In Metamorphosis
and Identity, award-winning historian Caroline Walker Bynum
explores the Western obsession with the nature of change and personal
identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but
concerned as well with Antiquity and the twentieth century, Bynum
confronts the question of why intellectuals, religious leaders,
and ordinary people alike exhibited a precise and persistent desire
to understand how the individual both changes and remains the same.
Examining shifting conceptions of change itself in the years around
1200, Bynum situates the intense medieval curiosity about radical
or substantial change in the context of specific cultural and social
developments. Two images of change — hybridity and metamorphosis
— were prominent in imaginative literature, theology, the
visual arts, and natural philosophy; these sites of competing and
shifting understandings each entailed different anthropological
and psychological assumptions. As Bynum demonstrates in the four
essays of Metamorphosis and Identity, the fascination with
boundary crossing and alterity reveals an effort across different
genres to delineate the regularity of nature and to establish a
strong sense of personal identity, perduring even beyond the grave.
Included as the final chapter of Metamorphosis and Identity
is Bynum’s 1999 NEH Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor given
by the U.S. government to a scholar in the humanities.
“Once again, Caroline Walker Bynum’s work captures,
with characteristic vividness and precision, the particularity and
the urgency of the thought-patterns of a long-past Middles Ages,
and our own anxieties about the fragility of that ‘glorious
inexplicable and... totally improbable thing: identity.’”
— Peter Brown, Princeton University
“Bynum is asking that even while we deploy all the tricks
and tools of modern historical analysis, we take seriously the obligation
to marvel at the complexity, at the otherness, of the medieval world,
a world that we will never perfectly understand and yet that seems
to point to something worth understanding.”
— Patrick J. Geary, The New Republic Also by this author:
Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
|