(Download) "Disrupting the Subject: Julian of Norwich and Embodied Knowing." by Journal of Curriculum Theorizing # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Disrupting the Subject: Julian of Norwich and Embodied Knowing.
- Author : Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 204 KB
Description
Julian of Norwich (1342-1413) the medieval English mystic and anchoress was a profound and radical thinker. Her book the Divine Revelations of Love, written in 1373, refuses any linear or quick reading. Meanings are not in her text, but in the experience of reading; of circling through the words, of never finding a final resting place and of being reminded that understanding requires patience. Her narrative strategies are only one of the many areas of Julian's work that I could address. Julian is well known for her theological innovations in relation to the concepts of sin, love, the trinity, and prayer. She is perhaps best known for her thorough theology of God as Mother. As a curriculum theorist however, my own interest in Julian regards her theories of how one comes to know, what is knowable and who can be a knower. It is the exclusion of women religious thinkers from the history of curriculum theory that is the impetus for this research. Julian wrote her life against and within St. Pauls dictate "I suffer women not to teach." Despite this sanction, women religious were able to claim authority as knowers through having direct revelations from God, in other words, mystical experiences. For Julian, mysticism provided an avenue for authorizing herself as a knower through recuperating the body as a site of knowing. According to Leigh Gilmore (1994) "through their remapping of the body, mystics represented it as a network of possibilities and not simply as biological fact" (pg 118). How the body becomes a text for medieval mystics to authorize themselves as knowers is the focus of this research. Julian's negotiation of gender is a powerful reminder that who can be a knower and how we come to know is always inscribed in gender relations.