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References
Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987);The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, Lectures on the History of Religions sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, New Series, 15 (New York; Columbia University Press, 1995). The essays contained in Bynum'sFragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991) are linked to the concerns of both these monographs.
Originally published in 1977, it was reprinted in expanded form in a collection to which it gives its name: Caroline Walker Bynum,Jesus as Mother. Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987).
Bynum's approach makes her, at least to some extent, a literary critic. Yet, despite her determination to look at language carefully, she lacks the finest critics' sensitivity to linguistic specificity—a defect which is indicated by the failure ever to give more than the occasional word in the original language. To see how material and themes not unlike Bynum's are handled by a genuinely literary scholar, it is interesting to compare Peter Dronke'sImagination in the Late Pagan and Early Christian World. The First Nine Centuries A.D. (Florence: SISMEL—Edizioni del Galluzzo 2003), especially Chapter 4 on earthly paradises.
Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), pp. 1–33.
Ibid.Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), p. 29.
For example, three of the essays collected inFragmentation and Redemption are explicitly designed to ‘use major twentieth-century intellectual figures as a means to better understand late medieval religion’ (p. 14): the anthropologist Victor Turner in “Women's Stories, Women's Symbols’, the sociologists Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch in ‘The Mysticism and Asceticism of Medieval Women’ and the art-historian Leo Steinberg in ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages’.
See J.M.M.H. Thijssen and H.A.G. Braakhuis (eds.),The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle's ‘De generatione et corruptione’: Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern, Studia artistarum 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999).
See Christopher J. Martin, “The Logic of Growth: Twelfth-Century Nominalists and the Development of Theories of the Incarnation’,Medieval Philosophy and Theology 7 (1988), pp. 1–15.
Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 380–93.
The comment was made by Pierre Alféri, who has written on William of Ockham. It is quoted by Alain de Libera (Penser au moyen âge [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991], p. 56), who is one of the small band of specialists in medieval philosophy to have faced up and reacted to the challenge this comment presents.
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Marenbon, J. The metamorphoses of Caroline Walker Bynum. Int class trad 11, 272–280 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02720037
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02720037