| Metamorphosis and Identity Contributor(s): Bynum, Caroline Walker (Author) |
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ISBN: 1890951234 ISBN-13: 9781890951238 Publisher: Zone Books OUR PRICE: $37.80 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2005 Annotation: The four studies in this book center on the Western obsession with the nature of personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with an eye toward antiquity and the present, Caroline Walker Bynum explores the themes of metamorphosis and hybridity in genres ranging from poetry, folktales, and miracle collections to scholastic theology, devotional treatises, and works of natural philosophy. She argues that the obsession with boundary-crossing and otherness was an effort to delineate nature's regularities and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, extending even beyond the grave. She examines historical figures such as Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, Bernard Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante, as well as modern fabulists such as Angela Carter, as examples of solutions to the perennial question of how the individual can both change and remain constant. Addressing the fundamental question for historians -- that of change -- Bynum also explores the nature of history writing itself. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Europe - Medieval - History | Modern - General |
| Dewey: 126 |
| Series: Mit Press |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (1.00 lbs) 288 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - Medieval (500-1453) |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In Metamorphosis and Identity, award-winning historian Caroline Walker Bynum explores the Western obsession with the nature of change and personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but concerned as well with Antiquity and the twentieth century, Bynum confronts the question of why intellectuals, religious leaders, and ordinary people alike exhibited a precise and persistent desire to understand how the individual both changes and remains the same. Examining shifting conceptions of change itself in the years around 1200, Bynum situates the intense medieval curiosity about radical or substantial change in the context of specific cultural and social developments. Two images of change -- hybridity and metamorphosis -- were prominent in imaginative literature, theology, the visual arts, and natural philosophy; these sites of competing and shifting understandings each entailed different anthropological and psychological assumptions. As Bynum demonstrates in the four essays of Metamorphosis and Identity, the fascination with boundary crossing and alterity reveals an effort across different genres to delineate the regularity of nature and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, perduring even beyond the grave. Included as the final chapter of Metamorphosis and Identity is Bynum's 1999 NEH Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to a scholar in the humanities. |
Contributor Bio(s): Bynum, Caroline Walker: - Caroline Walker Bynum is Professor of Medieval European History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and University Professor Emerita at Columbia University. She is the author of Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion and Metamorphosis and Identity, both published by Zone Books. |