IMC 2010: Sessions

Paper -a:
How were holy persons selected as recipients for prayer? Most often, miracle stories only tell of the praying person having already made the decision of recipient, but there were exceptions from this pattern: the habit of casting lots to explore the divine will of whom to address in prayer. Lot casting, a seldom studied religious habit will be in focus in my paper.

Paper -b:
In the chapter 'Catherine's Wisdom' of The Life of St Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Blessed Raymond of Capua narrates a particular discussion between himself and the saint in which she outlines her beliefs concerning love.

At the end, Catherine provides an illustration of a man enveloped within the sea as being like a devout man enveloped within God. Just as a man can only see things in the water and perchance outside objects that are reflected and can only touch the water and things through the water, so it is the same with a man who is wholly God's '[…] because all activity takes place within God and remains within Him' (Lamb 86). This final stage of love is remarkably reminiscent of the fourth degree of love as expounded by St Bernard of Clairvaux in his De diligendo Deo (On Loving God) (c. 1126). However, Bernard says that, 'I know not whether it would be possible to make further progress in this life to that fourth degree and perfect condition wherein man loves himself solely for God's sake' (Stiegman 40). Does Catherine think that the fourth degree of love can be reached in this earthly life?

This paper looks at Raymond's understanding of Catherine's theology of love with respect to her own articulation in her Dialogue and Letters. By placing Raymond's image of Catherine and Catherine's own words side by side, we can come to grasp St Catherine, herself, and how she is in accord with yet differs from Bernard.

Paper -c:
This paper examines the relationship between readerly agency and writerly control in a work that inscribes the complexities of this relationship into a dialogue between Christ and an elite devout reader. Le Dyalogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ (1468?) is a lengthy catechism between Christ and its patron Margaret of York, which, I will argue, reproduces for Margaret the struggles to reconcile the contemplative and active lives while it instructs her in devotional reading. In what ways this rarely read text addresses and assesses its mixed life reader, even as she makes assessments of her own, will be my subject.