The Religious Body Imagined
Edited by
Pamela D. Winfield [+–]
Elon University
Pamela D. Winfield is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Elon University and specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and doctrine. She has edited three special issues of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal CrossCurrents (2014, 2017, 2019) and was the lead co-editor (with Steven Heine) of Zen and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of the award-winning Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013; Association of Asian Studies – Southeastern Conference Book Award, 2015) and numerous articles on religion and visual culture. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Asian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and others. She serves on the Body and Religion steering committee and co-chairs the Art, Literature, and Religion Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and has convened or co-convened numerous conferences and conference panels that explore religious conceptions of the body.
Mina Garcia [+–]
Elon University
Mina Garcia is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University and specializes in continental and colonial Spanish literature of the 16th-21st centuries. Her first book Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft: Between La Celestina and Cervantes (Magia, Hechiceria y Brujeria: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes” (Renacimiento, 2011) was recently followed by her second book Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado, 2019). Throughout her numerous articles and chapter contributions, Garcia explores the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies, Latin American colonial culture and literature, the relation between society and superstition in the early modern period, and the spiritual and territorial conquest of the Americas, especially colonial Mexico.
Katherine C. Zubko [+–]
University of North Carolina Asheville
Katherine C. Zubko is Professor of Religious Studies and NEH Distinguished Professor of the Humanities (2018-23) at University of North Carolina Asheville. Her areas of expertise include aesthetics, ritual, performance and embodied religion in South Asia. Zubko is the author of Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam (2014), and co-editor with George Pati of Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions (Routledge 2019). Current research interests include exploring the role of embodied gestures of compassion and hospitality in performances on conflict transformation, and inclusive, interdisciplinary curriculum design as part of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
The Religious Body Imagined examines the ways in which the human body has been imagined, imaged, and discursively produced in particular places, times, and religious traditions.
This book brings together representative papers from most of the world’s major traditions and geo-historical locations, and explores the religious body’s various functions, roles, and transformative effects through a range of disciplinary and theoretical lenses (e.g. visual culture, literary, performance and cultural studies, ethnography, space / place, ritual, postcolonial theory and social justice as it pertains to embodiment). Most significantly, it is organized according to novel, thought-provoking thematic foci that advance the field and can be generative for classroom use. Specifically, it includes twelve chapters organized into sections on the Gendered Body, LGBTQ Bodies, Migrating Bodies, Host Bodies, Sensational Bodies, and National Bodies.
The Religious Body Imagined contributes new and original research as well as theoretical insights that can substantially help to expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary field of religion and body in general.
Table of Contents
Prelims
Elon University
Pamela D. Winfield is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Elon University and specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and doctrine. She has edited three special issues of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal CrossCurrents (2014, 2017, 2019) and was the lead co-editor (with Steven Heine) of Zen and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of the award-winning Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013; Association of Asian Studies – Southeastern Conference Book Award, 2015) and numerous articles on religion and visual culture. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Asian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and others. She serves on the Body and Religion steering committee and co-chairs the Art, Literature, and Religion Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and has convened or co-convened numerous conferences and conference panels that explore religious conceptions of the body.
Elon University
Mina Garcia is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University and specializes in continental and colonial Spanish literature of the 16th-21st centuries. Her first book Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft: Between La Celestina and Cervantes (Magia, Hechiceria y Brujeria: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes” (Renacimiento, 2011) was recently followed by her second book Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado, 2019). Throughout her numerous articles and chapter contributions, Garcia explores the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies, Latin American colonial culture and literature, the relation between society and superstition in the early modern period, and the spiritual and territorial conquest of the Americas, especially colonial Mexico.
Elon University
Pamela D. Winfield is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Elon University and specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and doctrine. She has edited three special issues of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal CrossCurrents (2014, 2017, 2019) and was the lead co-editor (with Steven Heine) of Zen and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of the award-winning Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013; Association of Asian Studies – Southeastern Conference Book Award, 2015) and numerous articles on religion and visual culture. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Asian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and others. She serves on the Body and Religion steering committee and co-chairs the Art, Literature, and Religion Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and has convened or co-convened numerous conferences and conference panels that explore religious conceptions of the body.
