Vol. 4, No.1 April 1993
MATSUKURA Fumihiko reported on his re-examination of theevidence surrounding the founding of the 7th-century temple Kanimanji. This site was made sacred and the founding of the temple there is attributed to the acts of a woman who saved the lives of crabs, releasing them back into the sea. In contrast to the evidence found in Nihon ryoiki and Hoke genki, new evidence suggests a Korean connection to the origins of this temple.
NAKANO Yuko examined the issue of religious gender discrimination imported to Japan with Buddhism. In addition to such aspects as doctrinal tenets that hold women hindered by inherent obstacles and flaws and by the need to be transformed or reborn as men before they can achieve salvation or enlightenment, discrimination appeared as well in such social practices as the forbidding of the presence of women at certain sacred sites or in particular rituals. Nakano finds that in contrast to what has heretofore been interpreted as the liberating effect of the new Salvation sects of the Kamakura perioed, these new sects attempted to define all women as "Mothers" and sacralize them as Mothers of the Human race, which only intensified discriminatory attitudes and the tendancy to separate women theologically. She believes this to be an issue as yet wholly ignored by scholars of the Salvation Sects.
MATSUO Kenji's paper dealt with the ordination and certification of nuns, particularly as seen in the activities of the priest Eison. Matsuo criticized the work of USHIYAMA Yoshiyuki on nuns and convents on the grounds of failing to distinguish adequately between the two major categories of male clerics in Japan and therefore distorting what the perception of clerics was toward the "salvation of women." Matsuo believes not only that the official State-recognized priests held multiple and differing views concerning women's salvation, but that in the Kamakura period there emerged a fundamental difference between these State priests and the reclusionary monks of the new Kamakura sects. The former tended to view women as a collective group when considering their qualifications for salvation, whereas the latter were concerned with the salvation of individual women on a case by case basis, which was a revolutionary change in Buddhism. Matsuo focuses on Eison and his Ritsu group, which differs from the old Nara school of Ritsu and which Matsuo believes should be studied with the new Kamakura sects.
The seminar concluded with KANDA Yoriko's report on Tokugawa period Shugendo and Kannagi (miko), and Shudo Yoshiki's review of the history and historical documents of the Shugendo movement on Mt. Yoshino.
On April 25, 1992 at the Spring Conference of the New England Historical Association at Worcester, MA, Dr. McLaughlin chaired a session on Parallel Lives: Female Monasticism and the Church in the Middle Ages, and she sends us the following report:
Chair: Mary McLaughlin (Millbrook,
NY)
Comments:
Penelope Johnson (New York
University)
Lisa Bitel (University of
Kansas): "In Cella Seorsum: Early Irish Nuns and the Claustration
Question."
Bruce L. Venarde (Harvard
University): "Going to Heaven, Going to Hell: New Approaches to Religious
Change in the Twelfth Century."
Katherine Gill (Princeton
University): "Negotiating Difference: Survival Strategies of Women's Religious
Communities in the Late Middle Ages."
"Concerned especially with early medieval Ireland, Lisa Bitel, a graduate of Smith College, with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard Univeristy (1987), is assistant professor of history in the University of Kansas and the author of Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Bruce Venarde, a graduate of Swarthmore College and a candidate for the Ph.D. in history at Harvard, is completing a dissertation entitled 'Women, Monasticism and Social Change; A Study of Female Monastic Foundations in France, Belgium and England, 10th-13th Centuries.' Late medieval women's religious communities in Rome and elsewhere in central Italy are the special focus of Katherine Gill, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, a candidate for the Ph.D. in history at Princeton, and recently appointed as assistant professor in the Yale Divinity School.
"These papers reflect developing concerns and more innovative approaches in current research on medieval religious women. Studied, as they are in these papers, in the perspectives of religious and social change, these religious professionals appear more significantly than ever as agents of change, creators and manipulators, resisters and shapers, of the institutional and communal structures of medieval Christianity.
"Unconvinced by the notion of a golden age for medieval religious women, Lisa Bitel finds in the Irish evidence of a different and more complex pattern than that apparent elsewhere in the early middle ages. Noting the absence of claustration among early Irish nuns and the persistence of marriage and kinship as models for the relations between female and male communities, she emphasizes the 'remarkable ability of these nuns to adapt their spiritual needs to the whimsical contours of the patriarchy,' a perception which, she believes, should guide future study of nuns throughout medieval Christendom.
"Against what has been, until recently, a conventional view of the 'Twelfth-Century Renaissance' as a highly unfavorable time for religious women, Bruce Venarde argues most persuasively (with the support of a substantial data base) that the expansion of female monasticism in this period was in fact spectacular. As many new communities of women (c.300) were founded in France in the twelfth century alone as in the five preceding centuries altogether, a fact suggesting that religious women in this period were not only victims but also beneficiaries of social and economic growth.
"Similary remarkable, Katherine Gill contends, was the multiplication and the diversity of women's religious communities in late medieval Italy, many of them originating informally rather than under the auspices of a religious order. Though dependent in important ways on male religious and ecclesiastics, these communities tended often to resist subordination; differing in functions from male communities, and often from one another, women's houses responded to a wide variety of social and religious needs and their study may well lead us to new models of institutional and monastic history.
"Commenting on these papers, Penny Johnson remarked on the usefulness of German reception-theory for the feminist approach to texts, which readers may read in two ways, either manipulating them or being manipulated by them. In the perspective of this theory, she emphasized how the authors of our three papers had brought their own questions to their texts, as active rather than passive readers, finding something new in these texts or using them, in their appropriate contexts, to show how women and their communities made sense to themselves."
[ Volume 4 of IMJS Reports was compiled by Angela E. Okajima ]
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