The Powers of the Holy explores ways in which the language and
images of Christian devotion in late fourteenth-century England
were inextricably bound up with a variety of social and political
relations. Addressing a wide range of texts, David Aers and Lynn
Staley analyze the complex, shifting, and often extremely subtle
forms in which writers responded to this situation.
Aers concentrates on representations of the humanity of Christ.
He unfolds the spiritual and political implications of different
versions of the humanity of Christ composed in this period,
addressing major issues of gender and power introduced into the
field by Caroline Walker Bynum and others. He considers
conventional devotional texts, Wycliffite writings, Langland's
Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's Revelation. Staley focuses
on Julian of Norwich and Geoffrey Chaucer, two very different minds
working both within and against dominant conventions of
representations and power. Though not usually paired, both writers
signal their knowing participation in the contemporary debate about
power and authority, a debate that was conducted using the language
of sanctity.
The Powers of the Holy shows how and why medieval attempts to
deal with an emerging crisis in the legitimization of authority (in
most domains) interacted with conflicting versions of Christian
sanctity. Simultaneously it shows just how, and why, matters that
were distinctively spiritual could be politicized. Future readings
of the period will undoubtedly follow this book's cultivation of
methodologies that avoid any splitting apart of the study of
devotion and devotional texts, the study of the politics of
ecclesiastical and secular institutions, and the study of
gender.
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