Sophia's blessing: modern attitudes towards wisdom using medieval allegorical models

Abstract

This project started in a course I took from Professor Judith Kellogg: English 780W: Medieval Women Writers from which I gained more ideas and momentum for its creation. I began to take an interest in the allegory of the medieval times, and wanted to recreate that genre in a modern time frame. Titled "Sophia's Blessing," this piece is concerned with a character coming to grips with the world around her. As a woman in the 20th century, she doesn't feel certain anxieties that women in medieval times felt due to their gender. However, the world is still a place in which she needs to locate herself, and traveling through a kind of dream state allows her to enter a carnival of humanity. With her dog, Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom, representing the main virtue that allows her to move forward, she is guided by Evagrius Pontincus1, head of the carnival, as she experiences the extremes of what "being human" can mean. Using allegorical dream vision, she begins to come to grips with humanity and what she is as a human.