Women's visions, men's words [electronic resource] : the portrayal of holy women and men in fourteenth-century Italian hagiography.

1991

1 online resource (317 p.)

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This dissertation examines portrayals of female and male saints by male religious writers in late medieval Tuscany and Umbria. The eleven holy women and nine holy men considered comprise all the saints who died between the years 1289 and 1330 and for whom early sources, most of which are vitae, are extant. Historical background which made the subject of human learning a charged issue for late medieval religious writers includes the broadened social distribution of education, which bequeathed power, status and wealth on disenfranchised groups; and theological and philosophical doubts about the ability of human knowledge to comprehend religious truth. The world-renouncing character of late medieval spirituality caused male religious writers to feel ambivalent about their erudition and about the status it bestowed on them and on their educated and prospering religious orders. They expressed this ambivalence diversely according to the sex of the saints about whom they wrote. The actual fact of men's relatively higher rates of literacy and schooling, coupled with the traditional association of men with mind, word and reason, led male writers, learned themselves and interested in models for their own sanctity, to exalt holy men who were also learned, but then renounced or somehow transcended their learning and the status it bestowed. The actual fact of women's relatively lower rates of literacy and schooling, coupled with the traditional association of women with body, intuition and meta-reason, led male writers, who already looked on women as "other," to exalt unlearned holy women for their easy access to supernatural knowledge: miraculous literacy, divinely infused wisdom, and visions. While men's infrequent visions confirmed them in this-worldly occupations such as priest and preacher, women's frequent visions established them as conduits joining the divine and earthly realms. Women's visions captured ineffable truth, endowed women with a public voice, and accentuated the corporeal quality of their religious experience.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 1991.

Yale University.