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Doctrine embodied : gender, performance, and authority in late-medieval preaching
This dissertation explores the late-medieval preacher's role as a human mediator between the divine and the earthly, a charged instance of medieval Christianity's anxiety about the body. The preaching manuals, hagiography, disputations, and canon law of the late-twelfth to early-fifteenth centuries show preaching theorists grappling with the role of the preacher's earthly body in his sacred office, as teacher and as representative of ecclesiastical authority. The medieval association of women with the body makes gender issues particularly useful in approaching these problems.
- "This dissertation explores the late-medieval preacher's role as a human mediator between the divine and the earthly, a charged instance of medieval Christianity's anxiety about the body. The preaching manuals, hagiography, disputations, and canon law of the late-twelfth to early-fifteenth centuries show preaching theorists grappling with the role of the preacher's earthly body in his sacred office, as teacher and as representative of ecclesiastical authority. The medieval association of women with the body makes gender issues particularly useful in approaching these problems."@en
- "The first two chapters examine the attitude of preaching theorists, particularly Augustine, Alan of Lille, and Thomas Waleys, toward rhetoric, discussing the potential conflict between God's input and the preacher's and the way idealized images of saintly women preachers like Katherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene could help to resolve it. Chapter Three looks at how the preacher as an exemplar and user of exempla moved between his allegiances to, and identifications with, God and to his audience. The ability of exemplary narratives to escape their contexts is considered in Chapter Four, which examines various exemplary women, including Lady Philosophy and Chaucer's Custance and Griselda, to show that while women could "teach" by example, such teaching often required their physical suffering. Chapter Five looks at three extraordinary women, Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, who managed to evade clerical attempts to define women's preaching out of existence, and ends with a consideration of Margery Kempe's conflicts with the clerical hierarchy. Chapter Six juxtaposes medieval discussions of acting and preaching by Thomas of Chobham and Humbert of Romans with the work of J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Jacques Derrida in order to examine the anxiety aroused by a preacher's ability to create his, or her, own authority. Chapter Seven explores how the emphasis on bodiliness in the frame of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, especially the fictional representation of the author's own body, provides a secular version of the great problem in preaching: the way the body impinges on and is impinged on by the word, or Word, that constitutes an individual's authority to speak."@en
- "Doctrine embodied : gender, performance, and authority in late-medieval preaching"@en
- "Doctrine embodied Gender, performance, and authority in late-medieval preaching"@en