Writing Holiness: Genre and Reception across Medieval Hagiography

Building upon the literary attention increasingly turned toward vernacular saints’ lives over the last twenty years, Writing Holiness is a thoughtfully curated essay collection, providing case studies of medieval saints’ cults from Italy and Castile to Germany and England, with a particular focus on their textual expressions. Having reviewed the current state of hagiographical scholarship, Jessica Barr and Barbara Zimbalist's excellent and substantial introduction contends that hagiographies benefit from continual reassessment using new critical approaches, such as Trans and Disability Studies. It then moves on to identify a specific concern with the overspilling of boundaries. Hagiographies burst the boundaries of geography and temporal periodization in the course of being repeatedly relocated and rewritten to fulfill new functions and address new audiences. They also trouble conventional boundaries of gender, presenting saintly protagonists who sometimes assume fluid gender roles and undermine simple binarisms. In addition, ‘the traditional generic boundary of hagiography proves unexpectedly confining: several essays demonstrate how hagiography bleeds generously into the related genres of exempla, sermons, and romance. Finally, the movement of texts across linguistic boundaries upsets easy assumptions about Latin cultural superiority, opening up alternative opportunities for vernacular linguistic authority. These several types of boundary violation provide a structure to the volume, enabling the reader to tread a coherent thematic path through otherwise diverse materials.The first section, “Saints Across Borders,” addresses mobility from a geographical and temporal standpoint. Marianne Ritsema van Eck treats the cult of St. Helena, mother of Constantine and legendary “cross finder,” charting the movement of her relics from Rome to abbeys in Reims, Trier, and Venice between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, a maneuver enabling the locations that housed them to claim a significant connection with imperial Rome. In parallel with her own posthumous journeys, Helena was lauded in her vitae as a supplier of Holy Land relics to western Europe, becoming a “versatile paradigm of mobility” on many fronts (p. 52). Set against these far-flung travels, Bianca Lopez's essay remains firmly localized in the March of Ancona, using notarial sources to trace and account for the diminishing popularity of the cult of its local saint Nicolas of Tolentino (d. 1305) in the late Middle Ages, by contrast with the increasing prominence of the cult of the Virgin's house at Loreto (Santa Maria di Loreto). Moving west to Tuscany, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa's essay uses the fountains of Siena as a springboard for considering the prevalence of images of flowing water in the visionary writings of Catherine of Siena and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Both Catherine and Mechthild invoke the purifying effect of running water for its spiritual implications, and they link it closely to the healing, thirst-quenching flow of blood and water from Christ's heart. Finally, Jenny Bledsoe deconstructs the divide between the medieval and Early Modern periods in her study of Folger MS V.b.334, a seventeenth-century manuscript collection of mostly female saints’ legends from an English recusant context, including two of the eighth-century sister saints of East Anglia, Aethelthryth and Seaxburh. Bledsoe surveys some of the possible sources of these two legends (although it should be noted that John of Tynemouth, not Capgrave, was the author of the fourteenth-century Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae, later printed in the early sixteenth century as the Nova legenda Anglie). Veronica O'Mara and Virginia Blanton's new edition of the fifteenth-century collection of English female saints’ lives in CUL, MS Add. 2604: Saints’ Lives for Medieval Nuns, II (2024) may offer a further option. Bledsoe suggests convincingly that the personal circumstances of these eighth-century women—high-status members of a single family who negotiated marriage, motherhood, and abbessial responsibility—were likely to speak powerfully to the mixed experiences of the Early Modern Catholic laywomen and continental nuns who probably constituted the primary readers of this manuscript.The second section of the collection, titled “Crossing Gender and Genre,” contains three innovative essays variously focused on gender and generic fluidity. Christine Cooper-Rompato conducts a fascinating study of four saints’ lives (Fursey, Cecilia, Thais, and Macarius) embedded within the fourteenth-century sermon cycle known as the Middle English Mirror, interrogating the changes that take place when a