The last Cathars

Barber, Malcolm

doi:10.4324/9781351223980-7

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Newman, Catherine of Alexandria (November 25). 16 Mechthild's decision to start with the Annunciation, rather than the more usual Feast of the Nativity, reflects the significance of the Virgin Mary in the worship of the community. The annunciation leads the reader from the Virgin's miraculous conception, to her equally miraculous delivery.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 While ecstatic agony and pleasure frequently accompanied these visionary experiences, permitting, Luce Irigaray contends, a peculiarly feminine means of expression, it was not uniformly experienced or appreciated. 16 Mechthild of Hackeborn, for example, manipulates the convention of the feminized Christ, and the beloved's affective response. As I discuss in Chapter 2, in Mechthild's collection of her visions, the Liber Specialis Gratiae (the Book of Special Grace), Christ's identity is fluid, loving, nurturing and reciprocal, his 13 Hildegard, Scivias II.…”

Section: Ccslmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 Paul, Brown contests, was unique in his theology of the flesh, for, while there is some evidence of the notion of human frailty in the face of fleshly desires throughout the New Testament (for example, I John 2. [16][17], other Christian writers had not developed Paul's radical or wide-reaching conclusions. 3 It was Paul's concepts of the flesh and the body that so influenced later Christian doctrine.…”

Section: Understanding Of the Body And Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 The female, he argues, is an 'impotent male', because of her inability to generate the heat necessary to turn blood into life-giving semen. 16 This heat and dryness makes male foetuses superior and therefore more active, although, in History of Animals, it makes the male less courageous and clever than the female. 17 The female is both more malleable and unstable: she is sooner tamed', responds more readily to 'caressing', and is more ready to learn than the male.…”

Section: Aristotlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…18 However, whereas men are 'more rounded off and complete' by nature, women tend to be more extreme. 16 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, I. 20.728a 17-21.…”

Section: Aristotlementioning

confidence: 99%

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Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Kathryn¹

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This thesis examines responses to Christ’s gendered flesh that are located not in canonical literary texts or traditional saints’ lives, but in the sermons, visions and confessions of devout and orthodox men and women, whose orthodoxy, upon closer examination, is nevertheless decidedly unorthodox. In it, using a series of test cases, I argue that closer scrutiny of these non-canonical texts thus offers a more nuanced understanding of late-medieval notions of interplay between gender, sexuality and the divine than has been considered within previous scholarship. Beginning with the thirteenth-century Liber Specialis of Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), I demonstrate that, although remaining within the bounds of orthodox scripture and exegesis, the Saxon author nevertheless presents her readers with a Christ whose identity as saviour is predicated on his elevation of the female and the fleshly, and whose symbiotic, fluid relationship with Mechthild implicates her as co-redeemer through a divine, glorious, joyful, and uniquely feminine fecundity. I follow this with a detailed close analysis of the early fourteenth-century transcript of a young woman’s heresy trial in southern France, in which she confesses to equating Christ’s body with the ‘filth’ of the afterbirth, a concept so awful to her that she had been unable to believe in God or the transubstantiation. As I argue, however, Auda Fabri, experiences a species of revelation not unlike other orthodox female mystics, but, lacking their communities of discourse, must remain in a state of abjection from which capitulation to androcentric authority alone can save her. My third case-study is a sermon by the fourteenth-century English priest, John Mirk, in which Christ condemns an unconfessed merchant to Hell through the clotted blood from his feminised side-wound, which he casts at the dying man. I argue that, in attempting to uphold orthodox belief and practices, Mirk reveals a profound anxiety regarding late-medieval beliefs regarding the body and feminised flesh of Christ, whose appearance Mirk eventually demonises. Finally, to initiate my set of conclusions, I focus briefly on a largely unknown thirteenth-century Hebrew text, in which a Jewish woman in Sicily seems to give birth to a messianic figure from her body, which drips honey and oil. The woman’s ecstasy, resonant of the experiences of Christian women mystics like Mechthild, suggests some sort of commonality between the Sicilian Jewish and Christian female communities in pre-plague Europe. Ultimately, then, this thesis argues for – and contributes to – the need for far wider recognition of the importance of non-canonical and more generically varied source material and its closer scrutiny to gain better understanding of the deeply gendered complexities attached to the many labile beliefs concerning Christ’s flesh and blood during the Middle Ages.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ccslmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Understanding Of the Body And Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Aristotlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…18 However, whereas men are 'more rounded off and complete' by nature, women tend to be more extreme. 16 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, I. 20.728a 17-21.…”

Section: Aristotlementioning

confidence: 99%

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Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Kathryn¹

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Legal Centralization and the Birth of the Secular State

Johnson

Koyama

2012

SSRN Journal

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This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal centralization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model in which legal centralization leads to the criminalization of the religious beliefs of a large proportion of the population. This process initially leads to increased persecution, but, because these persecutions are costly, it eventually causes the state to broaden the standards of orthodox belief and move toward religious toleration. We compare the results of the model with historical evidence drawn from two important cases in which religious diversity and state centralization collided in France: the Albigensian crusades of the thirteenth century and the rise of Protestant belief in the sixteenth century. Both instances support our central claim that the secularization of western European state institutions during the early-modern period was driven by the costs of imposing a common set of legal standards on religiously diverse populations.

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The last Cathars

Cited by 2 publications

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Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Legal Centralization and the Birth of the Secular State

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