Elon University
Mina Garcia is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University and specializes in continental and colonial Spanish literature of the 16th-21st centuries. Her first book Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft: Between La Celestina and Cervantes (Magia, Hechiceria y Brujeria: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes” (Renacimiento, 2011) was recently followed by her second book Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado, 2019). Throughout her numerous articles and chapter contributions, Garcia explores the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies, Latin American colonial culture and literature, the relation between society and superstition in the early modern period, and the spiritual and territorial conquest of the Americas, especially colonial Mexico.
Introduction
Introduction 1-9
Elon University
Pamela D. Winfield is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Elon University and specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and doctrine. She has edited three special issues of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal CrossCurrents (2014, 2017, 2019) and was the lead co-editor (with Steven Heine) of Zen and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of the award-winning Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013; Association of Asian Studies – Southeastern Conference Book Award, 2015) and numerous articles on religion and visual culture. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Asian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and others. She serves on the Body and Religion steering committee and co-chairs the Art, Literature, and Religion Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and has convened or co-convened numerous conferences and conference panels that explore religious conceptions of the body.
Elon University
Mina Garcia is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University and specializes in continental and colonial Spanish literature of the 16th-21st centuries. Her first book Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft: Between La Celestina and Cervantes (Magia, Hechiceria y Brujeria: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes” (Renacimiento, 2011) was recently followed by her second book Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado, 2019). Throughout her numerous articles and chapter contributions, Garcia explores the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies, Latin American colonial culture and literature, the relation between society and superstition in the early modern period, and the spiritual and territorial conquest of the Americas, especially colonial Mexico.
Part I: Gendered Bodies
1. People of the Book, Women of the Body: Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women’s Reproductive Literacy [+–] 13-34
Rutgers University
Michal Raucher is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. Her research lies at the intersection of Israel studies, Jewish ethics, and the anthropology of women in Judaism. As a Fulbright Fellow, Dr. Raucher conducted ethnographic research on reproductive ethics of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish women in Israel. She has been awarded grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for anthropological research, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Crown Family Foundation. Drawing on this research, Michal will publish her first book, Birthing Ethics: Reproductive Ethics among Haredi Women in Jerusalem with Indiana University Press in 2020. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty she was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. Michal has degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a doctorate from Northwestern University. She is currently researching the ordination of Orthodox Jewish women in Israel and America with the support of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the American Academy of Religion, and the University of Cincinnati.
Michal Raucher’s “People of the Book, Women of the Body: Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women’s Reproductive Literacy” relies on two years of ethnographic research among Haredi mothers in Jerusalem. Her research reveals that the women’s lived experience of repeated pregnancies cultivates a kind of embodied knowledge and self-reliant, self-validating authority that no longer consults the normative rabbinic and male-dominated authority systems that regulate all other sectors of Haredi life. In so doing, Raucher expands our understanding of embodied female agency in a tradition that has long been assumed to subjugate women.
Boston College
Elizabeth Rhodes is a professor of Hispanic Studies at Boston College, where she also serves on the Sexual Assault Network and teaches a course for future college teachers on responding to campus sexual assault. She specializes in religious texts and culture, particularly of Spain. Her current project discloses evidence of sexual assault of pre-adult Catholics carried out in the name of God during the early modern period. Her most recent publication analyzes the rape culture that informs the plot of one of Cervantes’s 1613 exemplary novels.
Elizabeth Rhodes investigates a handful of understudied texts related to “The Male Body and Catholic Piety in Early Modern Spain.” She observes that monks in monasteries also imagined themselves as conjugal brides of Christ and engaged in many of the same devotional practices as the better studied nuns in Spanish and colonial Hispanic convents. Because these men practiced “ardent devotion to the Eucharist, strict food management and manipulation, as well as extreme asceticism justified by pious intentions,” just like the nuns did, Rhodes calls into question the presumed gendered nature of early modern Catholic piety.
