Introduction to Topics in History (292-0-22)
Topic
Early Modern Religious Women
Instructors
Haley Elisabeth Bowen
Meeting Info
Parkes Hall 213: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
The Spanish nun Saint Teresa of Avila was in her thirties when she began to levitate during her ecstatic trances. "She dearly wished not to be considered a saint," a fellow nun recalled after her death, "so she constantly begged me and her other daughters to pull down hard on her vestments whenever we saw her rising into the air." The attempted concealment was futile, however; Saint Teresa's extraordinary spiritual gifts - and otherworldly humility - gained her instant fame and established a model for religious women that lasted throughout the rest of the early modern era.
At a time in which women's social roles were severely circumscribed, religious women and female religious communities flourished across Europe. Early modern women levitated, bilocated [appeared in two places at once], experienced visions, battled with the devil, wrote autobiographies, and pioneered religious missions around the world. Working within traditions and cultures that subordinated them to men, some religious women carved out relatively independent lives devoted to charity, teaching, and prayer (occasionally gaining fame, fortune, and notoriety along the way). This course will explore the lives and experiences of women of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faith within both Europe and European colonies in the Americas and Asia. Together we will engage with the cultural, theological, liturgical, social, and political factors which shaped women's spirituality from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Learning Objectives
Students will learn how to: read complex texts and images from the early modern period "slowly" by summarizing, analyzing, and synthesizing them in order to generate and support writing; analyze diverse historical methods and approaches in the study of early modern women; and reflect upon the historical relationship between gender and religious practice
Class Notes
History Major Concentration(s): European
Class Attributes
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area