Hagiography Beyond Tradition – serie

This book situates Alfred the Great in his hagiographic context. For 150 years, the fables told in the ninth century about Alfred’s childhood have posed interlocking disciplinary challenges to historians committed to evicting romance from history. Blending current Hagiography Studies with historical, literary, and biblical hermeneutics can help us forgo the anti-hagiographic commitments which motivated the scholars who purified the Victorian cult of Alfred by expunging his legends and salvaging his historicity. The book focusses on the typological functions of three Alfredian fables from the Old English Chronicle, the Old English Boethius, and Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, analyses the plot common to all three, critiques the psychological conjecture that Alfred’s childhood memory was their common source, and shows that synoptically they can help us see how Alfred shaped the curve of his own life’s destiny and how he engaged in the formation of his own cult to last a thousand years.

Sacred Sisters focuses on five saints: the four female Irish saints who have extant medieval biographies (Darerca, Brigid, Íte, and Samthann), and Patrick, whose writings -- fifth-century Ireland's sole surviving texts -- attest to the centrality of women in Irish Christianity's development. Women served as leaders and teachers, perhaps even as bishops and priests, and men and women worked together in a variety of arrangements as well as independently. Previous studies of gender in medieval Ireland have emphasized sexism and sex-segregated celibacy, dismissing abundant evidence of alternative approaches throughout the sources, including in the Lives of Ireland's female saints. Sacred Sisters places these generally marginalized texts at its center, exploring their portraits of empowered, authoritative, compassionate women who exemplified an accepting and affirming ethics of gender and sexuality that would be unusual in many mainstream Christian movements in the present day, let alone in the Middle Ages.

Only twelve years after German women had been granted voting rights, the German medievalist Elisabeth Busse-Wilson, a first-wave feminist activist and scholar, challenged centuries of silence about violence against women by taking on the case of the most famous European saint, the young Elisabeth of Thuringia (1207-1231). Married at a very young age, St. Elisabeth soon fell under the spell of the notorious confessor and inquisitor Konrad von Marburg. His brutal treatment of the young woman was erased from the cult of St. Elisabeth to protect male privilege both in the church and society at large. Published to coincide with the 700-year anniversary of her death, Busse-Wilson's study caused a storm of controversy. Translated for the first time into English, this book reintroduces to a contemporary audience this long-forgotten but still provocative and timely classic.

This multidisciplinary analysis of the cult of Radegund of Poitiers, from the sixth century to the twenty-first, illuminates the roles saints play at the intersection of gender and politics. No other medieval saint was so politically charged or had such an astonishing range of constructed personae. The many “Radegunds” encountered in this study – virgin, wife, mother, royalist, republican, colonizer – can all be interpreted as responses to contemporary political events, shifting spiritual trends, and changing attitudes towards women’s role in society or the Church. The long trajectory of Radegund’s meanings and functions over the centuries suggests that saints have played a more significant ideological role in state formation, nationalism, and identity politics than is typically recognized. To “rewrite” Radegund is thus to rewrite the history of the French nation, and this ground-breaking study shows how powerful medieval hagiography has been and continues to be in the emergence of nationalism and the “Myth of the French Nation.”

This book presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography.

This book presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography.

This book explains how the late medieval Cistercian Order and its communities in Central Europe engaged with, adopted, and supported a broad range of saints’ cults as an element of their relationship with the outside world, within their network and as an important element of their identity. Contrary to traditional interpretations of Cistercian culture, the Order was not against the cult of saints. The liturgical calendar accommodated numerous saints, and central to Cistercian identity in the later Middle Ages was St Bernard of Clairvaux, who embodied the Order and delivered key interpretations within its monastic culture. Many individual communities were highly invested in the cult of saints as they sought to create strong local and regional belonging, maintain ties to the outside world, and control significant elements of the devotional landscape. However, the saints also cemented crucial bonds within filiations and facilitated a shared identity within geographically extensive networks. Textually, materially, visually, and ritually, cults of saints between 1300 and the early sixteenth century were an important facet of Cistercian culture; by exploring these manifestations, we can better understand late medieval monasticism on its own terms.An analysis of the complex connection between Cistercian communities and the Order itself and a study of the monastic practice of ‘living with the past’, this book is a valuable contribution to the historiography of medieval monasticism and medieval religious culture.

Sacred Sisters focuses on five saints: the four female Irish saints who have extant medieval biographies (Darerca, Brigid, Íte, and Samthann), and Patrick, whose writings -- fifth-century Ireland’s sole surviving texts -- attest to the centrality of women in Irish Christianity’s development. Women served as leaders and teachers, perhaps even as bishops and priests, and men and women worked together in a variety of arrangements as well as independently. Previous studies of gender in medieval Ireland have emphasized sexism and sex-segregated celibacy, dismissing abundant evidence of alternative approaches throughout the sources, including in the Lives of Ireland’s female saints. Sacred Sisters places these generally marginalized texts at its center, exploring their portraits of empowered, authoritative, compassionate women who exemplified an accepting and affirming ethics of gender and sexuality that would be unusual in many mainstream Christian movements in the present day, let alone in the Middle Ages.

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the tenth to the fourteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability—medieval and otherwise—with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

Published to coincide with the 700-year anniversary of her death, Busse-Wilson's study caused a storm of controversy. Translated for the first time into English, this book reintroduces to a contemporary audience this long-forgotten but still provocative and timely classic.