Scholastic Affect: Gender, Maternity and the History of Emotions

by Clare Monagle

Scholastic theologians made the Virgin Mary increasingly perfect over the Middle Ages in Europe. Mary became stainless, offering an impossible but ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This work offers an implicit theory of the utility and feelings of women in a Christian salvationary economy. The Virgin was put to use as a shaming technology, one that silenced and effaced women's affective lives. The shame still stands to this day, although in secularised mutated forms. This Element deploys the intellectual history of medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory to consider the implications of Mary's perfection within modernity, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present.

75 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2020

Reviews

[Sandra Saravolac · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Clare shared that she'd published Scholastic Affect I knew I had to read it ASAP. She is such a fantastic scholar and lecturer, having taught a Middle Ages class in my first year of uni. I really enjoyed how this explored the intersections of gender, religion and purity in a contemporary way. It was personal, admirable and provided a look into perceptions of Mary that transcend traditional theology.

[Krijn Pansters · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book is not immaculate, but it is wonderful, original, inspiring, refreshing, brave. The author’s disarmingly honest testimony elicits my own honesty: as a (white, male, European) church historian studying the classics of medieval spirituality and morality, and as a father-to-be, I am not ashamed to admit that I find the combination of historical analysis and personal accounting – no matter how ‘stained’ with the ideological trace of gender and affect theory – very appealing. After the trauma of reading Holly Crocker’s “Medieval Affects Now”, reading this book is a healing experience. Monagle’s passionate perspective may also present a way forward in current discussions on the use(fulness) of the term ‘emotion’ for the medieval period (cf. Brian Patrick McGuire’s review of Lauren Mancia’s “Emotional Monasticism” in TMR 20.08.18). I also see some parallels with the work of historical theologians who as ‘feeling-knowers’ are personally invested in their subject matter.