The male body and Catholic piety in early modern Spain

Authors

  • Elizabeth Rhodes Boston College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.16250

Keywords:

embodied piety, religious asceticism, food culture, food and religion

Abstract

Features of embodied female piety adduced from late medieval texts are now established categories of interpretation for religious experience in the early modern period. These include intense Eucharistic devotion in relationship to food culture, extreme food manipulation and exaggerated violence against the physical self. However, evidence from documents by and about early modern religious men indicates that male and female ascetic piety had more in common than not during this period. Strategies of backgrounding or masking those practices when carried out by men made them less visible in comparison to those practised by women, due to gender inflections in religious politics.

Author Biography

  • Elizabeth Rhodes, Boston College

    Elizabeth Rhodes is a professor of Hispanic studies at Boston College. A specialist in early modern Hispanic studies, she has had three Fulbright research grants, an NEH Faculty Fellowship, and has been a visiting fellow in the Women’s Studies Program at the Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Dressed to Kill: Death and Meaning in Zayas’s Desengaños (2011; Toronto: University of Toronto Press), and her most recent publication (2020) is Indecent Theology: Sex and Female Heresy in Counter-Reformation Spain. Renaissance Quarterly 73(3): 866–896.

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Published

2020-10-30

How to Cite

Rhodes, E. (2020). The male body and Catholic piety in early modern Spain. Body and Religion, 3(2), 129–148. https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.16250