Part II: LGBTQ+ Bodies
3. Harvey Milk’s (Sexual and Sacred) Body [+–] 59-79
Emory University
William K. Gilders is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. He received his B.A. from the University of Toronto, his M.A. from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Judaism in Antiquity) from Brown University. His research and teaching deal with cultural history, especially its religious dimensions, ranging geographically and chronologically from the ancient Mediterranean world to 21st century North America, with special attention to collective memory and the deployment of images and constructions of the past. He is the author of Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and several articles on ancient Israelite religious practice interpreted from the perspective of anthropology and ritual theory. In addition to his work on ritual and sacrifice, he has a strong interest in gender and sexuality, particularly cultural agency and creativity in North American LGBTQ communities. He is currently working on a project that examines how the assassinated gay activist Harvey Milk (May 22, 1930–November 27, 1978) has become an iconic figure who is honored and memorialized and whose legacy is claimed and contested.
Harvey Milk, assassinated over forty years ago on November 27, 1978, is a queer saint. This paper, in the self-identifying voice of a gay man, will explore the significance of Harvey Milk’s cultural sanctity in relation to his sexual embodiment. It emphasizes that “Saint Harvey” was a leading figure in a movement of sexual liberation and was himself a strongly sexual being. These facts are sometimes downplayed in his representation as a sacred figure, which often focus on his dead body and its “relics” (such as his blood-stained clothing), over against his vitally sexual pre-assassination body. Examining the phenomenon of the “canonization” of a sexually embodied gay (Jewish) agnostic, this paper specifically asks “what happens when Milk’s sacralization is explicitly tied to his sexuality? Can a saint be a sexual being, not peripherally or incidentally, but centrally and essentially?”
4. Non-binary Sexual and Gender Identities in the Community: The Khuntha as an Isolated Being in the Mosque [+–] 80-101
Independent scholar
Saqer A. Almarri is an independent scholar and translator. They hold a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Binghamton University–State University of New York (2019). Their research examines how Islamic jurists incorporate bodies that do not conform to the
dominant sexual binary into frameworks of Islamic law, and the changes to epistemology when translating pre-modern scholarship into modern languages. Saqer’s previous
scholarship has appeared in academic publications such as Women & Language (2018) and TSQ (2016).
dominant sexual binary into frameworks of Islamic law, and the changes to epistemology when translating pre-modern scholarship into modern languages. Saqer’s previous
scholarship has appeared in academic publications such as Women & Language (2018) and TSQ (2016).
The Mamluk jurist Abd al-Rahim al-Isnawi wrote a legal manual to articulate what Islamic law, in the Shafi‘i form, expects of the religiously observant life of a khuntha who has yet to be assigned a sex. Al-Isnawi described a congregational prayer format that allows a khuntha, or a group of khunatha, to participate in the congregation. Building on theories of space, religion, and gender as articulated by Michel de Certeau, Kim Knott, and Doreen Massey. This essay surveys the series of cases (10 in total) through a reading of strategies the jurist uses to regulate a khuntha’s access to men’s, women’s, and separate spaces, as well as to regulate interpersonal relations between men, women, and the khunatha.
Part III: Migrating Bodies
Elon University
Mina Garcia is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University and specializes in continental and colonial Spanish literature of the 16th-21st centuries. Her first book Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft: Between La Celestina and Cervantes (Magia, Hechiceria y Brujeria: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes” (Renacimiento, 2011) was recently followed by her second book Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado, 2019). Throughout her numerous articles and chapter contributions, Garcia explores the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies, Latin American colonial culture and literature, the relation between society and superstition in the early modern period, and the spiritual and territorial conquest of the Americas, especially colonial Mexico.
Set in the aftermath of the Moriscos expulsion decree, El Hamete de Toledo by Lope de Vega has found a new relevance on stage and in the political debates linked to the current immigration crisis. This paper aims to rethink the current victimization of Muslims as seen in the version presented by AlmaViva Teatro, a Spanish company that used the tragedy of Early Modern Spain to connect to a contemporary audience, thirsty for social justice. To this end, I will focus on the treatment of Hamete, a Moor imprisoned in Spain and whose body becomes the symbol of the Other to be conquered. As such, along the play, his body is vilified, dehumanized, chained and tortured. The culmination of this process coincides with the final act, the moment of his conversion, but also of the physical dismemberment of his body, a brutal ritualistic sacrifice in the name of eternal salvation.
