Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography

Church History, Dec, 1999 by Bonnie Effros

Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography. By John Kitchen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xvi 256 pp. $49.95 cloth.

The past few years have seen the proliferation of innovative works on gender and the female body in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, including important books by Lisa Bitel, Lynda Coon, Kate Cooper, and Aline Rousselle. Merovingian hagiography has long been ripe for a full-length study in this rapidly developing field due to the possibilities offered by the unusually high visibility of women in this genre as compared to contemporary historical, legal, and epistolary sources. John Kitchen therefore defines his objective in this timely monograph as the identification of hagiographers' "chief rhetorical strategies" in defining sanctity among women and men in sixth-century Gaul (17-18). He sets out to challenge propositions that female holy women reflected or created clearly delineated alternatives to male models of sanctity.

Kitchen introduces his discussion on a somewhat negative note, citing a general lack of comprehensive and methodologically sound studies of Merovingian hagiography. Criticizing recent treatments of saints' vitae by both historians and theorists, he advocates a return to structuralist textual interpretation along the lines of the scholarship of the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye earlier this century. While a closer reading of these texts has long been merited, Kitchen's approach limits his parameters in a number of ways, not least of which is the absence in his bibliography of many recent studies of gender. With respect to primary sources, he has restricted himself to three hagiographers so as to be able to devote himself to each more thoroughly. The four main chapters of his book (2-5) thus involve detailed discussion of six prose biographies by Venantius Fortunatus, the twenty pieces in Gregory of Tours's Life of the Fathers, and Baudonivia's Life of Radegund. Although his monograph is divided evenly between male and female saints, Kitchen's search for diverse, contemporary pieces with secure authorship has also had the unfortunate consequence of addressing women directly in just three of the twenty-seven primary texts studied.

In his illuminating discussion of Venantius Fortunatus's authorship of prose vitae sponsored by members of the ecclesiastical elite, Kitchen has drawn attention to Fortunatus's promotion of ideals of behavior suited to contemporary members of the male urban clergy. Fortunatus's saints were bloodless martyrs characterized by both their challenge of secular authorities and their condemnation of excessive asceticism. Fortunatus depicted Marcellus, as he did a number of other bishops, as the "contemporary embodiment of a scriptural model" with regard to sixth-century realities (32). Kitchen is thus at his best in drawing contrasts between the writings of the former author and Gregory of Tours's rich diversity of saints, from stubborn hermits to devout abbots. In Kitchen's view, the unity of the disparate subjects of Gregory's Life of the Fathers lay in their shared exegetical goal. Gregory used each saint as a typological model demonstrating the continued workings of God in postbiblical time. Although Kitchen does not suggest why Gregory's hagiographical horizons were wider than Fortunatus's more rigid corpus, one might suppose that as a member of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, Gregory depended less upon elite patronage than his recently arrived colleague.

More problematic is Kitchen's application of what he identifies as universal qualities of sanctity in Merovingian hagiography to the three female biographies under discussion. Assessing a brief reference to women as of the inferioris sexus in Gregory's preface to the Life of Monegund and long descriptions of Radegund's self-annihilating behavior in Fortunatus's biography, Kitchen rightly notes that these women, like their desert predecessors, were portrayed as eradicating their femininity as embodied in their physical beings to achieve holy status. His long discussion as to the similarity of ideal behavior valued in female saints and their male counterparts is unfortunately not matched by close analysis of the larger contexts in which these values were promoted. Although Kitchen admits that in Gregory's writings the only Christian warriors who had to be freed miraculously from their earthly ties were Monegund and the slave Portianus, he reads this parallel as a positive feature of the applicability of the same motifs among men and women. Monegund never escaped the shadow of her holy sponsor, and was noted to have deferred to the authority of Saint Martin even when performing posthumous miracles. Likewise, although Kitchen acknowledges that Fortunatus omitted from his account of Radegund all incidents in her life that would have shown her in conflict with or having bested contemporary episcopal leaders, he is cautious about declaring this vita as less than representative of the saint's life. Both clerics clearly defined the sanctity of these women not just as a consequence of their miraculously' male bodies, as proposed by Kitchen, but, more importantly, in their submission to male clerical authority.