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Interdisciplinarity in Teaching Medieval Mysticism: the Case of Angela of Foligno

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Catherine M. Mooney
Affiliation:
Weston Jesuit School of Theology

Abstract

This essay addresses two related challenges facing educators who teach about medieval saints, mystics, and their texts. The first is how to relate to the theologies and spiritualities of people who inhabited cultures radically distinct from the modern and postmodern periods. The second regards the contemporary tendency to evaluate medieval believers in terms of modernist intellectual frameworks, most notably clinical psychological categories. A case study approaching the medieval mystic Angela of Foligno from three disciplinary points of view—clinical psychology, historical theology, and cultural history—illustrates how educators might respond to students' penchant to privilege clinical psychology when considering medieval mystics and saints, and shows not only the complementarity of interdisciplinarity, but also its limitations.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2007

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References

1 Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights. Information available from http://www.martinbarofund.org/.

2 Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (Edizione critica), ed. Thier, Ludger and Calufetti, Abele, 2d ed. (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985)Google Scholar; Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Lachance, Paul (New York: Paulist, 1993).Google Scholar All translations are from the Lachance edition.

3 See especially, Complete Works, chaps. 1–3.

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29 The classic work, which makes the case too strongly, is Delumeau, Jean, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries, trans. Nicholson, Eric (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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34 It bears repeating that Brother A. played an important role in molding Angela's story. Subsequent editions and translations of the Book have sometimes embellished Angela's sinfulness; Mooney, , “The Changing Fortunes of Angela of Foligno,” in History in the Comic Mode, 5667.Google Scholar On men's fashioning of women's stories, see Caroline Bynum, Walker, “Women's Stories, Women's Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner's Theory of Liminality,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991)Google Scholar; Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Mooney, Catherine M. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Coakley, John W., Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), esp. 111–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 See, for example, his Testament, The Earlier Rule, and the two versions of his Letter to the Faithful, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1. Thomas of Celano, Bonaventure, and other biographers recount Francis's frequent examples of humility and penance; see Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vols. 1–2.

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40 Complete Works, 126.

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50 Delooz, Pierre, Sociologie et canonisations (Liège: Faculté de Droit, 1969), 7Google Scholar; see also idem, “Toward a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. Wilson, Stephen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 189216, esp. 194.Google Scholar

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53 Of twenty-three women saints in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany and Umbria for whom there are relatively early sources, six, including Angela, had married, and another unmarried woman had taken a lover; see Mooney, Catherine M., “Nuns, Tertiaries, and Quasi-Religious: The Religious Identities of Late Medieval Holy Women,” Medieval Feminist Forum 42 (2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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64 For examples of cultural psychological approaches that shed light on the social origins, development, and meaning of mental suffering, see Kleinman, Arthur, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988)Google Scholar; and Swartz, Leslie, Culture and Mental Health: A Southern African View (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar