Weibliches Charisma. Figurationen von Macht und Herrschaft in England und Frankreich (700–1500)

Teilprojekt	08 – TP Dumitrescu
Fachbereich	English Medieval Studies
Spannungsfelder	Personalität und Transpersonalität Kritik und Idealisierung
Interdisziplinäre Transkulturalitätswerkstätten	Materielle Aspekte von Macht und Herrschaft Frau(en) des Herrschers/Weibliche Herrschaft

Das Teilprojekt widmet sich gezielt Diskursen über weibliche Akteure und den ihnen in Literatur und erzählenden Quellen zugeschriebenen Ausprägungen von Macht und Herrschaft im vormodernen England und Frankreich in der Zeit von 700 bis 1500. Es stützt sich dabei auf ein breites Spektrum von Forschungsarbeiten zu Charisma, Verzauberung, Anmut und Berühmtheit, verstanden als weiblich konnotierte Aspekte von Macht und Herrschaft, die Frauen in die Lage versetzen, Einfluss auf Andere auszuüben – abseits der traditionellen, von Männern geprägten Strukturen.

 

Abstract

This project aims for a better understanding of elite women’s power in medieval Europe by focusing on the ways their personas are constructed through charismatic strategies, either their own or as depicted in medial representations. The emphasis is on charismatic strategies that are transgressive, either because they counteract masculine power structures or because they incorporate seemingly “negative” qualities (vulnerability, sin, secrecy, etc.). As a result of the work in the first phase of the SFB, the second phase of our project will focus on ways that elite networks and assemblages (of people, texts, objects, etc.) assist the construction of feminine charismatic personas. Conversely, it will also examine how elite groups are created and reinforced by deliberate charismatic strategies.

This project argues for a ‘charisma complex’, an umbrella term for a nexus of power, fascination, fame, enchantment, and emulation. The agency of individuals portrayed as charismatic is often close to power, though it is not always active political power. Such persons elicit fascination, the desire to know, possess, or even destroy. They acquire authority and interest through means that can seem magical or otherworldly. They often become famous, or enjoy powerful resonance in their immediate context. Finally, audiences of the charismatic person often attempt to copy their gestures, habits, language, or style of dress. The project does not argue that particular historical or literary figures truly were charismatic; the best we can say in most cases is that people had an interest in representing them as charismatic. Rather, this project aims to examine representations of charismatic performances to look at the strategies they depict. Max Weber understood charisma as something followers ascribe to their leader, and can just as easily take away. This project approaches it as a phenomenon that arises in the exchanges between performers and audiences, patrons and authors, texts and generations of readers.

Building on the first phase of the project, this new phase will feature increased attention to how the power exercised by premodern women is created within and shaped by elite feminine networks and assemblages, as well as shaping notions of elite status, identity, and image. It draws on recenthistorical research in medieval studies that has emphasized women’s kinship as an important factor in royal power, on work in book and art history revealing the roles of women in literary creation (especially by being patrons of women’s saints’ lives), and on ongoing feminist trends in literary criticism. On a theoretical level, the project will continue using performance and celebrity studies approaches as in the first phase, but will also add theoretical writers on assemblages and collectivities.

Ergebnisse - was wurde erreicht?

This project began with the recognition that feminine forms of charisma and charismatic power, influence, and agency, had been neglected in scholarship on medieval charisma. The project's interdisciplinary work in the first phase of the SFB has helped us broaden the scope of the research question in promising ways. Our strategy has not been to look for individual terms for charisma in premodern texts, but to see if there are charismatic strategies that can be identified as such across texts. These might include the use of animal symbolism to denote the magnetism, strength, and virtue of an individual; the use of bright light imagery (suns, stars, halo, auras) to lend figures a divine quality; rituals of investment and incorporation through specific, symbolically-laden clothing items. Perhaps most surprising has been the extent to which we have found substantial cross-cultural continuities among premodern charismatic performances. Through our workshops, SFB Spannungsfelder and working groups, and the larger Spannungsfeld conferences, we have been able to find similar effects across cultures, forming a standard vocabulary of charismatic performance.

The work of the subproject has been significantly advanced by three SFB-funded conferences: ‘Charisma: Imagining Women's Power in Medieval Europe’ (2017), ‘Between Women: Female Networks, Kinships and Power’ (2018), and ‘Crossing Cultures, Crossing Periods: A Performance Studies Laboratory’ (2019), as well as by a panel on ‘Charisma’ organized by the project leader and Laura Miles for the New Chaucer Society 2016 Congress in London. The conference on ‘Charisma’, near the start of the funding period, allowed us to refine but also question the use of the term ‘charisma’ for the study of the medieval past. With the help of an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, we agreed that ‘charisma’ remains a problematic term if the goal is to identify and define it in historical contexts. However, it is possible to speak of overlapping charismatic performances, strategies, and representations in a wide range of texts and images. ‘Charisma’, it was agreed, is a useful heuristic tool for identifying forms of influence and agency, allowing previously ignored strategies of power to become visible. The conference and the London panel also showed that there is overlap between masculine, feminine, inter- and transsexual charismatic representations, so that any study of ‘feminine’ charismatic forms has to be done in the context of a range of gender identifications.

