Abstract:

M. Shawn Copeland recounts a story of resistance within Harriet Jacob’s autobiography about her life in slavery. In response to claims of ownership by others, she responds, “You have tried to kill me, and I wish you had; but you have no right to do as you like with me.” Copeland describes that act as a fundamental and profound self-affirmation against those who would seek to claim other’s bodies or minds, especially those of women (“Wading Through Many Sorrows,” 122).

In response to such moments in Copeland’s work including her book Enfleshing Freedom, this paper seeks to examine methodological tensions in recapitulating history in certain theologies (an issue raised by Womanist scholars). This paper begins by highlighting how memory and history relate in Copeland’s work as well as how Medieval and Historical theologians have emphasized them, such as in the works of Burcht Pranger and Willemien Otten. Furthermore, one can distinguish several different sub-genres of constructive theology that have placed an explicit focus on history and reintegration of this matter into the present, including the mid-20th century Catholic movement of Nouvelle Théologie and the more recent Protestant movement of “Theology of Retrieval.” This essay offers that Womanist Theology also seeks to determine how contemporary scholars adjudicate and retrieve history. In such cases, remembering in Womanist theology becomes an act of ethical importance and ultimately resistance when opposing any effort to obscure the past or reify previous structures. It concludes by proposing that Womanism and other Liberationist theologies can productively participate in, and even further, the aims of Medieval and Early Modern Christian studies within theological discourses.