...) facilitated creativity.11 Moreover, the womb was quite emphatically not an emblem of a closed subjectivity. 12 As Maus notes, childbirth renders the womb a paradigm of permeability. 13 The very metaphor that male poets champion for its impermeable interiority is, simultaneously, the most permeable part...

...Allison Adair Alberts This essay argues that the South English Legendary 's life of Saint Margaret, patron saint of childbirth, reflects the devotional practice of imitatio Christi when it represents labor pains not as the shameful curse of Eve but as a miraculous moment in which the mother...

... pp.; 12 illus. $35.00. Jordan, Mark D. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1997) 1998. x, 190 pp. Paper $14.00. McMullan, Gordon, ed. Renaissance...

... lengthwise rather than widthwise, bordered on either side with decorated bands, mimics a girdle and requires the reader to unwrap the entire scroll in order to read the prayer and instruction. 37 In medieval Marian theology, the girdle was revered as a relic and had a history (considered below) involving...

... major studies of the Jovinianist controversy have appeared, and both of these have been devoted to a consideration of Jovinian’s theology. 6 Little attention has been paid to the responses of Jovinian’s opponents and to their role in deŽning Jovinian as “heretic. ” Three Western churchmen...

.... The second Trotula text, the De curis mulierum, uses a form of secre- tum twice. In the first instance, the author (who, as I will argue elsewhere, speaks in a female voice to a female audience) is discussing lesions of the vagina and perineum that occur in childbirth because...

... (the lying-in period following childbirth), she had gone in the evening to a sermon. She had asked a poor woman, Barbara, the widow of Hanns Angels, to watch over the child. She had ordered Barbara not to lift the child up out of the crib, but to leave it lying. During this time, Anna Müller had come...

... the surrounding forest shaped sacred objects in and around the rural healing chapel. The ecological characteristics of healing waters intersected with understandings of the salvific theology of the blood of Christ; the hewn ecology of the oak jubé or rood screen framed the ontological complexity of Christ’s human...

... 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 Middle English mystery plays theology knowledge clerical learning sensory experience Handling Knowledge: Holy Bodies in the Middle English Mystery Plays H. M. Cushman Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts In the climax of the N-T­ own and Chester...

... Queen’s College, CUNY Flushing, New York Leprosy in medieval Europe was a symbolically charged phenomenon that generated complex and often contradictory responses from medical science, theology, and popular culture. Although incidences of leprosy were negli- gible...

... died in childbirth with her fourth child at the age of thirty-­seven, Il merito is the final work of a woman who may be thought of as one of Italy’s first feminist theorists. Of the seven women who take part in a day-­long dialogue about the value of women, the most vocal, and most critical...

... corporis humani in utero, an attempt to recon- cile observation-based Galenic medicine with the more abstract Aristote- lian principles governing university theology. In Galen, the female produces  a seed displaying an active function in generation similar to that of the male seed. In Aristotle...

... and laborious sort of inquirers into truth, but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness” (140). According to Bacon, true knowledge will be found by “labor” rather than idolatrous love, an association between productive work and childbirth that evokes Bacon’s...

... of heterosexual desire—perhaps even confirms antifeminist expectations of the danger of feminine sexuality even as it celebrates it—and the second endorses women’s participation in a feast that authorized the ritual of churching that they, in imitation of Mary, underwent after childbirth. Virgin martyr plays...