Holy Women Research Articles

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by Nancy Bradley Warren

Reviewed by: Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by Nancy Bradley Warren Kathleen Forni Nancy Bradley Warren. Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. 228. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. It will probably come as little surprise to most readers that Chaucer's ambiguity and malleability regarding orthodoxy and heterodoxy made him a useful figure in "religiopolitical conflicts" in his postmedieval reception. But while Chaucer's Lollard leanings and perceived proto-Protestantism have received abundant critical attention, his association with continental female spirituality in his own age and his role in premodern Catholic counter-tradition polemics have been less studied. Nancy Bradley Warren fills this lacuna in the poet's reception, situating Chaucerian invocation within efforts to "establish religious and national identities on both sides of the Atlantic" (13). Armed with meticulous research and careful close reading, Warren convinces that the political value of the Protestant Chaucer (which I and others have proposed) provides only a partial account of his postmedieval canonization. Using a "transnational and transperiod approach" (13), Warren suggests that Chaucer represented a masculine cultural authority who could "save the English Catholic past from feminization" (4). The pejorative feminine [End Page 457] here is associated with both mystical spiritualism and (surprisingly) vernacular religious texts. While Warren's narrative is not a corrective to those who link his postmedieval canonization to his perceived Wycliffite leanings, Chaucer occasionally emerges as "a figure who masculinizes and rationalizes the English Catholic Middle Ages" (99). Warren maintains that his female monastic pilgrims reveal Chaucer's "awareness of and interest in the emergence of Lollardy—the greatest English religious controversy of his lifetime—as well as his cognizance of the burgeoning visionary, mystical, and prophetic spirituality of Continental holy women" (9). Chapter 1, "Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales," revisits The Prioress's Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale within the context of the Brigittine spirituality associated with St. Birgitta of Sweden (1349–73), whose revelations emphasize the power of the Virgin Mary and maternal intercession, as well as the efficacy of vernacular religious translation and female spiritual instruction. The Second Nun's Prologue not only emphasizes the power of Mary's virginal maternity but also posits the legitimacy of vernacular translation (the "mother tongue"). And St. Cecilia herself demonstrates that female "conseil" can lead to salvation; as such, the tale nicely "quits" the denigration of womanly counsel found in The Nun's Priest's Tale (which immediately precedes The Second Nun's Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript). Warren rereads The Prioress's Prologue as a reflection of the popular cult of the Virgin Mary in the fourteenth century, and highlights its "salvific power" of maternal suffering and the "the dynamics of Incarnation" (30), providing a layer of sophistication to what is sometimes seen as an infantilizing expostulation. Nonetheless, it is difficult to get around the notorious anti-Semitism of the tale; Warren concurs that the tale of the little "clergeon" lacks some "spiritual and intellectual sophistication," which is perhaps owing to "imperfect religious knowledge, imperfection that could be ameliorated by access to vernacular translations of religious texts" (36, 37). One might add, however, that St. Birgitta's Prophesies and Revelations itself is littered with denigrating references to the Jews—revealing a less salutary aspect of her spirituality, and an aspect of Marian devotion that continues to unsettle. Real nuns also read some Chaucer, or at least texts that mention Chaucer. Chapter 2, "Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers," explores Chaucer's literary legacy as attested to by the manuscripts owned by several prominent English nunneries with [End Page 458] Lancastrian affiliations (Warren meticulously traces the family back-grounds and surprising political connections of the women in these monastic houses). The Brigittine nuns at Syon possessed a miscellany (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 416) that included—in addition to Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and several other texts on ethics, political advice, history, and philosophy—The Parliament of Fowls (or at least lines 1–142 of the poem, since the manuscript...

Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima

In this rigorously researched analysis of the lives of holy women in colonial Lima, Nancy van Deusen offers an exploration of female networks and their particular relationship to embodied holiness. She uses women's engagement with material objects as a primary focus to link a series of case studies, as such objects had both spiritual and didactic potential. As religious women moved in and out of spaces that were exclusively feminine, they communicated theological, devotional, and spiritual knowledge to each other. The monograph argues that women used such knowledge to gain greater autonomy and power.Part 1, “Material and Immaterial Embodiment,” focuses on material objects and their crucial role in early modern spiritual practice. It is divided into three chapters, each of which discusses the ways in which religious objects—such as sacred art, devotional books, and relics of living saints—became animated through the process of devotional focus. It further demonstrates how the objects activated multiple sensorial experiences that heightened women's access to the divine.Chapter 1 centers on Lima's most famous holy woman, Saint Rose of Lima, and her relationship with her female disciples. Rose, van Deusen demonstrates, taught her disciples through her own engagement with statues, print engravings, and cloth. Rose's example communicated how touch in particular could act as a conduit to the divine. In chapter 2, van Deusen expands the theme of materiality and the senses by focusing on the bodies of female mystics and their embodied experience of divine union. Here she connects mysticism with the practice of reading, arguing that holy women transformed into a kind of text that could be read. Seventeenth-century beata Ángela de Carranza, the subject of chapter 3, promoted herself as a living saint through distribution of her body parts (hair, nails, etc.) as though they were relics, highlighting how pieces of bodies could act as evidence for holiness. Taken together, these three chapters reveal how gendered activities connected to wider Catholic beliefs about the divine power of material objects.Part 2, “The Relational Self,” shifts to a discussion of how holy women constructed self-identities in relationship to others—specifically within communities of women and their networks of sociability. Chapter 4 addresses the vocations of women of color as donadas in Limeño convents. Donadas were essentially servants who had been “donated” to convents, usually beginning as slaves to well-to-do nuns (p. 96). Van Deusen looks at large-scale patterns by analyzing the applications of nearly 500 women to take vows as donadas, arguing that their lowly status in the convent did not bar them from spiritual and social networks and that many were able to achieve meaningful spiritual lives.In chapter 5, the author turns to María Jacinta Montoya, who toiled for years on behalf of beatification of her husband, Nicolás de Ayllón. Nicolás was a rare example of a holy person who was at once of low social status (a tailor), married, and indigenous. María Jacinta's efforts were complicated by her support of the controversial beata Ángela de Carranza (the focus of chapter 3) and her entanglement with the Inquisition. But the chapter focuses on María Jacinta's efforts to position her husband's holiness in relationship to herself in a kind of mirroring, contrasting her sinfulness with his saintliness. The last chapter discusses a civil suit that erupted between an affluent mother and her daughter, Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega, over whether the daughter could take vows as a nun instead of getting married as her mother desired. The conflict between the two revolved around how each understood the application of the theological concept of free will. The chapter demonstrates how the relationship between Josefa and her mother shaped important discussions about adult women and freedom of conscience in eighteenth-century Lima.In the conclusion, van Deusen draws together the main themes of the book's case studies and argues that networks of women played crucial roles in the spread of information about the divine among women. The first and second parts of the book could be connected a bit more clearly, as they occasionally felt like different books, particularly with the strong focus on theoretical frameworks in the first part and the employment of social history methodologies in the second. Nevertheless, van Deusen is deft at uncovering fascinating and little-known women whose lives reveal a spectrum of behaviors, beliefs, and activities that shed new light on early modern devotional practices. While the focus here is on Lima, it is easy to see how van Deusen's female religious culture reverberated throughout the Catholic world.

Arte de rua

No contexto interdisciplinar entre Artes e Design, o texto aponta o espaço público como suporte físico e agente produtor de imagens na construção de narrativas visuais. Neste sentido, contextualiza a Arte de rua como ação potente, que protagoniza as vivências das pessoas, enquanto ativa lugares políticos de fala. Apresenta referências em Lynch (1990) e Mitchell (2017) para pensar a produção imagética das cidades como ações recíprocas,afirmando o protagonismo feminino neste discurso (Butler 2017, Davis 2016). Neste sentido, o projeto “Santas Mulheres” (2018) se apresenta como um objeto-resistência, que passa a circular pelo espaço público como prática artística e ativista.