One of the innovations of this project from the beginning was its use of performance and celebrity studies methodologies in the study of medieval sources. Performance studies, a field that developed in the late twentieth century out of linguistics, anthropology, and theatre studies, remains to this day a presentist field. Historical studies are in the minority, and with a few exceptions only go as far back as the eighteenth century. Conversely, scholars in medieval studies have not adopted performance studies approaches widely, both due to assumptions about the lack of dramatic life in the premodern period and due to other methodologies prevailing. The performance studies laboratory helped our project, along with other interested members of the SFB, broaden our understanding of the range of performance studies approaches to historical material. A number of the insights gained from this workshop were gender-specific, such as the ways nuns experienced embodied rituals, the specifically female use of proverbs and performance of traditional wisdom, and the way early modern school performances of Classical texts presented charismatic female figures. However, the papers given at this workshop also sensitized us to a broader range of contexts and genres where charismatic performances can be identified, such as convent liturgy, festival books and albums from Ottoman celebrations, and the oral composition and performance of formal letters.

Particularly valuable for understanding the rituals and performances associated with ‘charisma’ has been our ongoing exchange with TP 14 Orthmann, as well as that project's international workshop, ‘The Ceremonial of Audience: Transcultural Perspectives on Pre-modern Representations of Power’. That workshop, as well as other guest talks organized TP 14 Orthmann, have helped our own project to understand how gifts and ritual presentations of clothing in our own corpus serve to establish power relations between parties. This insight is particularly useful when examining the richly-described clothing of women in vernacular romance, who are often considered incidental to masculine power structures. Likewise, our participation in the ITW ‘Materielle Aspekte von Macht und Herrschaft’ (participating TPs: 03 Bemmann, 04 Bremer, 11 Klaus, 13 Morenz, 17 Schwieger, TP 19 Taranczewski/Schley, TP 21 Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, TP 22 Stieldorf) has allowed us to deepen our analysis of the material aspects of charismatic performances, for example by revealing the extent to which the logic of sacred relics also informs secular representations of power and objects. It has become clear that a study of charisma has to take into account symbolic objects and spaces: clothing, burial practices, books, images, relics, and construction works.

An important contribution of TP 08 to the SFB as a whole has been to foster increased attention to questions of gender in all contexts. Drawing on the recognition in contemporary feminist scholarship that ‘unmarked’ gender roles, i. e. figurations of masculinity, as are as essential to gender analysis as marked ones such as feminine, genderqueer, or transsexual figurations, TP 08 has brought speakers to SFB events who address ideas of masculine rulership. This has been important in showing how different gender ideologies shape both how men rule and how their rule is perceived. However, this added dimension of analysis has also rendered our project more attentive to situations in which male figures in history and literature carry out charismatic strategies we have identified as typically feminine, i. e., transgressive, troubling, incorporating vulnerability and spectacular defeat. While TP 08’s main focus remains on the unaddressed research question of the nature of feminine charisma and power, our analysis is increasingly embedded in a larger consideration of the relationship between gender and charisma in medieval England, France, and by necessary extension, Europe.

Our international workshops as well as the ITW ‘Frau(en) des Herrschers’ (participating TP 01 Albert, TP 02 Becher/Dohmen, TP 05 Brüggen, TP 07 Dahlmann, TP 11 Klaus, TP 14 Orthmann, TP 15 Plassmann, TP 16 Schwermann, TP 17 Schwieger, TP 19 Taranczewski/Schley, TP 21 Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, TP 22 Stieldorf) have also revealed the extent to which certain transcultural similarities in the feminine exercise of power are closely tied to the biology of reproduction. For example, exceptional women often move into positions of greatest power or influence (including effective rule) either once beyond childbearing years: the Mughal Nur Jahan and the English Empress Matilda are examples of this effect. This is not a surprising observation, but serves as an important reminder that biological processes are as important to determining who exercises power and how as ideologies are.

Because of the relative dearth of women in the position of the ultimate ruler, this project has also considered a variety of elite (and occasionally, middle and lower class) women from its beginning. The analysis of feminine charismatic strategies has necessarily required the examination of spiritual leaders, heads of religious organizations, female teachers and authors, and the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of male rulers. In this sense, the project has already been preparing for the second phase's work on power among elites.

