Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219614
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, William Revere
This article examines John Bunyan’s relationship to traditions of representing labor reaching back before the Reformation, from Piers Plowman and its imitators through to a range of “plowman” satires, complaints, and reformist dialogues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bunyan’s provocative rejection of the virtues of labor in part one of The Pilgrim’s Progress brings together theological convictions about justification by faith with a vision of mechanic mobility and schooling in the Spirit that disrupts a range of social forms and hierarchies. Yet in part two of The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly in the figure of Mercie, Bunyan offers up a new valuation of the exemplarist potentials of labor. Part two expands rather than contracts Bunyan’s exploration of the active life of dissent, reimagining questions of embodiment, habituation, imitation, and community. Mercie’s labors are performed in continuity with a late medieval tradition linking work and virtue. Her example prompts reconsideration both of Bunyan’s own dissenting allegories and of the uses of literary forms and ethical traditions across conventional period boundaries and confessional identities.
{"title":"The Conditions of Mercy","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, William Revere","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219614","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines John Bunyan’s relationship to traditions of representing labor reaching back before the Reformation, from Piers Plowman and its imitators through to a range of “plowman” satires, complaints, and reformist dialogues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bunyan’s provocative rejection of the virtues of labor in part one of The Pilgrim’s Progress brings together theological convictions about justification by faith with a vision of mechanic mobility and schooling in the Spirit that disrupts a range of social forms and hierarchies. Yet in part two of The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly in the figure of Mercie, Bunyan offers up a new valuation of the exemplarist potentials of labor. Part two expands rather than contracts Bunyan’s exploration of the active life of dissent, reimagining questions of embodiment, habituation, imitation, and community. Mercie’s labors are performed in continuity with a late medieval tradition linking work and virtue. Her example prompts reconsideration both of Bunyan’s own dissenting allegories and of the uses of literary forms and ethical traditions across conventional period boundaries and confessional identities.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"403-429"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48214943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219566
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Sonja Drimmer
Chronicles of fifteenth-century England teem with severed heads. Frequently, these texts focus less on the event of decapitation than on its enduring result: namely, the modified and adorned head of the deceased, spiked and exhibited in a prominent public venue. This article concentrates on textual descriptions of such sights in order to propose that the head was not simply a byproduct of the premodern state’s judicial cruelty or merely evidence of the deceased’s damnation; rather, the displayed head was a visual phenomenon in its own right, one that was often more available for public inspection than the act of execution that preceded it. Severed heads thus assumed the role of public sculpture: they were likened to and in dialogue with figural representations in stone that inhabited the civic landscape, and manipulated by their creators to speak specific statements through their material properties, visual form, and conspicuous display.
{"title":"The Severed Head as Public Sculpture in Late Medieval England","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Sonja Drimmer","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219566","url":null,"abstract":"Chronicles of fifteenth-century England teem with severed heads. Frequently, these texts focus less on the event of decapitation than on its enduring result: namely, the modified and adorned head of the deceased, spiked and exhibited in a prominent public venue. This article concentrates on textual descriptions of such sights in order to propose that the head was not simply a byproduct of the premodern state’s judicial cruelty or merely evidence of the deceased’s damnation; rather, the displayed head was a visual phenomenon in its own right, one that was often more available for public inspection than the act of execution that preceded it. Severed heads thus assumed the role of public sculpture: they were likened to and in dialogue with figural representations in stone that inhabited the civic landscape, and manipulated by their creators to speak specific statements through their material properties, visual form, and conspicuous display.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"293-321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44988347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219578
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Giuliano Mori
Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum has long been studied as a manifesto of the humanist divergence from medieval culture. This article reconsiders the role of Bruni’s Dialogi in the development of Italian humanism and especially in the development of the humanists’ awareness of their cultural identity as a group. The essay argues that Bruni’s principal aim was not to distance himself from previous traditions, but rather to mark a distinction between two concurrent conceptions of humanism that prevailed in his own time. Through the Dialogi, Bruni criticizes Niccolò Niccoli’s cultural extremism and advances a moderate ideal of humanism that seeks to revise and incorporate nonhumanist traditions instead of rejecting them outright. In doing so, Bruni also intends to shield his ideal of humanism from the attack of the traditionalist sector of Renaissance culture.
