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1 Introduction “The world and humankind became wild— another world,” beamed the voice of God to his eager pupil, Catherine of Siena, offering her a brief symposium on the rationale and processes of the creation and re-creation of the world.1 In the first creation, he explained, God fathered the heavens and the earth, ornamenting them with essential light, water, and populace and balancing them in a harmonious providential system. But, he continued, the sin of the first humans introduced disorder to the whole of creation,a rebellion that passed from humans to plants and animals . The created world,then,was in need of re-creation. It was for the purpose of this second creation,God explained,that he became human,entering material creation and subjecting himself to the suffering crucifixion: By sending into the world my Truth, the incarnate Word, I saw to it that he should take away the wildness and uproot the thorns of original sin. And I made it a garden watered by the blood of Christ crucified, and planted there the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit after rooting out 1. Catherine of Siena, Il dialogo della divina provvidenza ovvero libro della divina dottrina, ed. Giuliana Cavallini (Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1968), 140, p. 387;Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue,trans. Suzanne Noffke (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), 288 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text in abbreviated form). 2 HOLY MATTER deadly sin. All this happened only after my only-begotten Son’s death. (Catherine of Siena, Il dialogo, 140, p. 387; Noffke, 288) Accordingly, he instructed in the candid voice of a seasoned tutor, it should be clear to Catherine and all the Christian devout, when gazing on the features of the well-ordered landscape,that it was God himself who was actively “feeding and nurturing the worm within the dry wood, pasturing the brute beasts,nourishing the fish in the sea,all the animals on the earth and the birds in the air,commanding the sun to shine on the plants and the dew to fertilize the soil” (Il dialogo, 141, p. 390; Noffke, 290). Catherine’s Dialogue reflects a perception, found at the heart of later medieval European Christian devotion, that the phenomenal world was the material matrix into which God entered when he became human via Mary, a world that he restructured and redeemed when he suffered and died on the cross.2 The material into which God entered,that he chose to carry with him in his assumption into heaven, reasoned the progenitors of this conviction, must have been specially marked, rendering it capable of manifesting divinity . In this study I investigate medieval efforts to perceive such a potential manifestation. I examine how and why a perception of the material world as re-created emerged, and how it shaped Christian devotion in later medieval Europe as individuals and communities attempted to access God in their material surroundings. This study, then, is my attempt to fathom the logic and language of later medieval Christianity. It is a history of ideas and of meditative teachings, a probing of the religious imagination, more than a chronicle of social practice or administrative maneuvering. As such, its purpose is not to bring to light new details documenting the rich reality of a distant social world, but to reevaluate our present understanding of that world, to offer a fresh interpretation of the details we have already amassed. Here I use the doctrine of re-creation, largely unrecognized and poorly understood by scholars, as a means to consider the complex relationships between women and men in professed religious life in the later Middle Ages,and to evaluate the gendered language and imagery of monastic instruction. At the same time, I argue for the absolutely pivotal importance of the doctrine of re-creation to the later medieval religious imagination, and demonstrate how a proper understanding of it allows us to rethink the meaning of key terms and concepts in the 2. On the occasions that I refer to beliefs about God by using the masculine pronoun, I am doing so in an effort to render the most appropriate medieval conceptualizations of God. On this problem of language,see Rosemary Radford Ruether,Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983). INTRODUCTION 3 scholarly literature of medieval Christianity, concepts like “nature,” “incarnation ,” and “affective piety.” Such a project is necessary because, for various reasons having as much to do with our own contemporary preoccupations as with...

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