Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts

by Farmer, Sharon; Rosenwein, Barbara H.

• ISBN13: 9780801486562
• ISBN10: 0801486564
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, postmodern 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 In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays -- all hitherto unpublished -- that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship.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

Author Biography

Sharon Farmer is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor of History, Loyola University, Chicago

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction	1	(18)
Sharon Farmer
Barbara H. Rosenwein
Part 1: New Paradigms, Traditional Tools
Monastic Memory and the Mutation of the Year Thousand	19	(18)
Patrick J. Geary
Perennial Prayer at Agaune	37	(20)
Barbara H. Rosenwein
Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes in the Twelfth-Century Scriptorium	57	(22)
Alison I. Beach
Part 2: Texts and Contexts
Sulmona Society and the Miracles of Peter of Morrone	79	(18)
Robert Brentano
Female Religious Experience and Society in Thirteenth-Century Italy	97	(26)
Luigi Pellegrini
Saints and Angry Neighbors: The Politics of Cursing in Irish Hagiography	123	(30)
Lisa M. Bitel
Part 3: Rethinking Binaries
The Beggar's Body: Intersections of Gender and Social Status in High Medieval Paris	153	(19)
Sharon Farmer
The Leper's Kiss	172	(17)
Catherine Peyroux
The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques, and Temples in Medieval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico	189	(31)
Amy G. Remensnyder
Saints, Heretics, and Fire: Finding Meaning through the Ordeal	220	(19)
Thomas Head
Contributors	239	(4)
Index	243