Christ Goes Research Articles

Unintended Bigamies: Holy Widowhood, Marriage, andSponsa Christiin Erasmus'sDe Vidua Christiana

Christ's brides were hell bound by the end of the Middle Ages, when women—in the figure of the witch—were increasingly seen as Satan's spouses. Such is the narrative arc of Dyan Elliott's significant recent study ofsponsa Christi(bride of Christ),The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. Elliott points toward the incarnational logic of Christianity in general and the type of physically immanent bridal mysticism that flourished among late medieval women in particular to locate some of the dynamic forces that helped make possible the theological ideas about witches that flourished from the fifteenth century onward. Elliott has done much to enrich our understanding of the development of an embodied version of the bride of Christ. Medieval and early modern Christianity held out an option, for women at least, to marry Jesus—to become asponsa Christi—in a literal sense, a form of marriage sustained by such things as legal mechanisms, theological visions, particular emotions, religious rituals, and spiritual practices. But Elliott's argument, stopping as it does right before the tumultuous sixteenth century, lends itself to a reading that the literalizedsponsa Christiwas bound henceforth to the early modern witch craze. Desiderius Erasmus's 1529 treatiseDe vidua christianaprovides us evidence that the literalizedsponsa Christideveloped in alternative ways in the early modern period, including the creation of a distinctive vision of the Christian widow who is, at times, bigamous.De vidua, then, can serve as the basis for expanding upon an alternative historical trajectory for the bride of Christ that Elliott mentions in passing in her study.

Икона «Преображение» из собора Соловецкого монастыря. Особенности и интерпретация иконографической программы

The Transfiguration icon, housed in the Moscow Kremlin museum, is the main icon of the Transfiguration cathedral of the Solovetsky Monastery. The icon was painted around 1558 by masters from Novgorod, bearing influence of the Moscow painting trends. The classical iconography of the Transfiguration in this icon is diversified with four more themes. The first one depicts two prophets carried by angels to the Mountain Tabor. The second presents the apostles headed by Christ going up and down the mountain. Тhe third is the parable of new and old wine. The fourth shows the Jewish people meeting Christ. The third and the fourth themes are quite unique. The Homily on Transfiguration by Ephrem the Syrian helps us decipher the iconographical design of this image. The sophistication and the refinement of the way the main ideas of the text are put into painting suggest that the content was elaborated by a person of theological and artistic mind. No doubt the iconic image was designed by Philipp, the Metropolitan, and it is a bright feature of Philipp, who at that period was the abbot of the Solovetsky Monastery. A very interesting person, an outstanding figure of that epoch, Philipp manifested himself as an apologist of the Old Testament wisdom which nourishes The Church as well as the New Testament.

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 – 1500

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 – 1500

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500. By Dyan Elliott. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ix + 470. $59.95 cloth.

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500. By Dyan Elliott. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ix + 470. $59.95 cloth. - Volume 82 Issue 4

Elliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 466 pp. $59.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessElliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 466 pp. $59.95 (cloth).Anne L. ClarkAnne L. ClarkUniversity of Vermont. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 93, Number 3July 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/672219 Views: 23Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

DYAN ELLIOTT. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500.

DYAN ELLIOTT. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500.

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment In the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500 by Dyan Elliott (review)