{"title":"Competing Humanisms","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Giuliano Mori","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219578","url":null,"abstract":"Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum has long been studied as a manifesto of the humanist divergence from medieval culture. This article reconsiders the role of Bruni’s Dialogi in the development of Italian humanism and especially in the development of the humanists’ awareness of their cultural identity as a group. The essay argues that Bruni’s principal aim was not to distance himself from previous traditions, but rather to mark a distinction between two concurrent conceptions of humanism that prevailed in his own time. Through the Dialogi, Bruni criticizes Niccolò Niccoli’s cultural extremism and advances a moderate ideal of humanism that seeks to revise and incorporate nonhumanist traditions instead of rejecting them outright. In doing so, Bruni also intends to shield his ideal of humanism from the attack of the traditionalist sector of Renaissance culture.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"323-347"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44995653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219590
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Daniel Jütte
This article explores the trauma that early modern witchcraft trials inflicted on survivors and their communities. The point of departure is the case of Margareth Los, a widow accused of witchcraft in 1520s Württemberg. Subjected to brutal torture, Los was acquitted provisionally after three years in jail. Remarkably, she had the strength to produce an account of her ordeal and to bring her case before the highest court of justice in the Empire. The historical literature on witch trials has long been polarized by the quest for the most “accurate” death tolls. However, the social cost of witch hunts cannot be assessed by the number of death sentences alone. As Los’s case illustrates, witch hunts often had inconclusive outcomes, leaving the accused in a legal limbo that could last for years or even decades. Only one outcome was always the same: witch trials left behind a population of uprooted, dispossessed, and traumatized individuals.
{"title":"Survivors of Witch Trials and the Quest for Justice in Early Modern Germany","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Daniel Jütte","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219590","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the trauma that early modern witchcraft trials inflicted on survivors and their communities. The point of departure is the case of Margareth Los, a widow accused of witchcraft in 1520s Württemberg. Subjected to brutal torture, Los was acquitted provisionally after three years in jail. Remarkably, she had the strength to produce an account of her ordeal and to bring her case before the highest court of justice in the Empire. The historical literature on witch trials has long been polarized by the quest for the most “accurate” death tolls. However, the social cost of witch hunts cannot be assessed by the number of death sentences alone. As Los’s case illustrates, witch hunts often had inconclusive outcomes, leaving the accused in a legal limbo that could last for years or even decades. Only one outcome was always the same: witch trials left behind a population of uprooted, dispossessed, and traumatized individuals.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"349-375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42554812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219626
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Laurie Ellinghausen
The “sailor ballads” of the early British Empire employ popular song not only to investigate sailors’ hardships and victories, but to explore the character attributes of seafaring men. This article argues that the range of attitudes and concerns present in these texts signals a larger cultural conversation about these men’s fitness as husbands to the nation’s women, fathers to its children, and members of its communities. Although protoimperialist and mercantilist writers such as John Dee, Robert Hitchcock, and Edward Misselden stressed the social benefits of employing common men in large-scale seafaring projects, the ballads explore the consequences of the common sailor’s presence—and most particularly, his prolonged absence—on the traditional stabilizing structures of family and community. In doing so, the ballads critically examine the potential rewards and consequences of imperial expansion from a terrestrial, local, and communal perspective.
{"title":"“A wife or friend at e’ery Port”","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Laurie Ellinghausen","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219626","url":null,"abstract":"The “sailor ballads” of the early British Empire employ popular song not only to investigate sailors’ hardships and victories, but to explore the character attributes of seafaring men. This article argues that the range of attitudes and concerns present in these texts signals a larger cultural conversation about these men’s fitness as husbands to the nation’s women, fathers to its children, and members of its communities. Although protoimperialist and mercantilist writers such as John Dee, Robert Hitchcock, and Edward Misselden stressed the social benefits of employing common men in large-scale seafaring projects, the ballads explore the consequences of the common sailor’s presence—and most particularly, his prolonged absence—on the traditional stabilizing structures of family and community. In doing so, the ballads critically examine the potential rewards and consequences of imperial expansion from a terrestrial, local, and communal perspective.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"431-453"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43230240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219602
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, M. Lesser
This article addresses Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, an epic, twenty-canto retelling of Genesis. Scholars have often considered Hutchinson’s poem an inferior version of Paradise Lost insofar as it does not transgress biblical narrative. Attending to the poem’s portrayal of childbearing in relation to seventeenth-century birthing prayers and affect theory, this article demonstrates how Hutchinson’s figuration of the body belies any notion of her poem as “Christian cliché.” The article argues that the political value of Order and Disorder stems not from Hutchinson’s depiction of motherhood as a prototype of self-possessed, liberal political agency, but from her account of affective feeling as unbinding woman from any fixed position or category. Finally, the article shows how Hutchinson’s depiction of childbearing, as an ongoing process rather than a teleological event, parallels her understanding of both poetry and providence.
