Hagiography was one of the most popular genres of the European Middle Ages. It inspired, instructed, entertained, and ultimately promoted local individuals according to well-recognized patterns of Christian holiness. It also documented how veneration and promotion developed over time, refracting shifting--and sometimes competing--local and institutional interests. Yet scholarly analyses of these texts have often focused upon authorized Latin vitae, affirming canonical priorities over other voices(8). Why should modern hagiographical scholarship continue to be bound by the same conventions as medieval hagiographers? Do such approaches reinforce literate, clerical, or male perspectives of how saints were encountered? Jessica Barr and Barbara Zimbalist raise these questions in the excellent introduction to their volume Writing Holiness (7-32). Their collection employs literary methods to examine alternative receptions of holy texts and to raise new questions about materiality and temporality, gender and genre (13-23). In doing so, the approaches represented here disrupt canonical narratives and ultimately broaden our perspective on hagiographical genres and their reception (8). Saints continue to enjoy long afterlives, and this new contribution helps us understand why.
Writing Holiness is a hardcover volume comprising ten essays that provide new insights into different hagiographical contexts. Each essay relates how its exemplar crosses boundaries that could be geographical, temporal, generic, gendered, linguistic or textual. Its range encompasses the entirety of the Middle Ages from hagiography about the third-century saint Cecilia to a seventeenth-century manuscript treatment of East Anglian sister saints (139-162, 255-281, 109-135). Altogether, these discussions serve as an “entry point into a multivalent discourse of sanctity, the culmination of a long process of production that drew on multiple narratives in different modes, in dialogue with features of holiness, from local cults to pilgrimage routes to devotional practices to beloved relics” (12). Barr and Zimbalist’s introduction sets this up splendidly, providing a comprehensive historiography of literary approaches with full bibliography (7-32). Following the introduction, the compiled essayshave been organized into three sections to draw attention to particular “border-crossings” (23): “Saints across Borders” (34-135), “Crossing Gender and Genre” (137-196), and “Writing across Languages” (199-281).
In the first section, “Saints across Borders,” four essays explore cults that have traversed space and time with narratives that benefit from cross-disciplinary approaches (23). Marianne P. Ritsema van Eck’s “Helena on the Move: The Makings of a Medieval Saint” tracks Helena Augusta’s (d. 330) travels, both before her death and after it, to reconsider how her cult authenticated Holy Land relics in the ninth-century Rhineland (35-64). Reconsidering Helena’s development across centuries and borders exposes the tensions between legend and history. It further reveals the European preoccupation with material evidence of Christ and the Holy Land, as much as the ways that the Catholic Church in Rome came to promote universal exemplars, like Helena, over local cults (59). The second essay, “From Holy Flesh to Holy Houses: The Late Medieval Rise of Non-Corporeal Relics in the March of Ancona,” similarly unwraps how tensions between universal saints and local cults played out in notarial bequests and hagiography in the Italian March of Ancona (65-84). Bianca Lopez traces how Loreto’s Marian contact relics eventually superseded the local, corporeal cult of St. Nicholas of Tolentino (d. 1305) by the early modern period (67-68). Discerning how a cult develops is less central to the last two essays of this section, as approaches turn towards changing discourses about holiness (24). In the third essay, “‘Fluvius autem de Corde Dei égredibatur’: Medicalized Discourse and Holy Women’s Writing at Helfta and Siena,” Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa highlights the practical and spiritual dimensions of hydraulic imagery for drinking, cleanliness, and spiritual purification (85-108). The writings of Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1282) and Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) are deftly filtered for aquatic imagery that inspired their respective communities’ “beatific vision of life” (86). Jenny Bledsoe’s “Holy Families and Vowed Life: The Legends of East Anglian Sister Saints in a Seventeenth-Century English Manuscript” leans into contextual setting even more, specifically the effects of England’s schism upon Folger MS V.b.334 (109-135). She explores how the redaction of its Lives of St Æthelthryth of Ely’s (d.679) sisters blended secular and religious roles as a way of providing new examples for married women in England as much as “English Catholic nuns living in continental convents” (131). Situating texts within their historical contexts provides new approaches to these cults and refracts methodologies that will bear fruit when grafted elsewhere. The narratives attached to a knife, a house, a fountain, and a manuscript might otherwise seem difficult to connect, but the essays contained within “Saints without Borders” reveal some of the ways that hagiographical narratives have developed over time in response to changing contexts.