“Clad in flesch and Blood”: The Sartorial Body and Female Self-Fashioning in The Book of Margery Kempe

This article examines how the engagement with textiles and textile-craft in The Book of Margery Kempe facilitates the performance of Margery's female religious identity. Drawing on the fundamental precepts of performance theory, the article responds to recent scholarly interest in the manifestations of material devotional culture and the performative body. It first maps out the charged theological significations of textiles and their subsequent transformative potential. Then, it examines how Margery finds an active tool in “fabrics of devotion” in the form of saintly relics, images, and garments themselves, and how Margery's adoption of white garb refashions her body in the image of a saintly matrilineage. It concludes that interaction with Bridgettine visual and material objects supplies Margery with a new Marian iconography, which allows her to perform a double imitatio, weaving together the thread of her own life into the rich tapestry of archetypal holy women.

Sean L. Field, Courting Sanctity: Holy Women and the Capetians. Ithaca, NY, and London Cornell University Press, 2019, pp. 266

In Courting Sanctity, Sean Field delivers a comprehensible, and at times, remarkably complex portrait of the relationship between the French dynasty of the Capetians and female prophets and mystics of the mid-thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries. His argument and thus the purpose of the investigation are clearly established from the beginning: starting with King Louis IX (1214–1270), holy women were integral in establishing the sanctification of the crown, but as the monarchy grew in secular power or entered into periods of crisis, court officials started to target and to condemn these spiritual females as sorceresses or demonic threats.

Mystical Traditions Are Political

Mystical Traditions Are Political

Marie of Oignies, of Nivelles, or of Villers: The Multiple Textual Identities of a 13th-Century Holy Woman

Nancy Bradley Warren (2005: 133) maintains that ‘female spirituality and the revelations of holy women were valuable, and extremely valuable, sources of symbolic capital’ in the pre-modern era. In this article, I dissect the ways in which various authors harnessed the ‘symbolic capital’ of the 13th-century holy woman Marie of Oignies (d. 1213). Jacques of Vitry composed Marie’s vita in c. 1215. Most of what we know about the holy woman’s life is contained in this text, which offers us the first extant account of a new form of female spirituality which blossomed in the era, the beguine lifestyle. But Jacques’ account is only one of several iterations of Marie’s life. Two other texts offer significantly different textual constructions of the holy woman: a 13th-century liturgical office in Marie’s honour, and a chronicle of the foundation of Oignies’ priory. Each text manufactures distinct versions of Marie in order to siphon off the holy woman’s ‘symbolic capital’ to their own reserves. This entails a re-situation of Marie in each work – both literal and metaphorical – as she becomes a special patron not just of Oignies, but Nivelles, Villers Abbey, and the entire diocese of Liege. This investigation operates as a case study for the ways in which the precise contours of a saintly individual’s individuality may be fashioned differently by interested parties – specifically that of a hagiographer (Jacques of Vitry), monastic institution (Villers Abbey), and spiritual community (Oignies priory) – as a means to assert their own identity. Modern actors continue to trade on Marie’s reputation, as various Belgian towns seek to claim the holy woman as ‘one of their own’. In my conclusion, then, I demonstrate the ways in which Marie has become a tradable asset in the cultural heritage of the Walloon region.

