A specimen
Jun. 5th, 2011 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThis is the abstract of an academic article about a mediaeval religious movement. It may seem unchivalrous to give the author's name and the title, but if I had not it would still have been extremely easy to discover her via Google. I rather want to underline that there is no exceptional folly or wickedness about this particular person or her work; rather, that the central badness of it is nothing more than average, symptomatic of a wholly poisonous way of approaching history and other discipline that unfortunately prevails and has prevailed for a very long time.
From Prostitutes to Brides of Christ: The Avignonese Repenties in the Late Middle Ages
By Joëlle Rollo-Koster
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol 32:1 (2002)
Introduction: This study investigates cultural appropriation in late medieval Avignon. It is an illustration of how a notoriously disenfranchised group, prostitutes, creatively appropriated an ascendant cultural model, that of traditional conventual life, to better their own lot in life. This process of appropriation occurred during late medieval Avignon’s papal residency within the context of male authority attempting to control the dangers of female sexuality. In order to rein in the threat of sexual promiscuity, the city magistrates institutionalized prostitution, then tried to remedy this vice through charity, and finally encouraged the reform of prostitutes by establishing Repenties houses —convents for repentant prostitutes—where Mary Magdalene was promoted as a central hagiographic model of penance.
Yet despite their marginal status within the city and their vulnerability to male forms of power, I show how these women adopted—and were remarkably successful, even in worldly terms—a religious life according to male clerical forms. The Repenties appropriated conventual life by organizing their house according to a monastic rule. They successfully assimilated spiritual models of feminine penance circulating in the late Middle Ages, and they fostered their temporals (worldly goods and properties) just as did nuns from regular orders. Evidence of this cultural competition is seen very clearly in the spatial tug-of-war that took place between the founders of the Avignonese Repenties and the Repenties themselves. Even though the Repenties’ convent was marginalized on Avignon’s southern periphery, the Repenties’ presence in the material form of real estate endowments and acquisitions was felt in the very heart of the city. The ability to appropriate the norms and practices of a dominant culture proved to be determinative in shaping the history of the Avignonese Repenties.
Never mind the lousy English - clear prose is a reflex of a clear mind - what is really atrocious about this sort of thinking is the complete reduction of everything to a struggle over power, and of all distinctions to that between male and female. To this kind of historiography, it is simply a given that any social group exists in order to struggle for power. Why it should want to do so is never asked; and what it wants to do with it - a much more fundamental issue in the study of power, which after all means the ability to do or affect things - is only asked in a form that goes right back to the all-emcompassing struggle for power. That is to say, narratives, ideologies, programs and values - the things that really shape a party or a movement - are only approached as instruments in the struggle for power, and studied to the extent that they are likely to increase or diminish power. Witness for instance the horrible idea of the "appropriation" of a cultural model for the benefit of the Repenties as a group. That there should have been nothing in particular to appropriate, because that cultural model was the common heritage of prelates and prostitutes and all points between, does not begin to enter the author's mind. She creates, or rather implies - the pattern is never made explicit - a false time sequence in which a "cultural model" exists outside the community of prostitutes and Repenties until they "appropriate" it. This is not how mediaeval society works and teaches us precisely nothing about Avignon in the 1300s, or any other such place. And notice how any distinction other than male/powerful and female/powerless becomes phantasmal or vanishes; the article seems to centre on the one hand only on such men as are powerful, papal secretaries and members of government, and on the other hand isolates the prostitutes from any social context (who were those women? what kind of families did they come from? who were their customers?) to reduce them to rootless, featureless objects of the action of papal power. In the name of God, is there nothing else to say about women and men?
From Prostitutes to Brides of Christ: The Avignonese Repenties in the Late Middle Ages
By Joëlle Rollo-Koster
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol 32:1 (2002)
Introduction: This study investigates cultural appropriation in late medieval Avignon. It is an illustration of how a notoriously disenfranchised group, prostitutes, creatively appropriated an ascendant cultural model, that of traditional conventual life, to better their own lot in life. This process of appropriation occurred during late medieval Avignon’s papal residency within the context of male authority attempting to control the dangers of female sexuality. In order to rein in the threat of sexual promiscuity, the city magistrates institutionalized prostitution, then tried to remedy this vice through charity, and finally encouraged the reform of prostitutes by establishing Repenties houses —convents for repentant prostitutes—where Mary Magdalene was promoted as a central hagiographic model of penance.
Yet despite their marginal status within the city and their vulnerability to male forms of power, I show how these women adopted—and were remarkably successful, even in worldly terms—a religious life according to male clerical forms. The Repenties appropriated conventual life by organizing their house according to a monastic rule. They successfully assimilated spiritual models of feminine penance circulating in the late Middle Ages, and they fostered their temporals (worldly goods and properties) just as did nuns from regular orders. Evidence of this cultural competition is seen very clearly in the spatial tug-of-war that took place between the founders of the Avignonese Repenties and the Repenties themselves. Even though the Repenties’ convent was marginalized on Avignon’s southern periphery, the Repenties’ presence in the material form of real estate endowments and acquisitions was felt in the very heart of the city. The ability to appropriate the norms and practices of a dominant culture proved to be determinative in shaping the history of the Avignonese Repenties.
Never mind the lousy English - clear prose is a reflex of a clear mind - what is really atrocious about this sort of thinking is the complete reduction of everything to a struggle over power, and of all distinctions to that between male and female. To this kind of historiography, it is simply a given that any social group exists in order to struggle for power. Why it should want to do so is never asked; and what it wants to do with it - a much more fundamental issue in the study of power, which after all means the ability to do or affect things - is only asked in a form that goes right back to the all-emcompassing struggle for power. That is to say, narratives, ideologies, programs and values - the things that really shape a party or a movement - are only approached as instruments in the struggle for power, and studied to the extent that they are likely to increase or diminish power. Witness for instance the horrible idea of the "appropriation" of a cultural model for the benefit of the Repenties as a group. That there should have been nothing in particular to appropriate, because that cultural model was the common heritage of prelates and prostitutes and all points between, does not begin to enter the author's mind. She creates, or rather implies - the pattern is never made explicit - a false time sequence in which a "cultural model" exists outside the community of prostitutes and Repenties until they "appropriate" it. This is not how mediaeval society works and teaches us precisely nothing about Avignon in the 1300s, or any other such place. And notice how any distinction other than male/powerful and female/powerless becomes phantasmal or vanishes; the article seems to centre on the one hand only on such men as are powerful, papal secretaries and members of government, and on the other hand isolates the prostitutes from any social context (who were those women? what kind of families did they come from? who were their customers?) to reduce them to rootless, featureless objects of the action of papal power. In the name of God, is there nothing else to say about women and men?
