Junior Faculty Fellow 2003-04
Morgan Powell (German and French
Language and Literature)
Franklin College, Switzerland
Mary’s Reading: Gender, Literacy and Gnosis,
1120-1230
Literature in the French and German vernaculars emerges definitively
as a separate tradition distinct from Latin letters in the course
of the twelfth century. This “scriptural” arrival of
the vernaculars is paralleled in the field of visual art by an enormous
expansion in the themes and applications of religious images. At
the same time, innovative attempts are underway to combine the written
word and the image as complementary vehicles of the understanding
and transmission of God’s Word. My research considers these
phenomena as different manifestations of one central concern: the
exploration of alternative gnosis, of ways of knowing the Word that
bypass the tradition of clerical learning and favor an experience
of presence.
The consideration of these different developments as related and
complementary runs counter to the idea that courtly, vernacular
literature draws on an oral and secular poetic tradition, as opposed
to the written and religious tradition produced and preserved largely
in the monasteries. However, my research reveals a connection between
new modes of monastic instruction, undertaken to accommodate a rapidly
growing number of monastic women and adult conversi, and the early
articulation of a poetics of the vernacular text. Both rely on an
audio-visual delivery of the Word for audiences defined, a priori,
as unlearned or illiterate. But it is the classification of this
mode of reception as “female” that proves the most far-reaching
in importance. The world of Latin exegesis undergoes its own transformation
beginning in the early twelfth century with the visionary Rupert
of Deutz. Rupert defines a new, subjective authority for reading
Scripture that takes its model from no less than Mary’s experience
of the Word in the Incarnation. Through a complex redefinition of
his reading self, Rupert articulates a “female” reading
of Scripture that then served as a model for actual women visionaries
such as Hildegard of Bingen. Reading here becomes an immediate experience
of divine presence that occurs in the body. As such it can properly
avail itself of bodily vehicles—the image, and oral performance.
In Mary’s experience of the Word, the twelfth century found
a model for a reconception of Christian gnosis that enabled exploration
of alternative media, often seen as justified by the attempt to
reach different audiences. In this endeavor, exegesis, image and
narrative all met as the potential means to one aesthetic response,
and it is in this way that Hildegard’s visions, the new acceptance
of images, and vernacular literature form part of one and the same
media revolution.
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