Laudatio in Honorem Jacobi Dalaruni

Laudatio in Honorem Jacobi Dalaruni Sean L. Field (bio) Could there be a more auspicious day than 14 July on which to honor a French scholar? Though the idyllic setting of the Saint Bonaventure campus is far from the bustling Place de la Bastille, the date could hardly be more fitting for the recipient of the 2016 Franciscan Institute Medal, given Jacques Dalarun's truly revolutionary contributions to Franciscan scholarship. Born in 1952, on All Saints' Day, Jacques Dalarun worked his way up through the highly competitive French educational hierarchy, reaching the level of professeur certifié by 1974, agrégé d'histoire by 1975, doctor in medieval history by 1984, and habilité à diriger les recherches by 1994. During these years he taught first at the collège level from 1975 to 1984, and then, as his first books began to appear, at the Université de Franche-Comté and the École française de Rome, where he was named Directeur des études médiévales in 1990. He was appointed Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1997, and served from 1998 to 2004 as Director of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes. In 2013 his intellectual achievements were crowned with election to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and thus to the Institut de France. This is the curriculum vitae of a French scholar who has reached the very pinnacle of his profession. All of this success was founded on a string of brilliant studies, beginning in 1985 and 1986 with two ground-breaking volumes on Robert of Arbrissel, the twelfth-century founder of Fontevrault.1 In retrospect, the scholarly approach that has served Jacques so well ever since was already in evidence in these first books: Identify, edit, and translate important new texts; analyze them closely while bringing the reader along at every step; ask new questions, offer new arguments, and push forward the state of historical knowledge. Thus, Jacques was already a rising star in the French scholarly firmament by 1986, but his interest had not yet been caught by specifically [End Page 527] Franciscan topics. His path toward Franciscan subjects was via a road decidedly less traveled. Rather than beginning with Francis or Clare, it was an interest in saints on the margins of society that led Jacques first to figures such as Micheline de Pesaro (d. 1356) and Claire de Rimini (d. 1326), relatively obscure but fascinating Italian holy women, in two studies published in 1992 and 1994.2 These books moved Jacques into Franciscan circles, but they also signaled another enduring element of his career—an attention to medieval women's religious experience, and to the ways in which women as well as men felt and shaped spiritual currents. It seems fair to say, however, that Jacques Dalarun cemented his place as a major scholar of Franciscan history with the trio of studies on Francis of Assisi he published between 1994 and 1999, English versions of which have been published by the Franciscan Institute as Francis of Assisi and the Feminine, The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi, and Francis of Assisi and Power.3 Taken together, these works offered entirely fresh perspectives on Francis by way of modern scholarly approaches to gender and power. They also signaled Jacques's bold intervention in the contentious "Franciscan question"; that is, the long-running debate over how best to use the difficult and contradictory sources in assessing who Francis "really" was. A profound step forward in this debate was Jacques's brilliant 2007 volume Vers une resolution de la question franciscaine. La Légende ombrienne de Thomas de Celano, which pieced together fragmentary textual clues to argue that Thomas must have written a previously unknown life of Francis in the 1230s, between his Vita prima of 1229 and Vita secunda of c. 1247.4 This argument was well received, but for the moment remained a hypothesis awaiting definitive proof. It was also at that point, by 2008, that Jacques took on his extraordinarily productive and important role as director of the collection "Sources franciscaines" for Éditions du Cerf and Éditions franciscaines (continuing now under the auspices of the...

Maternity and Faith in the Copenhagen Bohun Women Saints’ Lives (Royal Library, Ms Thott 517 4º)

Ms Thott 517 4° is a small illuminated fourteenth century English manuscript thatprincipally contains three Anglo-Norman French texts composed by different authors,each narrating episodes from the life and afterlife of one of the three most popularfemale saints in England at that time - Mary, Christ’s mother, Margaret, the virgin martyr,and Mary Magdalene, the repentant harlot. One of the lives, that of Saint Margaret,is followed by an antiphon, a versicle, and a prayer. The manuscript was illuminatedin a very distinctive style associated with two artists working for the Bohun family, probablysome time after the death of Humphrey de Bohun (1342-1373), the seventh Earlof Hereford, sixth Earl of Essex and second Earl of Northampton. This article discussesthe reasons why this manuscript may have been intended for a female audience,perhaps for one or more of the close female relatives of Humphrey de Bohun - hiswife, Joan (1347-1419), his daughter, Eleanor (1367-1399), who married Thomas ofWoodstock, Edward III’s youngest son, in 1376 or his daughter, Mary (1370-1394), whoin 1381 wed the king’s grandson, Henry of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV.I argue that Ms Thott 517 4° contains texts and images that would be appropriate forthe contemplation and instruction of a female audience. I show that the texts that wereselected for inclusion in the manuscript narrate the lives of two holy women who wereclose to and important for Christ and who were present at many of the central eventsof his life, as well as a virgin who was martyred because of her faith. I also show thatthe major illuminations in the manuscript depict the heavenly favours bestowed oneach of the holy women as a consequence of the lives they led. Thus a female audiencecould draw strength from the holy women’s examples. Additionally, in the article Idemonstrate that the three holy women whose lives were included in Ms Thott 517 4°were all believed to come to the assistance of women in labour.It is argued that the likely intended audience for Ms Thott 517 4° was a female who,more specifically, was about to enter or already was in her childbearing years. However,it is also suggested in this article that the Lives were not necessarily meant for theexclusive contemplation of one person. The Transitus mariae and the legend of MaryMagdalene deal with issues, such as faith, conduct and death, which might have hadrelevance for a widow. Furthermore, the Transitus text, with its focus on the lamentingmother of Christ, could have had a particular interest for the dowager countess, whois known to have commissioned the devotional poem, the Complaint of the Virgin. It is,therefore, suggested in this article that both Joan de Bohun and one of her daughterscould have been the intended audience of the Lives.

