Monastic Narrative Practices

2020 ◽  
pp. 371-387
Author(s):  
Katherine Allen Smith
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Institutional Identity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Textual Communities ◽  
Narrative Functions ◽  
Textual Basis ◽  
Devotional Life ◽  
And Performance

Stories comprised the very fabric of devotional life and institutional identity in medieval European monasteries. The monastic habitus encouraged the reading, glossing, composition, and performance of many different kinds of narratives, and the religious men and women who took these tasks to heart became, in a sense, living books. This chapter describes three fundamental ways in which narratives shaped the medieval monastic experience in the Latin West: first, by promoting particular models of holiness; second, by creating a textual basis for coherent, resilient communal identities; and third, by defining boundaries, albeit flexible and permeable ones, between religious communities and the outside world. Each of these narrative functions represents a rich vein of recent scholarship on medieval monasteries as devotional and textual communities.

scholarly journals Weavers & Warriors? Gender and Online Identity in 1997 and 2007 V1.0

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Ruane
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Investigation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Internet Technology ◽  
Online Identity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Online Interactions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Active Exploration

In 1997 the Internet was seen by many as a tool for radical reinterpretation of physicality and gender. Cybertheorists predicted we would leave our bodies behind and interact online as disembodied minds, and that the technology would reshape the way we saw ourselves. However, physicality has proved to be an inextricable part of all our interactions. Changing Internet technology has allowed Net users to find a myriad ways to perform and express their gender online. In this paper I consider attitudes to gender on the Net in 1997, when the main concerns were the imbalance between men and women online and whether it was possible or desirable to bring the body into online interactions. In much of the discourse surrounding gender online, a simple binary was assumed to exist. I go on to consider the extent to which those attitudes have changed today. Through my own experience of setting up a women’s community on Livejournal, and my observations of a men’s community set up in response, I conclude that though traditional attitudes to gender have largely translated to the Net and the binary is still the default view, some shifts have occurred. For example, between 1997 and today there seems to have been a fundamental change in perceptions of women’s attitudes to adversarial debate, and an increase in awareness of genders beyond the binary. In addition, experience and preliminary investigation lead me toward a hypothesis that today’s female-identified Net users are engaged in more conscious and active exploration and performance of their gender online than male-identified users are.

scholarly journals Choice of Pole and Ski Lengths Among Elite Cross-Country Skiers: The Influence of Sex and Performance Level

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per-Øyvind Torvik ◽  
Roland van den Tillaar ◽  
Øyvind Sandbakk
Keyword(s):  
Body Height ◽  
Sprint Performance ◽  
Performance Level ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Secondary Purpose ◽  
Double Poling ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
And Performance

Cross-country (XC) skiers employ whole-body exercise to generate speed through poles and skis. The choice of optimal pole and ski lengths are therefore of high importance. The aim of this study was to document pole and ski lengths among elite male and female cross-country skiers in the classical and skating styles and to investigate sex differences in body-height-normalized pole and ski lengths. Our secondary purpose was to correlate body-height-normalized pole and ski lengths with performance level within both sexes. In total, Norwegian men and women (n = 87 and 36, respectively), participating in the Norwegian XC championship 2020, were investigated. Most athletes used poles close to the length allowed by the International Ski Federation (FIS) in the classical style among both sexes, with men using slightly longer poles than women (p < 0.05). Body-height-normalized pole lengths in skating were similar in men and women (around 90% of body height). Women used relatively longer ski lengths than men in both styles (p < 0.05). Women showed moderate correlations (r = 0.43, p < 0.05) between body-height-normalized pole lengths and sprint performance. Male and female cross-country skiers use as long classical ski poles as possible within the current regulations, while they use skating poles similar to recommendations given by the industry. The fact that men use longer body-height-normalized poles than women, where there is a correlation between pole length and sprint performance, indicate that faster women are able to better utilize the potential of using longer poles when double-poling. However, while women use relatively longer skis than men, no correlation with performance occurred for any of the sexes.

Voices of Thunder

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-83
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
David Walker ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Maria Stewart

This chapter accounts for the centrality of nineteenth-century black oral culture to the development of the essay as a distinct African American literary genre. The author illustrates how the sermons and orations of nineteenth-century men and women such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Harper, and Fredrick Douglass laid the foundation for the African American essay. It is shown how these authors combined accounts of their personal experience with traditions of oral performance. Because the line between the spoken and written word was blurred by nineteenth-century conventions, these authors blended various rhetorical and performance strategies to shape the art of the essay. In doing so, these writers became “voices of thunder.”The essayists discussed in this chapter used biblical references and appropriated democratic discourse to advance anti-slavery agendas. They appropriated the rhetoric of the founding documents of the American republic and remade them into the rhetoric of counterrevolution. Their works emphasized the material realities of life in America for blacks, both enslaved and free. Their expressions of freedom, and the rhetorical strategies they modelled informed the work of their literary descendants.

