Date: Tuesday November 18,
Time:12-2pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building,The University of Sydney All welcome

Abstract: According to her vita, Lukardis of Oberweimar began her career as a young Cistercian nun suffering from various ailments. Her passions make her a stigmatized holy woman, who undergoes a spiritual pregnancy and visible stigmata, and eventually shares her charisma with the sisters of her convent of Oberweimar. In this paper I propose reading her life as a text in which the transformative power of emotions is central, both in her own life and in that of the convent. Her transformation is an emotional transformation, happening through the bodily performance of passions, a word which merits comment; her sanctity and emotional sharing transform the convent into an emotional community which, most probably, does not last.
Exploring the power of emotions as represented in the vita offers an opportunity to reflect, first, on the importance of emotions in late-medieval anthropology, and secondly on the problems a (medievalist) historian meets while working on emotions in history.

Image: Christ on the Cross, Schnütgen Museum, Cologne. Devotional image attributed to a female monastic designer, Germany in the 14th century. Discovered and published by J. Hamburger, in Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997