ABSTRACT
In many ways the new approaches to medieval religion that this volume documents can be traced to a ground-breaking paper by Caroline Walker Bynum presented in May 1977 at a Cistercian Studies Conference in Kalamazoo; the article that grew out of that paper is what is included here. Bynum’s careful and systematic reading of well-known texts on medieval monastic spirituality showed that there was much more to discover about the spirituality of reformed monasticism than just about the various modes of ascent of the soul toward God on which earlier historians had been focusing. The language and images she uncovered had been ignored as they were thought irrelevant because they had to do with “feminine” aspects of behavior, or irreverent (in the sense of not in appropriate good taste for academic discourse), because they discussed bodily functions such as nursing and body parts such as a mother’s breasts.
