How does the gendering of images in medieval hagiography render holy women vivid, compelling, and desirable? On February 27, five scholars set out to answer this question. Rachel Smith (Villanova University) opened the conversation with insights from her monograph Excessive Saints: Gender, Narrative, and Theological Invention in Thomas of Cantimpré’s Mystical Hagiographies.
Smith first discussed Thomas’ treatment of Lutgarde of Aywieres. One day, while in rapture, Lutgarde appeared to be drenched in blood. A priest, who was spying on Lutgarde, approached and cut her bloodied hair without her knowledge to keep as “evidence of her devotion.” The lock, however, reverted to its normal, unbloodied state after Lutgarde came to her senses. Smith argued that this bloodied hair serves as an externalization of Lutgarde’s holiness, that “the dramatization of the flesh seeks to capture the hiddenness of the heart.” From here, it becomes the male hagiographer’s role to chronicle the ecstasy of witnessing this transformation of Lutgarde’s body and the holiness it presents, an ecstasy which the hagiographer “sees himself as otherwise unable to access.” The mistake here, according to Smith, is one of literalization, where the lock of hair is deemed the sole mode of connection to God, ignoring the interplay between the inner and the outer of the person seen in the hair’s return to normal.
Smith then turned to Christina the Astonishing. In Thomas’ account, Christina died as a young woman, but when she approached the gates of heaven, she was given the option to return to her earthly life in order to do penance for the souls in Purgatory and to warn the living of the punishment that awaited them if they did not repent. Christina’s story is macabre and often gruesome, describing her body losing all proportion, limbs extending and bending, “rolling into balls of wax.” Her body goes through horrific tortures at the hands of the townspeople, despite her heavenly mandate to witness to them for their salvation. Based on this story, Smith commented on the dangers of using the body as an externalization of the holiness of the individual. Christina’s body is misinterpreted, her form deemed a literalization of her soul, like Lutgarde’s, but this time a demonic literalization. Smith concluded by saying that 8 LUMENCHRISTI.ORG 9 “Thomas’s recognition of such difficulty is registered in his acknowledgment that the wondrous horror that is the force of the text’s believability is also the cause of its unbelievability.” The use of externalization opens the witness to a false literalization, resulting in even the holy being called demonic.
After Smith, three distinguished medieval scholars responded: Willemien Otten (University of Chicago), Barbara Newman (Northwestern University), and Bernard McGinn (University of Chicago, emeritus). Otten voiced a newfound concern, which she acknowledged called into question even a great deal of her own prior career: namely, the dangers of grouping women in a category simply because they are women. For Otten, we may lose the unique characteristics of each woman by viewing them as the same simply due to their sex and be unable to see them how they want to be seen.
Professor Newman explicated Thomas’ differing narrative perspectives on the lives of each of these women. In the case of Lutgarde, Thomas was likely one of her confessors and, as such, was privy to many of her most private moments, ensuring a high degree of reliability in his account. Christina’s vita, on the other hand, was written using testimonies of the community years after her passing. Given Thomas’ outsider perspective, Newman pointed out how unlikely it was that Thomas would know about the intimate moments of Christina’s life. Because of Thomas’ lack of a source for these scenes, Newman calls into question their veracity.
Professor McGinn focused on how the historical context affected Thomas’ writing. McGinn observed how, given the great deeds of the women Thomas writes about, their experiences are overshadowed by “wonder at the astounding miracles of God publicly shown in his chosen Saints.” McGinn contextualized this with the knowledge that, at the time, female saints were often described as excessive. The spread of these “visionary excessive female mystics” in the 13th century challenged traditional notions of women, and because of that, McGinn suggested the possibility that Thomas recognized these issues but did not know how to reconcile them beyond his faith in the divine nature of these women’s stories.
This symposium was made possible by the co-sponsorship of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, Medieval Studies Workshop, and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.