Can I Give My Heart to You, Literally? with Barbara Newman

In her book The Permeable Self, Barbara Newman—John Evans Professor of Latin, as well as English, Classics, and History at Northwestern University—explores the importance of coinherence in the medieval view of personhood. This is the concept that persons are profoundly interconnected, existing not in isolation but “in” each other. One illustration of this is the trope of exchanging hearts, whether between lovers or between female mystics and Christ. 

The concept of our selves having such porous boundaries is perhaps an alien one to the contemporary American mind. But in this episode, Barbara discusses stories of heart transplant patients who—without knowing anything about the donors of their new hearts—began to take on personality traits of the donors. In a society where we often define personhood by its individuality and separateness, what do we make of instances such as these, which seem to bear out a medieval understanding of what it means to be human?

Barbara and Ryan discuss this and other aspects relating to how people in the Middle Ages conceived of personhood. They delve into saintly telepathy, the relationship between virginity and fertility, the social life of trees, and the tension between the public, performative persona and a private, interior sense of self. Together they ponder the different ways that people can be seen as existing coherently with each other, both in the present and across the boundaries of time through genealogy.