Metamorphosis and identity / Caroline Walker Bynum.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. 11)
• Introduction: Change in the Middle Ages (p. 15)
• The Ulster Werewolves (p. 15)
• Change: The Concept (p. 19)
• Change and the Twelfth Century (p. 22)
• Hybrid and Metamorphosis (p. 28)
• Some Methodological Considerations (p. 33)
• I Wonder (p. 37)
• Recent Scholarship on Wonder and Wonders (p. 40)
• The Many Wonder Discourses of the Middle Ages (p. 42)
• Theological and Philosophical Discussion (p. 48)
• Admiratio in Devotional Literature (p. 51)
• The Marvelous in Literature of Entertainment (p. 53)
• The Range of Wonder Responses (p. 56)
• Wonder and Significance (p. 69)
• Wonder as Cognitive, Perspectival, and Non-appropriative (p. 72)
• Wonder and the Modern Historian (p. 73)
• II Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf (p. 77)
• Again the Question of Bodily Change (p. 79)
• Ovidian Poetry as Fascination with Change (p. 86)
• Theological Speculation on Growth and Change (p. 89)
• Werewolf Stories as Testing of Boundaries (p. 92)
• The Ovid Reception as Enthusiasm for Order (p. 98)
• Learned Theology and Miracle Stories as Ontological Control (p. 101)
• Were Medieval Werewolves Really Metempsychosis? (p. 105)
• Conclusion (p. 109)
• III Monsters, Medians, and Marvelous Mixtures: Hybrids in the Spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux (p. 113)
• Mixture and Monster (p. 117)
• Similitude and Doubleness (p. 127)
• Change and Unitas (p. 131)
• Natural Philosophy as the Context of Bernard's Understanding (p. 144)
• Twelfth-Century Religious Life as Context (p. 147)
• Literature and Art as Context (p. 150)
• Conclusion: Hybridity in the Spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux (p. 158)
• IV Shape and Story (p. 163)
• The Problem of Personal Identity (p. 163)
• Some Stories About Werewolves: Ovid's Lycaon (p. 166)
• Stories About Werewolves and Metamorphosis: Angela Carter (p. 173)
• Metamorphosis and Identity (p. 176)
• Shape and Story, Body and Narrative (p. 180)
• Metamorphosis in Dante (p. 182)
• Conclusion (p. 187)
• Afterword (p. 191)
• Notes (p. 195)
• Photo Credits (p. 275)
• Index (p. 277)