Metamorphosis and Identity

By: Caroline Walker Bynum

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Paperback | 4 October 2005

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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.

Industry Reviews

Bynum is asking that even while we deploy all the tricks and tools of modern historical analysis, we take seriously the obligation to marvel at the complexity, at the otherness, of the medieval world, a world that we will never perfectly understand and yet that seems to point to something worth understanding.

-Patrick J. Geary, The New Republic

Over the past 30 years, Bynum has published an initially contentious series of books that have illuminated many aspects of the oddness of the medieval world... This time she focuses on Christians' intense devotion to objects that they believed both signaled and embodied God's essence and glory.

-The Chronicle of Higher Education

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Society & Culture Social Issues & Processes Social Discrimination & Inequality Literature, Poetry & Plays History & Criticism of Literature General Literary Studies Classical Literary Studies Philosophy Cultural Studies History General & World History

Earliest Times to Present Day Early History from 500 to 1500 Modern History from 1700 to 1900

Acknowledgments	p. 11
Introduction: Change in the Middle Ages	p. 15
The Ulster Werewolves	p. 15
Change: The Concept	p. 19
Change and the Twelfth Century	p. 22
Hybrid and Metamorphosis	p. 28
Some Methodological Considerations	p. 33
Wonder	p. 37
Recent Scholarship on Wonder and Wonders	p. 40
The Many Wonder Discourses of the Middle Ages	p. 42
Theological and Philosophical Discussion	p. 48
Admiratio in Devotional Literature	p. 51
The Marvelous in Literature of Entertainment	p. 53
The Range of Wonder Responses	p. 56
Wonder and Significance	p. 69
Wonder as Cognitive, Perspectival, and Non-appropriative	p. 72
Wonder and the Modern Historian	p. 73
Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf	p. 77
Again the Question of Bodily Change	p. 79
Ovidian Poetry as Fascination with Change	p. 86
Theological Speculation on Growth and Change	p. 89
Werewolf Stories as Testing of Boundaries	p. 92
The Ovid Reception as Enthusiasm for Order	p. 98
Learned Theology and Miracle Stories as Ontological Control	p. 101
Were Medieval Werewolves Really Metempsychosis?	p. 105
Conclusion	p. 109
Monsters, Medians, and Marvelous Mixtures: Hybrids in the Spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux	p. 113
Mixture and Monster	p. 117
Similitude and Doubleness	p. 127
Change and Unitas	p. 131
Natural Philosophy as the Context of Bernard's Understanding	p. 144
Twelfth-Century Religious Life as Context	p. 147
Literature and Art as Context	p. 150
Conclusion: Hybridity in the Spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux	p. 158
Shape and Story	p. 163
The Problem of Personal Identity	p. 163
Some Stories About Werewolves: Ovid's Lycaon	p. 166
Some Stories About Werewolves: Marie de France's Bisclavret	p. 170
Stories About Werewolves and Metamorphosis: Angela Carter	p. 173
Metamorphosis and Identity	p. 176
Shape and Story, Body and Narrative	p. 180
Metamorphosis in Dante	p. 182
Conclusion	p. 187
Afterword	p. 191
Notes	p. 195
Photo Credits	p. 275
Index	p. 277
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Metamorphosis and Identity

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