ENCOUNTERING BIBLIAL BODIES
RESEARCH SHOWCASE

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Schedule

Ellen Wilkinson B2.4

10:00–10:15 Coffee  

10:15–10:30 Welcome  

10:30–11:00 Peter Oakes (Religions and Theology): What have Bodies to do with Salvation? The Transformation of ‘Bodies of our Humiliation(?)’ into ‘the Likeness of the Body of (Christ’s) Glory’ in the Idea of Salvation in Philippians 3:21.

11:00–11:30 Kate Bowen (Nazarene Theological College): Sidelined in the Body and by the Body: Re-reading Corinthians 12:22–26 through an Ableist-Critical Lens

11:30-11:40 Comfort Break

11:40–12:10 Anke Bernau (EAC): Bodies Enmeshed

12:10–12:40 Gillian Redfern (EAC): Bodies Beyond the Anthropos: The Medieval Symbolism of the Body of the Hare.

12:40–1:25 Lunch  

1:25–1:55 Cordelia Warr (Art History and Cultural Practices): Painting, printing, sculpting, forgery (and washing).

1:55–2:25 Naomi Baker (History): Clothed with the Sun: Apocalyptic Women in Early Modern England

2:25–2:55 Meaghan Allen (EAC): ‘To Dust You Will Return’: ‘Dusting’ in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2:55–3:10 Coffee

3:10–3:40 Rachel Miller (Religions and Theology):  ‘Your Worst Enemy is Your Body’: Jesus, Mary, and Gender in Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021)

3:40–4:10 Siobhán Jolley (Religions and Theology) “A World We Have Not Yet Seen”: Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon's The Map as Feminist Counter-Reception

4:10–4:40 Scott Midson and Holly Morse (Religions and Theology): Creating Desire and Desiring Creation: De/constructing the First Women of Mythology and Posthumanism

4:40-5:00 Concluding discussion and remarks  

Abstracts

Peter Oakes (Religions and Theology) - What have Bodies to do with Salvation? The Transformation of ‘Bodies of our Humiliation(?)’ into ‘the Likeness of the Body of (Christ’s) Glory’ in the Idea of Salvation in Philippians 3:21.

At the culmination of the main argument of Paul’s letter to the Christians at Philippi, he presents a vision of that he says they are waiting for,

For our community is in heaven.  From it we eagerly await a saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our tapeinōsis into conformity with the body of his glory, in accordance with the power that enables him also to subject to himself all things. (Philippians 3:20-21)

This is saving not of the psyche (‘soul’) nor of the pneuma (‘spirit’), but of the sōma (‘body’). What difference does this make? How does it relate to the physicality, or otherwise, of Paul’s ideas of salvation in other texts? How should we translate tapeinōsis? ‘Humility?’ ‘Humiliation (NRSV)?’ ‘lowliness (NIV)?’ Does the idea have a relation to Christ’s ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν (‘humbled himself’) on the way to the cross? What does the idea of ‘transformation’ of bodies involve? What sort of end state is envisaged by likeness/conformity with ‘the body of Christ’s glory’?

Issues of bodiliness raise key interpretative questions for my current research project, writing the Greek Testament Commentary on Philippians (Eerdmans).

Kate Bowen-Evans (Nazarene Theological College) - Sidelined in the Body and by the Body: Re-reading 1 Corinthians 12:22–26 through an Ableist-Critical Lens.

