Scholastic Affect: Gender, Maternity and the History of Emotions

Clare Monagle

doi:10.1017/9781108886406

Series: Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses

Scholastic Affect

Gender, Maternity and the History of Emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2020

Clare Monagle

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Clare Monagle: Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney

Summary

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.

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Keywords

Virgin Mary scholastic theology history of emotions gender feminism

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Type: Element
Information: Series: Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108886406 [Opens in a new window]

Online ISBN: 9781108886406

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication: 06 August 2020

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