Reuniting Genders. - Review - book review

Cross Currents, Spring, 2001 by Dawn Marie Hayes

John Kitchen, Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xv+255pp.; appendix. $49.95 (cloth).

Since the early 1980s a new trend has emerged in the scholarship on the female saints and writers of Merovingian Gaul. During the past two decades a number of scholars have argued that hagiographic accounts by and about women have features that distinguish them from those written by men. For example, a male writer often represented his female subject as a virago, "a woman with the attributes of a man." (125) A woman, however, usually focused on the feminine characteristics of her female saint: nurturing, maternity and especially charity. According to current scholarly consensus women writers of the early Middle Ages constructed alternatives to the ideals and virtues found in the saints' lives associated with men.

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John Kitchen has recently set out to challenge this belief, arguing against the interpretation that men and women represented female saints differently. This argument, according to Kitchen, is based on assumption rather than on rigorous systematic investigation of the hagiographic sources. Through a comparative, philological study Kitchen seeks to lay the foundation for further systematic investigations of the hagiography produced by and about females during the Merovingian period. Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender is a revision of the doctoral dissertation Kitchen completed at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies in 1995. As the author states in the introduction, he has two main objectives. The first is to identify the "rhetorical strategies" of two sixth-century men who wrote about male and female saints; the second, to examine how a female writer's discussion of a holy woman compares with the hagiography produced by the two male authors. Kitchen executes his strategy in two parts, appropriately titled "Sancti" (Holy Men) and "Sanctae" (Holy Women). "Sancti" contains two chapters: the first investigates six prose biographies by Venantius Fortunatus and the second explores Gregory of Tour's collection of Lives, the Liber vitaepatrum. The choice of Fortunatus and Gregory, Kitchen notes, is logical since they wrote the majority of the surviving literary works of Merovingian Gaul. "Sanctae" is also two chapters long, beginning with a discussion of Gregory's Life of St. Monegund and Fortunatus's Life of St. Radegund, and ending with an examination of a second life of St. Radegund written by a woman, Baudonivia. Kitchen uses coordinates within these texts-prefaces, use of Scripture, saint types, presence of previous hagiographic trends, and borrowings from other hagiographic texts-as points of comparison between the individual works.

Of the two parts of the book, the second is certainly the most provocative. Part I moves slowly, identifying the major characteristics of the male saints discussed by the two male authors. Part II, however, is more interesting; it is where Kitchen attempts to answer the central questions of the book. For example, he asks if Fortunatus and Gregory change their approach to sanctity when their subjects are no longer men but women. His answer: not in any significant way. Gregory's Life of St. Monegund has minor variations from the male saints' lives, but overall his rhetorical approach remains constant. Elements such as the centrality of the Bible, an emphasis on the Christian view of history, references to past models of sanctity and claims that the saint had changed life on earth in some significant way remain intact. Gregory does mention in his preface that Monegund was a member of the "inferior sex," which he does not do for males, but doesn't mention it again. Instead, says Kitchen, Gregory reconciles this obstacle to holiness by stressing the virile, masculine power that Monegund has assumed on the road to sanctity.

In the preface to his Life of St. Radegund Fortunatus also calls attention to the saint's gender. And, like Gregory, he too compensates for her inherent weakness by emphasizing her masculine qualities, which are revealed during her struggle for holiness. Yet, unlike Gregory who refrains from elaborating on St. Monegund's gender, Fortunatus's discussion of St. Radegund is loaded with references to her female body. She suffers terribly from self-inflicted and other-inflicted tortures. Kitchen suggests that these punishments are probably related to the obstacles female bodies presented to attaining sanctity.

Although some scholars have argued that Baudonivia's Life of Saint Radegunddirectly contradicts Fortunatus's Life, Kitchen suggests that Baudonivia instead has subtly contrasted her work with his. Baudonivia's work is not as original as scholars have argued. For example, she draws extensively on Fortunatus's hagiographic works. What does distinguish Baudonivia from her male counterparts, however, is the indifference she shows to Radegund's gender in the preface to her Life. This is a break with a long literary tradition that holds that by definition a female saint is a problematic figure. The paradox, therefore, is that Baudonivia's preface to the life of a female saint is distinctive from Fortunatus's and Gregory's introductions to their male saints precisely because it is not. The similarities and differences between male and female hagiography are far more complex than we have realized. No sharp distinctions can be made between male and female depictions of sanctity.

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Reuniting Genders. - Review - book review

Cross Currents, Spring, 2001 by Dawn Marie Hayes

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