Camille, Chapter 1

1. How does Camille define "liminality"? What are our liminal experiences? How does liminality both construct and challenge the center?

2. Camille claims that boundaries "intensify the very desires they delimit"? Do you agree? Can you think of contemporary examples of boundaries (temporal, geographical, ritual)

3.Identify and order (according to ontological importance) the kinds of boundaries (e.g. the village, the body) essential to medieval experience. Be prepared to discuss your list.

4. How do the concepts of word and image, center and margin, order and ambiguity influence medieval manuscript hermeneutics?

5. How are "travesty," "profanation," "sacrilege" and "play" essential to the continuity of the sacred in society"?

Mills and Bildhauer, Introduction

1. Translate into your own usable terms the definitions of "liminality" and "abjection" in this chapter.

2. How is Lionel both a figure of "abjection" and "liminal"?

3. How are Monsters "polysemous?" (temporal, social, gendered, "intimate strangers," historical, and "triggers for ontological inquiries".)

Bovey, pp. 15-27

Review and be prepared to discuss the questions on page 6 in relation to the images in Bovey.