The second section is gathered under the heading of “Crossing Gender and Genre.” The three essays here explore how hagiography intersects with other popular genres, empowering readings beyond the narratives (24). This approach enhances the ways we consider medieval audiences’ “understanding of sanctity” as well as “challenge perceived binaries of gender” (24-25). Christine Cooper-Rompato shows us how reception of hagiographical genres can differ. “Saints in the Exempla of the Middle English Mirror: Rewriting Accounts of Saints Fursey, Cecilia, Thais, and Macarius” compares these saints’ hagiographical narratives with the accounts redacted in the fourteenth-century English Mirror (139-161). Each comparison shows the ways the English redactor emphasized new moral interpretations, somatic associations, or teachings that did not derive from the Latin originals (58). This argument isolates and interpolates how redactions could be unique to translations, regions, and authorial tastes, necessitating appreciation for the ways that sermon exempla were “likely the primary point of access to many saints for lay audiences” (25). More gendered approaches infuse Caitlin Koford’s “Hybrid Devotion: Writing the Life of Christ across Genre” (163-178) and Matthew Desing’s “Tarsiana and the Redemption of Captives: The Saintly Princess as Liberator in the Early Castilian Apollonius of Tyre Legend” (179-196). Koford argues that the reforming sermon collections of Maurice de Sully directed lay audiences towards Christ’s adult life. Manuscripts of this text were often bound with hagiography and Passion narratives, implying that altogether they formed a complete “theological and devotional source” (164). Imitatio Christi also underpins Desing’s interpretation of the characterization of Apollonius’ daughter, Tarsiana, in the Castilian Libro de Apolonio. Desing argues that gender-bending allusions to Tarsiana’s formal education, her performance of quasi-sacramental rites, and her liberation of captives integrate more masculine, clerical traits into the narrative for a Castilian audience (193). The essays in this section consider some of the ways that hagiography can be shaped by other genres, whether they are exempla, sermons, or mester de clerecía poetry. Openness to crosspollination between texts provides further points for disrupting gendered expectations of their reception in the Middle Ages and today.
This volume’s third and final section covers “Writing across Languages.” Its three essays each consider the ways that their hagiographical subjects have been transformed through revision and redaction, translation and movement (26). In “Lost in Translation? Hagiographic Redactions Crossing Language Borders” (199-233), Racha Kirakosian considers how editorial interventions reveal “deliberate choices and document how the hagiographical material was reshaped to meet the needs of a particular community” (208). Comparison of the Latin and vernacular translations of women’s visionary texts, such the fourteenth-century German redaction of Gertrude of Helfta’s Legatus diviniae pietatis, reveal how translation and re-writing adapted hagiography for different audiences. Kirakosian is right to note that vernacular translations should be considered equally authoritative since the texts considered themselves so (222). “Translating Raymond of Capua’s Life of Catherine of Siena in Fifteenth-Century England and Germany” likewise compares Latin and vernacular versions to reveal adaptations made over time (235-253). Steven Rozenski argues that the Dominican reformer Raymond made himself a central figure of St. Catherine of Siena’s Latin vita; his influence was only reduced by translations made for lay audiences in other regions (237). The final essay in this volume seeks to draw out evidence of female voices and readership within male-authored hagiographical texts (255). Jennifer N. Brown’s “She Said: Female Agency and Voice in Middle English Hagiographic Accounts” (255-281) considers how mid-fifteenth century Lives of visionary saints Katherine of Alexandria (d.305), Marie of Oignies (d.1213), Brigitta of Sweden (d.1373), and Catherine of Siena involve direct speech that becomes a kind of “textual relic” of the saint (255). Their voices from the grave--or hagiographical inventio--reveal female agency, rejection of authority, and manifest their subject’s interior connection with God. Brown’s “Coda” is of further interest for reflecting upon how The Book of Margery Kempe (written in the 1430s) and the “Second Nun’s Tale” from Chaucer’sThe Canterbury Tales (written between 1387-1400) slip in and out of direct speech (274-278). The fluctuations in texts reveal authorial familiarity with hagiographical and scriptural tropes circulating in fifteenth-century England. Brown encourages readers to hear glimpses of mystical encounters and female voices as well (276-277). Concluding the volume with reference to these two late medieval narratives shows that “hagiographies’ embrace of the female voice is also one of female agency” (278).
Ultimately, the boundaries traversed by Writing Holiness mimic those negotiated by the hagiography it covers. Barr and Zimbalist note this in their introduction; connections likewise extend between essays that are not necessarily gathered within the same section (23). The range of materials covered here is expansive and open to nuance. Hagiographical narratives can be fluid things: they have been shown here to cross boundaries that are textual, geographic, temporal, generic, and gendered. This volume appreciates the richness of narratives rather than replicating past scholarly conventions. Each essay can stand alone as a useful contribution to its respective focus, though when read in conversation with the rest of the volume, it offers further possibilities. There is much here for those interested in medieval women, vernacular literature, Christian materiality, and medieval religious culture, both lay and clerical. Writing Holiness suggests new critical approaches and modes of reading that enhance our understanding of saints’ popularity through the medieval literature of hagiography. It is a multifaceted volume that deserves consideration by scholars of medieval hagiography, saints, and their audiences. All its contributors, not just Brown, appear to have responded to Margery Kempe’s “I deservyd meche mor” (277).