Late Medieval Spirituality and...

A Panel Discussion
May 3
7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue
English Department Lounge, Room 4406

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, University of Pittsburgh 

"Devotion: Minimum Requirements"

--> In this brief paper I consider how the ‘Revelations’ of the illiterate visionary Ermine de Reims (d. 1396) dramatize the acquisition of minimum requirements of devotional practices by what Jean Gerson termed ‘les simples gens.’ Is a pastoral handbook ‘hidden’ in the midst of Ermine’s ‘Revelations’? And how do demonic attempts at sabotaging Ermine’s devotion help to define the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith and their translation into practice?

Andrew Cole, Princeton University
 “…Substance”
This paper is a start toward answering the questions, “How can we explain Julian of Norwich’s interest in ‘substance’ as a philosophical, theological, and spiritual term? What, if anything, is her relation to the late-medieval scholastic inquiries into substance?”

Kathryn Smith, New York University 

“The Book Within the Book:  Allegorical and Metaphorical Books in Illuminated Manuscripts Made for the Laity”

In this short talk I consider a selection of illuminated religious and devotional manuscripts made c. 1250-1500 for lay owners in which the interrelated notions of the body of Christ as a book, and the book as a mirror of the self, are expressed through innovative visual images and illustrated texts.  These “allegories and metaphors of the book” originated in classical, Hebrew, and early Christian literature and found fulsome expression in monastic writing. The later and late medieval manuscript examples I analyze evince a sophisticated consciousness of these metaphors on the part of the designers and professional artists charged with giving them visual form, as well as the books’ elite, aspirant owners and users.

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Sculpted Signs and Shattered Idols in Illuminated Weltchroniken of the Early Fifteenth Century
Nina Rowe, Fordham University
April 5
7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, English Department Lounge
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406

It is a challenge for art historians to find visual evidence of discomfort with dominant devotional practices in the late Middle Ages. The Church was a key institution with the wealth to commission sculpted and painted images by leading artists, and ecclesiastical works tended to be the ones protected over the centuries and now installed in museum collections. Scholars celebrate the late medieval period as one in which sculptors in particular experimented with daring new formulations that cast Jesus and Mary as emphatically human figures with which one could empathize. But the compassionate veneration such images were intended to inspire veered toward idolatrous practice officially rejected (but often promoted) by the Church. If inquisitorial records of so-called heretics tell us that there were laypeople who sought to distance themselves from devotional engagement with images, can we find art historical evidence of similar dissent? In this paper I argue that illuminated Weltchroniken of the decades around 1400 exhibit unease over contemporary Christian practices of image veneration. In these German vernacular, versified world chronicles, stories from the biblical past were retold to address contemporary concerns of lay city dwellers. I examine passages presenting the story of Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar in two early fifteenth-century Weltchronik manuscripts (New York: NYPL Spencer 38 and Munich: BSB Cgm 250). Analyzing images and texts of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream sculpture and subsequent idolatry, I argue that these manuscripts disclose an urban population scornful of dominant Christian modes of worship.

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Doubt as Emotion in an "Age of Faith":

The Case of The Second Shepherds' Play 

 

Rossell Hope Robbins Memorial Lecture

March 1, 2013, 7:30 p.m.

CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406

Sarah McNamer, Associate Professor

Department of English, Georgetown University

           

This talk participates in a current of recent work that locates forms of Christian doubt in an 'Age of Faith.' It does so by approaching the subject from the point of view of affective experience, as this experience appears to be expressed in and scripted by literary and dramatic texts. Doubt, I suggest, can and should be considered a 'cognitive feeling' or 'intellectual emotion.' These concepts can open up new ways to explore the contours of unbelief prior to Descartes. They can also open up familiar texts: in this case, The Second Shepherd's Play. The heart of this lecture is an extended reading of this, the most beloved and heavily-anthologized of all Middle English plays. This is not, I argue, a simple, harmless, farcical play designed to serve faith -- as religious drama is so often assumed to do; rather, it is a daring experiment in cultivating an experience of radical doubt: doubt in the divinity of Christ, in the scheme of redemption, in the right ordering of the universe. A close reading of the literary qualities of the play -- features such as wordplay, soliloquy, generic swerves, dramatic structure, characterization, and competing aesthetic registers -- suggest that it appears to have been designed to generate radical, affectively-produced, existential doubt. This reading of the play invites a reconsideration of its date; its place in the history of emotion; and the borders of the medieval and the modern.

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Infidels, Hermaphrodites, and Other Animals:
On the Boundaries of the Human in the Middle Ages
Leah De Vun, Rutgers University

Friday, February 1
7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, English Department Lounge
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406

This paper examines hermaphroditism in light of questions about the nature of humanity in the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance. In the late Middle Ages, scholastic natural philosophers – inspired by newly available classical texts – began to construct taxonomies of organisms in which sexual difference played a central role. Scholastics identified the absence of distinct sex, shifting sex, and monstrous genitalia as key characteristics of nonhuman categories of beings, including plants, animals, and demons. The apparent boundaries between male/female and human/nonhuman intersected with other sorts of boundaries: visual art in bestiaries, maps, travel literature, and marginalia indicated that Jews and Muslims too were in some sense hermaphrodites. Sexual difference became a way to distinguish between not only humans and non-humans, but also Christians and non-Christians and Europeans and non-Europeans. If humans were distinct from animals inasmuch as they had only two sexes, then humans who displayed multiple sexes or the attributes of multiple sexes approached the condition of beasts and therefore lost the subjectivity and dignity unique to humanity. I argue that in texts and images from the twelfth to the fifteenth century hermaphrodites operate as pivotal figures that reinforced not only sexual, but also religious and racial difference. 

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Lists, Numeracy, and the Culture of Reckoning in Late Medieval England

Martha Rust, New York University

 
Friday, December 7
7:30 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue
ROOM 9204 (*note change from our usual room)

Lists, Numeracy, and the Culture of Reckoning in Late-Medieval England

Typifying late-medieval interest in minute details of the Passion, a Middle English poem advises readers that if they would worship “syngerly” every drop of blood Christ shed during the crucifixion, they should say one hundred Pater Nosters every day for fifteen years. The devotional practice recommended in this and many other short works in Middle English would seem also to exemplify a phenomenon Thomas Lentes has labeled “counting piety” since they entail accounting for great quantities of all manner of things--from Pater Nosters, to drops of blood, to wounds, and more. However, when we stop and ask ourselves what techniques such accounting might have entailed, it quickly becomes clear that a facility with counting as we customarily think of it--a matter of assigning in ordinal sequence one number to each object in a collection in order to determine how many objects are present--would not have been necessary for carrying out these devotions. The words ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred would not have been uttered as a practitioner finished her daily quota of a hundred Pater Nosters, for instance; instead, by using a rosary, she would have drawn upon an alternative mathematical competency, one that measures quantities by referencing the size of a set rather than the sequence of ordinal numbers. Since finding equivalence by means of establishing a one-to-one correspondence between two sets is its fundamental operation, I call this alternative method of counting “reckoning,” drawing upon two of the many senses of “reckoning” in Middle English: “settling accounts” and “enumerating”--or “listing.” As I show in this paper, a close look at written lists reveals that they present the basic materials for this method of counting and thus call upon not only literacy but a kind of numeracy as well--that is, a facility with “reckoning” a quantity of items rather than counting them. A recognition of the verbal and pseudo-numerical aspects of written lists makes way for the identification of works that activate both: a mode of composition I term a poetics of reckoning.

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