Agnes of Harcourt, Felipa of Porcelet, and Marguerite of Oingt: women writing about women at the end of the thirteenth century

Church History, June, 2007 by Sean L. Field

Three vernacular religious biographies were written by women about other women around the year 1300: Agnes of Harcourt's Francien Vie d'Isabelle de France (ca. 1283), Felipa of Porcelet's Provencal Vida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina (begun ca. 1297), and Marguerite of Oingt's Franco-Provencal Via seiti Biatrix virgina de Ornaciu (between 1303 and 1310). (2) Although a limited number of similar texts had been composed in Latin dating back to the early Middle Ages, (3) and a few twelfth-century women such as Clemence of Barking had refashioned existing Latin lives of early female martyr-saints into Anglo-Norman verse, (4) the works of Agnes, Felipa, and Marguerite are the first extant vernacular biographies to have been written by European women about other contemporary women. (5) Just as strikingly, after the three examples studied here, few if any analogous works appeared until the later fifteenth century, (6) with most writing by women about other religious women in the intervening period instead being found in "Sister Books" and convent chronicles. (7)

These three hagiographic works are thus seminal by any measure, yet they have been relatively little studied and never treated as a group. (8) To be sure, each text in this trio has its place in other contexts. Agnes's writings, for instance, can be studied within the categories of royal and Capetian sanctity, (9) and the three works can be analyzed in terms of Franciscan (Agnes and Felipa) and Carthusian (Marguerite) spirituality. Yet when taken together, they open up a number of questions that center on gender and its intersections with sanctity and hagiography: Do these female hagiographers share common concerns? Are there themes that run through these works that might let us identify issues that were uppermost in religious women's minds at this moment? How do the authors portray their relationships to their subjects? How similar are their interests and authorial strategies to those of contemporary male hagiographers?

These questions become particularly compelling when situated within recent historiographic trends. In the wake of such landmark works as Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, a scholarly consensus emerged in the 1990s that saw the medieval association of women with the body as central to women's religious experiences. This association had allowed women to identify with the humanity of Christ and to deploy a severe asceticism that marked them as sources of salvation for themselves and for those around them. In the face of a generally misogynist culture, religious women could therefore turn the avenues open to them--their own often suffering bodies, food preparation and distribution, access to the Eucharist, care of the sick--into miraculous or mystical religious expression with a strongly somatic emphasis. (10) Though this paradigm produced important insights, scholars have recently grown much less confident with this "bodily" approach to women's religious experience. From one direction, historians such as Sharon Farmer have shown that status could be as important as gender in determining the way thirteenth-century clerical elites thought about bodies. (11) More important for this article, another recent trend has insisted on the importance of separating out the evidence of male-authored vitae of women from writings by women themselves. (12) Amy Hollywood's work in particular has redirected attention towards the spiritual masterpieces of women such as Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete as the best starting points for analyzing women's own understanding of their spiritual experiences, while arguing that although these women's writings may have employed bodily metaphors, they did not focus on harsh asceticism and somatic forms of piety in the same way that male-authored representations of women did. (13)

Building on this latter trend is innovative recent scholarship that examines the way the relationship between male biographers and female saints conditioned the texts through which we read most women's lives. In volumes such as the Gendered Voices collection edited by Catherine Mooney, close study of the relationship between medieval women and their male confessors, admirers, and biographers has fostered a more nuanced understanding of how women functioned in male thinking about sanctity, piety, and heresy. (14) John Coakley's work has been particularly influential in this regard. His recent book, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators, analyzes how writing about women allowed male clerics to explore "the issues of religious authority posed by the coexistence of informal and institutional powers." Male authors "pictured their female subjects as claiming an authority of their own to speak and be heard ... based upon their evident extraordinary access to God, especially in visions, revelations, and ecstasies" and worked through the question of "how to position it in relation to their own, which typically derived from their status as officeholders in the church." (15) Thus, as men wrote about women, they were tracing the complementary or conflicting limits of two kinds of power, and their representations of their subjects had to find ways to contrast and separate these spheres. Hollywood's and Coakley's observations together produce a picture of male confessors who quizzed holy women about their interior spiritual experiences, which they then transformed into outer bodily behaviors that made these women graphic examples of ascetic and paramystical piety. (16)