Description
Book SynopsisJust like the modern hysteric, a figure that catalyzes clinical vocabularies confirming medieval theological anxieties, the demoniac has been considered an anomalous and abnormal manifestation of womanhood. Incapable of self-governance, both linguistic and corporeal, the medieval possessed is placed in the category of the pathological. The symptoms of possession are part of a multilayered discourse coined by medieval theologians, authors of exempla, hagiographers, and natural philosophers. The subjectivity of the demoniac becomes, thus, a fetishistic construction which allows medieval male intellectuals to ponder questions about demons, the supernatural, and the human body. Demonic Possession, Vulnerability, and Performance in Medieval French Drama advocates for an affective and ethical framework of reading the vocabularies of possession in which the demoniac's convulsions, contortions, shrieks of pain, and snapshots of disarticulated language are not conceptualized as
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments – Introduction – Medieval Theologians Facing the Possessed – The Voice of the Possessed – Sensorial Encounters with the Possessed – Effacing Demons: Storytelling, Healing, and Ritual – Conclusion – Bibliography – Index.
