tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post1112230712358806366..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Reading the StarsCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1778518531768465362010-02-13T18:57:17.456-05:002010-02-13T18:57:17.456-05:00Your abbess, for instance, is doing something pret...<i>Your abbess, for instance, is doing something pretty radical, it seems.</i><br /><br />I don't think it seemed that way to her; she was behaving like a count, and often with the cooperation of her brothers who were actually counts. That was what her family did. This was in tenth-century Spain, so there is an extent to which women have a public rôle that the Middle Ages more largely would deny them, but Abbess Emma would have been a special case anywhere, I think. She is, in any case, the subject of <a href="http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~jjarrett/works.html" rel="nofollow">my only real publication</a>, so if you like you can judge for yourself.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-25909558764123478012010-02-12T10:10:39.192-05:002010-02-12T10:10:39.192-05:00it's tricky, with Christine de Pizan, but I su...it's tricky, with Christine de Pizan, but I suppose the thing I like about the book of the city of ladies in particular is the way in which there is a real 'writing back' to Augustine and Bocaccio, and the way in which she is imagining a community of women and a mode of expression that comes from her space, her bedroom, that is expanded and extended into a whole city. It reminds me a lot of A Room of One's Own.<br /><br />Writing as a non-violent resistance as opposed to rebellion? Very interesting. I absolutely agree that it is in concrete material conditions and political changes that 'resistance' really happens, like a good marxist. Your abbess, for instance, is doing something pretty radical, it seems. <br /><br />Though writing (and I particularly like images of women's PRIVATE reading practices - there is a line at the end of geffrei gaimar about his patroness constanza reading in bed) certainly produces changes in readers, and changes in the way we interact with reality itself, so someone like Christine de Pizan is hopefully being USED by readers to imagine new forms of collective activity, or new ways of living. Which in turn hopefully allows more people like your abbess to operate on a more material level. <br /><br />I love roland barthes in Writing: Degree Zero, where he notes that ecriture "elle sa developpe comme un germe...elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une contre-communication". But there is a great way the much maligned psychoanalyst Masud Khan describes Barthes' thought here - "we analysts have to learn to tolerate the hostile intent in l'ecriture and train ourselves to discpline it so that it speaks what we mean it to speak and does not degenerate into fallacious ritualistic tantalization or rejection of others." <br /><br />anyway, ramble over<br /><br />xYork CMS Postmedieval Reading Grouphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10679333256880248770noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-43040154942990931292010-02-12T08:21:37.945-05:002010-02-12T08:21:37.945-05:00I very much like the idea that resistances of the ...<i>I very much like the idea that resistances of the second type are, in a way, just an affect of the system of power itself, a system that produces its own instability.</i><br /><br />Ooh, I like that. Taking it further, though, women who choose that path, as long as their works aaren't found heretical and so on, have chosen to accept the strictures (though of course monasticism is first and foremost about that acceptance, so, not surprising maybe). The famous tale of the Merovingian princesses's rebellion at St Radegund's Poitiers indicates that there was a more direct form of resistance to enclosure and silencing available to some. And my pet abbess, daughter of a count, takes about twenty people to court in her time and that's the ones she beat (I think we can prove there are others she didn't). Are Hildegard of Bingen or Christine de Pizan (or, heck, Héloïse) protesting, or collaborating compared to these? Is writing an act of rebellion or a strategy of non-violence?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6764924517498538122010-02-11T22:31:25.645-05:002010-02-11T22:31:25.645-05:00It's funny, in my archaeology class today we w...It's funny, in my archaeology class today we were talking along similar lines, I suppose, at least in terms of resistant readers, or material things that produce resistances...when looking at the way nunneries were designed (on a straight up Christian parallel to the jewish train of thought here) there seemed to be two options: i) women are cloistered away to ensure their protection, patriarchal badness etc etc, which is kinda boring, or, ii) these spaces exist, and are generated out of some kind of ideological schema, but nevertheless, these communities of women produce interesting subjectivities and writings themselves (see Christine de Pizan, Clemence of Barking, whatever) that interrogate the very terms of the whole business.<br /><br />I very much like the idea that resistances of the second type are, in a way, just an affect of the system of power itself, a system that produces its own instability. Hence liking Derrida and so forth. <br /><br />As Deleuze says, "there's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons".<br /><br />Ben xYork CMS Postmedieval Reading Grouphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10679333256880248770noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-43750623398520551852010-02-11T19:52:57.818-05:002010-02-11T19:52:57.818-05:00Great post! This is the flip side of wonder, isn&#...Great post! This is the flip side of wonder, isn't it? The not-All, those whom wonder can't include without occluding the not-so-wonderful conditions of incorporation. <br /><br />I'd suggest, by the way, that the lion on the hill, clearly looking at the star, in the Meeting of the Magi, represents the Lion of Judah, and that we have, then, Jewish adoration/supersession built into the image itself.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com