scholarly journals Adhiyajña: Towards a Performance Grammar of the Vedas

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Smith
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Performance Context ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Reference ◽  
A Performance

Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts. This article attempts to theorize how one might construct an alternative to modern conceptualizations of “the poem” that more closely appropriates the conceptualization of textuality in the Rigveda, an anthology of 1028 sūktas “well-spoken (texts)” that represents the oldest religious literature in South Asia. In order to understand what these texts are and what they were expected to do, this article examines the techniques by which the Rigveda refers to itself, to its performer, to its audience, and to the occasion of its performance. In so doing, this article theorizes a “performance grammar” comprising three axes of textual self-reference (spatial, temporal, and personal); these axes of reference constitute a scene of performance populated by rhetorically constructed speakers and listeners. This performance narrative, called here the adhiyajña level, frames the mythological narratives of the text. By examining the relationship between mythological narrative and performance narrative, we can better understand the purpose of performing a text and thus what kind of an entity Rigvedic “texts” really are. While this article proposes a rubric specifically for the Rigvedic context, its principles can be adapted to other premodern texts in order to better understand the performance context they presuppose.

The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Rey ◽  
Karen Richman
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
African Religion ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Religious Syncretism ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
And Performance

The convergence of African religion and Christianity in the Atlantic world has inspired some of the most significant and most analyzed examples of syncretism in the study of religion. Scholarly discussions of these phenomena, however, tend to portray religions like Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil as mergers of various Euro-Christian and ‘‘traditional’’ African elements that chiefly result from processes of cognitive ideation, thereby blurring the integrative somatic dimensions of religious syncretism. Modes of embodying knowledge, power, and morality are thus largely absent from the discussion of religious syncretism in Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, as well as other contact-cultural religions, whose congregational and performance spaces now span national boundaries. Drawing upon the historiography of Kongolese and Haitian religion, and on our multi-site ethnographic research among religious communities in Haiti, to think about religious syncretism in the African diaspora, this paper focuses on two key metaphors of mimetic knowledge and embodiment, mare and pwen (tying and point), arguing that they are both fundamental processes in Haitian religious syncretism and essential tropes for understanding Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, processes that are of predominantly Central African, and especially Kongolese, origin.

Mulieres sanctae

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 77-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda M. Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mendicant Orders ◽  
The Church

The early thirteenth century was an extraordinary period in the history of piety. Throughout Europe, and especially in urban communities, lay men and women were seized by a new religious fervour which could be satisfied neither by the new orders nor by the secular clergy. Lay groups proliferated, proclaiming the absolute and literal value of the gospels and practising a new life-style, the vita apostolica. This religious feeling led to the formation, on the eve of the fourth lateran council, of numerous orders of ‘poor men’ and shortly afterwards, to the foundation of the mendicant orders. From this novel interpretation of evangelical life women by no means wished to be excluded and many female groups sprang simultaneously into being in areas as far distant as Flanders and Italy. Yet how were such groups to be regarded because current attitudes to women were based on inconsistent and contradictory doctrines? It was difficult to provide the conditions under which they could achieve their desire for sanctity as they were not allowed to enter the various orders available to men. How then were men to reply to the demands of these women for participation in religious life? That there should be a reply was evident from the widespread heresy in just those areas in which the ferment of urban life encouraged the association of pious women. And heretics were dangerously successful with them! For the church, the existence of religious and semi-religious communities of women raised, in turn, many problems, not least the practicalities involved in both pastoral care and economic maintenance. Only, after 1215, when it attempted to regulate and discipline them, did it realise the widespread enthusiasm on which their movement was based.

Tragic form and feeling in theIliad

1982 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Way

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

Ethical and Moral Duties in Rabbinic Judaism

2019 ◽  
pp. 424-436
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wyn Schofer
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Legal Standards ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Moral Duties

The modern study of ethics and moral duties in Rabbinic Judaism has its foundation in the examination of halakhah and covenant. Recent scholarship of the last twenty-five years has emphasized that rabbinic sources situate law in relation to exegesis and narrative, and the well-known distinction between law (halakhah) and non-legal materials (aggadah) has been examined both for its significance in culture and identity creation and for its intellectual and moral features. A renewed approach to ethics and moral duties in Rabbinic Judaism studies halakhah with attention to the intertwining of textual and literary forms with conceptual content, and with attention to political and social contestation, as well as identity formation, in the articulation of legal standards. The domain of law overlaps with that of morality in several elements of halakhah, including ritual practice, taxation and charity, relations between men and women, and responses to damages.

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