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This book is devoted to medieval Iberian women, readers and writers. Focusing on the stories and texts women heard, visually experienced or read, and the stories that they rewrote, the work explores women’s experiences and cultural practices and their efforts to make sense of their place within their familial networks and communities. The study is based on two methodological and interpretive threads: a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and, a study of women’s writing, or, more precisely, women’s textualities, as a process of creating words but also acts, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected.
"Mediating Fictions examines the variety of strategies that these authors use to deprecate women healers, and in the process, to create early modern "others" to whom the ideal, male physician could be contrasted. Spill, La Celestina, and La Lozana andaluza all attempt to dissuade their readers from seeking the healing service of ordinary women."--BOOK JACKET.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Unveiling Eve is the first feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In the Jewish Middle Ages, writing was an exclusively male competence, and textual institutions such as the study of scripture, mysticism, philosophy, and liturgy were men's sanctuaries from which women were banished. These domains of male expertise—alongside belles lettres, on which Rosen's book focuses—served as virtual laboratories for experimenting with concepts of femininity and masculinity, hetero- and homosexuality, feminization and ...
This translation of part of the diary of a 17th century Peruvian mystic includes the convent life of slaves and former slaves and baroque Catholic spiritual experiences from the perspective of a woman of color.
This essay collection studies the Apocalypse and the end of the world, as these themes occupied the minds of biblical scholars, theologians, and ordinary people in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Early Modernity. It opens with an innovative series of studies on “Gendering the Apocalypse,” devoted to the texts and contexts of the apocalyptic through the lens of gender. A second section of essays studies the more traditional problem of “Apocalyptic Theory and Exegesis,” with a focus on authors such as Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore. A final series of essays extends the thematic scope to “The Eschaton in Political, Liturgical, and Literary Contexts.” In these essays, scholars of history, theology, and literature create a dialogue that considers how fear of the end of the world, among the most pervasive emotions in human experience, underlies a great part of Western cultural production.
In this engaging work, Bruce L. Venarde uncovers a largely unknown story of women's religious lives and puts female monasticism back in the mainstream of medieval ecclesiastical history. To chart the expansion of nunneries in France and England during the central Middle Ages, he presents statistics and narratives to describe growth in broad historical contexts, with special attention to social and economic change. Venarde explains that in the years 1000–1300 the number of nunneries within Europe grew tenfold. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, religious institutions for women developed in a variety of ways, mostly outside the self-conscious reform movements that have been the tradition...
María de San José Salazar (1548-1603) took the veil as a Discalced ("barefoot") Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, María fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, María demonstrates through fictio...
Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250-1300 investigates the gender system at work in medieval Perpignan. Using a series of notarial registers - unique as surviving records for the social history of the thirteenth-century realms of Aragon and Majorca, the political confederations to which this town belonged - Rebecca L. Winer opens a window onto the experiences of women and their families. Her interpretive framework reveals medieval assumptions about the distinct natures of Christian, Jewish, and enslaved Muslim women by analyzing which actions were curbed, controlled, or fostered in these different groups. Sensitive to questions of social rank and marital status, the book depart...
Through an examination of the role of nuns and the place of convents in both the spiritual and social landscape, this book analyzes the interaction of gender, religion and society in late medieval and early modern Spain. Author Elizabeth Lehfeldt here examines the tension between religious reform, which demanded that all nuns observe strict enclosure, and the traditional identity of Spanish nuns and their institutions, in which they were spiritually and temporally powerful women. Lehfeldt's work is based on the archival records of twenty-three convents in the city of Valladolid, and peninsula-wide documents that include visitation records, the constitutions of religious orders, and spiritual biographies. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain is the first book-length study in English to pose this chronological and conceptual framework for identifying and analyzing the role of nuns and convents in late-medieval and early-modern Spanish society.
The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres ...