Gender, The Body, and Holiness in the Middle Ages

Ryan Coyne studies the relationship between modern European philosophy and the history of Christian theology.  His research thus far has focused on the history of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction.  His first book, Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond University of Chicago Press, 2015) examines the shifting roles assigned to religion, and to Augustine of Hippo more specifically, in Martin Heidegger’s early, middle, and later works. Coyne is currently completing a second book tentatively entitled A Spectacle for the Gods: Nietzsche and the Question of Faith. In it, he analyzes Friedrich Nietzsche’s struggle to redefine faith after the death of God, arguing that this struggle sheds new light on recent debates in continental philosophy of religion. A third book-length project, on deconstruction and method in the philosophy of religion, is tentatively entitled The Dreams of Metaphysicians. Coyne’s teaching generally focuses on the themes of subjectivity, temporality, and the nature of religious experience as they appear in ancient, medieval, and modern texts. His longstanding interests include Christian mysticism, the history of Augustinian theology, and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Professor Newman (Ph.D. Yale) is known for her work on medieval religious culture, comparative literature, and women’s spirituality. Her most recent books are The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships (2021) and a translation of Richard Methley’s collected works (2021). She is also the editor/translator of Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives (2008) and Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Book of Special Grace (2017). Other works include Making Love in the Twelfth Century (2016), Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013), Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece (2006), God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003), and From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (1995), as well as three books on Hildegard of Bingen.

Professor Newman has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern. She holds the John Evans Chair of Latin Language and Literature and previously held a Charles Deering McCormick Chair of Teaching Excellence (2003-06). Professor Newman is a past president of the Medieval Academy of America and director of the graduate cluster in Medieval Studies.

Willemien Otten studies the history of Christianity and Christian thought with a focus on the medieval and the early Christian intellectual tradition, especially in the West, and an emphasis on the continuity of Platonic themes. She analyzes (early) medieval thought and theology as an amalgam of biblical, classical, and patristic influences which, woven together, constitute their own intellectual matrix. Within this matrix the place and role of nature and humanity interest her most. She has worked on the Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena, on twelfth-century humanistic thinkers including Peter Abelard and, most recently, has ventured into the thought of R.W. Emerson and William James.

Her co-edited volume Religion and Memory (Fordham, 2013; with Burcht Pranger and Babette Hellemans) addresses how best to conceive the pastness of religion. Her co-edited volume Eriugena and Creation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014; with Michael I. Allen), brings together selected papers on medieval nature. Besides her medieval work Otten maintains an active interest in Tertullian, Augustine, and the broader patristic tradition. With Editor-in Chief Karla Pollmann, she edited the three-volume Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (430–2000) (Oxford, 2013) and with Susan Schreiner she co-edited Augustine Our Contemporary. Examining the Self in Past and Present (Notre Dame, 2018).

Reflecting her interest in natural theology beyond the medieval period, Otten’s latest study Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford, 2020) approaches ideas of nature and human selfhood across a wide array of thinkers, from Augustine to William James and from Maximus the Confessor to Schleiermacher. Deconstructing the notion of pantheism in the Western religious tradition, Otten draws attention to a more elusive idea of nature in which nature is an ally and co-worker of the divine. During her leave Prof. Otten will be at work on a new project on nature with a more prominent role for the interaction with human nature

Willemien Otten was a 2015–2016 ATS/Henry Luce Fellow in the History of Christianity and in Winter 2017 served as visiting distinguished Tipton professor of Catholic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In November 2019 Otten received an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, for her comprehensive work in the history of theology and church history. From 2011 to 2022 Otten served as President of the Society for Eriugenian Studies (SPES). Her Etienne Gilson lecture “Creation and Gender in Eriugena, Hildegard, and Hadewijch,” at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) in Toronto, Canada appeared with PIMS press in 2023.

Willemien Otten is the immediate past Faculty Co-Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion and is one of the editors of the Journal of Religion.