NEW SEEDS, NEW HARVESTS THIRTY YEARS OF TILLING THE MYSTIC FIELD

Traditio ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
BARBARA NEWMAN
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Medieval Mystics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
And Gender

This article offers a retrospective on the last thirty years of scholarship on medieval mystics. After surveying some recent resources, such as Bernard McGinn's multivolume history, the Companions to Christian Mysticism, and the journal Spiritus, it discusses the varied approaches of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century work, notably the material turn and the linguistic turn. The former, embracing studies of the body and gender, emotions and eroticism, art and material objects, reacts against earlier conceptions of mysticism as concerned exclusively with the timeless, invisible, and transcendent dimension of human existence. Feminist scholarship, queer theory, history of the emotions, and the study of visual culture have all figured prominently, while the relationship between mysticism and political activism is identified as an area ripe for further study. Complementing the material turn, the linguistic turn has brought new interest in apophatic theology in the wake of Derridean deconstruction, but also entails fresh work on vernacular mystics and the role of vernacularity in disseminating spiritual wisdom. The essay closes with an account of imaginative theology and a call for more reading across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as the artificial boundary between sacred and secular writing.

scholarly journals Iconografía y uso de la orina en la Historia del Arte / Iconography and Use of Urine in the History of Art

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-88
Author(s):  
José Antonio Colón Fraile
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Images

ABSTRACTWe studied how the urinating action and the use of the own urine have been used as an element of artistic expression in different art throughout history disciplines. This tour was organized by subject indexes, from the simplest to the most complex images semiotically. Contemporary art deserved special attention by incorporating the use of the body and its fluids as examples of human fears and obsessions, characterized the appearance of urine by its radicalism and gender affiliation.RESUMENSe estudia cómo se ha representado la acción de orinar y el uso de la propia orina como elemento de expresión artística en las distintas disciplinas a lo largo de la historia del arte. Se estructura este recorrido por índices temáticos, desde las imágenes más simples hasta las semióticamente más complejas, comenzando por la representación de niños que orinan, utilizados en todas las épocas como imagen de lo anecdótico y motivo decorativo para fuentes y jardines. Se continúa por otras imágenes que, aun siendo protagonizadas también por niños, poseen niveles de lectura culturalmente más elevados. Se divide este estudio en dos grandes épocas antagónicas: el mito de la Edad de Oro, estado natural y privilegiado para el ser humano, y el posterior mito de la caída en el que la sexualidad connota el acto de orinar ofreciéndonos nuevas lecturas desde el erotismo, la pornografía y su uso político-propagandístico. 

CHARTRES SCHOOL IN THE 12TH CENTURY CULTURAL RENAISSANCE: SUBSTANTIVE PRIORITIES AND EVOLUTION VECTORS

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
Michael A. Kornienko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Chartres Cathedral ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Cultural Renaissance ◽  
History Of

