The problem of female sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780-920

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by Julia M.H. Smith

Adalhelm, bishop of Sees (c. 890), believed he owed his see and his life to St Opportuna. In gratitude, he compiled an account of the life and miracles of this virgin saint, who had lived a century or so before his own episcopate began.(1) In praising Opportuna, he also praised Christ, who "not only makes known to us through men the path of righteousness, but also shows to all those who love him exemplars of religious faith and good conduct through women and young girls".(2) Adalhelm proposed a careful distinction between the men who embodied the injunction to a life of righteous action and the women and young girls who demonstrated exemplary piety and decorum. His words echo biblical phrases, rooting his understanding of sainthood in scripture.(3) They also presume that a woman's sanctity was somehow different from a man's.

The Carolingian era does not commend itself to anyone wishing, as most historians do, to study expressions of sainthood within a saint's own social and cultural milieu, for Adalhelm lived in an age and a culture which preferred to ascribe sanctity to those who were long since dead. In the few exceptions in which a man or woman was venerated for holiness in the immediate aftermath of their death, this person's sanctity was never active, charismatic or acknowledged during their lifetime. Instead, venerated as witnesses to Christian tradition and honoured as intercessors, the saints of Carolingian Europe attracted commemoration and liturgical cult, and sometimes even manifested themselves through miracles at their tombs. This was a religious culture far removed from that of late antiquity which, like the high Middle Ages, needed "to experience the holy directly". In the high Middle Ages, saints "could be seen, touched and imitated".(4) The Carolingian era forms an interlude in the history of sainthood, for no charismatic ascetics, healers, prophets or visionaries made their mark on a church whose bishops were implacably hostile to any such form of religious expression. By contrast, the cults of the dead flourished as never before. The absence of holy men and women does not mean an absence of ideas about sainthood, however, for ideas were projected in writing on to those figures of the past whose cults were commemorated at the major shrines of the day. In Carolingian Europe, the dearth of the living holy or of recently deceased saints contrasted sharply with a plethora of hagiographical writings.(5) Carolingian understanding of sanctity was located in the past, not in the present.

Historians have been slow to realise that sainthood is as problematic as it is ubiquitous in the Middle Ages. As Frantisek Graus pointed out, the study of medieval hagiography and saints' cults has generally been constrained within implicitly Christian terms of debate, a debate whose terms often reflect antagonisms of confessional origin.(6) To frame a definition of sainthood in terms of those men and women honoured with a formal cult, or who were subjects of informal (even unauthorized) veneration simply perpetuates this. Such a statement evades a deeper issue: whether sanctity is amenable to definition in any terms other than those of Christian doctrine and belief or its institutional expression.(7) Medievalists have either tended to presume that sanctity within the Christian tradition is timeless, placeless, personless, or else to argue that its manifestations are ordered by the specifics of culture, person and place.(8) Alongside the poles of monochrome objectification or a reductionist functionalism have been attempts to frame an understanding of sanctity in sociological terms, by quantifying and tabulating the "vital statistics" that constitute sainthood.(9) Yet all these different approaches miss the point that sanctity is in the eye of the beholder, that it was negotiated, contested and shaped as much by the needs of the audience as by the experiences of the saint in question.(10) Since it is extremely rare that we possess a saint's autobiographical writings, we needs must accept that at all times we study sanctity through the opinions of others.

Carolingian hagiography offers a particularly good forum for exploring the ways in which sanctity was understood and constructed, precisely because it originated in a culture with ideas about sanctity but no direct experience of it. This was as true for female as for male saints. Carolingian hagiographers wrote about women against the backdrop of a hagiographical tradition far more commonly turned to celebrating male saints than female ones.(11) Within this tradition, or in response to it, they generated images of women chosen for literary commemoration. The women in question have nothing in common as a group, ranging as they do from the fourth-century empress Helena, whose career took her from Trier to Rome, Jerusalem and Constantinople, to the late ninth-century recluse Liutberga of Wendhausen, whose world was bounded by the confines of her cell. The coherence of this selection of texts stems instead from the fact that they are all attempts to formulate an understanding of female sanctity that were made by writers informed by the beliefs, ideology and cultural resources of the Carolingian church. Some of the authors in question were men (bishops or monks) known by name, others anonymous - and conceivably women.(12) Though the dates at which they wrote can only rarely be stated precisely, most of them certainly worked, as most hagiographers did, long after their subject's death; only a couple wrote within living memory of the commemorated saint. Yet all of them wrestled with the same dilemma: how could they appropriately represent these holy women? For the historian, the problem and challenge of female sanctity in this period is to understand what shaped those representations and, taking a cue from Adalhelm, to inquire whether female sanctity took its own distinctive forms.