Discovery of the Individual

Religious texts of the distributor point, in her view, looked for self-expression by means of a search for an separate track and an appropriate group ( ghostlike or social) in which to live (85). That would explain the proliferation of religious societys and their competition for, as it were, the hearts and minds of adherents.

At the extremes, some groups tycoon be ostracized as heretical, but by and large the payoff of various religious orders should be understood as an make out in diversity, with one order or another accenting some behavior or custom that its adherents considered important. Membership in a group thus conferred on individuals a guts of their own identity and thus, by implication, their position in the cosmos. Bynum uses a number of religious treatises that "analyze the various orders or callings in the church" (90) to support that assertion. For example, a treatise by Gerhoh of Reichersberg seeks to "catalogue and categorise the full range of partings in world society and to maintain how each is religious" (90). The multiple groups, diverse as they were, evince multiple identities, which Bynum interprets as "a reflection of changing ideas of the Christian life" (92). Where the self begins to play a significant role is in the choice of group affiliation--or which of the many mansions in the father's kin was best--as individuals sought to determine whether they had wisely chosen the Christian way of life they adopted (93).

at these groups conferred amounted to a social identity, the link with the moral structures of the institutions equivalent to the bonk of civil society. Bynum illustrates that point with reference to the idea that arose in this period of using models for the good Christian life--e.g.

, imitation of Christ and the saints. The versed life of the self was a strategy for worship, but the outer, or social, life was to be lived after the fashion of admirable people. The feel of "likeness," Bynum says, citing modern historians Javelet and Morrison, "was a fundamental theological category in the twelfth century. To be holy was to be 'like' God," or wrought in His image (101-2). The dynamic of individuals modeling themselves after saints was replicated as orders were organized around "founders who were really prototypes," or ideal types, of human beings (103).

Bynum's choice of evidence tends to support her interpretation of the religious riddle through which the experience of individuality had to pass in order to find expression. That interpretation is based on what she sees the texts revealing close to 12th-century structures of thought. Whether the quest for selfhood was a singularity in the whole of gallant society is, however, difficult to sta
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