However, while the first phase of this project focused on charismatic figures as individuals, the focus for the second phase will be on the ways that charismatic figures are constructed within networks, and construct networks in turn. This added layer of analysis is the result of our project workshops and ongoing research as well as of continuing developments in medieval, feminist, and performance studies. In her new book, SharonMarcus(2019) emphasizes the multi-nodal creation of celebrity personas, through audiences, media, and the celebrities themselves. The work of Emma O’LoughlinBérat, the postdoctoral fellow during the project’s inception, has drawn awareness to the importance of women as patrons and family members, both in medieval historical texts and in vernacular romances (O’LoughlinBérat2018, 2019). More specifically, she has shown how female patronage and depictions of female characters allow for the imagination of elite genealogies that function as alternatives to patriarchal lines. The ‘Between Women’ conference on feminine networks helped us understand the possibilities of this line of inquiry by demonstrating the extent to which feminine agency takes place within complex networks of relationships, co-operations, travel, and transfer. It demonstrated that charismatic performances as well as elite female attempts at agency have to be considered with attention to relationships between elite individuals and institutions, imagined and real genealogies, geographic spaces, spiritual friendships, and elite objects. The same is true for textual representations of charisma, which need to be analyzed in the context of generic conventions, specific manuscript collections, and the historical collaborations and exchanges between authors, patrons, translators, artists, scribes, readers, and audiences of oral reading performances.

A focus on networks is line with current directions in the field. In medieval feminist scholarship, there has been work on communities of women, be they nuns (Foot2000;Yorke2003;Hollis2004;Venarde1997), noblewomen and aristocratic elites (Garver 2009; Ward2013), or royalty (Stafford 1997; Weissberger 2004; Klein 2006; Walthall 2008; Tyler 2017; Pick 2017). Research also continues on representations of women by men, whether in clerical culture (Lees/Overing, 2001), in the reception of the classics (McLeod 1991; Hagedorn, 2004; Hedeman 2008), as part of the querelle de femmes (Solterer 1995; Swift 2008) or as commentary on prominent women (Levin/Stewart-Nuñez, 2015). There is also a long but growing movement to examine women as active participants in literary and other networks, whether as authors, patrons, or intended audiences (Wogan-Browne 1991; Cherewatuk/Wiethaus 1993; Sanok 2001; Mulder-Bakker 2004; Raguin/Stanbury 2005; Blanton 2007; Watt 2007; Scheck 2008; Wallace 2011; McAvoy/Watt2012). The project will also look for theoretical impulses for thinking about networks and collectivities, for example from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988), Bruno Latour (1993), and the formalist analysis of Caroline Levine (2015).

While much of this research is necessarily concerned with familial relationships, even if incidentally, a particular contribution of this project will be to examine the all-female networks created by sisterhood. While scholarship on women’s roles within the medieval family has grown in recent years, in works by Linda ElizabethMitchell(2003), CarolNeel(2004), EvaLabouvie(2009) and CarolineLarrington(2006, 2015), sisters are consistently discussed as secondary to brothers, interchangeable with other sisters, or noted only in their absence from particular geographical centres (through marriage) or historical records (in chronicles that focus on specific family lines or political collectivities). In order to develop understanding of the charisma of sisters, this study offers a rethinking of the networks and strategies of influence exercised ‘off-stage’ by sisters to knowingly shape medieval representations of male and female power.

The project leader has published articles on collections of women’s lives and legendaries (2017, 2017), on charismatic medieval figures (2018), as well as on performance studies approaches to medieval literature (2018). The results of the conference on ‘Female Networks’ are currently being expanded and published in a volume on ‘Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages’, co-edited by Bérat, Hardie, and Dumitrescu, while Dumitrescu and Bérat are also currently finishing the edition of a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum on the topic of ‘Women’s Arts of the Body’. Along with Emily Butler and Hilary Fox, Prof. Dumitrescu is currently editing a reference collection of short essays entitled ‘Anglo-Saxon Women’. Dr. Hardie has published on female devotion and edited a volume on queen Æthelflæd, and Dr. Bérat, who remains an affiliated member of the SFB and the project, is currently completing her monograph ‘Imagining Genealogies: Women's Lineages and Power in Medieval British Literature, 1100–1400’, which has been requested for consideration by Cambridge University Press.