University of North Carolina Asheville
Katherine C. Zubko is Professor of Religious Studies and NEH Distinguished Professor of the Humanities (2018-23) at University of North Carolina Asheville. Her areas of expertise include aesthetics, ritual, performance and embodied religion in South Asia. Zubko is the author of Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam (2014), and co-editor with George Pati of Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions (Routledge 2019). Current research interests include exploring the role of embodied gestures of compassion and hospitality in performances on conflict transformation, and inclusive, interdisciplinary curriculum design as part of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
In the South Asian dance style of bharatanatyam, the devotional bodies of dancers and of the gods they portray model a performative porosity about “religious bodies.” But what embodied resonances of religiosity transfer when the intention of the dancer or topic is not marked as devotional? Apsaras Arts’ Agathi: The Plight of the Refugee (2017-18) offers an ethnographic case study through which I aim to deepen the theory around the porosity of bodies by developing the theoretical construct of an embodied palimpsest: a framework that allows previous “erased” layers to become present and interactive with later layers. I demonstrate how the choreographed gestures and rasas, or aesthetic moods, utilized to embody certain Hindu myths inform this danced portrayal of immigration experiences, but also note how the interactive layers of the palimpsest reshape classical theories about rasa, in particular karuna rasa, the mood of compassion, and can be used to particularize theories about kinesthetic empathy.
Part IV: Microcosmic Bodies
7. Religion and the Imperial Body Politic of Japan [+–] 153-177
Elon University
Pamela D. Winfield is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Elon University and specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and doctrine. She has edited three special issues of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal CrossCurrents (2014, 2017, 2019) and was the lead co-editor (with Steven Heine) of Zen and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of the award-winning Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013; Association of Asian Studies – Southeastern Conference Book Award, 2015) and numerous articles on religion and visual culture. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Asian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and others. She serves on the Body and Religion steering committee and co-chairs the Art, Literature, and Religion Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and has convened or co-convened numerous conferences and conference panels that explore religious conceptions of the body.
Pamela D. Winfield invites us to join her on a journey throughout the history of Japan, in order to elucidate the treatment given to the emperor’s body, not only physically, but also visually and ritually. In her article, ‘Religion and the Imperial Body Politic of Japan,’ infield argues that, although this notion of body politic only emerged technically during the early modern period, it was already present in premodern Buddhist teachings and was reinforced by cultural enactments that identified the body of the emperor with his empire and sought out the health of the former to ensure the wellbeing of the latter. Winfield provides a rich historical, historiographical, and theoretical analysis of the emperor’s rhetorical, artistic, and ceremonial body-state, emphasizing the centrality of his human, physical body while framing his religious and political authority over Japan.
University of Pennsylvania
Ori Tavor is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies and the Director of the MA Program
at the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of Confucianism and Daoism, the relationship between religion and wellbeing, and Chinese ritual theory. His work has featured in
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Body and Religion, and the Journal of Ritual Studies.
at the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of Confucianism and Daoism, the relationship between religion and wellbeing, and Chinese ritual theory. His work has featured in
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Body and Religion, and the Journal of Ritual Studies.
This chapter draws on Thomas Csordas’ theory of embodiment and ritual healing to offer an analysis of the relationship between demon quelling, sin, and personal wellbeing in religious Daoism. Current scholarship on the Daoist body tends to focus on individual meditative practices that involve the visualization of a pantheon of personal gods that reside within the inner geography of the body. In this chapter, however, I would like to shift the focus from individual elite practitioners to the early communities of organized Daoism known as the Celestial Masters. Drawing primarily on a scripture titled The Demon Statutes of Lady Blue, which combines an apocalyptic narrative with detailed descriptions of specific demons and the rituals needed to expel them, I will show that in these communities, the human body functioned not only as a symbol for the battle between gods and demons, but as the actual arena in which the fight takes place.
Part V: Sensational Bodies
Lawrence University
Anandi Silva Knuppel is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lawrence University. Her main research focuses on themes of lived religion, multisensory ethnography, and religious practices in transnational Hindu traditions. She has also published works on performance and classicality in Indian classical dance, and consults on digital humanities projects in South Asian Studies and related fields.
Scholarly literature on South Asian religions defines darshan as a ubiquitous practice across Hindu traditions. Scholars often define the practice as “seeing and being seen” by a deity most often in the context of consecrated temple images. My project takes this definition as a starting point rather than the end point and explores what “seeing” means within the context of a specific theology and for individual devotees in transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The tradition provides detailed guides to the form of the tradition, what devotional bodies are, what sensory perception should be, the practices one should undertake, how to perform them, and what to expect out of them. However, the textual imaginary of seeing is only one dimension to darshan. The ways that these imagined structures for bodily senses are put into practice and into bodies changes what seeing means in this tradition and complicates our assumptions about everyday religious practices.
