medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Apologies if I'm only listing the obvious things that
everyone knows already: please keep us informed about the
progress of your project.
On Sun, 3 Jun 2001 12:14:54 -0700 Ron Ganze
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> What I'm curious about is two things: exactly how to talk about
> individuality in ideal monastic conditions (i.e. what exactly the emptying
> of the will in the Benedictine rule and other monastic writings entails),
I'm sure you know this already, but one chapter of Bynum's
*Jesus as Mother* deals with this. I'd also suggest
Linda Georgianna, '"Any Corner of Heaven": Heloise's
Critique of Monasticism'. Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987), pp.
221-53;
Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene
Wisse. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
Talal Asad, 'On Ritual and Discipline in Medieval Christian
Monasticism', Economy and Society 16 (1987), pp. 159-204,
Sarah Beckwith, 'Passionate Regulation: Enclosure,
Ascesis, and the Feminist Imaginary', South Atlantic
Quarterly 93 (1994), pp. 803-24,
Michel Foucault 'The Battle for Chastity'. In Western
Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times,
edited by Phillipe Ariès and André Béjin, pp. 14-25.
Translated by Anthony Foster. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Foucault and Richard Sennett. 'Sexuality and Solitude'.
Humanities Review 1 (1982), pp. 3-21.
a list rather biased towards what monasticism does to
gender & sexuality, because that's the angle I came to it
from.
> and anything that might deal with how a saint is "constructed" in a saints'
> life--how that saint is seen as being part of the communion of saints and
> thus the barriers between the saints break down, as in The Earliest Life of
> Gregory, how saints are typologically constructed, etc.
Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the
Lives of the Early Saints. Hanover, New Hampshire and
London: Brown University Press for University Press of New
England, 1987.
Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their
Biographies in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
> It's all part of a larger project on
medieval subjectivity, and I'm trying
> in the part I'm currently working on to discuss subjectivity in the saints
> lives. The monastic angle is important because I think audiences and
> intentions are part of the equation--how should we incorporate the monastic
> environment and the place of the saint's life in the liturgy into a
> discussion of the type of subjectivity we see in the
saints' lives?
> I guess what's at the heart of this question is "How did people conceive of
> themselves as people?" I think there's going to be a difference between
> secular and religious works, and that those works that come out of the
> monastery are going to be tapping into a very different version of what it
> means to be an individual than other works--individuality is going to be
> less of a concern, perhaps, because of the focus on the eternal and the
> constant reminder of eternal time and space provided by "living" the
> liturgy. Yet individuals still have to be dealt with to a certain degree in
> these texts. "How are these individuals conceived of?" is the question I'm
> trying to answer.
>
> I guess I'm moving towards an intertextual conception--saints are "built" by
> making various pre-existing texts speak to one another possibly in
> conjunction with some actual events from a real life (of course in the case
> of St. Rumwold . . .). If this insight proves true, however, I'm not quite
> sure yet what I want to do with it.
>
> Does that make it any more clear? I apologize for the lack of clarity--this
> is a thought in formation rather than something fully thought out, which is
> why I'd like to find some secondary sources, if possible.
>
>
> --Ron Ganze
> Department of English
> University of Oregon
>
>
>
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