This paper offers an ableist-critical re-reading of First Epistle to the Corinthians 12:22–26, exploring how the “body of Christ” metaphor both exposes and resists hierarchies of embodiment within ecclesial life. Here, ableism is understood broadly to include not only disability but also the privileging of normative, cisheteronormative bodies within interpretive and ecclesial frameworks. Such a hermeneutic deliberately re-centres the embodied experiences of disabled and LGBTQIA+ believers, whose marginalisation persists within many contemporary Christian contexts. Disability theology emphasised Paul’s claim that the “seemingly weaker” members are “indispensable” (v.22), yet this insight has not been consistently extended to other marginalised bodies. While disabled persons continue to struggle for full inclusion, LGBTQIA+ members are often further excluded from recognition within the ecclesial body. This paper argues that Paul’s metaphor resists such exclusions. Central to the argument is Paul’s theological claim that God has “composed the body” (v.24) so as to confer greater honour on those deemed “unpresentable” or lacking status according to prevailing social norms. This divine inversion destabilises human systems of valuation and exposes problematic ecclesial hierarchies. The body metaphor thus functions not as a static description of unity but as a critical framework through which communities are called to examine their own practices of inclusion and exclusion. The enduring force of Paul’s argument lies in its transhistorical applicability: each generation must discern which bodies it renders marginal and confront this in light of God’s preferential honouring of the disregarded. In this way, 1 Corinthians 12:22–26 offers a theologically robust resource for challenging ableist and heteronormative assumptions and for reimagining the church as a community in which marginalised bodies are not merely included but indispensable.

Anke Bernau (English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing) - Bodies Enmeshed

When Judith visits the lecherous general Holofernes in his chamber in order to save her people, two kinds of ‘net-work’ structure Middle English retellings of this apocryphal story: the hairnet that Judith is wearing, and the netted curtain that surrounds Holofernes’ bed. Though both items are luxurious, intricate objects, they draw upon different associations. This paper will look at medieval ‘net-works’ (bodies, ornaments, instruments that are ‘meshed’) to discuss some of the ways in which they speak – as material things and as metaphysical dynamic – to the ‘knotted’ human condition in late medieval England. Drawing out the net’s associations with Christ and his apostles, the devil, hunters, spiders and human ingenuity, I will contextualise that encounter to examine what it means to be a body enmeshed.

Gillian Redfern (English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing) Bodies Beyond the Anthropos: The Medieval Symbolism of the Body of the Hare

Later medieval representations of the hare across various images and literary genres reveal some often-oppositional symbolism. For medieval theologians such as St Augustine, for example, the biblical hare elicited both negative and positive connotations. The positive view regarding hares arises from commentaries on two verses in the Old Testament. It was believed that these creatures, being too weak to defend themselves, would hide from predators in crevices. Thus they were taken as representing Christians or the Church, which instead of trusting in human strength hides in the rock that is Christ. One example of this interpretation is in St. Augustine's comment on Psalm 103.18, which in his text read, ‘the rock is a refuge for hedgehogs and hares’, and Augustine explains that ‘the rock was Christ’.

Another example is the interpretation of Proverbs 30.28 which lists four creatures that ‘are of the least on earth, yet are wiser than the wisest’. The second of these wise creatures is the lepusculus, usually understood as the diminutive of lepus, ‘hare’. The lepusculus is called ‘a weak people’ that ‘makes its lair in the rock’; Bede and St. Jerome interpret this ‘weak people’ as the Church, which does not trust to her own strength ‘but has learned to look for safety in the help of her Redeemer’, thus the hare symbolised weakness and strength, timidity and sagacity.

Further, the hare was thought to defy binaries of gender, defy classification by name, and upturn traditional hierarchies on the scala naturae. It was a creature thought capable of oscillating between male and female genders, and therefore able to reproduce without a mate. For some, the hare symbolized promiscuity and homosexuality, but at the same time, for others, its reproductive capacity meant that the hare could also symbolize fertility and virginity – a notion which might explain the prevalence of the three hares motif in many medieval churches. This research paper will explore more fully the body of the medieval hare, in order to understand its complex and contradictory place in the medieval imaginary.

