Vittoria Colonna

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna's influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women's place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Vittoria Colonna

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna’s influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women’s place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Aelred and Sworn Brotherhood

Friendship seems to be a subject that is not often talked about in church and, even if talked about, it is usually in the context of providing support for single Christians or those struggling with same-sex attraction. Ironically, such an approach exposes the deep flaws, particularly within Protestantism, due to the neglect of the vocation of celibacy as well as the rich resource on friendship within the Christian and cultural tradition. Retrieving from Aelred’s theology of friendship, together with the idea of sworn brotherhood in Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, this article seeks to show the promise of theological retrieval for the life of the church. It argues that while Aelred’s theology provides a helpful way of thinking theologically about friendship, the portrayal of sworn brotherhood in Luo’s novel provides the embodiment of such friendship. Ultimately, it is through this process of retrieval that the church can convincingly put forth spiritual friendship to those who are single or samesex-attracted as an optionthat is no less viable than marriage.

The Spiritual Dimensions of Friendship

It was the spiritual dimensions of my friendship with Vern Bengtson that I treasure most. Vern was always willing to discuss the dark sides of himself and to listen to my spiritual pain. His empowering way of advancing the meanings of aging were a spiritual gift. This presentation will address the value of spiritual friendship in human aging. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Religion, Spirituality and Aging Interest Group.

Toward a Poetics of Friendship

This introductory chapter traces the origin of the poetics of friendship to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and, by extension, Cicero’s De amicitia. Aristotle’s definition of the perfect friend in static categorical terms presents significant challenges to narrativization, that is, to a mode of literary expression based in conflict and change. Following Ullrich Langer, the chapter explores how Aristotle’s largely static categorical framework is filtered through the discourse of spiritual friendship in the Middle Ages, exposing the key problem of the perfect friend’s ultimate unknowability. Alternatively, following Cicero’s more fluid dialogical exploration of the problem of friendship, the chapter traces a second trajectory for a poetics of friendship that draws on Kathy Eden and Nancy Struever’s work on the more recognizably modern notion of intimacy. Taken together, these two genealogies provide the foundation for an evolving poetics of friendship in the narrative prose and dramatic works of early modern Spain.

“I have called you friends”: Toward a pedagogy of friendship in the classroom

Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, penned a powerful dialogue about the complexity of friendship titled Spiritual Friendship. Aelred’s central claim is that friendship is the primary means through which Christ’s love enters the world. In this article, I apply Aelred’s insights on spiritual friendship to argue that Christ is the Friend at the center of the classroom. In particular, I suggest pedagogical practices that facilitate friendship as a Christian virtue, compelling learners to befriend one another, to befriend the subject, and to befriend God. Aelred does not suggest that everyone whom we love is to be a spiritual friend. Rather, those whom we choose to befriend are to be tested caringly and critically for their adherence to virtue. With the help of my ancient, theologian friends (Aelred, Augustine) and my friends who are leading voices in contemporary Christian pedagogy (David Smith, James K. A. Smith, Paul Griffiths), I aim to teach students to empathize with authors (and other learners) with whom they disagree, even to befriend them, even as they test whether those ideas are to be drawn into friendship.

Eine Heilige in Gesellschaft: Formen der Kooperation in der ›Legende von Prothus und Hyacinthus‹ bei Jacobus von Voragine, der Lichtenthaler Schreiberin Regula und Gottfried Keller

This paper explores variations in portrayals of cooperation and friendship in legends of martyrs, focussing on the ›The Legend of Saints Protus and Hyacinth‹ in different historical contexts. When adapting the legend in the fifteenth-century, the compiler and copyist Sister Regula amended the standard ›Legenda Aurea‹ version by introducing an additional plot line recounting cooperation between two female martyrs. In turn, in the nineteenth century, the Swiss author Gottfried Keller dismissed the notion of spiritual friendship altogether and replaced it with the ideal of a hierarchical relationship between spouses.