34th Annual Meeting: Southeastern Medieval Association
Bodies, Embodiments, Becomings
2-4 October 2008
Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri

[co-hosted by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Saint Louis University, and the BABEL Working Group, with organizing assistance from Washington University in Saint Louis]

Featured Respondent

Amy Hollywood, Elizaberth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies, Harvard Divinity School (author of: The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, a study of the body and gender in late medieval Christian mysticism, and Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, on Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray and their fascination with excessive bodily and affective forms of Christian mysticism)

Special Exhibit

“What a Piece of Work is a Man — Reading the Body in Medieval Manuscripts”a special exhibit of manuscript facsimiles in six groupings: The Social Order, The Body Bared, Holy Bodies, The Body as Other, The Body in Pieces, and Bodies in the MarginsFirst Floor Foyer, Pius XII Memorial Library

Call for Papers

In his book Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that we know the human body “is divisible into semidiscrete systems (nervous, digestive, circulatory, excretory, reproductive), but that these structures nevertheless form a bounded whole, a singular organism. The human body is therefore described as a marvel of God or of evolution, a system so autnomous from its environment that it can dream theology and science in order to envision how it came to be the culminating creation in a world of similarly distinct bodies and objects.” But what if the body is less than this idealization and also “more than its limbs, organs, and flesh as traced by an anatomical chart”? Read more

34th Annual Meeting
Southeastern Medieval Association
2-4 October 2008

Saint Louis University
Saint Louis, Missouri

*co-hosted by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Saint Louis University, and the BABEL Working Group, with organizing assistance from Washington University in Saint Louis

Figurae 1. Sessions (Busch Student Center) & Friday Night Reception (Knights Room, Pius XII Memorial Library)

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Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock

34th Annual Southeastern Medieval
Association Meeting
2-4 October 2008
Saint Louis University
Saint Louis, Missouri

[See informal photos of BABEL@SEMA 2008 here]

BABEL Working Group panels:

a. Eros and Phenomenology I

Jessica Rosenfeld (Washington University in Saint Louis), Organizer

Cary Howie (Cornell University), Presider

• Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), “Eros and Event in Malory’s Tale of Balyn and Balan“
  

  This paper will focus on a narrative “break” as well as a moment of “undoing” in Malory’s Tale of Sir Balin: when Balin kills another knight Launceor, occasioning Launceor’s lover, an unnamed woman, to fall into a “sorrow out of measure” and to exclaim to Balin that he has killed “two bodyes . . . in one herte, and two hertes in one body, and two soules,” after which she kills herself with her lover’s sword. The scene is so ubiquitous in medieval romantic literature, it practically swerves toward the comical. But what is unexpected (for Balin in particular, as he is the epitome of rash action without remorse) is what Malory tells us happens next: Balin is so struck with wonder at the woman’s will to self-destruction over her love for the dead knight, and so ashamed of himself for causing that destruction, that “for sorow he myght no lenger beholde them, but turned hys horse and loked toward a fayre foreste.” Read more