The Importance of Modesty Virtue in Islamic Communication; Ethics and Islamic Management

The Divine religions and teachings of God's messengers have always explained true role of women in the world creation. Meanwhile, Islam and its transcendental culture cared human rights of women more than all schools and enshrined in all dimensions of life according to their capabilities and needs. Unfortunately, today, it has been accused of ignoring women's rights. However, with the brief explanation of the status of women in human history, the importance of Islam which have posed for women to be recognized. About the character of the holy women of Islam, virtue and perfection has been quoted in a variety of circumstances and their traditions. Quran mentioned some merit women are termed such as: Sareh (wife of Ibrahim (AS)), Mary (SA)( mother of Jesus), Pharaoh's wife (Asiah). In some Ahadith of the Prophet (PBUH), master of women in the paradise (and in other Ahadith, world) are four: Mary (mother of Jesus), Asia (wife of Pharaoh), Khadija and Fatima. And the most perfect one is Fatima. These Contents in the teaching of Islam itself indicate possibility of growth and excellence in female personalities to the top of humanity virtues. Since Islam has deep attention to the stability of family foundation, has always considered the growth and transcendence of women in all aspects with its teachings and laws. So that women in addition to the natural and innate tasks, not only as mother, sister or wife share as partner in men's scientific services but also deal with learning and teaching of sciences and participate in community services. Research and evaluation in Islamic civilization indicates that women in some periods of the Islamic history have been able to achieve great status in various fields. In the early Islamic period, in the age of Omayyad, moral values got weak and the face of Islamic government changed and due to this unfavorable situation, dignity and magnitude of women fell down and men and women communication stood at guile and cunning and hatred instead of truth and sincerity, and since men suspected to women, kept them at home and prohibited from participating in society, abuse of women began gradually and introduced poems and stories of the guile and cunning of women. (Zidan) The tendencies of Omayyad's period continued in Abbasid rules with gradual evolution. With formation of Islamic civilization of the second century (AH) Throughout the Muslim lands had witnessed prosperity of science and literature development and growth of many scientists and scholars. One of the great and remarkable achievements of Islamic civilization is the participation of women in various and multiple dimensions. So that existence of scholar women can be considered as one of the most important component of development. There have been so many women scientists in some cities such as Bukhara, Nayshabur, Shiraz, Isfahan, Samarqand Toos, Andalusia Balkh and Marv, who were experts and scholars of their eras. In many conquered cities by Muslims in the early centuries before the arrival of Islam, the women did not enjoy of their prestige and dignities, but the teachings of Quran and Islam's rich and unique culture gave them better position Certainly, the way of prevailing thinking in these societies are also important and effective on this downturn or speed and sometimes these impacts has had ups and downs. This article tries to review the present status of women in Islamic history, the efforts of science, art and mysticism of the early centuries to the sixth century AH. In the works of historians and researchers such as Belazori(2-3 centuries AH), Yaaghubi (3rd century AH) Samaani (506-562 AH) Ibn Asaker (499-571 AH) and Khatib Baghdadi, along scholar men names, some women with high position have been mentioned. Also, in many books such as the Aalam Alnesa, by Omar R. Kahhalah, Riyahin Alshariah, written by Sheikh Zabihollah Mahallati, the Alnesa’ Almomenat, by Hassoun, many women have been introduced during the fourteen centuries of Islamic history.

