Gendered identities in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs : performing the bride / by Line Cecilie Engh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Engh, Line Cecillie, author.

Series:

Europa sacra ; v. 15.

Europa sacra ; volume 15

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bernard, of Clairvaux, Saint, 1090 or 1091-1153. Sermones super Cantica Canticorum.

Bernard.

Bible. Song of Solomon--Criticism, interpretation, etc--History--Middle Ages, 600-1500.

Bible.

Bible. Song of Solomon--Sermons.

Bible. Song of Solomon.

Gender identity in the Bible.

Women in the Bible.

Sermons.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 444 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, [2014]

Summary:

This series is concerned with the relationship between religion society, culture and identity in Europe from the early medieval period to the end of the ancient regime with particular emphasis on continuity and transformation within urban religious life and institution. The series concentrates on medical Europe, though may also include North Africa and the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on studies that focus on history in the longue durée. In this analysis of Bernard of Clairvaux's famous Sermons on the Song of Songs, gendered imagery is treated, for the first time, as an interpretative key. Through close readings of Bernard's text and through the rich array of recent medieval studies on sex and gender, this book challenges familiar interpretations of body, gender, and asceticism, disrupting the commonplace view of medieval monasticism as desexualized and un-gendered. Bernard not only interprets, but also embodies or actualizes the figure of the bride, generating images of celibacy as erotic pleasure and monks as fecund and female. Through his performance, Bernard provides a hermeneutical model on which he patterns himself and his audience, the Cistercian choir monk. By analyzing the rhetorical functions of Bernard's female self-representation, the author explores how complex and varied female images in the text are absorbed into the bridal role - lactating mother, ecstatic virgin, weeping widow, needy girl. By appropriating femaleness, Bernard transformed the Cistercian cloister into an inverted world that anticipated eschatological restoration and salvation. In this parallel monastic reality, the book argues, males performed all parts while gender hierarchy was upheld to establish notions of superior and inferior, worldly and heavenly, humility and sublimity. The male-female duality in this language is not one of equality, but was rather forged into a hermeneutical hierarchy in which, ultimately, a fully Christomimetic man both appropriates and negates femaleness. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Gender Blending and Gender Crossing in Premodern Devotion 17

Chapter 2 Erotic Imagery and Maternal Imagery - Configuring the Bride 63

Chapter 3 The Mother, the Virgin, and the Bride - Idealized Femaleness 151

Chapter 4 The Feminized Male - Displacement, Service, and Humility 203

Chapter 5 Inverting Hierarchies, Staging Eschatology - Unmaking and Remaking Worlds 263

Chapter 6 Appropriation and Unification - Feminized Man, Divinized Man 325.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

2503550037

9782503550039

OCLC:

890938922

Publisher Number:

99961834252