Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih, eds., Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe. Routledge, 2002
Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: Riches and Salih introduce this collection with a story from Gerald of Wales's Life of St. Gilbert of Sempringham.In this account, St. Gilbert suppresses carnal desire in one of his nuns by exposing his aged, withered, and scabcovered body to the nuns' gaze while preaching against lust combining "preaching and striptease" to effect.Riches and Salih's discussion of this story acknowledges one of the primary conundrums of the study of gender and religion in the Middle Ages: "it is impossible to discuss this kind of story with any degree of certainty, given the modern commentator's distance in time and space in addition to the insurmountable problem of the impossibility of truly accessing another person's subjective experience" [emphasis mine] (1).Each author in this collection of scholarly essays, then, grapples with the impossible-to tra'uscend time, space, and experience in order to comprehend "the relationship between gender and religious culture in particular, as well as medieval understandings of belief systems in general" while also acknowledging that '''male' and 'female' are not constants" through time and space (1).
Source: Medieval Feminist Forum
Author: Julie Chappell
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W83012387