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History

Western Michigan University

2018

Hagiography

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck Oct 2018

Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck

The Hilltop Review

A late medieval mystic prone to violent bouts of sobbing, Margery Kempe suffers a range of verbal abuse in her titular text, ranging from simple rumors, to outright accusations of heresy and possession. While we might accept such accusatory speech as indicative of the era and Margery’s controversial role as a public “holy woman,” further investigation reveals a narrative strongly driven by the notion of “suffering by slander,” and the weight attributed to the spoken word. The Book of Margery Kempe shows us an oral culture filled with “deviant speech,” and within its own rhetorical construction as a text, elevates …


The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel Mar 2018

The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel

Richard Rawlinson Center Series

In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Ælfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism provided by the four Latin Doctors and illustrated in the early Latin Lives of Roman martyrs, revealing the importance of memory in the construction of the monastic "third gender." In the second section McDaniel turns to creating a historical and theological cultural …