN, Brides of Christ « Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico »

Depuis l’ouvrage pionnier de Josefina Muriel paru en 1946 Conventos de monjas en la Nueva Espana, les etudes monographiques ou thematiques se sont multipliees, principalement autour des couvents de Puebla, de Mexico et de Guadalajara. Neanmoins, elles n’offraient pas de nouveau panorama general sur la vie conventuelle feminine en Nouvelle-Espagne au vu des sources recemment examinees. C’est precisement ce qu’Asuncion Lavrin s’attache a faire dans ce nouvel ouvrage a la lumiere de ses propres ...

Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (review)

Reviewed by: Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico Kristine Ibsen Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. By Asunción Lavrin. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 496. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-804-75283-1.) In Brides of ChristAsunción Lavrin reconstructs daily life in the convent through a comprehensive documentation of the individual experience of women religious in Colonial Mexico. Focusing primarily on case studies from convents in Mexico City and Puebla, Lavrin follows the path of nuns' lives "through their own eyes" (p. 4) and on their own terms, from the decision to [End Page 895]profess and period of the novitiate through the devotional practices that sustained their piety once they had taken their vows. Opening with a discussion of the broader social and economic contexts in which convents developed in the New World, Lavrin elaborates the multiple paths to religious life available to women and the degree to which orders were willing to adapt themselves to colonial society. In the second part of the book, each chapter addresses a different material dimension of life in the convent. The level of detail documented here is superb, as Lavrin examines a wide range of issues, from the internal hierarchies of the religious community and rules of governance; practices of discipline and self-mortification; sexuality, sickness, health, and death. The nuns' interactions with one another, with ecclesiastical authorities, and with their spiritual directors are elaborated at length, as are the consequences for those women who transgressed the rules defining such relations. The final three chapters each address a specific topic related to convent life: indigenous convents, the religious reforms of the late-eighteenth century, and the written work of women religious. Especially interesting is the discussion of the controversies arising from the Church's attempt to impose vida comúnand the informal networks of women across convents that developed. Despite the gendered and occasionally misogynous presuppositions of their male prelates, religious women exercised considerable symbolic power in colonial Mexico as "repositories of a special form of spirituality, regarded as desirable in the building of a new society" (p. 1). In Lavrin's epilogue this is extended to suggest how devotional practices "specifically promoted to cater to female affectivity" (p. 351) such as Marian worship have had a lasting impact in Mexican culture. Meticulously documented with archival sources and the culmination of decades of research, Brides of Christis an invaluable contribution to gender studies and to the wider field of colonial Mexican history. Kristine Ibsen University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

Aztec Vestal Virgins and the Brides of Christ: The Mixed Heritage of New Spain's Monjas Coronadas

On several occasions in his career the Mexican-Creole scholar and priest don Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora (1645–1700) wrote admiringly about elements of the Aztec past in order to help define the c...

Brides of Christ: conventual life in colonial Mexico

Brides of Christ: conventual life in colonial Mexico

Liturgy and the Spiritual Experience of Religious Women at Santa Maria de Vallbona, Catalonia

Liturgical sources can be valuable resources for investigating medieval women’s spirituality. A collection of liturgical manuscripts from the Cistercian women’s abbey of Santa Maria de Vallbona in Catalonia illustrate changes in the monastery’s devotions from the mid-twelfth through the late fourteenth centuries. The offices for certain saints, notably Margaret, Katherine, and Ursula, became more elaborate during this period, suggesting their importance to the nuns. The offices for these saints show common themes, linked to the material in the common office for virgins at the monastery. These themes emphasize not only nuptial imagery from the Song of Songs, but also prudence and preparation, exemplified by the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25.1–13). Themes of prudence, preparation, and chosen status appear in all of the offices for female saints, suggesting a spiritual focus for nuns different from the image of nuns as brides of Christ.

