Ebook: Excessive saints: gender, narrative, and theological invention in Thomas of Cantimpré's mystical hagiographies
Author: Smith Rachel J., de Cantimpré Thomas
- Tags: Christian hagiography, Christian hagiography--History and criticism, Christian women saints, Christian women saints--Biography, Hagiographers, Hagiographers--Belgium, Hagiographes, Hagiographie chrétienne--Histoire et critique, Biographies, Criticism interpretation etc, Thomas -- de Cantimpré -- approximately 1200-approximately 1270, Christian hagiography -- History and criticism, Christian women saints -- Biography, Hagiographers -- Belgium -- Biography, Belgium, Thomas -- (de Cantimpré), Hagiographie c
- Series: Gender theory and religion
- Year: 2019
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- City: Belgium
- Language: English
- epub
For thirteenth-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, the Southern Low Countries were a harbinger of the New Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit, he believed, was manifesting itself in the lives of lay and religious people alike. Thomas avidly sought out these new kinds of saints, writing accounts of their lives so that these models of sanctity might astound, teach, and trouble the convictions of his day.
In Excessive Saints, Rachel J. D. Smith combines historical, literary, and theological approaches to offer a new interpretation of Thomas's hagiographies, showing how they employ vivid narrative portrayals of typically female bodies to perform theological work in a rhetorically specific way. Written in an era of great religious experimentation, Thomas's texts think with and through the bodies of particular figures: the narrative of the holy person's life becomes a site of theological invention in a variety of registers, particularly the...