Receivers and Deceivers

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-217
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Religious Lives ◽  
Holy Women

Chapter 5 considers the religious trajectories of female stigmatics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some holy women met with opposition but nonetheless succeeded in their religious lives, while others who claimed stigmatic status had their reputations destroyed. Theologians like Johannes Nider (d. 1438) doubted and criticized the idea of women as bearers of Christ’s wounds. Despite the hostile positions put forward by Nider and other-like minded theologians, renowned female stigmatics such as Magdalena Beutler (d. 1458) and Osanna of Mantua (d. 1505) navigated their religious careers effectively through precarious waters. However, stigmatics like Chiara Bugni (d. 1514) and Lucia Brocadelli (d. 1544) were not able to maintain their influential positions as bearers of Christ’s wounds.

The Gender Troubles of Feofan Prokopovich

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 198-228
Author(s):  
Gary Marker
Keyword(s):  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Dual Codes ◽  
Minimalist Approach ◽  
Holy Women ◽  
Gender Trouble

Abstract This essay constitutes a close reading of the works of Feofan Prokopovich that touch upon gender and womanhood. Interpretively it is informed by Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble, specifically by her model of gender-as-performance. Prokopovich’s writings conveyed a negative characterization of holy women and Russian women of power, a combination of glaring silences and Scholastic dual codes that in toto denied the association of womanhood with glory or wisdom. In this he stood apart from other East Slavic Orthodox homilists of his day, even though they too invariably associated virtue with masculinity (muzhestvo). For Prokopovich, wisdom, strength, constancy, etc., were innately masculine. Women, by contrast, were weak, inconstant, non-rational, and guided by emotion. His sermons nominally in praise of Catherine I and Anna Ioannovna were suffused with narrative gestures that, to those attuned to the nuances of Scholastic rhetoric, ran entirely counter to their nominal message. Several panegyrics to Anna, for example, made no mention of her at all, a practice in sharp contrast to his sermons to male rulers, which typically placed the honoree firmly in the foreground. Even more startling is his singularly minimalist approach to Mary, for whom he composed almost no sermons and whose presence he barely mentioned in tracts where one would have expected otherwise. This essay concludes that this attitude reflected both his personal preferences and influence that Protestant Pietism had on his thinking.

WOMEN'S MAWLID PERFORMANCES IN SANAA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF “POPULAR ISLAM”

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Holmes Katz
Keyword(s):  
Spirit Possession ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Great Cost ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
The Relationship

It has long been recognized that much of the richness of Muslim women's ritual lives has been found outside of both the mosque and the “five pillars of Islam,” in a wide set of devotional practices that have met with varying degrees of affirmation and censure from male religious scholars. This recognition has given rise to a valuable literature on such practices as shrine visitation, spirit-possession rituals, and Twelver Shiʿi women's domestic ceremonies. The prevalence of such noncanonical rituals in Muslim women's lives, although waning in many parts of the contemporary world, raises questions about the relationship between women's religious practices and the constitution of Islamic orthodoxies. Have women, often given lesser access to mosque-based and canonical rituals, historically resorted to autonomous and rewarding religious practices that are, nevertheless, fated to be marginalized in the male-dominated construction of Islamic normativity—a normativity that women may ultimately internalize and master only at great cost to their religious lives?

Canadian and American Religion Redux: Revisiting America’s Religious Exceptionalism and Persistence Compared to Canada

2021 ◽  
pp. 000842982110042
Author(s):  
Alastair Hay
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Welfare State

Two core lines of argument presently define our understanding of why Christianity’s historical influence continues to persist in the lives of Americans to a degree not observed in Canada (despite the recent loss of religious affiliation in both countries). These are: 1) changes in the functional dominance of social systems (i.e. shifts to the welfare state in Canada) and 2) important foundational, cultural differences between Canada and America. Using a historiographic approach (coupled with quantitative research conducted in Canada and the US), this article argues that one less well-recognized factor also deserves our attention: Charles Taylor’s observation that American religious culture was primed for the Age of Authenticity. In this article I argue that Taylor was probably right. Over and above the well-established individualistic character of the religious lives of Americans is a related, but important, additional effect—the sanctioning of the ‘this-worldly’ potential of the individual life from within its religious institutions. It is this aspect of America’s religious exceptionalism, I argue, that has also helped to render the religious lives of Americans less vulnerable to – but not immune from – the watershed effects of the sixties compared to Christianity in Canada.

Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Holy Women ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Mary Of Egypt ◽  
The Middle Ages

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.

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