Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile I: Christ and Mary Divinized
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
Organizer Name
Jessica A. Boon
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Presider Name
Laura Delbrugge
Presider Affiliation
Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Paper Title 1
Reassessing the Passion in _La passion del eterno principe_ (Burgos 1493)
Presenter 1 Name
Isidro J. Rivera
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Kansas
Paper Title 2
Style as Symbolic Form: The Relationship between Aesthetics and Devotion in Post-1492 Isabelline Spain
Presenter 2 Name
Jessica Weiss
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Texas-Austin
Paper Title 3
Imagining the Passion in Isabelline Spain: Mary and the Jews
Presenter 3 Name
Jessica A. Boon
Paper Title 4
Respondent
Presenter 4 Name
James D'Emilio
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of South Florida
Start Date
9-5-2014 1:30 PM
Session Location
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
Description
Cynthia Robinson’s 2013 publication, Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Penn State Press), is being hailed as a “frame-breaking” work that radically challenges current assumptions that Castilian Christianity paralleled European trends before 1492. Robinson’s work is the first of its kind to draw together a wide range of cultic images and spiritual texts from across Iberia and across religious distinctions, and her analysis reveals that late medieval Castilians focused their devotions on Christ’s divinity and Mary’s divine qualities rather than on Christ’s painful suffering. Robinson locates this ‘Castilian particularity’ in the influence of the Catalan Eiximenis’ Vita Christi rather than extra-peninsular texts such as Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditaciones Vitae Christi, a forceful argument that requires scholars of Castilian spirituality to rethink the panorama of Christian devotion within the contours of the peninsula instead of gesturing to broader European movements. This session seeks papers that take up Robinson’s call to integrate the study of art history with the study of devotional texts, or that address the influence of peninsular devotion to Mary on the development of a unique Castilian Passion spirituality, or that consider the shift in Passion spirituality post 1492 once interest in Christ’s suffering is newly introduced to Castile.
Jessica A. Boon
Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile I: Christ and Mary Divinized
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
Cynthia Robinson’s 2013 publication, Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Penn State Press), is being hailed as a “frame-breaking” work that radically challenges current assumptions that Castilian Christianity paralleled European trends before 1492. Robinson’s work is the first of its kind to draw together a wide range of cultic images and spiritual texts from across Iberia and across religious distinctions, and her analysis reveals that late medieval Castilians focused their devotions on Christ’s divinity and Mary’s divine qualities rather than on Christ’s painful suffering. Robinson locates this ‘Castilian particularity’ in the influence of the Catalan Eiximenis’ Vita Christi rather than extra-peninsular texts such as Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditaciones Vitae Christi, a forceful argument that requires scholars of Castilian spirituality to rethink the panorama of Christian devotion within the contours of the peninsula instead of gesturing to broader European movements. This session seeks papers that take up Robinson’s call to integrate the study of art history with the study of devotional texts, or that address the influence of peninsular devotion to Mary on the development of a unique Castilian Passion spirituality, or that consider the shift in Passion spirituality post 1492 once interest in Christ’s suffering is newly introduced to Castile.
Jessica A. Boon