Cordelia Warr (Art History and Cultural Practice) - Painting, printing, sculpting, forgery (and washing)

In this talk I will explore the various ways in which visuality – including ideas about painting, printing, and sculpting – were brought to bear on understandings of female stigmatics in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The numbers of those who claimed to have the stigmata and the variety of stigmatic experience as well as the diversity of the physical appearance of the stigmata means that this is a messy subject which can appear to frustrate attempts to build a coherent narrative or trajectory. Yet it is precisely within this mess that it is possible to discern the thread that demonstrates, in diverse ways, the importance of visuality and the visual arts in relation to attempts to understand and interpret stigmata. I concentrate on female stigmatics not only because the majority of stigmatics were women but also because the issues surrounding women as bearers of Christ’s wounds were more fraught than those surrounding men. Their stigmata were the focus of both continuous doubt and emphatic trust: the miracle of the reception of the stigmata appeared to prove their extraordinary faith and intimacy with Christ at the same time as provoking the need to ascertain their veracity. 

Naomi Baker (History) - Clothed with the Sun: Apocalyptic Women in Early Modern England

When the 64-year-old Joanna Southcott announced in 1814 that she was pregnant with the Messiah, her claim was based on her conviction that ‘the woman in the 12th chapter of Revelation is myself’. Astonishing as her words might have seemed, Southcott was following in a long line of radical Protestant women who identified not only spiritually but sometimes even physically with ‘the apocalyptic woman’ described in Revelation 12. 

Clothed with the sun and standing on the moon, the mysteriously unnamed woman of Revelation 12 – identified as a ‘great wonder’ – gives birth to a messianic ‘man-child’ before being chased by a dragon into a wilderness. In the early modern period, Protestants tended to interpret the figure as a symbol of the Church, emphasising her weakness and vulnerability to persecution. In doing so, they largely ignored the uncanny strangeness of the Revelation passage, in which the ‘apocalyptic woman’ is also associated with extraordinary cosmic power. Radical Protestant women in this era often approached the figure differently, refusing to simplify her significance. Paying attention to the cosmic as well as the vulnerable aspects of her suffering maternal body, they repeatedly returned to her as a figure in whom the divine and the human were united. Often fusing her with Sophia/Wisdom while at the same time rescuing her from her purely symbolic role, they tended to identify with her personally. For many of these women, the woman clothed with the sun became a means of exploring the divine potential of humanity, particularly the divine significance of the female body.

In this paper, I will explore responses to ‘the apocalyptic woman’ by Protestant mystics, focusing on the writing of Ann Bathurst and Jane Lead, two late seventeenth-century leaders of the Philadelphian Society. Drawing closely on the biblical account of woman clothed with the sun, both Bathurst and Lead emphasise the significance of female physicality– in erotic and maternal terms – as they reach for new ways of discussing the nature of salvation. 

Meaghan Allen (English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing) - ‘To Dust You Will Return’: ‘Dusting’ in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) contains multitudes. The series tells the story of Buffy Summers, a California teenager who happens to be the “Chosen One” or “Vampire Slayer”; her life’s mission is to “stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness”. A significant corpus of scholarship has analysed the ways in which Buffy actively draws upon the tropes, themes, and iconography of the Gothic and Horror genres. However, a thorough assessment of the fundamental role the Medieval, and thus by extension the Biblical, plays in the series is lacking. To address this absence, this presentation proposes a way to read Buffy “medievally” through the central eschatological concepts of blood, dust, and “resurrection” via the living (un)dead (particularly vampires). This presentation will investigate the myriad interpretations and functions of ‘dust’ from Genesis 3:19 – “For dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return” – to consider the phenomenon of ‘dusting’ (or slaying) vampires in Buffy. Doing so will hopefully unearth the intricate layers of ecology, metaphysics, theology and eschatology in Buffy in exciting new ways.

Rachel Miller (Religions and Theology) - ‘Your Worst Enemy is Your Body’: Jesus, Mary, and Gender in Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021)

The film Benedetta (2021) by Paul Verhoeven tells the story of the eponymous 17th century nun. Among other things, Benedetta experiences violent and erotic religious visions and develops an intimate bond with a fellow sister. In this paper, I explore one of these visions, and the sexual element of the relationship between Benedetta and Bartolomea.

Firstly, the naked Benedetta has a vision of the crucified Jesus instructing her to remove his loincloth. In doing so, Benedetta does not reveal a penis, arguably the expected sexual organ of the son of god, but rather a vulva. I propose that thinking of Jesus, god’s only son, as in possession of a vulva may lead to the development of societies that are more inclusive of and tolerant towards people of all genders, especially trans people.

