Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ...And women His humanity A little fillip of Caroline Walker Bynum, a historian I fangirl relentlessly. This is all tied into the thesis, which will, some day, be complete. Probably. "Thus, to men, women was a marked category, an exception to the generalization homo, a reversal or ordinary condition. 'To become woman' was an obvious image of renunciation and conversion. Moreover, as I have argued elsewehre, male writers assumed that women would undergo reversals too. Male biographers not only labeled women as weak far more frequently than women described themselves in such terms, they also told women's stories as stories of radical conversion and urged women to become virile, masculine, in rising to God. Late medieval men, like those of the patristic period, were titillated and made anxious by stories (some of which were clearly fabricated) of women masquerading as men in order to enter monestaries. Male biographers (who also, somewhat inconsistently, advised women to choose female models) felt that saintly women must be elevated or authenticated by male qualities. For example, when Raymond of Capua worried about the authenticity of Catherine of Siena's visions, he received a vision from God in which Catherine's face changed into the face of a bearded man. (Raymond understood the bearded man to be Christ.) But women themselves did not, by and large, see women as a marked category, nor did they worry about themselves as exceptions or special cases of the general category 'humanity.' Women did not assume that their religious progress involved 'becoming male.' Women, of course, described themselves in female images. Moreover, religious women - wherther nuns, beguines, tertiaries or laywomen without ostensible affiliation to any order - adobted practices (such as fasting, chastity, white garments, uncontrolled weeping) that distinguished them from those in worldly roles. But female writers often seem, by woman, ot have meant human being. And conversion or reversal was a less central theme in women's spirituality then in men's. ... ...women did not have a strong sense of binary opposites grouped around the male/female contrast. They did not associate specific personality characteristics - such as authority, rationality, nurture, emotion - with one or the other sex. Although they made use of the conventions of vernacular love poetry to write of themselves as brides, they also slipped easily into male imagery where no reversal or even gender-specific meaning was implied. Hadewijch saw the soul sometimes as a knight seeking his lady, sometimes as a bride reaching her lover. to Julian of Norwich, the soul that is saved and cared for by mother God is a genderless 'child.' (The pronoun it rather than he or she is used in the Middle English.) --From Fragmentation and Redemption, Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion by Caroline Walker Bynum 4:29 p.m. - 2005-02-25 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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