Encounters with Medieval Women: Mary of Egypt
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The Importance of Literacy in the Middle Ages
In the classic version of Mary's life, we see all of it through Zosmas' eyes. He's the figure through whom the reader enters the story. There's a sense in which she owes her tradition and her story to him as a witness. She seems to want to be shriven once before she dies. And then she dies quite soon afterwards. So there's asense in which she can never be fully separate from his masculine institutional power from the church. Nor does she want to be.
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