{"title":"Unbinding the Maternal Body in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, M. Lesser","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219602","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, an epic, twenty-canto retelling of Genesis. Scholars have often considered Hutchinson’s poem an inferior version of Paradise Lost insofar as it does not transgress biblical narrative. Attending to the poem’s portrayal of childbearing in relation to seventeenth-century birthing prayers and affect theory, this article demonstrates how Hutchinson’s figuration of the body belies any notion of her poem as “Christian cliché.” The article argues that the political value of Order and Disorder stems not from Hutchinson’s depiction of motherhood as a prototype of self-possessed, liberal political agency, but from her account of affective feeling as unbinding woman from any fixed position or category. Finally, the article shows how Hutchinson’s depiction of childbearing, as an ongoing process rather than a teleological event, parallels her understanding of both poetry and providence.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"377-402"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41565150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219554
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Johannes Wolf
This article takes a new approach to the conflicts represented in the thirteenth- century saints’ lives of the Katherine Group. Identifying saints and idols as contrasting poles in these conflicts, it argues that the category of sentience is a key distinguisher that is consistently employed to denigrate idols and idolators. Pagan antagonists are systematically identified as nonagential and material; by contrast, the saints communicate divine truth unimpeded and resist attempts to disrupt their highly integrated performances. The category of sentience is shuttled to-and-fro between parties as various antagonists attempt to reduce the saint to the status of an object. While superficially victorious, the saints finally fall prey to the binary logic of hagiography: to triumph over interrogation, torture, and death, the saint ultimately sacrifices her own sentience. This analysis reveals the investments of a medieval theory of sentience with implications for both hagiography at large and the twenty-first-century material turn.
{"title":"An Old Materialism","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Johannes Wolf","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219554","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes a new approach to the conflicts represented in the thirteenth- century saints’ lives of the Katherine Group. Identifying saints and idols as contrasting poles in these conflicts, it argues that the category of sentience is a key distinguisher that is consistently employed to denigrate idols and idolators. Pagan antagonists are systematically identified as nonagential and material; by contrast, the saints communicate divine truth unimpeded and resist attempts to disrupt their highly integrated performances. The category of sentience is shuttled to-and-fro between parties as various antagonists attempt to reduce the saint to the status of an object. While superficially victorious, the saints finally fall prey to the binary logic of hagiography: to triumph over interrogation, torture, and death, the saint ultimately sacrifices her own sentience. This analysis reveals the investments of a medieval theory of sentience with implications for both hagiography at large and the twenty-first-century material turn.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"269-291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47794441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219530
R. Palmen
Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition of shame that adapts and exploits Latin Stoic and eclectic material. This article surveys this largely unexplored Latin tradition (Cicero and Ambrose) and its treatment in later moral-philosophical and pastoral debates (Gregory the Great, Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and William Peraldus). Late antique and medieval Christian authors regard a positive responsiveness to shame as a constructive habit signaling the ability to live a socially harmonious life. The discussion demonstrates the inherent moral value of shame (and other self-reflexive emotions) and the constitutive role of shame for moral agency.