Language, Literacy, and the Saintly Body: Cistercian Reading Practices and theLife of Lutgard of Aywières(1182–1246)

Many years before the death of Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246), a thirteenth-century Cistercian nun renowned for her asceticism and visionary insight, Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–ca. 1270) approached a group of nuns and lay brothers to arrange for the disposal of her relics should she die during his absence. Thomas—a Dominican preacher and theologian who penned a hagiography of Lutgard in addition to several other holy women of the mid-thirteenth century Low Countries—wanted her hand as “a sacred memorial” (sacram memoriam). The abbess Hadewijch agreed to his request. Repeating a medieval misogynistic commonplace, Thomas then wrote that “since it is women's nature to be unable to keep secrets. . . the nuns told Lutgard how I had ordered her hand to be cut off.”

Holiness and humour

Although Christian spirituality includes a long tradition of suspicion of humour, humour can express and further holiness in several ways. Humour serves holiness in religious satire; it can also communicate the self-transcendent perspective of holy women and men. Humour and holiness can also illuminate each other because both are inherently relational. Christian holiness consists primarily in right relationship to the Holy One and, thus, to others. Humour’s complex relational nature is examined with the help of Ted Cohen’s analysis of joke-telling and evolutionary and cognitive research. Humour and its primary expression, laughter, are inherently ambiguous, capable of expressing and creating a range of attitudes and relationships; consequently, they can both conduce to and hinder holiness. Finally, humour can contribute to the religious imagination, and thus to holiness, by challenging established images of the holy, inviting fresh theological reflection, and inspiring ethical action. Both holiness and humour require openness to that which is beyond us and agility in responding to the other.

Picturing the liturgy: Notes on the iconography of the Holy Women at the Tomb in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Ethiopian manuscript illumination

AbstractAlmost five decades ago the late Stanislaw Chojnacki, one of the founding fathers of Ethiopian art history, began the task of describing the themes in Christian Ethiopian painting. Since then, others have contributed to the study of different subjects in Ethiopian art. Yet there are still gaps in our understanding of Ethiopian iconography. The aim of this study is to help fill these gaps by offering some remarks on the iconography of the Holy Women at the Tomb in fourteenth-century Ethiopian manuscript illumination.

Soul Mates and Collaborators: Spiritual Direction in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

AbstractThe 15th century is often regarded by scholars as a turning point in the history of spiritual direction, marking the beginning of a “Golden Age,” which lasted well into the 18th century. The “confessor‐spiritual director” emerged as one who fulfilled the role of spiritual counsellor as well as granting the forgiveness of sins after confession. Over the past two decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the dynamics of the relationships between confessors and their penitents, both inside and outside of the cloister. Scholars of both late medieval and early modern Europe have traced the ties that these spiritual relationships could create between the sexes, particularly where male clerics directed the souls of holy women (lay and religious). Within the scholarship, a new attentiveness to the complexities of these encounters has challenged the traditional conception of male–female, confessor‐penitent relationships as repressive and controlling. This article seeks to explore this recent shift in the historiography, before offering some new perspectives on future directions the field may take.

Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna.By Janet K. Page

Serious and sustained research on nuns and music in the early modern period began in earnest in the mid-1990s with the publication of two ground-breaking books: Craig A. Monson’s Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995) and Robert L. Kendrick’s Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996). Those monographs set the standard in the field and inspired subsequent investigations of seventeenth-century convent music in other Italian cities as well as in Spain and New Spain. Relatively little scholarship, however, has been directed at the activities of holy women in German-speaking lands, perhaps because the Reformation had such a devastating effect on convents in those regions. Janet Page’s new monograph on the nunneries of Vienna during the period of their revival in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is thus significant because it broadens the geographical sphere and widens the time period of current literature on monastic musical culture.