 

 

Sekundärquellen - Bibliografie

• Virginia Blanton (2007), Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615, University Park, PA.
• Elisabeth Bronfen/Barbara Straumann (2002), Die Diva. Eine Geschichte der Bewunderung, München.
• Peter Brown (1982), The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley/Los Angeles.
• Ders. (1983), The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity, in: Representations 2, 1–25.
• Karen Cherewatuk/Ulrike Wiethaus (edd.) (1993), Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, Philadelphia.
• Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London.
• Theresa Earenfight (2010), Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe, New York.
• Sarah Foot (2000), Veiled Women, Aldershot.
• Valerie L. Garver (2009), Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Ithaca, NY.
• Suzanne C. Hagedorn (2004), Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, & Chaucer, Ann Arbor.
• Rebecca Hardie (2019), Male and Female Devotion in Three Texts of the Vercelli Book: Vercelli VII, XVII and Elene, in: English Studies 100, 3, 1–18.
• Anne D. Hedeman (2008), Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De Casibus, Los Angeles.
• Stephanie Hollis/W. R. Barnes/Rebecca Hayward/Kathleen Loncar/Michael Wright (2004), Writing the Wilton Women, Turnhout.
• C. Stephen Jaeger (1994), The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200, Philadelphia.
• Ders. (2012), Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West, Philadelphia.
• Stacy Klein (2006), Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature, South Bend, IN.
• Eva Labouvie (2009), Schwestern und Freundinnen. Zur Kulturgeschichte Weiblicher Kommunikation, Wien.
• Carolyne Larrington (2015), Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature, York.
• Dies.(2006), King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition, London.
• Bruno Latour (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA.
• William Layher (2010), Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe, New York.
• Clare Lees/Gillian Overing (2001), Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, Philadelphia.
• Carole Levin/Christine Stewart-Nuñez (2015), Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens, Basingstoke.
• Caroline Levine (2015), Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton.
• Charles Lindholm (1990), Charisma, Cambridge, MA.
• Sharon Marcus (2019), The Drama of Celebrity, Princeton.
• Elizabeth McAvoy/Diane Watt (2012), The History of British Women's Writing, 700–1500, Basingstoke.
• Glenda McLeod (1991), Virtue and Venom. Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Ann Arbor.
• Linda Elizabeth Mitchell (2003), Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England, 1225–1350, New York.
• Madison Moore (2018), Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, New Haven.
• Anneke Mulder-Bakker (2004), Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200–1550, Turnhout.
• Carol Neel (2004), Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, Toronto.
• Arlene Okerlund (2009), Elizabeth of York, New York.
• Emma O’Loughlin Bérat (2019), Constructions of Queenship: Envisioning Female Sovereignty in Havelok, in: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118, 234–251.
• Dies. (2018) Romance and Revelation, in: Katherine C. Little/Nicola McDonald (edd.), Thinking Romance, Oxford, 134–152.
• Emma O’Loughlin Bérat (2021), Women’s Acts of Childbirth and Conquest in English Historical Writing, in: Irina Dumitrescu et al. (edd.), Everyday Arts: Craft, Voice, Performance. Sonderheft der Zeitschrift Medieval Feminist Forum. [im Druck, s. Anlage]
• Lucy Pick (2017), Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms, Ithaca.
• John Potts (2009), A History of Charisma, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire.
• Virginia Chieffo Raguin/Sarah Stanbury (2005), Women's Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, Albany, NY.
• Joseph Roach (2007), It, Ann Arbor.
• Catherine Sanok (2007), Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England, Philadelphia.
• Helene Scheck (2008), Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastic Culture, Albany, NY.
• Helen Solterer (1995), The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture, Berkeley.
• Pauline Stafford (1997), Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England, Oxford.
• Lisa Benz St. John (2012), Three Medieval Queens: Queenship and the Crown in Fourteenth-Century England, New York.
• Helen J. Swift (2008), Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France, 1440–1538, Oxford.
• Elizabeth Tyler (2017), England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage c.1000–1150, Toronto.
• Bruce L. Venarde (1997), Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–1215, Ithaca.
• David Wallace (2011), Strong Women: Life, Text and Territory 1347–1645, Oxford.
• Anne Walthall (2008), Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, Berkeley.
• Jennifer C. Ward (2013), English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages, New York et al.
• Diane Watt (2007), Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500, Cambridge.
• Barbara F. Weissberger (2004), Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power, Minneapolis.
• Elena Woodacre (2013), Queenship in the Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the Queen in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras, New York.
• Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (2001), Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity and its Authorizations, Oxford.
• Barbara Yorke (2003), Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, London.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Projekt

Projektleitung

Prof. Dr. Irina A. Dumitrescu

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie Abteilung für English Medieval Studies Regina-Pacis-Weg 5 53113 Bonn

+49-(0)228-737841

idumitre[at]uni-bonn.de

 

 

 

 

 

Projektmitarbeit

Dr. Rebecca Hardie (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin)

Sonderforschungsbereich 1167 "Macht und Herrschaft" Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Poppelsdorfer Allee 24 53115 Bonn

+49-(0)228-7354463

rhardie[at]uni-bonn.de

Assoziierte Projektmitarbeit

Dr. Emma O'Loughlin Bérat