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2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11014010
Caroline Walker Bynum's work illustrates how a historian engages in conversation about matters of interest to historical subjects, matters of interest within the academy, and matters of concern to the general public. The key methodological paradox is how she respects the past for its otherness and strangeness, yet her books are always relevant to the present. Holy Feast and Holy Fast deals with the function of eating and fasting in ways that have had resonance for discussion of anorexia, but her interest in the meaning of food and fasting leads her in the epilogue to reflection on medieval and modern approaches to religious symbols more generally. The Resurrection of the Body contributes to recent discussion of personal identity. Wonderful Blood explores the character of late medieval religion but also anti‐Semitism. Christian Materiality builds on the “material turn” in history and the humanities. In each case, however, Bynum addresses contemporary issues (whether academic or public) always on her own terms and with clear emphasis on matters of interest to her historical subjects.
2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11014023
As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this article argues that Bynum's work on gender has overturned bedrock interpretations of the religious significance of the widespread ascetic practices of the Western Christian Middle Ages. Bynum's claim has been that medieval asceticism is best understood not as an upshot of dualism — of the soul and body understood as in opposition — but as “an effort to plumb and realize all the possibilities of the flesh.” Drawing on underused religious sources, analyzing in their larger social and cultural context the images that medieval women and men used, and employing a comparative analysis of female and male spiritualities, she has demonstrated that each had its own different emphases. In this effort, she has pioneered what is sometimes called a “history of masculinities.” Focusing on women's own experience and ferreting out basic assumptions of their religious thought and practice, she has argued for women's profound contributions to their contemporary theological culture by drawing on the dominant culture's hierarchical gender binaries in order to undermine them and accentuate their shared (bodily) humanity with Christ. Bynum has shown successfully that medieval women had confidence in their own ability to love and imitate Christ and thus to participate in the salvation of the world.
2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11014036
A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this essay explores the side of Bynum's scholarly personality that may be regarded as comparativist. She is interested in comparison with regard to periods of time, with regard to ritual and gender‐based religious practices in the Christian West, and with respect to similarities that might be claimed between elements of Christian and non‐Christian cultures. Her thoughts about morphology, materiality, and gender extend beyond medieval Europe to the world at large. Her coedited volume Gender and Religion (1986), the first of its kind, has figured importantly in the development of the field many call comparative religion. Here Bynum's impact on selected scholars of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religion — as well as of non‐Western Christianity — is assessed. This essay concludes with the text of a response delivered by the author, who is a scholar of Hinduism, to Bynum's Lionel Trilling Lecture at Columbia University, “Am I My Body? Medieval Theories of Bodily Resurrection and Some Modern Implications” (1991).
2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11014049
As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this essay traces the origins and development of Bynum's interest in the material artifacts of late medieval Christian spirituality. The author narrates these evolutions through analyses of a single object, the Louvain beguine cradle from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The essay begins by treating Bynum's research from the 1980s to the early 1990s as moving toward a “visual theology” and then charts her movement from an interest in matter to an interest in materiality over the second half of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty‐first century. Finally, the author uses the Louvain cradle's appearance in Bynum's most recent book, Dissimilar Similitudes, to articulate and reflect upon her contribution to material culture studies.
2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11014062
As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this essay stresses Bynum's commitment to the methods and questions of history but also the unparalleled impact of her work on adjacent fields, including and perhaps even especially art history. Furthermore, her body of scholarship registers a consistent engagement with art historians. Weaving together personal memoir and historiography, this article sketches the manifold ways in which Bynum's publications have responded to and shaped the contours of medieval art history in America since the early 1990s — particularly with respect to questions of gender, body, identity, violence, and materiality — and the formative role that her mentorship and pedagogy have played in the author's development as an art historian.
2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11014075
In this afterword to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” Bynum's early work is seen to have revolutionized the fields of medieval studies and religious studies by disclosing the need to account for the embodied and gendered aspects of Christian spirituality. It reflects on the enduring influence of her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast on the study of premodern mysticism, sanctity, and witchcraft, then discusses the impact of Bynum's later works on the reception of Holy Feast and Holy Fast in the third decade of the twenty‐first century.
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