Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, post-modern critical theory, and gender studies to understand the social meanings of medieval religious movements, practices, figures, and cults. In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays--all hitherto unpublished--that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship.
Some of these essays re-envision the professionals of religion: the monks and nuns who carried out crucial social functions as mediators between living and dead, repositories for social memory, and loci of vicarious piety. In their religious life these people embodied an image of the society that produced them. Other contributions focus on social categories, usually expressed as dichotomies: male/female, insider/outsider, saint/outcast. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts is the first book to show the interaction of seemingly antithetical groups of medieval people and the ways in which they were defined by, as well as against, each other. All of the essays, taken together, form a tribute to Lester K. Little, pioneer in the study of religion in medieval society.
Table of Contents
Monastic memory and the mutation of the year thousand / Patrick J. Geary -- Perennial prayer at Agaune / Barbara H. Rsenwein -- Claustration and collaboration between the sexes in the twelfth-century scriptorium / Alison I. Beach -- Sulmona society and the miracles of Peter of Morrone / Robert Brentano -- Female religious experience and society in thirteenth-century Italy / Luigi Pellegrini -- Saints and angry neighbors: the politics of cursing in Irish hagiography / Lisa M. Bitel -- The beggar's body: intersections of gender and social status in high medieval Paris / Sharon Farmer -- The leper's kiss / Catherine Peyroux -- The colonization of sacred architecture: the Virgin Mary, mosques, and temples in medieval Spain and early sixteenth-century Mexico / Amy G. Remensnyder -- Saints, heretics, and fire: finding meaning through the ordeal / Thomas Head.