| Paper 1517-c | Eve's Quest for Redemption
(Language: English)
Ellen Sorenson, Indian Prairie School District, Naperville, Illinois
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Teaching the Middle Ages, Theology, Women's Studies |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Margery Kempe's spiritual journey begins with an internalized tension which prevented her from clearly identifying her spiritual placement in the Church's design for personal salvation. A way for her to enter the Church's schemata was through identification in roles that correspond to her secular life. Reconstruction of and participation in familial visions afforded Kempe both a reconciliation of outstanding pain and grief and a closure to her earthly family relationships in the spiritual realm as she was unable to achieve in the secular. This paper will explore that disparity between Kempe's earthly role as daughter/mother/spouse and these same roles as they appear in her visionary experiences.
Paper -b:
This paper points to investigate the rhetorical contribution of Middle Age feminine mystic voices. The rhetoric of spiritual senses becomes for the mulieres religiosae living between 13th and 14th centuries a fundamental linguistic way to relate about their experiences of ecstatic perception of Divine Love. They can expound and voice their ineffable travel and make it real thanks to the perceptible essence of the narration: the five spiritual senses of 'sight', 'hearing', 'taste', 'smell' and 'touch' make possible the reportatio itinerarii.
The sense of 'taste' will be kept, in our essay, as the best way to realise and express the mystic union: we will confront some exemplary feminine auto-hagiographies with reference to the way each author applies the metaphor of taste. In Beatrix of Nazareth, Mary of Oignies, Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich's contributions we will be able to find some important variations on the use of the metaphor, that we will distinguish as different steps in proceeding with what we call spiritual travel of ecstatic knowledge.
Paper -c:
In the three Middle English texts of the life of Adam and Eve, Eve is the aggressive advocate of her family's salvation. She is both pilgrim and author as she journeys from Eden back to the gates of Paradise seeking the healing oil of mercy and then gathers her family around her to teach the lessons she has learned on her journeys through life. These texts, which characterize Eve as a model for medieval readers, are the fragmentary NLS Adv MS 19.2.1, the prose Lyff of Adam and Eve in the massive religious Vernon manuscript, Oxford Bodleian MS Eng. poet.a.1, and Canticum de Creatione, Trinity College, Oxford MS 57.
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