The author analyzes the prerequisites for the formation of a theological and philosophical school, founded in 990 by Bishop Fulbert in Chartres, which flourished during the years of the Episcopal ministry of Yves of Chartres (1090–1115), a recognized intellectual center of Western Europe. The role of the Chartres Cathedral School as a citadel of metaphysical, cosmological and natural-scientific Platonism in the era of early scholasticism is revealed. The philosophical orientation of the Chartres school (orientation to the ideas of Neoplatonism), as shown in the work, is the result of a combination of the ideas of Plato, aristotelism, stoicism, pythagoreanism, Eastern and Christian mysticism and religion. The body of ideas characteristic of the Neoplatonism tradition is analyzed, the account of which is essential in understanding the specifics of the Chartres school ideological platform: the ideas of a mystically intuitive knowledge of the higher, the stages of transition from “one and the universal” to matter, the idea of comprehension of pure spirituality. The thesis is substantiated that the time of the highest prosperity of the Chartres school, its highest fame is the XII century, which went down in the history of civilization as the era of the cultural renaissance taking place in France. The specificity of the 12th century renaissance, as shown in the study, lies in the growing interest in Greek philosophy and Roman classics (this also determines the other name of the era – the Roman Renaissance), in expanding the field of knowledge through the assimilation of Western European science and the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. The thesis in which the specifics of the entry of Greek science into the culture of Western Europe is also identified. This entry was carried out through the culture of the Muslim world, which also determined the specifics of the cultural renaissance of France of the XII century. Radical changes are revealed that affect the sphere of education and, above all, religious education; the idea of reaching the priority positions of philosophy and logic is substantiated – a situation that has survived until the end of the Middle Ages. This situation, as shown in the work, was facilitated by the rare growth rate of the translation centers of Constantinople, Palermo, Toledo. It is shown that scholasticism in its early version is oriented towards religious orthodoxy. In the teaching of philosophy, the vector turned out to be biased towards natural philosophy, which was due, as shown in the work, to the spread of the ideas of Aristotle and Plato. In its educational program, the school synthesized the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Elements of natural philosophy are inherent in the works of Bernard of Chartres, Gilbert of Poitiers, Thierry of Chartres representing the Chartres school. Deep studies on the problem of universals ensured the invasion of logic in the field of metaphysical constructions of the Chartres school.

At the end of the line: on kairological history

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-90
Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Negotiation Of Identity ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Making Choices ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Anatomy ◽  
Identity And Difference

Abstract This essay examines, from a position within Classics, different angles on critiques of historicism and the turn to anachronism in History, Art History, Medieval Studies, and Queer Theory before proposing the idea of ‘kairological history’, on the model of the artist Paul Chan’s ‘kairological art’. On this analysis, ‘kairological history’ engages the critical and creative resources of anachronic thinking alongside tools of historicism (e.g. empiricism, successionism, periodization, alterity) in making choices about ‘telling time’. These choices reflect a critical understanding of how temporality shapes the valuation of the past, particularly in relation to a ‘classical’ past; the negotiation of identity and difference between past and present; and the kinds of communities that history aims to support. The second half of the essay examines two instances of anachronism within the history of anatomy, one from Galen and one from the early twenty-first century. Both cases represent problems that historicism can correct. But the modality of correction, in itself, is anaemic and risks the very teleology that linear history is so often faulted for. The essay therefore explores what gets lost and what gets found when temporality is aligned with linearity, as well as non-linear modes of telling time.

scholarly journals Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

scholarly journals Approaches to the World

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesa Lindemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Responding to the critique of methodological ethnocentrism, Lindemann develops a new general social theory that is also highly sensitive to socio-cultural differences. Drawing on Helmuth Plessner’s theory of excentric positionality, social order is understood as a symbolically and technically mediated spatio-temporal order that is integrated by an order of violence. Lindemann hereby brings together three significant aspects of recent debates: the debates on the necessity of a theoretical turn (such as the linguistic turn, the material turn, the body turn, the pictorial turn and the spatial turn); second, the debates on the actor status of non-humans and the borders of the social world, and third, the discussions about the role of violence in structuring social processes.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Bray
Keyword(s):  
Military Personnel ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
East Asian Region ◽  
Medical Associations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gender And Health ◽  
And Gender

This volume breaks new ground in the history of East Asian biopolitics, offering the first broad-based exploration of gender and health in the region during the long twentieth century. The core theme is the complex meshing of biology, body, and citizen that underpins projects of biological nation building and molds the forms of modern subjectivity. The nine case studies presented here, spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation building throughout the period. Colonial powers and medical associations, government bureaucrats, military personnel, and pharmaceutical companies as well as scientists, educators, and medical practitioners contributed to the legitimation and popularization of evolving scientific discourses and interpretations of the gendered body, sex, and reproductive health. As novel visions of the body and its possibilities took shape, new expressions of individuality, sociality, transgression or resistance, new desires, and fears emerged. Across the region and over the decades, norms and ideals, techniques, terminology, and forms of scientific or cultural authority circulated and converged, faded and resurfaced. In mapping such flows, influences, and reactions, the volume highlights the prominent role that the biopolitics of health and gender has played in knitting and shaping the East Asian region as we know it today....

