well as of scholars at the beginning of their careers indicates that the role played
by the ‘lower’—more ‘material’—senses in the constitution and transmission
of religion will catch up with the scholarly interest in the body.
Embodied religion
Few topics have received more scholarly attention in recent years than the body,
especially in connection to sexuality and food. Some of the work on the body
has consisted of impenetrable musings produced by adherents of some variety
of ‘post’–theory; but even readable work has been curiously immaterial, as
hardly any attention has been paid to what most bodies do during most of
their waking hours, namely, work—one of the exceptions being Peter Gose’s
remarkable Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class
Formation in an Andean Town(1994). Similarly, insofar as it has not paid
attention to the usual consequences of sexual activities, especially at times when
reliable contraception was not available, some work on sexuality has a
disembodied character. In general, however, interest in the role played by the
body in religion has resulted in valuable monographs and collective volumes,
such as those edited by Jane Law, Religious Reflections on the Human Body
(1995), and Sarah Coakley, Religion and the Body(1997). In some cases, work
on the body may appear in books that, because of their titles, may be neglected
by scholars of religion; an example of this is William McNeill’s Keeping
Together in Time(1995). In terms of specific traditions there is an abundance
of work. Christian theologians’ concern with repressing sexuality or at the very
least minimizing sexual pleasure has been studied in Peter Brown’s almost
canonical The Body and Society(1988); while the same theologians’ wilful
misreading of translations of Hebrew texts has been examined in painstaking
detail in Elizabeth Clark’s Reading Renunciation(1999), a book that every
student of religion, regardless of area of specialization, ought to read, in order
to see how theological exegesis can turn straightforward statements into their
opposite. Medieval views of sexuality have been studied by Pierre Payer in his
work on the penitentials and on the later Middle Ages (1993); as well as,
comprehensively, by James Brundage, in Law, Sex, and Christian Society in
Medieval Europe(1987). In a celebrated essay, collected in Jesus as Mother
(1982), Caroline Bynum has studied how medieval devotion led in some cases
to imagining Jesus as mother; while her Holy Feast and Holy Fast(1987) is
devoted to the symbolism of food among medieval women. The peculiar
interaction between desexualization and manliness is explored in Matthew
Kuefler’s The Manly Eunuch(2001), while the no less peculiar emphasis on
the genitality of Jesus has been studied by Leo Steinberg in The Sexuality of
Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion(1983/1996: not to be
missed is the ‘Retrospect, 1995’, which has Bynum as one of its targets).
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1011
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2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
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30111
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35
6
7
8
9
40111
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