Theory Lecture: Amy Hollywood, “Apophasis and Ecstasy, at the Limits of Gender” 11/8, 4:15 p.m.

Amy Hollywood, “Apophasis and Ecstasy, at the Limits of Gender”

Thursday, November 8, 4:15 p.m.   Downey House 113

Light refreshments will be served.   Sponsored by the certificate in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory

Christian women write, and they write about religion. This might seem unexceptional, yet the fact that women have written over the course of the history of Christianity is surprising given the restrictions on women’s education and religious authority that emerge as early as the 1st century and continue to play a role in Christianity today. As if to harness the possibilities engendered by women’s writing,  modern scholarship repeatedly describes women’s theological production as differing in significant ways from men’s. Why? What’s at stake in insisting on these differences? And how do texts by medieval women, particularly those of the thirteenth century Dutch-speaking beguine, Hadewijch, both exemplify and resist such categorizations?