{"id":141,"date":"2018-06-17T20:34:36","date_gmt":"2018-06-17T20:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/?p=141"},"modified":"2018-06-26T12:55:56","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T12:55:56","slug":"day-8-medieval-british-prototype-feminists-2nd-day-of-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/?p=141","title":{"rendered":"Day 8: Medieval British Prototype Feminists (2nd Day of Class)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(by Carol)<\/em><\/p>\n

While, yesterday, I gave a general overview of the course and some terms for adaptation studies and feminism, today we discussed some sample writings from Julian of Norwich<\/a>‘s Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe<\/a>.\u00a0 Both women were mystics, but one was a wife and mother and the other was an anchorite nun.\u00a0 Neither woman was a feminist per se, but certainly each had a strong personality and they found empowerment from the Church, odd as that may seem.\u00a0 They are among the first British women of letters, though (technically) Margery was illiterate and dictated her book, which is considered by some to be the first autobiography written in the English language.<\/p>\n

\"woman

Woman brewing beer.<\/p><\/div>\n

Margery (c. 1373 \u2013 after 1438) was the daughter of a merchant, who was also a mayor for awhile. When she was twenty years old, she married John Kempe, and together they had fourteen children.\u00a0 At one point, she tried brewing beer, was very good at it for awhile.\u00a0 After the birth of her first child, according to her Book<\/a>, she had a meltdown that lasted for eight months: she saw demons and devils who attacked her,\u00a0 \u00a0to \u201cforsake her faith, her family, and her friends,\u201d and they even tried to get her to commit suicide.\u00a0 She was “saved” by a vision of Jesus, who came to her and said, “Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?”\u00a0 After that, for the rest of her life, she had visions in which she talked with Jesus, with God, and with Mary.\u00a0 She was tried for heresy numerous times in her life, but never condemned.\u00a0 Alison Torn<\/a> concludes, “Unlike many diagnosed with psychosis today, Margery Kempe had a cultural space in which to explore her experiences. Religion provided Margery with a structure that left her with her dignity and freedom, a space that valued beliefs and meaning.” Today, most of us would see Margery Kempe as battling mental illness, yet Torn also observes: “The boundaries between madness and religious experiences are still a contested area, and one where pathological explanations need to be challenged.”<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what Torn means by stating that “psychological explanations need to be challenged”\u00a0\u2014 except that certainly there is dignity associated with a mystical experience seen from a religious rather than medical perspective.<\/p>\n

\"Julian

Julian of Norwich<\/p><\/div>\n

Julian of Norwich (c. 8 November 1342 \u2013 c. 1416), unlike Margery Kempe, was literate.\u00a0 She was a poet.\u00a0 Her first mystical experience came to her at the age of thirty, when she was near-death from a severe illness.\u00a0 While praying, in preparation for her death, she received 16 visions, which (after surviving the illness, of course) she wrote down.\u00a0 These are known as\u00a0\u00a0Revelations of Divine Love<\/em> (also known as A Revelation of Love\u00a0\u2014 in Sixteen Shewings<\/em>).\u00a0 In addition to describing her sixteen visions, she also discusses such concepts as universal love and hope, religious schism, the plague, and war.\u00a0 It is considered to be the first book published in the English language that is written by a woman.<\/p>\n

Julian was older than Margery by about thirty years, but they were alive at the same time.\u00a0 Margery once visited Julian.\u00a0 According to A Clerk of Oxford<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some time around the year 1413, a few years before the likely date of Julian\u2019s death, Margery Kempe<\/a> came to pay her a visit in her cell in Norwich (on which, see this post<\/a>). To give you some sense of their relative ages, Margery Kempe was born around the same year (1373) that Julian had her first revelations, at the age of thirty. I think many of us would be glad to have the opportunity to talk to Julian of Norwich, although I like to think that if I was lucky enough to get that chance I wouldn\u2019t do what Margery Kempe did \u2013 which was, not surprisingly, talk about Margery Kempe. (To be fair to her, I suppose she had gone there for advice…) Kempe\u2019s account of Julian\u2019s words to her is suspiciously focused on the things Kempe was obsessed with, as a laywoman struggling to find validation for her own form of intense religion devotion: the importance of trusting to personal inspiration, chastity, the holiness of devout tears (Kempe was notorious for bursting into noisy tears during Mass, much to the annoyance of her neighbours), and counsel which essentially says \u2018if people don\u2019t like you, you must be doing something right\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on THAT wall!<\/p>\n

Anyway, you might wonder what these two women have to do with feminism and film and literature.\u00a0 I see them as setting the stage, in England, for future feminism.\u00a0 One has to remember that the misogynist anti-feminist doctrine of St. Jerome<\/a> was prevalent in England at this time.\u00a0 It was not easy to be a woman with a voice.\u00a0 For England, too, the 1300s were still the Middle Ages, while at the same time in Italy concepts Renaissance humanism<\/a> was beginning to develop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(by Carol) While, yesterday, I gave a general overview of the course and some terms for adaptation studies and feminism, today we discussed some sample writings from Julian of Norwich‘s Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,20,33,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carols-stories","category-day-8","category-musings-for-carols-book","category-students"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/houndingproductions.org\/floundering-in-florence\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}