Saints’ Lives

Abstract

Conventional images of medieval women readers depict them as quietly passive, sitting alone or in a motionless group, reading a psalter or Book of Hours. These images do not seem to correspond with representations of women seen in one of the most popular medieval genres, the saint s life, in which the young female subject is shown actively fighting dragons, debating energetically with scholars, or enduring extensive and varied physical torture, from being stretched on a spiked wheel to having her skin flayed off while still alive. It is hard to imagine these active, aggressive female saints pausing to ruminate quietly on Scripture. What, then, might be the connections between the subjects of medieval virgin martyr narratives, so full of talk and action, and the subjects of medieval scenes of reading, which often emphasize passivity and stillness? How might we usefully connect the female hagiographic subject with the reading practices of medieval women?¹ How do saints’ lives figure scenes of reading, writing, or textual production? This essay will argue that Middle English virgin martyr narratives are in fact deeply infused with scenes of literacy, including reading, writing, textuality, and textual production. The texts within these texts are the bodies of the virgins themselves, both written upon and read by writers and readers within and outside of the narratives. Saints bodies, I will argue, especially in scenes of torture, function as both texts being written and texts to be read — as literal and visible artefacts that contain deeply spiritual messages. Reading and writing the saint s body thus provides medieval women readers and writers with the kind of literate textual strategies that will benefit them in their own literary endeavours. In their intense focus on the body, saints lives enact a wide range of textual practices.