Sacred Bodies

Catalog description

How did ancient Christians understand embodied holiness? What did the bodies of saints demonstrate or reveal? Different notions of what makes a body “sacred” have abounded in Christian history, and continue to inflect our broad cultural thinking about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and health. This course will explore those constructions and their malleability through the reading of ancient Christian hagiography (stories about saints). We will ask whether and how multiple notions of sacred bodies might be visible in Christian imagination. The course is organized around three broad categories of holy bodies: the heroic body, the desiring body, and the performing body. Seminar format. WRIT