Liturgy and the Spiritual Experience of Religious Women at Santa Maria de Vallbona, Catalonia

Liturgical sources can be valuable resources for investigating medieval women’s spirituality. A collection of liturgical manuscripts from the Cistercian women’s abbey of Santa Maria de Vallbona in Catalonia illustrate changes in the monastery’s devotions from the mid-twelfth through the late fourteenth centuries. The offices for certain saints, notably Margaret, Katherine, and Ursula, became more elaborate during this period, suggesting their importance to the nuns. The offices for these saints show common themes, linked to the material in the common office for virgins at the monastery. These themes emphasize not only nuptial imagery from the Song of Songs, but also prudence and preparation, exemplified by the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25.1–13). Themes of prudence, preparation, and chosen status appear in all of the offices for female saints, suggesting a spiritual focus for nuns different from the image of nuns as brides of Christ.

Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature Gary Lim Tison Pugh, Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. xii, 220. ISBN: 1–4039–8487–5. $74.95. In contrast to his focus on the disruptive and radical potential of queer identities in Queering Medieval Genres, Tison Pugh’s new study explores how ‘restrictive ideologies [...] bear obfuscatory powers to wield queerness in furtherance of their own ends’ (13). After a brisk introduction that defends the value of terms such as ‘heteronormative,’ ‘heterosexual,’ and ‘homosexual’ while stating caveats against the dangers of their anachronistic use, Pugh turns his attention to the narrator of Pearl, Harry Bailey, Walter of the ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ and the eponymous protagonists of Amis and Amiloun and Eger and Grime. His argument proceeds by showing how normative masculinities are produced through acts of queering in each of these cases. Pugh’s book is strongest when it takes up well-worn concepts of queer theory, places them in an interesting context, and shows how they can be used to complicate notions of medieval masculinity. The chapter on Pearl, for instance, takes the ubiquitous erotic triangles of queer theory and then asks an inventive question: What happens when one of the homosocial competitors for the loved object’s affection is God himself? In Pugh’s analysis, while the Dreamer ends up abandoning his desires to God and attains normative Christian masculinity, it occurs by ‘experiencing the instructive lessons of compulsory queerness along the Christian path to spiritual normativity and sexual subservience as a Bride of Christ’ (28). His chapters on Pearl and the Chaucerian material also emphasize the way these texts queer the audience through sensitive readings of how the narratives are framed. For example, after observing that the Clerk makes an apostrophic plea to ‘noble wyves’ despite his overwhelmingly male audience, Pugh argues that a hermaphroditic reader is constructed as a result: ‘To whom is this repetitive direct address speaking, then, if not to the male pilgrims of the pilgrimage, now hermaphroditically created in the image of women they seek to control?’ (95). By showing that queer identities operate at the textual and meta-textual levels, Pugh makes a strong case for queer theory complicating our understanding of medieval ideas of reception and interpretation. Of particular interest to readers of Arthuriana would be Pugh’s chapters on the romances Amis and Amiloun and Eger and Grime. However, these chapters could have been developed in a more satisfying manner. The reading of Amis and Amiloun, for instance, rushes the protagonists through a host of queered identities—queered fraternal bonds, hermaphroditism in marriage, and eunuch-like asexuality—without [End Page 87] excavating and developing the significance and differences of each position. Pugh’s tendency to emphasize that narrative structures create queer identities is certainly a strength of his approach, but this occasionally limits the argument. For instance, he rightly observes that the experience of compromised masculinity oscillates between Amis and Amiloun through bodily effects: Amis is victimized by predatory female desire because of his good looks, and Amiloun is mocked by his wife when he is stricken by leprosy. However, the argument does not explore the fact that beauty and abjection queer masculinity in different, and perhaps even incommensurable ways. Still, Pugh’s vision of queerness in the Middle English literature is a much needed one. Not only does he show how queer moments are present in the most normative of religious and social arrangements, he demonstrates that queer identities are often conscripted to the production of normative masculinities. Further, his approach is a productive counterpart to other notable works on the queer Middle Ages. In contrast to the intricately historicized readings found in Karma Locherie’s Heterosyncracies and Glenn Burger’s Chaucer’s Queer Nation, Pugh concentrates on how queer interstices emerge from the narrative structures of the texts under consideration. This makes it a valuable addition to the expanding range of approaches to the queer Middle Ages. [End Page 88] Gary Lim City University of New York Copyright © 2008 Arthuriana

Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474-1540) (review)

Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474-1540). By Querciolo Mazzonis. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2007. Pp. xx, 247. $35.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-813-21490-0) Noted as a santa viva and a significant figure in early modern Catholicism, Angela Merici (1474-1540) is recognized for her foundation of the Company of St. Ursula, whose aim traditionally has been considered as dedicated to teaching and charity. In his book Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy:Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474-1540), Querciolo Mazzonis disputes this interpretation of the Company's original goals and instead emphasizes the uniqueness of Merici's innovative conception in creating a new option for female religious life. Based on an analysis of primary documents, Mazzonis argues that the original purpose of Merici's Ursulines was to enable noncloistered virgins to pursue a life as of Christ in the world within a structure that afforded them remarkable autonomy in shaping their own unmediated spiritual development. Mazzonis situates Merici and her Company within the context of late-medieval female spirituality, contemporary gender attitudes, Renaissance concepts of self, and spiritual trends in preTridentine Italy. In chapter 1, Mazzonis explores the late-medieval roots of Merici's religiosity, relating it to the experience of other laywomen who pursued a religious life outside the convent. He provides a brief reconstruction of Angela's life before examining the characteristics and organizational structure of her Company of St. Ursula, founded in Brescia in 1535. Living in their own homes as Brides of Christ, Ursulines followed a life of prayer, penance, and devotion in a democratic organization without institutional trappings, managed by women, and unusually independent of male church authorities. Charity and teaching were not principal goals of the original foundation, nor was charity central to Merici's spirituality or her sense of an active apostolate. Chapter 2 considers the Ursulines within the social, economic, and political context of Brescia. Examining prescriptive literature directed to women in the sixteenth century, Mazzonis notes how Merici drew on female identities of virgin, bride, and widow in the structure of her Company, but gave these a new empowering significance. He also establishes Merici as the author of the Rule of the Company of St. Ursula, which represents a rare example of a codification of the irregular, noninstitutional features of female spirituality. …

The Limits of Ecclesial Metaphors in Systematic Ecclesiology

ABSTRACTThis article looks at two major metaphors used in contemporary ecclesiology, the church as “the People of God” and as “the Bride of Christ,” which have functioned in some of the polarizing debates within the Catholic Church in North America. It then suggests some methodological reasons why reliance upon metaphors in ecclesiology, either through the balancing of different metaphors or the promotion of a dominant metaphor, is inadequate to the task of understanding the church systematically. It then suggests some avenues for future ecclesiological method that may help to understand the church better and so to respond better to contemporary ecclesiological debates.

Who is the Church? Zizioulas and von Balthasar on the Church's Identity

AbstractA renewed primary focus on the person of Christ has enabled some longstanding tensions between Christians, regarding scripture and tradition, the number of the sacraments, the ordained and baptismal priesthoods, and word and sacrament, to be positively addressed in recent decades. John Zizioulas maintains that for these divisions to be properly overcome Christ must be understood as a corporate personality, the Church being his mystical body and not having a hypostasis of its own. In his view, not only does Christ constitute the Church, as theologians would readily agree, but the Church also constitutes Christ, a reciprocal understanding which he recognises as problematic for many. This paper investigates Zizioulas' view, particularly by noting that he never uses the idea of the Church as bride of Christ, an image much invoked by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which tends to a personal understanding of the Church in union with but also distinction from Christ. With many comparative references to Balthasar, the implications of Zizioulas' liturgical understanding that 'the “I” of the Church is Christ' are explored and analysed.

Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England

While this book is a valuable contribution to the recent literature on martyrology, its title is somewhat misleading, for it is neither a study of the processes by which women became martyrs, nor is it a systematic investigation of all female martyrs, regardless of confession, across the period. Instead, it deals with the portrayal of a small number of evangelical women, actual martyrs or those subject to interrogation and torture—principally Anne Askew, but also Rose Allin, Elizabeth Young, Alice Dryver, Joyce Lewes, Alice Benden, Perotine Massey and Prest's wife—who feature in the pages of John Fore's Acts and Monuments (1563 and later editions), though the discussion of Askew looks back to John Bale's treatment of her case in the 1540s. The problem that Hickerson addresses is why, in an age attempting to reinforce patriarchy, Foxe should have presented his readers with accounts of such disorderly women—women who were seemingly prepared not only to answer back to their male interrogators, often learnedly and sometimes sarcastically, but also to abandon husbands and children for the sake of their faith: ‘By failing to mould them into silent, chaste and obedient women, … [Foxe] presented as martyrs women whom neither he nor his contemporaries would have wanted as wives’ (p. 99). Looking beyond the simplicities of the ‘strength-in-weakness’ paradigm, Hickerson argues that, despite indicating their godliness, Foxe sought to be subversive: he ‘did not design these women to serve as models of virtuous behaviour for living female members of a godly community; rather, as characters in an historical and cosmic drama described in Bale's Image of both Churches and Foxe's Christus Triumphans, they are models for disobedience to authority, whether marital, ecclesiastical or royal’ (p. 160). Hickerson's point is that, in a mindset suffused with apocalypticism and tending to see the Catholic obsession with celibacy (especially clerical celibacy) as one of the key marks of the false church of Antichrist, such earthly disobedience was more than mitigated by a higher subordination to a new husband, namely Christ. Eligibility for this mystical union came via election, which was, of course, open to both men and women, the ‘marriage’ being sealed through the covenant of the New Testament and consummated in martyrdom. In the process of becoming brides of Christ, details of earthly existences lost all significance.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality and the Arts in the Middle Ages

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality and the Arts in the Middle Ages

Domestic abuse in the household of God

The article compares the victimization that takes place in a dysfunctional abusive household and that which takes place in the household of God (Eph 2:9) where the bride of Christ (2 Cor 11:2) is abused at the hands of individuals that constitute what we know as the church system. This is often directed at the poor, individuals belonging to minority groups or those who for various reasons are unable to stand up against a system such as the Christian Church. The “analogical-familial theology” of Stephen Post is used as starting point. This “theology” involves four sequential, but nonlinear, stages: covenant, grace, empowering, and intimacy. The article broadens the spectrum of the theory beyond the family unit and to apply it to the broader family that belongs to God, the church. The aim of the article is to use these components from the analogical familial theology as framework and also as the criteria by which the experiences of those who see themselves as victims of abuse in the church are investigated.

The Theological Foundation of the Petrine Dimension of the Church: A Working Hypothesis

AbstractStarting from the way in which Vatican II combines references to the Church as Body of Christ and Bride of Christ in Lumen Gentium 7, this paper explores the relationship between these two images, both of which are centred on the Eucharist which in fact is their point of contact and union. The free consent of the Bride to the nuptial union is summarised in Mary's fiat at the Annunciation and reiterated at the foot of the Cross. In its response to Christ, the Church is fundamentally Marian, and will always remain so, into eternity. In this life, however, the Church has a sacramental and hierarchical structure by which Christ comes to encounter his Bride so as then, in her, to bring salvation to the world. She is the intrinsic medium of the salvific event of Christ, making him present to human freedom. Peter exemplifies the structure and ministry of the Church in its objectivity, and the Petrine principle is rooted in the Marian principle, both being co-extensive with the Church. An understanding of the Church in these terms, endorsed by Pope John Paul II, originated with Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, however, did not fully expound it. This paper argues for the close integration of ecclesiology and Mariology. Furthermore, it proposes that the nuptial mystery can be a key towards synthesising the Marian and Petrine dimensions of the Church, and thereby understanding the Church in all aspects of its structure and life. From this standpoint, fresh light is cast upon burning pastoral questions such as the (non-)ordination of women and the celibacy of the clergy.