Representation and Reception : Women in the Copenhagen Bohun Hours Ms. Thott 547 4º

Marina Vidas: Representation and reception. Women in the Copenhagen Bohun Hours. Ms. Thott 547 4º This article presents and analyzes depictions of women in the Copenhagen Bohun Hours (Copenhagen, Royal Library, Ms. Thott 547 4º), an exquisitely illuminated fourteenth-century English manuscript, made for a young female member of the Bohun family, and focuses on meanings images could have had for their primary viewer. The representations which are examined are of: the book owner, the Virgin Mary, shown on nine of the fully illuminated folia, St. Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene, Job’s wife, a group of nuns as well as of three mothers who appear in the bas-de-pages. Firstly, it is argued that the painted portrait of the book owner is flattering in its presentation of the subject’s beauty, status and character. Attention is drawn to the fact that in her portrait, the book owner resembles the Virgin shown on the same folio. Secondly, it is suggested that the representations of the armorials of the heiress’s natal family, dominant in the manuscript, are evidence of pride in her noble lineage and her succession to the family titles as countess in her own right while the arms of the crown, depicted on her surcoat in her portrait and on one of the fully-illuminated folios, proclaim her royal connections. Thirdly, representations of holy women are discussed and it is suggested that they offered the viewer a variety of relevant role models and experiences to admire, inspire, and imitate. It is also proposed that some of the tales and scenes in the bas-de-pages could have had a cautionary purpose. Finally, it is observed that there is a substantial interest not only in individual women but a more general preoccupation with women’s relationships with the divine, with children and with other women.

Women in Verse and Holy Women

Women in Verse and Holy Women

Holy Women and Hagiography in Colonial Spanish America

AbstractHoly women and hagiography (autobiographies and biographies of saints and holy persons) were defining features of the “spiritual renaissance” that flourished in Spanish American cities during the 17th and 18th centuries. Recently, scholars have expanded their traditional focus upon nuns and convent literature to consider hagiographical texts about pious laywomen, or beatas, among them non‐elite, native, African, and mixed‐race holy women. This article considers recent approaches to holy women and hagiography, which rethink the “marginal” or “subversive” position of beatas and non‐Europeans within colonial Spanish Catholicism. These studies also challenge historiographical narratives about the uniformly repressive nature of Counter Reformation Catholicism and illustrate how priests diversely responded to the intersection of Universal Catholicism and local religion in colonial Spanish America. The scholarship under review suggests that the evangelizing spirit of the Counter Reformation and enthusiastic lay female religiosity, which crossed racial and class lines, fostered more flexible ideals of feminine and non‐European piety than previously imagined. More broadly, these studies rethink approaches to religion that emphasize paradigms of domination versus resistance, dichotomize official and popular Catholicism, and isolate religious experience and practice from broader and more complex colonial contexts.

Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c.1100-c.1500, edited by Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden

Le terme de “saintete” designe dans ce volume un champ plus large que celui considere traditionnellement, incluant, en dehors des «saintes» reconnues, des visionnaires et plus generalement des figures «who found theological voice and profoundly influenced the spiritual practice of those around them» (p. 1). Apres l’«Introduction» (par Alastair Minnis et Rosalynn Voaden, pp. 1-9), une premiere section rassemble cinq «Introductory Essays»: Dyan Elliott, Flesh and Spirit: The Female Body, pp. 13...

Envy and Exemplarity in The Book of Margery Kempe

This essay reexamines Margery Kempe’s competitiveness as a facet of the emotion of envy. Long seen as a petty, nasty emotion, envy has recently been recuperated by Sianne Ngai as possessing critical agency in its capacity to address social inequality and negotiate one’s relationship to exemplary models. Kempe’s Book is suffused with portraits of Margery’s envy of her neighbors (and vice versa), her envy of holy women such as Mary Magdalene, and depictions of envy as a form of suffering that brings her closer to Christ. Kempe strategically structures her book via the logic of envy, depicting a holy woman navigating her relationships with her neighbors, clerical authorities, and female saints. She uses envy — with its simultaneous identifications and aggressions — to explore the construction of social categories and ideal femininity, as well as to portray herself as an exemplary, singular individual. Kempe shows envy to be an essential component of the practice of critical imitatio, positing new possibilities for exemplarity and community formation.