WMM · Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts

Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts

WOMEN MAKING MEMORIES: LITURGY AND THE REMEMBERING FEMALE BODY IN MEDIEVAL HOLY WOMEN’S TEXTS Devout women from medieval Europe knew the words, sounds, sights and movements of the Divine Office and Mass by heart. References to sensations and the gendered discourses produced by the liturgy abound in female-authored (auto)biographies and visionary texts written between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. Despite British and Continental women’s important literary contributions to Europe’s cultural heritage, the Middle Ages are still popularly presented as “dark ages” rife with misogyny. This project intervenes in this representation of the Middle Ages by amplifying medieval women’s dissenting voices. It argues that medieval women appropriate liturgical memoria (memory arts), that is, what and how the liturgy taught women to remember. Pairing literary analysis and historical contextualization, it has scrutinized six religious texts by medieval women from the British Isles and north-western Europe: the Diepenveen sister-book, a late-fifteenth, Middle Dutch compilation of nuns’ biographies from the Low Countries; a late-fifteenth-century Middle Dutch visionary text by Jacomijne Costers’ (d. 1503) and Mechtild van Rieviren (d. 1497) from Antwerp, present-day Belgium; a Middle Low German prayer-book from the Cistercian Medingen convent, Germany; the Middle High German sister-book from the Dominican convent St Katharinental in Diessenhofen, present-day Switzerland; and recluse Julian of Norwich’s (c. 1342–c. 1416) visionary text A Revelation of Love, and laywoman Margery Kempe’s (1373–c. 1439) autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe, both Middle English texts from Britain. The action sought to map how memory arts in medieval women’s texts appropriate the art of memory taught by the liturgy. It also strove to chart the understandings of gender, the body, and the relation between self and other imprinted on readers’ memories. The first comparative study of female-authored vernacular European texts, the project also tracked differences and similarities between texts, regions, and communities, and mapped change. The action concludes the following. Firstly, medieval women writers remake liturgical embodied memories into a collective memory located in all bodies in their communities. They also harness the body and memories to redefine what bodies get to be remembered. Secondly, they instil an understanding of community and individual as containing one another, by which they appropriate medieval medical theories that present women as biologically more impressionable. Thirdly, these women share themes and authorial concerns, but differ in their anxieties about embodied devotion and their view of the role of religious enclosure and community. The project also responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, with which it coincided, by examining how medieval women can inspire resilience in modern individuals; medieval women can exemplify resilience by their reaction to self-isolation and by how they process their memories of the Bubonic plague through their daily interaction with one another.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз