Pious Passion

"For all who want to make sense of fundamentalism as a long-term consequence of the modern world, Pious Passion will be required reading. It is also enjoyable, abounding in cogent arguments set forth in lucid prose and supported by compelling examples."—Bruce B. Lawrence, author of Defenders of God "Riesebrodt's trenchant analysis brings the comparative study of religious activism to a new level of sophistication, exploring not only the ideological development of fundamentalist movements but also the changes in social structure that produced them. Pious Passion is a signal event in the modern social sciences, for it helps to establish a new academic field—the comparative study of fundamentalism."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of The New Cold War?

The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.

Through an interlocking series of texts and images, this work explores how extreme sensations such as wonder, misery, ecstasy and rage have been portrayed at different moments in Western culture. Moving across multiple fields of creative endeavour and intellectual inquiry - from classical artefacts to Chicano art, political protest to operatic performance, Rene Descartes's writings on the soul to the Internet's digitised flesh - it reveals how the passions have elicited, eluded and transformed the act of representation.

The Pious Sex strives to enlighten the reader with respect to the relationship between women and religion. The notion that there is a special relationship between women and piety may call to mind the worst of the prejudices associated with women over the ages: the characterization of women as superstitious and inherently irrational creatures who must be kept firmly in hand by the patriarchal establishment. The suggestion that there is a special relationship between women and piety conjures up the most oppressive picture of womanly virtue. The contributors of this volume revisit the claim that women constitute the pious sex and investigate the implications of such a designation. This collection of original essays examines the relationship between women and religion in the history of political thought broadly conceived. This theme is a remarkably revealing lens through which to view the Western philosophical and poetical traditions that have culminated in secular and egalitarian modern society. The essays also give highly analytical accounts of the manifold and intricate relationships between religion, family, and public life in the history of political thought, and the various ways in which these relationships have manifested themselves in pagan, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian settings.

This anthology addresses the topic of "fundamentalism and gender" from inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives. By referring to three major themes--"Literalism, Religion, and Science," "Nation, State, and Community," and "Body, Life, and Biopolitics"--the book focuses on the analytical diversification of the term "fundamentalism" and on intersections between religion, gender, sexuality, race, and nation. International scholars in cultural history and theory, religious studies, Christian theologies, Islamic studies, history, social sciences, anthropology, comparative literature, and women and gender studies examine the historical and current specifics of religious as well as of secular forms of fundamentalism. They also take a critical look at the Western discourse about religious fundamentalism and the ambivalent role feminism plays in this context, considering questions such as, Why do all religious fundamentalisms claim normalizing definitions of sexuality, gender roles, and intergender relations? In what way do gender and sexual politics play a role in secular criticism of religious fundamentalism? And how are forms of secular fundamentalism characterized by gender constructs and sexual politics?

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE).

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