The Oldest Vocation : Christian Motherhood in the Medieval West / Clarissa W. Atkinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Atkinson, Clarissa W., author.

en Book Program, National Endowment for the Humanities Op, Author.

Contributor:

en Book Program, funder.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cornell University Press 2019

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Clarissa W. Atkinson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity at the Harvard University Divinity School. She also authored Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe, also from Cornell.

Summary:

According to an old story, a woman concealed her sex and ruled as pope for a few years in the ninth century. Pope Joan was not betrayed by a lover or discovered by an enemy; her downfall came when she went into labor during a papal procession through the streets of Rome. From the myth of Joan to the experiences of saints, nuns, and ordinary women, The Oldest Vocation brings to life both the richness and the troubling contradictions of Christian motherhood in medieval Europe.After tracing the roots of medieval ideologies of motherhood in early Christianity, Clarissa W. Atkinson reconstructs the physiological assumptions underlying medieval notions about women's bodies and reproduction; inherited from Greek science and popularized through the practice of midwifery, these assumptions helped shape common beliefs about what mothers were. She then describes the development of "spiritual motherhood" both as a concept emerging out of monastic ideologies in the early Middle Ages and as a reality in the lives of certain remarkable women. Atkinson explores the theological dimensions of medieval motherhood by discussing the cult of the Virgin Mary in twelfth-century art, story, and religious expression. She also offers a fascinating new perspective on the women saints of the later Middle Ages, many of whom were mothers; their lives and cults forged new relationships between maternity and holiness. The Oldest Vocation concludes where most histories of motherhood begin-in early modern Europe, when the family was institutionalized as a center of religious and social organization.Anyone interested in the status of motherhood, or in women's history, the cultural history of the Middle Ages, or the history of religion will want to read this book.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

1. Christian Motherhood: "Who Is My Mother?"

2. Physiological Motherhood: The Wandering Womb

3. Spiritual Motherhood: Extraordinary Women in the Early Middle Ages

4. Theological Motherhood: The Virgin Mother of God

5. "Mother of Love, Mother of Tears": Holiness and Families in the Later Middle Ages

6. Motherhood Reformed: The Parson's Wife and Her Children

7. The Construction of Motherhood

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 15. Jun 2019)

ISBN:

9781501740893

150174089X

OCLC:

1102795205