Sublime Bodies

Below is my abstract for the paper I am presenting in Reykjavik, Iceland, next July at the New Chaucer Society.  I have attached a digital composition inspired by my paper that I created for the freshman Seminar in Composition class that I am currently teaching.

Erotic Edification: Henry Suso’s Life of the Servant

and its Seduction of the Spirit

In The Life of the Servant, Henry Suso excites the senses of his readers through the enticing descriptions of his relationship with an androgynous Christ, and through these descriptions he proposes a model for the edification of the senses based on material seduction.  In resistance to the traditional dualistic approach to medieval asceticism, I follow scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum and Robert Mills, whose scholarship argues for the mutual implications between the material world and late medieval spirituality.  Henry Suso reveals such a reliance on the material world, and although he proposes that the senses need to be disciplined, this edification does not serve to stifle the senses, but instead to heighten them.  The disciplining of the body allows one to make use of one’s corporeal experiences, one’s pleasure and pain, as a means of discovering God in creation.  The Servant’s beloved, depicted as both Christ and Lady Wisdom, seduces the Servant through his/her sensual appeal.  From his initial encounter with Lady Wisdom through Scripture to his sexualized union with Christ through corporeal self-punishment, the Servant’s senses play a significant role in his discovery of the blessed life.  Suso describes Eternal Wisdom as both a seductive courtly lady and a handsome young knight, he presents both Christ and the Servant as exposed bodies dripping with blood, and he excites the senses with vivid descriptions of celestial music, flowering gardens, and intoxicating smells.  Through such sensual imagery, Suso inspires a bodily response in the readers, a response deeply imbedded in erotic desire.  Suso’s text becomes just as seductive to the readers as are the eroticized bodies he describes, and its seductive capabilities parallel the Servant’s own conversion, occurring in response to a carnal reaction to erotic texts—the scriptural Books of Wisdom.  Suso reveals the usefulness of the material world and its sensual appeal in his choice of material descriptions that appeal to the senses (capable of enticing both the Servant and the readers); however, he further edifies his readers’ senses by discouraging the (logical?) development of this eroticized faith to the antinomian ends of the Free Spirit heresy.  By explicitly arguing that his text does not serve this end goal, he leaves the readers, whose senses are highly excited, looking for another outlet for this desire, and Suso presents God as this outlet.  Like the eroticized faith proposed and developed by such scholars as Ruth Mazo Karras, Karmen MacKendrick, and Nancy Partner, I argue that the edification that Suso offers to his readers relies on an intentional reorientation of material eroticism towards an intimate relationship with God.  

The Saracens of the West: Honoré Bovet and the Decadence of a Schismatic Church

Honoré Bovet’s L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun presents a heated discussion between a prior, the ghost of Jean de Meun, and a group of outcasts, including a physician, a Jew, a Saracen, and a Jacobin.  The text, written in 1398, occurs during the Western Schism and looks toward the prophecies related to the apocalyptic year 1400, when the “Church is blackened” and the “Saracens are victorious.”  Through this conversation, each of the characters explains why he was excluded from the Christian community, and each defends himself by accusing the Christians of comparable crimes; each, that is, except the Saracen.  Unlike the other three marginalized figures, the Saracen never admits to any crime and never apologizes.  Instead, he articulates a lengthy description of the monstrous Christians with whom he has come into contact.

Following the organizational patterns of the preceding engagements with the physician and with the Jew, the Saracen’s reprimand against the social decadence of the fourteenth century must act as a parallel to the reasons why the Christians cast them out of France. Because these moral flaws relate to common social practices, like feasting and dressing fashionably, rather than explicit religious discrepancies, the Saracen, I believe, passes a fascinating judgment that both implicitly and damningly reveals to the Christians the implications of these apparently shallow judgments.  For centuries, Christians linked the luxury of the East with Ezekiel 16, where God reprimands Jerusalem for sharing in the decadence of Sodom. 

According to the Jacobin who provides a gloss on the Saracen’s diatribe, Islam is not ontologically distinct from Christianity but arose as a result of the Great (East-West) Schism; Saracens, then, join the ranks of earlier schismatic races, including that of the Sodomites.  Although some Christians might be quacks like the physician, or usurers like the Jew, most are not; however, any Christian that enjoys dining or wears the latest fashion clearly reveals his relationship to the Saracens (and, thus, the Sodomites). The Saracen indirectly reveals how the late fourteenth century social practices of feasting and high fashion, Saracen-like practices, result from the contemporary Western Schism, and the people of the divided church are, in fact, Saracens themselves.  The victory of the Saracens, then, does not result from an external enemy, but develops from the interior degradation of the Western Church.