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Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts

Project description

Giving voice to medieval devout women

Medieval women writers strategically appropriated liturgical memoria – what and how the liturgy taught women to remember – and were significant contributors to Europe’s cultural and spiritual heritage. The EU-funded WMM project will examine works from the British Isles, Low Countries and German territories through the prism of medieval thought on embodied cognition. The research will focus on how early women authors transformed liturgical memory arts, and how these holy women responded to and interrogated the liturgy’s numerous discourses on the body, gender, the Self and the Other. This comparative analysis of texts will shed light on the interactions between the texts and the writers restoring the importance of medieval women authors.

Objective

Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts

Devout women from medieval Europe knew the words, sounds, sights, and movements of the Divine Office and Mass by heart: references to sensations and gendered discourses produced by the liturgy abound in female-authored (auto)biographies and visionary texts (1300-1500). This Oxford-based project argues that these medieval women writers strategically appropriate liturgical memoria (memory arts), that is, what and how the liturgy taught women to remember. Combining close-reading and historical contextualization, this study examines twelve works from the British Isles, Low Countries and German territories through the prism of medieval thought on embodied cognition to uncover how early women authors transform liturgical memory arts, and how these holy women thus respond to and interrogate the liturgy’s numerous discourses on the body, gender, and self and Other.

The project will benefit from presentation and collaboration opportunities at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), focusing on mysticism, memory and literature. Furthermore, Professor Henrike Lähnemann, an authority on medieval spirituality, will mentor the researcher.

Driven by a feminist impulse, this uniquely international, comparative analysis of texts in Middle English, Middle Dutch and Middle High German introduces Anglophone scholars and the general public to little-known Continental texts and reveals European parallels and interactions between texts and writers. Simultaneously, it enhances Oxford’s, the United Kingdom’s and Europe’s knowledge base on British and Continental women’s literary inventiveness, ultimately amplifying medieval women’s voices and illuminating their significance to Europe’s cultural and spiritual heritage.

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2018

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Coordinator

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 212 933,76
Address
WELLINGTON SQUARE UNIVERSITY OFFICES
OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom

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Region
South East (England) Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Oxfordshire
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 212 933,76
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