Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition: Inventing Women(Studies in Medieval Literature)

About the Book

Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition 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.

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

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

Review :
Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition: Inventing Women takes the "Catholic Tradition" to a new level. It is a nuanced and critical assessment of women's identities that were often shaped by men, within patriarchal structures, and yet, driven by outstanding women far beyond existing norms. Christopher Flavin engages with narratives on and of women like Perpetua in the second century to Teresa of Ávila in the 16th. Without falling into postmodern traps, the book insists on the communal aspect and the impact these women had on experiencing faith in novel ways. Methodologically too, this is innovative and stimulating reading. Contemporary academic cultural studies are all in various ways heirs to the Enlightenment in the sense that they approach their subject matter with a critical, even skeptical “hermeneutic of suspicion” informed by certain normative assumptions that privilege individual human autonomy above all other goods. Inventing Women provides a much-needed corrective by examining a Catholic literary tradition of writing by and about holy women as a relatively coherent and continuous tradition from late antiquity to the Reformation. Sensitive to the gendered characterizations this tradition employs in constructing the distinct identities of particular holy women, Flavin nonetheless emphasizes the role of the texts in forging a community of believers that transcends gender through the common Christian calling to imitate Christ. Inventing Women is a timely work that speaks very much to key theoretical and interpretive issues that concern all fields of humanistic study. This book is a daring and provocative study that will surely change the way scholars generally consider the writings of women in the Catholic historical and literary traditions. Setting forth a trajectory that leads us from such foundational texts as The Passion of Saint Perpetua in the early centuries of the Church to the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila during the counter reformation, Flavin generates a remarkable reading, the originality of which displaces the perception of these women of faith as "static icons" of some "feminine ideal" with this fundamental constant: by way of their writings, they assume the power to "invent" and "reinvent" themselves while remaining in dialogue with the collective values of the faith community. Flavin’s book would be very appropriate for a graduate seminar discussing the complex problems inherent in understanding pre-modern textual presentations of feminine identity, their dialogue with various audiences, and the level to which these constructs reflect actual women.