Sinners and Saints

Catalog description

This course examines the complicated relationship between sanctity, sin, and illness in attitudes toward women in the later middle ages. Students will consider how medieval writers conceptualized the mystical experiences, martyrdoms, and illnesses of women in particular, students will grapple with the ways sex and gender shape texts by comparing how men and women wrote about the female soul and body. A range of literary genres will be consulted: hagiography, autobiography, and medical treatises.