The Tongue of the Fathers

by Tonwsend, David; Taylor, Andrew; Townsend, David

• ISBN13: 9780812234404
• ISBN10: 0812234405
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Although historians and scholars of vernacular medieval literatures have increasingly focused on constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality, specialists in medieval Latin have been largely isolated from such developments. Much scholarship on medieval Latin has remained grounded in the methodologies of the "old" philology. When readers from other disciplines have looked to Latin texts they have, in turn, used them mostly as benchmarks against which to measure the innovations of the vernacular.The Tongue of the Fathersforges a stronger and more productive relationship between medieval Latin and gender studies. Taylor, Townsend, and their collaborators focus on the representations and constructions of gender and sexual difference in a range of texts emerging from the centers of twelfth-century cultural prestige and power. In chapters on Abelard, Heloise, Bernard Silvestris, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Walter of Chacirc;tillon, they consider, on the one hand, the ways twelfth-century Latin texts constituted Latin as a monologic tongue in support of patriarchy, and, on the other, the sites of resistance offered by the texts to the very ideologies they ostensibly supported.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(13)
DAVID TOWNSEND
ANDREW TAYLOR
A Second Ajax: Peter Abelard and the Violence of Dialectic	14	(21)
ANDREW TAYLOR
Dominus/Ancilla: Rhetorical Subjectivity and Sexual Violence in the Letters of Heloise	35	(20)
MARILYNN DESMOND
Caput a femina, membra a viris: Gender Polemic in Abelard's Letter "On the Authority and Dignity of the Nun's Profession"	55	(25)
ALCUIN BLAMIRES
The Formative Feminine and the Immobility of God: Gender and Cosmogony in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia	80	(22)
CLAIRE FANGER
Scribe quae vides et audis: Hildegard, Her Language, and Her Secretaries	102	(34)
JOAN FERRANTE
Sex and the Single Amazon in Twelfth-Century Latin Epic	136	(20)
DAVID TOWNSEND
The Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs	156	(31)
BRUCE HOLSINGER
Bibliography	187	(18)
List of Contributors	205	(2)
Index	207	(6)
Acknowledgments	213