Reviewed by: The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment In the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500 by Dyan Elliott Ericka Swensson Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment In the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) 472 pp. Dyan Elliott’s monograph is a natural outgrowth of her previous work on spiritual marriage in the Christian church and her more recent scholarship on the relationship between the inquisition and the early modern European witch craze. In The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell, Elliott examines the metaphor of the sponsa Christi, or bride of Christ, as it evolved from the abstract to the literal. Elliott shows how the female mystics of the Middle Ages were “one link in the chain” (6) that united them to the so-called witches of the early modern period by examining the evolution of the sponsa Christi in western Europe from 200–1500 CE. Beginning with her analysis of the works of early church fathers, Elliott’s focus then travels northward to conclude her examination with the Beguines. In her first chapter, Elliott casts Tertullian, who was decidedly against marriage, as the unlikely originator of the sponsa Christi imagery. Elliott argues that in the late antique period there were two ways that early Christians understood the relationship between gender and chastity. The first was represented by the image of the virile woman whose chaste body, like the Desert Mothers and St. Perpetua, became male. The second category was that of the vita angelica which represented a “realized eschatology” (12) on earth in which the bodies of the chaste became androgynous like that of the angels. However, for Tertullian, the notion of the vita angelica became increasingly problematic as it created the context for miscegenation between (female) virgins and angels. Tertullian’s response was to cast the sexed human body as the point of difference between humans and angels, even in the afterlife. Tertullian then used the imagery of the sponsa Christi to place female virgins, not on par with angels or men, but at the mercy of their bridegroom. In chapter 2, Elliott broadens her scope to show how subsequent church fathers, including Cyprian, Origen, Athanasius, Ambrose, and Augustine, used the imagery of the sponsa Christi to moderate women’s dress and behavior, and to situate male clerics as authorities over consecrated virgins. One of the more interesting developments during this period was the way in which women increasingly began to embrace the imagery of the sponsa Christi which afforded them both a place of honor and a recognized legal and social status, albeit at great sacrifice. In her third chapter, Elliott examines the bride of Christ in the Barbarian West, demonstrating how the term came to include widows and mothers, as manifested in Aldhelm’s three degrees of female chastity. Elliott also explores the case of Queen Radegund, and her male and female hagiographers, who deployed the rhetoric of the sponsa Christi in various ways. In particular, Elliott focuses on Baudonivia’s life of Radegund claiming that her vita both anticipated the writings of subsequent female mystics and demonstrated how the sponsa Christi had become a “point of identification” not just imposed upon women but readily embraced by them. [End Page 258] Elliott explores the emergence of chaste heterosexual couples such as Abe-lard and Heloise in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in chapters 4 and 5, which coincided with increasing importance of the idea of consent in medieval marriage. Elliott also analyzes the unique relationship between women and their male confessors: labeling the phenomenon “heteroasceticism,” she describes it as a intense emotional attachment between a man and a women who are committed to a celibate life. Elliott argues that partners in these heteroascetic unions described themselves as participating in a quasi-conjugal union and, in doing so, directly engaged with the language of the sponsa Christi. However, the distinction between what she deems the “forebears” of heteroasceticism, represented by the relationships between Jerome and Paula or Fortunatus and Radegund, and the contemporary examples, such as Peter Damian, is not always clear. In chapter 6, Elliott discusses the emergence...

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500

The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500

Robert Herrick's

Herrick's 'Rex Tragicus' and the 'Troublesome Times.' Recent criticism of the poetry of Robert Herrick would suggest that Herrick's verse is far more responsive to the political and religious upheavals of the English Civil War than had long been supposed. In no poem are the evocations of what Herrick called the troublesome times more profoundly in play than in Good Friday: Tragicus, or Christ going to His Crosse, a poem from Herrick's collection of religious verses, Noble Numbers, which has been read as Herrick's pro-Royalist expression of concern for the impending trial and execution of Charles I. What follows here is an attempt to read the Rex Tragicus for what could have been read in and into it when it was published along with the rest of Herrick's Noble Numbers and Hesperides 1648. Examining the iconology of the Passion to which the poem is heir, this paper relates the Rex Tragicus to the controversies involving, not only the Crown, but the Anglican Church and the public stage, a...

A Message to the Members of the Fauna Preservation Society from Mr. Fairfield Osborn

There are essences in human life which defy analysis. Who can measure the influence upon the human spirit of an inspiring passage of music or of a radiant line of poetry or prose ? The inner being of man is forever something apart from utilitarian or material influences. The story of Christ going into the wilderness has been accepted through the ages not merely as a symbol but as an essential episode in the personality of an individual. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help” is a prayer flowing naturally from the human heart that senses the oneness of the individual and the natural world.