Life is reconstituted as a sermon exemplum and shaped to convey a specific moral argument. These changes may prove disconcerting: Cecilia, for example, shifts from the sweet-natured evangelist of Chaucer's “Second Nun's Tale” to a vicious apparition bent on defending her church property. Cooper-Rompato comments astutely that medieval audiences were probably far more likely to encounter saints through sermon exempla than through vitae and concludes that exempla need to be incorporated into an expanded understanding of hagiographic studies. Caitlin Koford continues the theme of potential generic continuity between sermons and saints’ lives, reinterpreting the twelfth-century sermon collection of Maurice de Sully as, effectively, an adult Life of Christ in many parts. This collection was copied alongside a passion narrative and a saints’ legendary in certain key manuscripts, arguably suggesting points of identity between the three genres. Finally, Matthew Desing transfers us to the Iberian Peninsula where, in the thirteenth century, a version of the Apollonius of Tyre legend, the Libro de Apolonio, was produced in Castilian. Through masterly argument, taking account of both local literary and political contexts, Desing demonstrates that the Apolonio-poet rewrites Apollonius's daughter, princess Tarsiana, in a way that elides her with male saints, in particular through her expanded role as the liberator of female captives. Not only does this poem superimpose hagiographical tropes upon a romance of antiquity, but it also plays with conventions of gender, exceeding boundaries of expectation on several fronts.Titled “Writing across Languages,” the third section turns to more translational and rhetorical concerns. Racha Kirakosian argues at length that vernacular translations deserve to be given as much critical attention as Latin hagiographies and viewed as authoritative versions in their own right. She exemplifies this via a discussion of Gertrude the Great's Latin Legatus divinae pietatis and its fourteenth-century German translation, Ein botte der götlichen miltekeit, additionally using these texts to discredit the conventional equation of women with the vernacular. Some specific examples of the changes between Gertrude's Latin text and its German successor would have been welcome here. Continuing the focus on change through translation, Steven Rozenski conducts a comparative study of the translation and reception of Raymond of Capua's Life of Catherine of Siena in England and Germany. Ein Geistlicher Rosengarten (A Spiritual Rosegarden), the fifteenth-century German translation of Raymond's Life, pays more attention to the material conditions of Catherine's asceticism and was intended to help regulate female Dominican spirituality. While the English translation of Catherine's own visionary testament, Il Dialogo (The Orcherd of Syon) fulfills a similar function for the English Bridgettines, the English version of Raymond's Life, which survives only in early print, seems to have been intended for a broader, more mixed audience, exemplifying Catherine's liminal status and dual appeal to both lay and religious recipients. Retaining the focus on female hagiography, in a final essay Jennifer Brown isolates instances of women's direct speech in the male-authored vitae of Katherine of Alexandria, Marie d'Oignies, Bridget of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, and their translations into Middle English. Brown interprets these utterances as moments of intimacy, immediacy, and female agency that allow female readers in turn to imagine themselves participating in intellectual debate (Katherine of Alexandria) or cojoining their voices to Christ's (Bridget and Catherine).Jessica Barr and Barbara Zimbalist have put together an interesting, well-structured collection of essays which makes a useful contribution to the growing field of pan-European hagiographic scholarship, deftly bringing together the individual subjects under the rubric of boundary violation. I remain unsure that saints’ lives in vernacular translation have been overlooked or downgraded quite as much as is occasionally suggested in the volume. Both the Medieval Translator conferences and book series—ongoing since the 1990s—frequently treat this topic, and there are any number of monographs and editions that focus on translated saints’ lives as strong texts in their own right. But that reservation aside, these essays do often offer genuinely new avenues for research. Looking back over the volume, I found particularly compelling Christine Cooper-Rompato's call to consider sermon exempla as an important supplementary source of saints’ lives, reworking select episodes from those lives for a much broader, more popular audience than the coterie recipients of Latin and vernacular vitae and legendaries.