Full Description
This collection brings together two flourishing areas of medieval scholarship: gender and religion. It examines gender-specific religious practices and contends that the pursuit of holiness can destabilise binary gender itself. Though saints may be classified as masculine or feminine, holiness may also cut across gender divisions and demand a break from normally gendered behaviour. This work of interdisciplinary cultural history includes contributions from historians, art historians and literary critics and will be of interest not only to medievalists, but also to students of religion and gender in any period.
Contents
Introduction: Gender and Holiness: Performance and representation in the later Middle Ages 1. 'The Law of Sin that is in my Members': Problem of male embodiment 2. The Role of Patronage and Audience in the Cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch 3. Virginial Effects: Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 4. Pain, Torture and Death in the Huntington Library 5. St George as a Virgin Martyr 6. Becoming a Virgin King: Richard II and Edward the Confessor 7. Female Piety and Impiety: Selected images of women in wall paintings in England after 1300 8. Staging Conversion: The Digby Saint plays and The Book of Margery Kempe 9. Gendering Charity in Medieval Hagiography 10. Ecce Homo
