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Introduction
Roberta Magnani 
A Cultural History of Women in Christianity: The Middle Ages (1000-1400)
Swansea University Author:
Roberta Magnani
Abstract
In the five hundred years covered by this volume, women in Christian Europe saw their agency progressively curtailed by hegemonic scholastic discourses aimed at controlling femininity by trapping it in stifling binaries (Eve/Mary; body/soul; corruption/salvation etc.). Building on apostolic and patr...
| Published in: | A Cultural History of Women in Christianity: The Middle Ages (1000-1400) |
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| ISBN: | 9781032080802 |
| Published: |
London and New York
Routledge
2024
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa31700 |
| Abstract: |
In the five hundred years covered by this volume, women in Christian Europe saw their agency progressively curtailed by hegemonic scholastic discourses aimed at controlling femininity by trapping it in stifling binaries (Eve/Mary; body/soul; corruption/salvation etc.). Building on apostolic and patristic authorities, the twelfth-century re-centring of Aristotelian philosophy and its misogynistic dualisms consolidated the subordination of women as matter, or corporeal beings, permeable to physical and moral malady. It was, however, women’s somatic spirituality which at the end of the Middle Ages, with the burgeoning of affective modes of piety, afforded them spaces of authority in the Church and society. Women’s alignment with the suffering of Christ on the Cross and with the salvific motherhood of Mary troubled the binaries designed to subjugate them. This introduction provides an exploration of women’s devotional and cultural authority, and polyvocality, through a consideration of their ontology, modes of devotion, discretio spirituum, mysticism, affective piety, and the discourses of medicine and religion. |
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| Keywords: |
Medieval History 400-1500, Women's & Gender History, Religion, Christianity, Religious History, History, Humanities |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |