Between cloister and papacy: The impact of bridal imagery on power relations in Western Europe, 1100-1400.

This project wil l analyse how and why a specific metaphor - the bride of Christ - emerged from the world of theological texts and came to shape central aspects of the ideological and institutional development in medieval Western Europe. In the period between 1100 and 140 0 the figure of the bride was disentangled from the cloistered spaces of devotion to become a social and political force in Western Europe. As bridal imagery moved between the ideological hothouse of the cloister and the political and pragmatic arena of t he reform papacy, it engendered complex ideological models that established and negotiated both the institution of marriage and structures of political hierarchies in Western Europe. Imbued with specific inferences regarding nurturance, fecundity, feminin ity, and sexuality, bridal imagery was then distributed to the wider population by means of marriage sermons. The project interrogates in what ways ideological and cognitive underpinnings related to body and gender helped shape constructions of authority and power relations.

The project engages in both a theoretical and a specific analysis of the impact of metaphor. It will analyse how and why a specific metaphor - the bride of Christ - emerged from the world of theological texts in the later medieval period to shape central aspects of the social, ideological, and institutional development in Western Europe. As bridal imagery moved between the ideological hothouse of the cloister and the political and pragmatic arena of the reform papacy, it engendered complex ideological mod els that established and negotiated both the institution of marriage and structures of political hierarchies in Western Europe. The project interrogates in what ways ideological and cognitive underpinnings related to body and gender helped shape construct ions of authority and power relations. In a broader and theoretical sense it deals with cognitive constraints on the social propagation of meaning. The project applies cognitive theory which is supported and supplemented by gender theory for a multidisci plinary enquiry into the following research questions: How did bridal imagery construct notions of celibacy as marriage, and what ideological and political functions did these constructions entail? How did bridal imagery construct a model for distributing power/hierarchies? How was this model enacted, embodied, and propagated? The source material analysed in the project includes sermons, treatises, letters, ceremonial books, in addition to lay literature and visual representations. Furthermore, the proje ct will profit from an established network of scholars with relevant expertise to address wider issues of ideological processing, political-institutional processes (hierarchies, authority), social-cultural processes (marriage, gender, etc.), and cognitive processes and cognitive distribution.