The Signifying Body:

Dismemberment, Body Parts, and Embodiment

Texts:

Abelard,  Historia calamitatum.

Bernard de Clairvaux, Apologia

Dante.  Commedia, excerpts

Guillem de Cabestanh, lyrics and razo

Heldris de Cournouaille, Roman de Silence.

Hildegard von Bingen, selections

Jean d’Arras OR Coudrette, Mélusine

Jean Renart, Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole.

Margery Kempe.  The Book of Margery Kempe.

Marguerite d’Oingt,  Le speculum. 

Suger, Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis, part II

Teresa d’Avila, selections

Selected 14^th c. English lyrics

Secondary Texts:

RECENT :

Alexander, Jonathan. "Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body."

College Composition and Communication 57.1 (2005): 45-82.

Armstrong, Guyda. "Heavenly Bodies: The Presence of the Divine Female in Boccaccio."

Italian Studies 60.2 (2005): 134-46.

Belting, Hans. "Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology."

Critical Inquiry 31.2 (2005): 302-19.

Bryce, Judith, Loredana Polezzi, and Charlotte Ross. "In Corpore: (Im)Material Bodies in Italy."

Italian Studies 60.2 (2005): 121-239.

Lambert, Anthony. "I Connect Therefore I Am: Connectivity and Networking in Bodies, Technologies,

Communities, and Selves." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 5.1 (2005).

Loughlin, Gerard. "Desiring Bodies." Cross Currents 54.4 (2005): 69-77.

Thomsen, Bodil Marie. "The Idea of 'War against Terror' and the Exhibition of Tortured Bodies."

p.o.v: A Danish Journal of Film Studies 20 (2005): 59-72.

AND 

Altieri, Charles.  “Engaging Affect in Painting and in Poetry.”  IN The Particulars of Rapture:

An Aesthetics of the Affects.

Ben-Ze’ev.  “Rationality and Functionality.” IN The Subtlety of Emotions.

Beaussart, Francois-Jerome.  “Corps malade et corps souffrant dans la littérature médiévale

réligieuse.”  Etudes Médiévales. Ed. Danielle Buschinger.  1999

Beckwith, Sarah.  Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings.

Brownlee, Kevin.  “Melusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis” Melusine of          

Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France.  Ed. Maddox and Sturm-Maddox Athens:

U of Georgia P, 1996, 76-99.

The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe.  Ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. 

London: Routledge, 1997.

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature.  Ed. Piero Boitani.  Cambridge, England: Brewer,

1999.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Essays in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender

and the Human Body in Medieval Religion.

Cestaro, Gary P.  Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body.  Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P,

2003. [A number of good chapters. Esp. “Lady Grammar between nurturing and Discipline”    

9-48; “The Primal Scene of Suckling in De Vulgari E” 49-76;

Conrad, Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apología and the Medieval  

            Attitude Toward Art

Corazzo, Nina.  “Dismembering the Female Body: The Breast of Saint Agatha.” Semiotics 1995.  Ed.

C.W. Spinks and John Deely. 

Enterline, Lynn.  The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature.  Ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey.  Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance.  Carbondale,

IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. [esp. intro & “The Knight’s Body and the female Auctoritas: Christine de Pizan’s Conduct Texts”]

Fragments for a  History of the Human Body: Part Three. Ed. Michel Feher. New York: Zone, 1989.

Gerli, E. Michael. “Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in

Celestina.” Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Ed. Josiah Blackmore.  Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies.

Hahn, Cynthia.  Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the

Thirteenth Century.  Berkeley :U of California P, 2001

Hamburger, Jeffrey F.  Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent.  Berkeley: U of

California P, 1997.

Hayes, Dawn Marie.  Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe. London: Routledge P, 2003.

Hess, Erika.  Literary Hybrids: Cross-dressing, Shapeshifting, and Indeterminacy in Medieval and Modern French Narrative.

Holsinger, Bruce.  Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culure: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 2001.

Huot, Sylvia.  “Dangerous Embodiments: Froissart’s Harton and Jean d’Arras’s

Mélusine” Speculum 78, #2 (2003) Apr: 400-420.

Irvine, Martin.  “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and

Remasculinization.”  Becoming Male in the Middle Ages.

Jager, Eric.  The Book of the Heart.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

Johnson, Mark.  The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1987.

Kristeva, Julia.  “Ego Affectus Est. Bernard of Clairvaux: Affect, Desire, Love.” IN Tales of Love.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson.  Metaphors We Live By.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

            .Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New      

York, NY, 1999.

Le Goff, Jacques.  “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages.” 

Trans. Patricia Ranum.  IN Ed. Michel Feher. New York: Zone, 1989, 12-26.

Lerer, Seth.  “The Courtly Body and Late Medieval Literary Culture.”  The Book and the Body.  Ed.

Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe.  Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1997.

MacKendrick, Karmen. The Word Made Skin. New York: Fordham UP, 2004.  [Especially,

Introduction, Word Made Flesh, Sacred Hearts, Figures of Desire]

McCracken, Peggy.  “The Curse of Eve: Female Bodies and Christian Bodies in Heloise’s Third Letter.” 

Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman. Ed.  Bonnie Wheeler, 2000.

McCracken, Peggy.  The Curse of Eve, The Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender and

Medieval Literature. Philadelphia: U of Penn, 2003.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.  “The Human Order” and/or “The Relations of the Soul and the Body and

the Problem of Perceptual Consciousness.” The Structure of Behavior. 

Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda.  Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. [Esp. “Writing the

Body: Male and Female in the Writings of Marguerite d’Oingt, Angela of Foligno, and Umiltà of Faenza” 204-224]

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain.

Schilder, Paul.  The Image and Appearance of the Human Body.

Spence, Sarah.  Introduction “Writing out the Body: Abbot Suger  De administratione” and “Text of

the Body: Abelard and Guibert de Nogent”  in Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century.

Smith, D. Vance. “Body Doubles: Producing the Masculine Corpus.”  Becoming Male in the Middle Ages.

Ed. Jeffrey Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler.  

Steinburg, Leo.  The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

Stewart, Susan.  “The Lyric Eidos” and/or “Touch in Aesthetic Forms.” IN Poetry and the Fate of the

Senses.

Thinking the Limits of the Body.  Ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Gail Weiss.

Todes, Samuel.  “The Subject Body in Perception and Conception: A Brief Sketch.”  Body and World.

Welles, Marcia L.  “Cervantes or ‘The Body in Parts’” “Never-Ending Adventure”: Studies in Medieval and

Early Modern Spanish Literature in Honor of Peter N. Dunn.  Ed.  Edward H. Friedman and Harlan Sturm.  Newark, DE: Cuesta, 2002.