Secondly, in an attempt to sexually satisfy Benedetta, Bartolomea whittles down a wooden icon of Mary into a phallic object. Proceeding to use it on Benedetta, Bartolomea helps her to reach orgasm. I propose that thinking of the virgin mother of Jesus as a symbol of queer desire and passion may lead to the development of societies where women’s possession of their own sexuality is no longer denied but rather sanctified.

Ultimately, I argue that these two case studies challenge cisgendered and heteronormative assumptions around the biblical characters of Jesus and Mary. By queering these figures, I propose that the film embraces embodied experience over oppressive orthodoxy. In doing so, Benedetta (2021) raises the possibility that queerness is holiness.

Siobhán Jolley (Religions and Theology)  - “A World We Have Not Yet Seen”: Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon's The Map as Feminist Counter-Reception

Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon's The Map (2021) is a monumental hand-sewn textile sculpture, that reimagines the life, mythology, and legacy of Mary Magdalene. My current research argues that The Map makes a major contribution to biblical reception studies, and specifically to the question of what biblical interpretation has done to, and through, women's bodies.

My proposed presentation situates The Map within the tradition of the medieval mappa mundi. Where those cosmological maps encoded a Christian geography centred on Jerusalem, Maher and Fallon construct a counter-cartography — a deep-blue cosmic landscape of feminist mythologies and speculative geographies, including Oiléan Olc, the Fields of Salomé, and Jezebel Heights. The choice of textile is itself a biblical-bodily argument: embroidery, appliqué, and crochet invoke histories of feminine labour while reclaiming the penitential work imposed on women incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries. The medium and the message are inseparable.

Central to the paper is the reception history The Map refuses. The seven demons of Luke 8:2, reimagined here as speech bubbles exemplify how sparse biblical detail was inflated into evidence of moral corruption, culminating in Gregory I's conflation of three distinct women (591 CE) and centuries of iconography that rendered the Magdalene penitent, sexualised, and subordinate. Irish institutional Catholicism translated this received, disciplined body into a mechanism for the literal incarceration of women. 

Drawing on Schüssler Fiorenza's feminist hermeneutics and reception theory, this analysis develops the concept of counter-reception: the embodied, imaginative refusal of a harmful interpretive tradition and the generation of conditions for a different one. Overall, it argues that contemporary art constitutes a serious and underexamined site of societal biblical reception — one where the consequences of interpretation are viscerally legible in women's bodies, and where the work of reimagining them is already underway.

Scott Midson (Liberal Arts/Religions and Theology) & Holly Morse (Religions and Theology) - Creating Desire and Desiring Creation: De/constructing the First Women of Mythology and Posthumanism

Genesis tells stories of human nature and humans’ place in the world. In our presentation today, we trace the contours of notions of gender in cultural narratives of creation that, we argue, reveal striking parallels between the divine creation of humans in the biblical account and technological creations in our image.  We propose that Eve, as a figure of generativity, knowledge, desire, and transgression, is helpful to think with as we both illuminate and critique our relationships with our gendered technological creations.  Specifically our task is to consider parallels between notions of artificiality and their gendered manifestations across mythological and technological creation(s). We do this by comparing two different figures: Eve, the Bible’s first woman; and Roxxxy, the world’s first sexbot. We’ll be thinking with out about questions such as: In what ways is the artificiality of these beings de/constructed, and what roles do the gendered relationships between these artificial women and their creators and consumers play in shaping such narratives? By exploring potential answers to these questions, we ask about the desires that underwrite ancient and contemporary acts of creation that involve the (image of the) human in some way. Exploring such desires, we suggest, reveals that the cultural, theological and philosophical tensions that have re-surfaced with the emergence of sexbots are rooted in considerably more ancient Western creation mythologies. Ultimately, we will argue that classical myths of creation continue to define contemporary mythologising of the human form within technology.