2. The Male Body and Catholic Piety in Early Modern Spain
The Religious Body Imagined - Pamela D. Winfield
Elizabeth Rhodes [+]
Boston College
Elizabeth Rhodes is a professor of Hispanic Studies at Boston College, where she also serves on the Sexual Assault Network and teaches a course for future college teachers on responding to campus sexual assault. She specializes in religious texts and culture, particularly of Spain. Her current project discloses evidence of sexual assault of pre-adult Catholics carried out in the name of God during the early modern period. Her most recent publication analyzes the rape culture that informs the plot of one of Cervantes's 1613 exemplary novels.
Description
Elizabeth Rhodes investigates a handful of understudied texts related to “The Male Body and Catholic Piety in Early Modern Spain.” She observes that monks in monasteries also imagined themselves as conjugal brides of Christ and engaged in many of the same devotional practices as the better studied nuns in Spanish and colonial Hispanic convents. Because these men practiced “ardent devotion to the Eucharist, strict food management and manipulation, as well as extreme asceticism justified by pious intentions,” just like the nuns did, Rhodes calls into question the presumed gendered nature of early modern Catholic piety.