Abstract
Augustine is not alone in conceiving of God as mother. Similar images of the deity reappear in many twelfth-century Cistercian texts, when, as Caroline Walker Bynum demonstrates, writers wish to express their pious withdrawal from “the world” and dependence on God alone.2 In Professor Bynum’s analysis, maternal imagery articulates “a new sense of God, which stresses his [sic] creative power, his love, and his presence in the physical body of Christ and in the flesh and blood of the eucharist.”3 Gazing on the body of Christ, twelfth-century Cistercians see his likeness to humans his vulnerable infancy, his capacity to bleed and feel pain. Their focus on Christ’s human body creates positive possibilities for real and imagined women, not only stigmatized as the flesh, but also redeemed through the flesh. Professor Bynum accordingly associates affective Cistercian devotion with a “feminization of religious language,” apparent not only in images of God as nurturing mother, but also in increased devotion to feminine figures (saints, the Virgin), and in praise for stereotypically feminine characteristics (weakness, humility, tears).4 The focus on affect encourages representations of the feminine in religion mother deity, mother church, mother saint, mother abbot and enhances the value of “feminine” virtues such as mercy, tenderness, and love.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Note
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 82.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 1–21, 110–69.
I take the phrase and inspiration from Steven Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett Sullivan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 71–89.
Pseudo-Bede, In Matthaei Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 14; Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected out of the Fathers by St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. John Henry Newman, 4 vols. (Southampton: St. Austin Press, 1997), 1: 82 (henceforth Commentary on the Four Gospels).
See, e.g., Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983): 3–27
John Gilchrist, “The Perceptions of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades,” Jewish History 3 (1988): 9–24
Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
John A. Watt, “Jews and Christians in the Gregorian Decretals,” Studies in Church History 29 (1992): 93–105
Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999)
Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation oj Jews and Judaism in the “Bible moralisèe” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
George Bornstein, citing Tzvetan Todorov, “T. S. Eliot and the Real World,” Michigan Quarterly Review 36 (1997): 499.
I agree with Kenneth R. Stow that medieval anti-Semitism derives from interactions of church and state, not from the church alone: Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), e.g., 4–5.
See also the essays collected in Anna Sapir Abulafia, ed., Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
“Emitte agnum, Domine,” 67. The biblical verse applies to Innocents’ Day, but this is the responsory for All Saints: see Brockett, “Modal and Motivic Coherence,” in The Fleury Playbook, ed. Campbell and Davidson, 60, n. 19. Again, preexisting music is given new meaning in the play. For the identification of the 144,000 with Christian martyrs, see C. Clifford Flanigan, “Rachel and Her Children: From Biblical Text to Music Drama,” in Metamorphoses and the Arts: Proceedings of the Second Lilly Conference, ed. Breon Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 39–40; Boynton, “Performative Exegesis,” 45–46, 50.
John Y. B. Hood’s apt description, Aquinas and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 74; for contradictions in the Gloss, see 73; for dominant influences on Aquinas, see 1–18, 56, 73.
For the invention of supersessionism, see Sarah Pearce, “Attitudes of Contempt: Christian Anti-Judaism and the Bible,” in Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt: Studies in Jewish—Non-Jewish Relations, ed. Siân Jones, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Pearce (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), 59–68.
See Terrence G. Kardong, trans., Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996)
“De Humilitate,” 129–68. I am indebted to two studies of this aspect of the Rule: Dom Cuthbert Butler, Benedictine Monachism: Studies in Benedictine Life and Rule (1924; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Speculum Historiale; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), 46–57; and Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 59–81.
Schlauch, “Allegory of Church and Synagogue,” Speculum 14 (1939): 448–64.
Michael Camille extends the image patterns: The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 175–80.
P. Alphandèry and A. Dupront (1959) and H. E. Mayer (1972), as reported by Peter Raedts, “The Children’s Crusade of 1212,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 281–82.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 68.
C. Clifford Flanigan, “The Liturgical Context of the Quem Queritis Trope,” Comparative Drama 8 (1974): 60.
McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth,” Speculum 72 (1997): 739.
I do not mean to exclude the influence of other discourses: see, e.g., Maureen Bolton, “Anti-Jewish Attitudes in Anglo-Norman Religious Texts: Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Christian Attitudes toward the Jews in the Middle Ages, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Routledge, 2007), 151–65.
Copyright information
© 2010 Theresa Tinkle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tinkle, T. (2010). Affective Exegesis in the Fleury Slaughter of Innocents . In: Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112032_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112032_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28888-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11203-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)