Forgetful of Their Sex

Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100

Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226740546, 9780226740539
• eBook ISBN: 9780226518992
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

In this remarkable study of over 2,200 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church by examining factors such as family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, and motherhood. The result is a unique depiction of the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society that led to recognition of sanctity.

"A tremendous piece of scholarship. . . . This journey through more than 2,000 saints is anything but dull. Along the way, Schulenburg informs our ideas regarding the role of saints in the medieval psyche, gender-specific identification, and the heroics of virginity." —Library Journal

"[This book] will be a kind of 'roots' experience for some readers. They will hear the voices, haunted and haunting, of their distant ancestors and understand more about themselves." —Christian Science Monitor

"This fascinating book reaches far beyond the history of Christianity to recreate the 'herstory' of a whole gender." —Kate Saunders, The Independent

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Jerome, “Letter CVIII,” St. Jerome’s Letters and Works, NPNF, 2d series, vol. 6 (New York, 1893), ch. 14, p. 202 (emphasis mine); “CVIII. Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae,” in Saint Jérôme, Lettres (Collection des Universités de France), ed. and trans. Jérôme Labourt (Paris, 1955), vol. 5, ch. 14, p. 176. The Life of Melania the Younger also notes that when she visited “the Cells” of Nitria, “the fathers of the most holy men there received the saint as if she were a man. The truth, she had been detached from the female nature and had acquired a masculine disposition, or rather, a heavenly one.” Elizabeth A. Clark, trans., The Life of Melania the Younger: Studies in Women and Religion, vol. 14 (New York and Toronto, 1984), pp. 53–54.

2. Gregory of Tours, Life of the Fathers, Translated Texts for Historians, Latin Series I, trans. Edward James (Liverpool, 1985), ch. 19, p. 124. Palladius also notes the special strength of women in his Lausiac History: “I must also commemorate in this book the courageous women [‘manly women’] to whom God granted struggles equal to those of men, so that no one could plead as an excuse that women are too weak to practice virtue successfully” (Palladius, The Lausiac History, trans. Robert J. Meyer. [ACW 34] [Westminster, 1965], ch. 41, p. 117). A number of other saints’ Lives of this early period emphasize that these women transcended the weakness of their sex and acted in a virile manner rather than as women. See, for example, the vita of St. Austreberta, which notes: “She thought her time for martyrdom had come. Proving that the heart in her breast was in no way feminine but virile, she drew the finely woven veil she wore on her head smoothly about her throat, extended her hands and bowed her head to expose her neck to the blow. And, as they tell it, he [Amalbert] stood astounded and immobile, admiring such fortitude in a woman as he had never seen in a man” (SWDA, p. 313). For this topic of the virile woman in early Christianity, see also Kerstin Aspegren’s The Male Woman: A Feminine Ideal in the Early Church, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Upsala Women’s Studies: A. Women in Religion, 4, ed. René Kieffer (Uppsala, 1990); and for the central and late Middle Ages, see Barbara Newman’s fascinating study, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995).

3. Leander of Seville, The Training of Nuns, in vol. 1 of The Iberian Fathers, FC 62, trans. Claude W. Barlow, (Washington, D.C., 1969), p. 192.

4. See Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago and London, 1984), pp. 12–14. Here Kieckhefer makes the important distinction between imitanda and admiranda—“the imitable deeds of the saint and those which should arouse a sense of wonder.”

5. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879, 1980), p. 1625.

6. J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Leiden, 1957), fascicule 10, p. 937.

7. Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orleans, 800–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Cambridge and New York, 1990), p. 10.

8. Hippolyte Delehaye, Sanctus: Essai sur le culte de saints dans l’antiquité (Brussels, 1927), p. 235.

9. John M. Mecklin, The Passing of the Saint: A Study of a Cultural Type (Chicago, 1940), p. 17.

10. Ibid., pp. 5–7, 17. In this tradition S. Bonnet provides the following definition: the saint is “a response to the spiritual needs of a generation. He is moreover a man who is the eminent representation of the ideas which Christians of a given time have developed of sanctity.” S. Bonnet, Saint-Rouin, histoire de l’ermitage et du pèlerinage (Paris, 1956), p. 75, cited by André Vauchez, La Sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, (Rome, 1981), p. 8.

11. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 161.

12. Eric Waldram Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church (London, 1948), p. 35; Vauchez, La Sainteté en occident, pp. 13–67.

13. Kemp, pp. 29, 36–39, 169; Vauchez, pp. 13–24. See the Council of Mainz (813), ch. 51. “Ne corpora Sanctorum transferantur de loco ad locum. Deinceps vero corpora Sanctorum de loco ad locum nullus praesumat transferre, sine consilio Principis, vel Episcoporum, & sanctae Synodi licentia.” Jacques Sirmond, ed., Concilia Antiqua Galliae (Paris, 1629, reprint Scientia Verlay Aalen, 1970), 2:286.

14. Kemp, Canonization and Authority, pp. 52, 55.

15. See Vauchez, La Sainteté en occident, especially pp. 39–120; Pierre Delooz, Sociologie et canonisations, Collection scientifique de la faculté de droit de l’Université de Liège (Liège and The Hague, 1969), pp. 23–40; Kemp, Canonization and Authority, pp. 82–150.

16. Kemp, Canonization and Authority, pp. 82–106; Delooz, Sociologie et canonisations, pp. 23–40.

17. See Delooz, p. 257.

18. For example, in his study L’Idéal de sainteté dans l’Aquitaine carolingienne, Joseph-Claude Poulin notes that in Aquitaine all of the saints who merited a biography in the Carolingian period were in fact men (pp. 42–43).

19. Galatians 3:28.

20. René Metz, “Le Statut de la femme en droit canonique médiéval,” in Recueils de la société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions (Brussels, 1962), 12, pt. 2:61.

21. See Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple, “The Power of Women through the Family in Medieval Europe: 500–1100,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. M. Hartman and L. W. Banner (New York, 1974), pp. 103–18; Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia, 1981), especially pp. 27–74; David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985), pp. 29–78.

22. See Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 82–98.

23. While there has been a great deal of interest in women saints in the later Middle Ages, until recently there have been relatively few studies which have focused on the mulieres sanctae of the early Middle Ages. See especially Suzanne Wemple’s classic study Women in Frankish Society; Patrick Corbet, Les saints ottoniens, Sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale et sainteté feminine autour de l’an Mil, Beihefte der Francia 15 (Sigmaringen, Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1986); Robert Folz, Les Saintes reines du moyen âge en occident (VI^e–XIII^e siècles), Subsidia Hagiographica, no. 76 (Brussels, 1992); and Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, N.Y., 1992). See also Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halborg, trans., with E. Gordon Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (SWDA) (Duke University Press, 1992); and Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London and New York, 1991). There have been a number of important monographs on saints in general (without a special focus on female saints) which also examine the early medieval period. For a discussion of recent works on saints during this period, see notes 28 and 29 below.

24. See especially R. I. Moore’s fascinating monograph, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (London and New York, 1987). In this study he notes many of the same societal changes which I have found in regard to women saints and “deviants.” I would like to thank Lee Patterson for recommending this work to me. See also R. W. Southern’s classic study, The Making of the Middl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: Saints’ Lives as a Source for the History of Women, ca. 500–1100
• Two: The Making of the Mulier Sancta: Public and Private Roles
• Three: At What Cost Virginity? Sanctity and the Heroics of Virginity
• Four: Marriage and Domestic Proselytization
• Five: “Golden Wombs”: Motherhood and Sanctity
• Six: Sorores Sanctae and Their Saintly Siblings: Terrestrial and Celestial Bonds
• Seven: Gender Relationships and Circles of Friendship among the Mulieres Sanctae
• Eight: Longevity, Death, and Sanctity: A Demographic Survey of the Celestial Gynaeceum
• Epilogue: The Celestial Gynaeceum
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations follow page 132
• Illustrations follow page 218