The Judeo-Christian scriptures understand humans as being made in the image of God. What exactly does this mean? Basic agreement is that it means humans can only know and understand themselves in relation to God. If, however, this God is pure uncreated spirit, where does human embodiment fit in? Is it an obstacle to understanding? Or is it in some way instructive? John Paul II comes down decisively in favor of the body’s value and importance. In his catechetical series, widely known as the Theology of the Body, John Paul II analyzes what is distinctive about human beings. He undertakes a “reading” of the body. This book reflects on John Paul II’s interpretation, extending his findings to the Virgin Mary. Her specifically female, maternal body is seen to offer insights into how the body images God—in how it “speaks.” The transformations of the female body parallel the transformations of language in poetry. The reconfigurations and accommodations of the gestational body are, this book suggests, poetic incarnations of God-likeness. Body-Poetics of the Virgin Mary offers a Mariological slant on theological anthropology and a new way to think of how humans poetically image God.

Oliverio Girondo is a leading figure of the Spanish American avant-garde. Parody, the Avant-Garde, and the Poetics of Subversion in Oliverio Girondo examines the presence and function of parody in Girondo's early poetry and drawings. It illustrates how, through the subversion of both conventional and vanguard poetics, these texts discredit the values imposed upon artistic production by institutionalized models and social codes. This book assesses the extent to which Girondo followed the theories outlined in his critical writings and considers how his works fit into the general trajectory of the historical avant-garde and contemporary Spanish American literature.

Firmly establishes the importance of early affective devotion in the hybrid poetics of the earliest English poetry.

Modern scholarship generally treats the "debate about women" (querelle des femmes) as a late medieval phenomenon, perhaps touched upon by canonic authors like Chaucer but truly begun by Christine de Pizan (1364-1429), and therefore primarily of English and French origin. That emphasis has obscured the ways in which both writers were participating in a much wider, much older cultural phenomenon with varied and intractable roots. Articles in this collection explore how gender is put into debate in Anglo-Saxon, German, Spanish and Italian cultures, and they re-examine French and Middle English debate literature. The collection is carefully planned to be accessible to students seeking an idea of the debate's motifs and contours while maintaining the high level of issue involvement necessary to commanding a more seasoned audience. Contributors include Pamela Benson, Alcuin Blamires, Margaret Franklin, Roberta Krueger, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, Ann Matter, Karen Pratt, Helen Solterer, Julian Weiss, and Barbara Weissberger.

Olivier-Thomas Venard's Thomas d'Aquin poète théologien trilogy, an in depth analysis of the scripture of St. Thomas Aquinas, is translated for a new audience in this streamlined anthology. Featuring selections from all three books in the trilogy, chosen in accordance with Venard's direction and discernment, it introduces not only arguments pertinent to the theme of this volume, but an invitation to explore the full breadth of Venard's work. Concentrating on the subjects of scripture, theology and literature, language as a theological question and the word of God, Murphy and Oakes capture the scope and energy of Venard's trilogy while collating many of its key passages. Ranging from the themes of a poetic gospel and Christology to the Thomist theories of semiology and the metaphysics of the Word, this volume sets scholars on the path to a deeper understanding of Aquinas's systematic theology.

Christopher M. Flavin examines the ways in which late classical medieval women’s writings serve as a means of emphasizing both faith and social identity within a distinctly Christian, and later Catholic, tradition, which remains a major part of the understanding of faith and the self. Flavin focuses on key texts from the lives of desert saints and the Passio Perpetua to the autobiographies of Counter-Reformation women like Teresa of Ávila to illustrate the connections between the self and the divine.