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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Gelber

Hester Gelber

Stanford University
Department of Religious Studies

Hester G. Gelber is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin.  Her specialty is late medieval religious thought, and she teaches courses on philosophy of religion and religion and science as well as medieval Christianity.  She has focused primarily on medieval Domincans, including Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God by Robert Holcot OP, co-editing Robert Holcot, Seeing the Future Clearly: Questions on Future Contingents, and her most recent book It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300-1350.

Project Summary

"With Justice and Mercy: The Medieval Retributive Cosmos," Gelber's project, analyzes the religiously defined cosmology of the high and late Middle Ages (1100-1535) as a mechanism for retribution and social control. Heaven, hell and purgatory defined a cosmic space with ancient roots but one that came fully into cultural force at this time. The cosmos took on the characteristics of a fully-fledged behavioral deterrence game. Looking at the medieval cosmos as a deterrence game discloses the structural dynamics of the system and sheds new light on the roles of Christ as the just judge and the Virgin Mary as the advocate and source of mercy.

The ideas for this project developed over the years out of Gelber's courses, particularly a seminar entitled "The Virgin Mary and Images of Power." Many others have researched various aspects of this project: heaven, hell, purgatory, medieval marriage, the Virgin mary, representations of the cosmic drama in art and literature, etc. However, no one has perceived the whole as a dynamic mythological system in the way that Gelber proposes to examine it. Her book will provide a different lens through which to see many otherwise well-known aspects of medieval culture in a new way.