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Rethinking Marian Maternity

When: —
Venue: Online

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This free international online event brings together four scholars of Marian maternity, putting medieval and modern thinking on the female reproductive body into intellectual exchange.

Together they will celebrate and reflect on a new monograph:

Clare Monagle, Scholastic Affect: Gender, Maternity and the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2020). Abstract below.

Clare will introduce her work; Isabel Davis, Lucy Allen-Goss, and Mary Beth Long will give short responses from the perspectives of their own current research. There will then be time for discussion, including with attendees. 

Please use this link to join the event. 'Doors' will open 15 minutes before the event begins, so that you can check your technical arrangements. I will mute attendees until invited to contribute comments and questions at the end of the session. The usual expectations on conduct are in place.

Abstract for Scholastic Affect:

Scholastic theologians made the Virgin Mary increasingly perfect over the Middle Ages in Europe. Mary became stainless, offering an impossible but ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This work offers an implicit theory of the utility and feelings of women in a Christian salvationary economy. The Virgin was put to use as a shaming technology, one that silenced and effaced women's affective lives. The shame still stands to this day, although in secularised mutated forms. This Element deploys the intellectual history of medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory to consider the implications of Mary's perfection within modernity, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present.

This is a COVID event: i.e. it is brought to you from across three timezones; contributors may also have the unmutable noises of their households in the background.

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