Gettysburg College
Megan Adamson Sijapati is Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from the University of California Santa
Barbara. Her interests are in modernity and religion, the body, contemplative traditions, digital religion, contemporary Islam and Sufism. She is the author of the book Islamic Revival in Nepal: Religion and a New Nation (2011) and co-editor of the books Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya (2016) and Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalaya: Conceptualizing the Global Ummah (2021), all published with Routledge. Her most recent publications examine connections between Islamic piety,
the body, and contemplative practices in digital contexts: ‘Sufi Remembrance Practices
in a Meditation Marketplace of Mobile Apps’ in Anthropological Perspectives on the
Religious Uses of Mobile Apps (Palgrave 2019) and ‘Islamic Meditation: Mindfulness
Apps for Muslims in the Digital Spiritual Marketplace’ in Cyber Muslims: Mapping
Islamic Networks in the Digital Age (OneWorld 2022).
Barbara. Her interests are in modernity and religion, the body, contemplative traditions, digital religion, contemporary Islam and Sufism. She is the author of the book Islamic Revival in Nepal: Religion and a New Nation (2011) and co-editor of the books Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya (2016) and Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalaya: Conceptualizing the Global Ummah (2021), all published with Routledge. Her most recent publications examine connections between Islamic piety,
the body, and contemplative practices in digital contexts: ‘Sufi Remembrance Practices
in a Meditation Marketplace of Mobile Apps’ in Anthropological Perspectives on the
Religious Uses of Mobile Apps (Palgrave 2019) and ‘Islamic Meditation: Mindfulness
Apps for Muslims in the Digital Spiritual Marketplace’ in Cyber Muslims: Mapping
Islamic Networks in the Digital Age (OneWorld 2022).
This paper explores the instrumentality of the body in religion through focus on praxis in a Shadhiliyya Sufi Muslim community based in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in western Pennsylvania. The practices and beliefs of this tariqah (Sufi order) are derived from the guidance of its recently deceased Shaykh, Muhammad al-Jamal (d. 2015), from Jerusalem, who began teaching in the US in the 1990s. Healing is a key religious practice in this tariqah and plays an important role in the spiritual seeker’s deepening relationship with Allah, a process the community refers to (in English) as ‘walking.’ Drawing upon two years of fieldwork, I argue the body is central to these Sufis’ religious experiences and their understandings of themselves and I will aim both to describe this complex production of the religious Sufi body in this tariqah and, through this, to theorize the body as a site where religion happens.
End Matter
Index 245-254
Elon University
Pamela D. Winfield is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Elon University and specializes in Japanese Buddhist art and doctrine. She has edited three special issues of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal CrossCurrents (2014, 2017, 2019) and was the lead co-editor (with Steven Heine) of Zen and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of the award-winning Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013; Association of Asian Studies – Southeastern Conference Book Award, 2015) and numerous articles on religion and visual culture. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Asian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and others. She serves on the Body and Religion steering committee and co-chairs the Art, Literature, and Religion Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and has convened or co-convened numerous conferences and conference panels that explore religious conceptions of the body.
Elon University
Mina Garcia is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University and specializes in continental and colonial Spanish literature of the 16th-21st centuries. Her first book Magic, Sorcery and Witchcraft: Between La Celestina and Cervantes (Magia, Hechiceria y Brujeria: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes” (Renacimiento, 2011) was recently followed by her second book Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado, 2019). Throughout her numerous articles and chapter contributions, Garcia explores the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies, Latin American colonial culture and literature, the relation between society and superstition in the early modern period, and the spiritual and territorial conquest of the Americas, especially colonial Mexico.
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781781799710
Price (Hardback)
£70.00 / $90.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781781799727
Price (Paperback)
£24.95 / $32.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781781799734
Price (eBook)
Individual
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£70.00 / $90.00
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£70.00 / $90.00
Publication
07/08/2024
Pages
264
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
students and scholars
Illustration
9 figures
