Abstract
This is a book about pleasure in the movement of the body; it traces the visual, tactile, and kinesthetic pleasures that accompany a consciousness of the body in space. That said, both the bodies and movements discussed in its pages might seem strange; indeed, I have selected them because they are, because their strangeness encourages us to think about body experience beyond the skin of the modern individual. These bodies are the cooperative bodies of monastic communities, the “dead” yet living bodies of anchorites, and the liminal bodies of women at the cusp of the religious/secular divide. All are in some sense, unsettled: they are body “productions” that could change shape either through a strenuous exertion of the will or a lack of mindfulness. Demanding constant enactment, perpetually in motion, they defy easy identification with the fixed categories of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, singular or shared. In doing so, they complicate the history of sexuality (to which this book aims to contribute), even while centering the history of affective desire.
Words are at their most powerful when they compel the body to repeat the movements they suggest.
—Gilles Deleuze
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Notes
Classic studies of affective theology include Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A.H.C. Downes (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940) and
Jean Leclerq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-Historical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).
More recent studies include Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990)
E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991)
and Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995). Affective theology also receives attention in Julia Kristeva’s history of the erotic, Tales of Love (New York: Columbia UP, 1987). Recent publications on Margery Kempe are numerous, a select few include: Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: U of Penn P, 1991)
Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Penn State UP, 1994)
Kathy Lavezzo, “Sobs and Sighs between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175–198; and the chapters on Kempe in Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993) and in Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999).
Important work on the medieval body includes: Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992)
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Natural Philosophy and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993)
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990)
and Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia UP, 1988).
For discussion of medieval marriage and family, see Clarissa Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991)
Michael Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996)
Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989)
David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985); and Carol Neel, ed., Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household and Children (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004). The study of medieval sexuality has also been greatly enhanced by “queer” histories such as those in Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval; Bernadette Brooten’s Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996)
Karma Lochrie’s Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999); and the recent anthology, Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001).
Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1979)
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980)
and James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987).
Other pioneering work on medieval sexuality includes: Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley, 1976); Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979)
Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983); and Pierre Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984).
A comparison of many of these works and their approaches to writing the history of sexuality can be found in Allen Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), pp. 117–137.
For a sense of the influence of Foucault’s work on the study of sexuality more broadly, see: David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1989), and his “Is There a History of Sexuality?” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993); the essays in Pat Caplan, ed., The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987)
and those in Edward Stein, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York: Routledge, 1992).
See also the discussions of psychoanalytic method in Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and the Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001).
See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) and
“Discourse in Dostoevsky,” from his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), pp. 181–269.
See Margery Kempe, The Book of Margey Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford UP, 1940).
See Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) and
Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1982). I also engage in the practice of “symptomatic” reading when analyzing my texts’ relations with their readers. This method follows the conviction that seemingly marginal elements of written works can hold important “clues” about their social context and ideological orientation. For a brilliant discussion of the history of this method in modern critical practice, see Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), pp. xx–xx.
For a discussion of this approach in relation to medieval literature, see Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodem Text (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), pp. 165–181 and xi-xvi.
See, for example, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), pp. 141–147
Carolyn Walker Bynum, fesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982), pp. 7, 142, 157
The Latin text is taken from Sancii Bernardi Opera, Vol. I, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, ed. Jean Leclercq et al. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957), p. 5.
The English translation is from Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works, trans. G.R. Evans, (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 212.
See Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain: 1000–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 101–106, and
Sally Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 94–112, on Cistercian detachment from women’s piety.
Paul Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society” Viator 13 (1982), pp. 399–401 [367–414].
The quoted phrases are from Andrew Talyor, “Into His Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), p. 42.
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© 2006 Lara Farina
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Farina, L. (2006). Introduction. In: Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04931-5_1
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