Radical Thinking in Religious Contexts: Medieval Women on Self-Knowledge, Truth, and Nature
Clémence Boulouque, Elizabeth Castelli, and Christia Mercer.
This project has four closely related goals. First, we are concerned to explore how epistemologically disadvantaged people have found means within religious contexts to acquire knowledge and how such knowers question the broader dynamics (or fault lines) between private learning and public life. Second, we intend to offer the first thorough-going account of the innovative ways in which 12th- to 16th-century Christian women navigated the severe restrictions placed on them as knowers, while proposing profound truths about God, the world, and the divine worthiness of all human beings. Third, we will use our new account of medieval women to show that core assumptions about the development of modern philosophy need to be rethought. Finally, we hope to use the lessons learned from our study of medieval women as the beginning of an analysis of later writers.
Workshop: Seeking Authority: Women, Genre, and Philosophical Reflection in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
February 15-16, 2020
The Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia held a two-day workshop on February 15–16, 2020 that brought together scholars of medieval and early modern literature, theology, philosophy, and art history to explore the creative and often perilous means that Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women used to reflect on questions about self, community, dignity, truth, and divinity. We discussed how women, who were considered intellectually and morally inferior to men, created ways to express new ideas and establish forms of authority. We inquired about the ways in which religious communities allowed women to promote radical religious and social change: What were the risks women and their communities faced when they shared their ideas publicly? And how did they minimize those risks? Finally, we discussed the genres and means of argumentation they used to present their ideas. The first day of the workshop highlighted these questions in Christian medieval philosophy. Presentation topics ranged from deciphering new insights within medieval philosophies of self to treating particular medieval women’s responses to religious and political authority through their articulations and transformations of notions of prayer, spirituality, knowledge, virtue, and the power of God. The second day of the workshop emphasized the distinctive contributions of Jewish and Muslim female figures and their responses to authority by reclaiming the meaning of religious identity.