From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to
rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination
with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider
the continuity - both of argument and of approach - that underlies
them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first
two address a question that was more in the forefront of
scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of
differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a
method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for
spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who
live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions
about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method
to the broader question of differences between regular canons and
monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of
monk - the Cistercians - and other religious groups, monastic and
nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some
of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of
canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as
example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious
life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with
affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks,
elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to
provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and
to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I
delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises
questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as
academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase
of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males?
Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female
spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay
differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather
than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of
many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many
writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier
studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of
the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender
that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century
Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing
twelfth - and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an
approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four
essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone
who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and
interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here.
For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval
spirituality that is not now - and perhaps has never been -
dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an
interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that
runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay
spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a
discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short
sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my
specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In
providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval
religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute
a general history nor that my method should replace that of social,
institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of
Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the
thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not
tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts
in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not
found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on
comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is
peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to
call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high
Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar
questions.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
