Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition

Inventing Women

Christopher M. Flavin

Christopher M. Flavin examines the ways in which late classical medieval women’s writings serve as a means of emphasizing both faith and social identity within a distinctly Christian, and later Catholic, tradition, which remains a major part of the understanding of faith and the self. Flavin focuses on key texts from the lives of desert saints and the Passio Perpetua to the autobiographies of Counter-Reformation women like Teresa of Ávila to illustrate the connections between the self and the divine.

Lexington Books

Pages: 204 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-4985-9272-7 • Hardback • January 2020 • $90.00 • (£69.00)

978-1-4985-9273-4 • eBook • January 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Series: Studies in Medieval Literature

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Medieval

Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition

Inventing Women

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Christopher M. Flavin examines the ways in which late classical medieval women’s writings serve as a means of emphasizing both faith and social identity within a distinctly Christian, and later Catholic, tradition, which remains a major part of the understanding of faith and the self. Flavin focuses on key texts from the lives of desert saints and the Passio Perpetua to the autobiographies of Counter-Reformation women like Teresa of Ávila to illustrate the connections between the self and the divine.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 204 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-4985-9272-7 • Hardback • January 2020 • $90.00 • (£69.00)

978-1-4985-9273-4 • eBook • January 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Series: Studies in Medieval Literature

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Medieval

Author

Christopher Flavin is associate professor of English and chair of the department of languages and literature at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Women Writing or Writing About Women

Chapter Two: (En) Gendering Texts: The Establishment of Women’s Christian Literary Traditions

Chapter Three: Perpetua and Her Daughters: Mystics, Mothers, Martyrs, and Texts

Chapter Four: Constructing a New Self: Women, Truth, and the Rhetorical Turn of the Twelfth Century

Chapter Five: Heloise and the Rhetoric of the Self

Chapter Six: “Texts Without Bodies, Churches Without Windows”: Affective Piety in Women’s Autobiographies

Chapter Seven: Reinvigorating the Traditions: St. Teresa and the Reformation

Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition

Inventing Women

Christopher M. Flavin

Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition

Inventing Women

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