scholarly journals Central European History since 1989: Historiographical Trends and Post-Wende “Turns”

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
European History ◽  
German History ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Central European ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

In a luncheon address at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in 2013, David Blackbourn delivered an impassioned plaidoyer to “grow” German history, i.e., to rescue it from the temporal “provincialism” that has, he believes, increasingly characterized the study of Germany over the past two decades. Blackbourn was critical of the growing emphasis on the twentieth century and especially the post-1945 period—not because of the quality of the work per se, but rather because of the resultant neglect of earlier periods and the potential loss of valuable historical insights that this development has brought in its wake. There have been other seemingly seismic shifts in the profession as a whole that have not left the history of Germany and German-speaking Central Europe untouched: greater emphasis on discourse analysis and gender, memory and identity, experience and cultural practices (i.e., the “linguistic turn” and the “new” cultural history). Accompanied by a decline in interest about Germany exclusively as a “nation-state,” the last decade in particular has seen a spike in “global” or “transnational” approaches. And, like other fields, the study of Germany has also witnessed greater interest in the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization—what Catherine Epstein referred to as the “imperial turn” in a piece that appeared in the journal Central European History (CEH) in 2013.

scholarly journals ‘Now—for a breath I tarry’: Breath, Desire, and Queer Materialism at the fin de siècle

2021 ◽  
pp. 345-365
Author(s):  
Fraser Riddell
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Embodied Subjectivity ◽  
Magnus Hirschfeld ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractRiddell explores how tropes of breath and breathlessness articulate the relationship between materiality, desire, and loss for queer subjects in Victorian literature. The essay presents readings of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, John Addington Symonds’s Memoirs, and Walter Pater’s ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (from Imaginary Portraits). It also examines nineteenth-century sexology (including writings by Magnus Hirschfeld) to demonstrate how certain modes of breathing were directly associated with non-normative sexuality in the period. Riddell draws upon insights from contemporary queer theory, in its turns toward negative affect and phenomenology, to examine precarious forms of embodied subjectivity in the history of homosexuality. By doing so, he demonstrates how experiences of embodiment are never universal but closely bound up with individual subject positions (such as sexuality and gender).

Trans

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quinn Eades
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
The Body ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Gender Diverse ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

Emerging from feminist and queer theory, trans theory asks us to challenge essentialist and heteronormative understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. Trans theory teaches us to critique essentialist and binary models of embodiment by attending to and centering the body in theory and in the world. In the early 21st century, trans people are more visible than we have ever been. There is an increasing appetite from “mainstream” readers for trans memoir, larger numbers of trans characters on screen and in the media, and out trans people now hold high-ranking political positions, teach in schools and universities, and act on stage and screen. Rather than the demand for trans stories being driven by scopophilia, curiosity, or voyeurism, it appears that there is a desire to genuinely understand trans lives, bodies, and lived experiences. Visibility comes with a price though, and we must be wary of tracing a simplistic progress narrative in relation to trans and gender diverse people and communities. When we appear in public, we gather our own communities, as well as allies and sympathizers, but these appearances also make us vulnerable to those who still fiercely deny our right to exist—the Vatican City’s thirty-one page statement discussing gender theory in education (2019), where we are told that trans people are “annihilating nature,” is a perfect example of this. While the term “trans” (more often than not) refers to transgender people, it is also a prefix that means “across”; trans denotes movement, going from one to the other, and change. Because we can find trans people across all times, places, and populations, we can also trace a complex, rich, and ever-expanding archive of trans writing, histories, and stories. It is through troubling the idea that trans people are a “modern” invention, that we are the living embodiment of political correctness gone mad, that we can begin to find each other in text, gather together, and work toward making significant social, political, and cultural change.

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