{"title":"Our Inner Custodian","authors":"R. Palmen","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219530","url":null,"abstract":"Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition of shame that adapts and exploits Latin Stoic and eclectic material. This article surveys this largely unexplored Latin tradition (Cicero and Ambrose) and its treatment in later moral-philosophical and pastoral debates (Gregory the Great, Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and William Peraldus). Late antique and medieval Christian authors regard a positive responsiveness to shame as a constructive habit signaling the ability to live a socially harmonious life. The discussion demonstrates the inherent moral value of shame (and other self-reflexive emotions) and the constitutive role of shame for moral agency.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"199-231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48982116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-8219542
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Suzanne M. Yeager
Saewulf’s Relatio de situ Jerusalem is one of the most significant yet understudied pilgrim texts of the twelfth century. Documenting the Jerusalem-bound traveler’s adventures through the medieval Mediterranean, the text is the first extant pilgrim document written immediately after Latin Christian armies seized control of the holy city. This article examines the text’s remarkable interest in autobiography and explores the resonance which crusading, early crusading narrative, Islamic presence, and Mediterranean voyaging had upon the pilgrim genre. This new analysis of Saewulf’s pre-modern self-fashioning is crucial to ways in which literary historians assess pilgrim literature through the valuable anthropological theories advanced by Edith and Victor Turner. As argued here, the status of a militarized Mediterranean in the twelfth century led to a shift in how pilgrims wrote about themselves. Saewulf positioned himself as a pilgrim who is transformed by his vivid exploits, not at the locality of the shrine, but while en route to Jerusalem. This study is an intervention in pilgrim and travel theory, proposing 1104 as a watershed moment in medieval travelers’ self-perception and autobiographical portrayal.
{"title":"Medieval Pilgrimage as Heterotopia","authors":"David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Suzanne M. Yeager","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8219542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8219542","url":null,"abstract":"Saewulf’s Relatio de situ Jerusalem is one of the most significant yet understudied pilgrim texts of the twelfth century. Documenting the Jerusalem-bound traveler’s adventures through the medieval Mediterranean, the text is the first extant pilgrim document written immediately after Latin Christian armies seized control of the holy city. This article examines the text’s remarkable interest in autobiography and explores the resonance which crusading, early crusading narrative, Islamic presence, and Mediterranean voyaging had upon the pilgrim genre. This new analysis of Saewulf’s pre-modern self-fashioning is crucial to ways in which literary historians assess pilgrim literature through the valuable anthropological theories advanced by Edith and Victor Turner. As argued here, the status of a militarized Mediterranean in the twelfth century led to a shift in how pilgrims wrote about themselves. Saewulf positioned himself as a pilgrim who is transformed by his vivid exploits, not at the locality of the shrine, but while en route to Jerusalem. This study is an intervention in pilgrim and travel theory, proposing 1104 as a watershed moment in medieval travelers’ self-perception and autobiographical portrayal.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"233-268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48423570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-7986589
J. McCafferty
St. Brigid is one of three patron saints of Ireland. Venerated for over a millennium as an abbess and ruler, provider of miraculous ale and dairy products, protector of cattle and of people, she has been a constant of Irish folk and religious life. Still referenced by groups as diverse as neopagans, female religious, and abortion rights activists, Brigid has been remolded repeatedly to suit the cultural needs of contemporaries. The arrival of print and the division of western Christendom into Protestant and Catholic confessions created new challenges for those who wanted to remember Brigid. This article delineates the various ways in which her seventh-century hagiography was edited, translated, conflated, and cut in order to render her into a female figure fit for the purposes of a resurgent Tridentine church. The abbess of Kildare was too big to be forgotten yet too culturally awkward to be left unchanged.
{"title":"Brigid of Kildare","authors":"J. McCafferty","doi":"10.1215/10829636-7986589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-7986589","url":null,"abstract":"St. Brigid is one of three patron saints of Ireland. Venerated for over a millennium as an abbess and ruler, provider of miraculous ale and dairy products, protector of cattle and of people, she has been a constant of Irish folk and religious life. Still referenced by groups as diverse as neopagans, female religious, and abortion rights activists, Brigid has been remolded repeatedly to suit the cultural needs of contemporaries. The arrival of print and the division of western Christendom into Protestant and Catholic confessions created new challenges for those who wanted to remember Brigid. This article delineates the various ways in which her seventh-century hagiography was edited, translated, conflated, and cut in order to render her into a female figure fit for the purposes of a resurgent Tridentine church. The abbess of Kildare was too big to be forgotten yet too culturally awkward to be left unchanged.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"50 1","pages":"53-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65998821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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