Abstract
The Bible both affirms and contests gender hierarchy. Women are to keep silent in the church and to attend under a veil; for man is the head of woman, as Christ is head of the church. A woman’s speech violates divine order. Christ nonetheless appears after his resurrection first to a woman, making her his apostle to the apostles, using her voice to spread his word. Scripture presents women in positions of authority not only as a disruption of ordained social order, but also as the basis of a new order that sets the church apart from dominant culture. As medieval exegetes attempt to decipher scripture’s meanings for their own lives, they confront many such contradictions, and they make choices about which passages to privilege, which to accept literally, and which to read for signs of hidden meanings. Through exegesis, writers create the Bible’s literary and theological unity out of disparate historical documents. In the process, they normalize ideologies of gender and power for the church.
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Note
See Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 32–97
Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz, ed., Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
Richard Valantasis, “Constructions of Power in Asceticism, ” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 775–821. Persistent medieval challenges to gender dichotomy have led scholars to conceptualize a “third gender,” for which see Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” in Gender and Christianity, ed. Bitel and Lifshitz, 34–51.
See, e.g., E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)
F. M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas oj the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference frotn Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
E.g., Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983; New York: Crossroad, 1987)
Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)
Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984)
Luise Schottroff, Silvia Schroer, and Marie-Theres Wacker, Feminist Interpretation: The Bible in Women’s Perspective, trans. Martin and Barbara Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998)
Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, Reading Judas: The Gospel oj Judas and the Shaping oj Christianity (New York: Viking, 2007).
Substantively similar conclusions are of course not exclusive to feminists: see, e.g., Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
For a challenging development of this idea, see Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Penner, “Mastering the Tools or Retooling the Masters? The Legacy of Historical-Critical Discourse,” in Her Master’s Tools? Feminist and Postcolonial Engagements of Historical-Critical Discourse, ed. Vander Stichele and Penner (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1–29.
See Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9–14.
See the seminal work of Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); and her The Gospels in the Schools, c. 1100-c. 1280 (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1985). For an excellent survey of her influence, see R. W. Southern, “Beryl Smalley and the Place of the Bible in Medieval Studies, 1927–84,” in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory oj Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical Historical Society, 1985), 1–16.
See, e.g., Ann W. Astell, The Song of Sons in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 25–72
Philip D. W. Krey and Lesley Smith, eds., Nicholas oj Lyra: The Senses oj Scripture (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 21–57
Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight oj Unbelievers: Nicholas oj Lyra and Christian Reading oj Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
A mischievous revision of Bernard Cerquiglini, “meaning was to be found everywhere, and its origin was nowhere”: In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 33. Cerquiglini exempts scripture from the “joyful excess” he finds in medieval variants.
For a theological view of the subject, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Volume 1: The Four Senses oj Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1998)
Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Volume 2: The Four Senses oj Scripture, trans. E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 2000).
“The Order of Discourse,” trans. Ian McLeod, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston, London, Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 58.
For the contradictions and discontinuities of scripture, see Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1995); and Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible, 17–53. For medieval attitudes, see Smalley on Carolingian exegesis, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 37–46.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 145. Berlinerblau develops an accessible, cogent account of exegesis as supplementation: The Secular Bible, 62–68. Eric Jager likewise points out that exegetes’ attempts to “ ‘fill in the lacunae’ in the scriptural narrative inevitably drew attention to the gaps in the text,” The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 33.
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© 2010 Theresa Tinkle
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Tinkle, T. (2010). Women on Top in Medieval Exegesis. In: Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112032_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112032_1
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