Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 45737
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Dresvina , Juliana
  • Contributor(s): Dresvina, Juliana, ed. and Blud, Victoria, ed.
  • Title: Attachment Theory for Historians of Medieval Religion: An Introduction
  • Source: Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction.Juliana Dresvina  Edited by Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud.  Brepols , 2020.  Pages 121 - 141.
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  • Subject (See Also): Kempe, Margery, Mystic Waiting to be Indexed
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  • Related Resources: "The next chapter, “Attachment Theory for Historians of Medieval Religion: An Introduction” by Juliana Dresvina, uses attachment theory to examine the role of adaptation in “periods of heightened, obsessive religiosity, such as we find in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in the West” (122). Dresvina applies the “main interpretive technique--that is, discourse analysis informed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience--to a variety of pre-modern examples of life-writing” (123). She gives an accessible overview of attachment theory and its applications to religion before turning specifically to examining medieval childrearing practices, attachment styles encouraged by medieval circumstances, and finally a case study of Margery Kempe. Demonstrating the higher likelihood of childhood loss of a primary attachment figure in the Middle Ages and considering the idea of God as an attachment figure, Dresvina argues that we can consider the development of Margery’s attachment to God as a parental figure as the result of insecure attachment to a parental figure in her childhood."
    [From the review written by Usha Vishnuvajjala of Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction, edited by Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud. Medieval Review (TMR ID: 22.04.11). Reproduced by permission of the Medieval Review.]
  • Author's Affiliation: University of Oxford
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 2020.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 9781786836748 (print); 9781786836755 (online)