Vices and Virtues: Gender, Subversion, and Moralizing Discourses
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Jacob Doss; Matthew Vanderpoel
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Texas-Austin; Univ. of Chicago
Presider Name
Matthew Vanderpoel
Paper Title 1
Chrétien's Economies of Shame
Presenter 1 Name
Ryan Smith
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. at Buffalo
Paper Title 2
Luxury and Luxuria: Gendering Jewelry in the Late Middle Ages
Presenter 2 Name
Sophie Ong
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Rutgers Univ.
Paper Title 3
Herrad of Hohenbourg's Interpretation of Conrad of Hirsau's System of Vices and Virtues: Women and Men as Authors and Audiences
Presenter 3 Name
Cheryl Goggin
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Southern Mississippi
Paper Title 4
Gendering Florilegia: Vice, Virtue, and Making Monastic Language
Presenter 4 Name
Jacob Doss
Start Date
12-5-2019 8:30 AM
Session Location
Schneider 1275
Description
Significant watersheds in medieval Christianity have often entailed the reconceptualization of notions of vice and virtue and of gender. From the twelfth-century "renaissance" and "reformation," amid the thirteenth-century "pastoral revolution," and after the rediscovery of Aristotle, these two conceptual categories formed a mutually influential discourse. However, much of the scholarship on the development of discourses of vice and virtue has not incorporated gender as a central category of analysis, outside of specific case studies, if at all. Where gender has been addressed vice and virtue has often been treated primarily as an egalitarian, gender-neutral discourse. Certainly, on one level, one's susceptibility to vice or the development of virtue was not the domain of one or another gender, but this did not stop medieval people from creatively deploying these concepts in gendered terms. Despite this seemingly ambivalent relationship to gender, medieval Christians wielded virtue and vice to organize social hierarchies, construct theoretical and practical anthropologies, and, as in telling cases such as Prudentius' Psychomachia, to subvert gender binaries.
This panel will aim both to interrogate and theorize, broadly, the extent to which moralizing discourses concerning the vices and virtues incorporated notions of gender and vice versa. How does the gendering of specific personifications of vices and virtues reinforce and subvert medieval discourses about gender? How do normative commitments to gender roles and performances structure programmatic and didactic accounts of vice and virtue? To what extent does the intersection of vice and virtue with gendered language change between different religious or non-religious contexts, for example between monasteries, the universities, and popularizing works for the laity, or in the politics of the nobility? How may recent gender- and queer- theoretical thought equip us to interpret medieval writings on vice and virtue?
Jacob Doss, Matthew Vanderpoel
Vices and Virtues: Gender, Subversion, and Moralizing Discourses
Schneider 1275
Significant watersheds in medieval Christianity have often entailed the reconceptualization of notions of vice and virtue and of gender. From the twelfth-century "renaissance" and "reformation," amid the thirteenth-century "pastoral revolution," and after the rediscovery of Aristotle, these two conceptual categories formed a mutually influential discourse. However, much of the scholarship on the development of discourses of vice and virtue has not incorporated gender as a central category of analysis, outside of specific case studies, if at all. Where gender has been addressed vice and virtue has often been treated primarily as an egalitarian, gender-neutral discourse. Certainly, on one level, one's susceptibility to vice or the development of virtue was not the domain of one or another gender, but this did not stop medieval people from creatively deploying these concepts in gendered terms. Despite this seemingly ambivalent relationship to gender, medieval Christians wielded virtue and vice to organize social hierarchies, construct theoretical and practical anthropologies, and, as in telling cases such as Prudentius' Psychomachia, to subvert gender binaries.
This panel will aim both to interrogate and theorize, broadly, the extent to which moralizing discourses concerning the vices and virtues incorporated notions of gender and vice versa. How does the gendering of specific personifications of vices and virtues reinforce and subvert medieval discourses about gender? How do normative commitments to gender roles and performances structure programmatic and didactic accounts of vice and virtue? To what extent does the intersection of vice and virtue with gendered language change between different religious or non-religious contexts, for example between monasteries, the universities, and popularizing works for the laity, or in the politics of the nobility? How may recent gender- and queer- theoretical thought equip us to interpret medieval writings on vice and virtue?
Jacob Doss, Matthew Vanderpoel