When teaching, I've often considered that one of the objectives of the historian is to cultivate empathy for the past, for the dead, for the people we study as historians and as students of history. To this end, particularly while teaching undergraduates, I've often developed imaginative exercises to help them engage with primary sources, with the text that we read together, and to place themselves in conversation with historical figures in various ways. I caution them that their imagining must be responsible and historically grounded, for instance, that if we're studying the Middle Ages, they may not use conventions of fantasy novels, so no dragons or magic. I have found this often helps students to appreciate past reality, although sometimes I get quizzical looks from colleagues when I talk about my own dead friends, mostly medieval monastic and theological figures. [1]
Professor Posa's work in imagining a hagiographical life of St. Scholastica had Gregory the Great included it in his Dialogues is of particular interest to me, given my conversations with students the past number of years. Her question is simple: What would it look like if Gregory the Great had given full treatment to Scholastica, the sister of St. Benedict of Nursia? She provides a scholarly justification for this imaginative, spiritual, but not counterfactual treatment of Scholastica. Posa's premise is that she is modeling the method that hagiographers would have used when writing their subjects' hagiographies. She simply has transposed this method into a contemporary key with both early medieval and contemporary concerns represented.
In the foreword, Father Michael Casey, OCSO advocates for what he calls “disciplined imagining,” highlighting examples of biography that were somewhat incomplete, so readers would have had to fill out gaps in the sources or in the narrative provided by authors and scholars. And historians, especially pre-modern ones, would well understand the ways in which we have to use our imagination in concert with the sources to fill out their gaps, to fill out our narratives, to reconstruct the past in as many dimensions as our sources and our minds allow. Posa, indeed, does this masterfully, rooting herself and her imagining of Scholastica's life in sources: Benedict's Rule, the Scriptures, other medieval lives of St. Scholastica, Gregory's own text of the Dialogues, as well as providing precedents from other hagiographic texts about holy women that inform her imaginative and creative choices. Likewise, Posa is not engaged in a naïve, uninformed, or unscholarly reading of the sources as she draws upon secondary literature from Terrence Kardong, Adalbert de Vogüé, James Palmer, Jean Leclercq, Benedicta Ward, R. A. Marcus, and a number of others. Thus, despite being a product of an imagination, her “lost” dialogue on the life of St. Scholastica is not unscholarly in its approach and is not willy-nilly or fanciful in its imagining. It is a deeply informed and plausible text, not a fantastical daydream.
My appreciation of Posa's project of moving Scholastica from a marginal role to a central one is not marred by the reframing of parts of the imagined dialogue between Gregory the Great and Peter the Deacon by contemporary concerns. For instance, Posa takes on the contemporary concern about the place of women in the Church and their status. Part of this is grounded in the scholarly concern about the often-ignored voices and lives of women, especially in the study of monastic history and spirituality (3). Part of this is grounded in the observation that, in Gregory's Dialogues, many female figures—whether virtuous or vicious—are ones that serve as mere foils for the male saints being portrayed (4-6). And part of it, as Posa acknowledges in her introduction, is that she does put “modern arguments for the equality of women...placed on the lips of the famous sixth-century pope” (17). We can see this in particular at a moment in which Gregory replies to Peter and his concern about wisdom, women, and learning (33). Gregory does indeed adopt a position that seems contemporary and particular to our own time.
Likewise, too, in Posa's imagined dialogue between Gregory and Peter, we can see an expression of a position around law and love. Posa does draw on Augustine in this conversation, as well as Benedict of Nursia, but we might see an oblique glimmer of a contemporary concern about the place of institution and regulation (55). Likewise, too, (and Posa concedes this openly and fairly), sometimes she imagines Scholastica as a sister of her own order, the Good Samaritan Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict (15). My eye was particularly caught by an articulation (in the mouth of the imagined Pope Gregory) of an arrangement of silent prayer, divine office in common, care for the sick, feeding the poor, and hospitality for foreigners and travelers (57). Well, I would never argue that medieval religious women were inactive; the arrangement that shows up in Posa’s imagined life of Scholastica resembles what contemporary religious communities would call “contemplatives in action.”
Posa argues for the inclusion of contemporary concerns in her construction of an image of St. Scholastica via Gregory's Dialogues by stating that hagiography has never been separated from the politics and ecclesiastical concerns of its authors (14-17). I do not find such inclusions to disrupt the image of Scholastica, and perhaps they might help a reader to see the places in which the concerns of medieval hagiographers are represented in their own vitae of the saints.
On the whole, Professor Posa's “Lost” Dialogue is an engrossing, deeply imagined, well- grounded text. Even the places in which I found I might not be entirely in agreement affirm something that I explain to students when I'm teaching them about saints' lives, martyrs' passiones, and hagiography. I tell them that often hagiography, in its spectacular and dramatic quality, in its imagining, is not the same as our genre of biography, but rather (with all due respect to the saints) it might be something more akin to fanfic or even graphic novels about the superheroes of our world. My students would be glad to see Carmel Posa's imagining of Saint Scholastica for this exact reason: it does the work of imagining and creative retelling of an important medieval woman.
--------
Note:
1. I have a forthcoming article on using St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises and its method to inform this sort of pedagogy: “‘In which another voice may speak’: Historical scholarship, Ignatian pedagogy, Belief and Disbelief” in Jesuit Scholarship in a Secular Age, eds. Matthew Ian Dunch, S.J. and Patrick Gilger, S.J. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press).