I'm currently working on a project on childhood in medieval saints' lives. Initially, I was drawn to this project because of a fascination with society as conceptualized and defined through the family unit. That is, sometimes I think about society as being composed of the building blocks of the family unit. I don't think that this is the only or solely correct way to think about society, but it can be a useful theoretical perspective. This concept is somewhat redolent of the Durkheimian/Girardian view that society is built and sustained through the process of differentiation from others. In my particular formulation, families act as microcosms of this concept, separating themselves from the rest of society through their own continued processes of distinction and integration. Married people, then, have to take account of both family units, acting as a bridge between the differentiated and the integrated. I suppose that's why some people (not me, I promise) don't like their in-laws.
This has relevance to the saints' lives I study because of the constant tension between their family units and the dueling concept of the eternal familial society of the church. The married saints Elizabeth of Hungary, Dorothy of Montau, Margery Kempe (I tend to treat her like a saint), and Frances of Rome come to mind. Though I do not advocate completely importing modern concepts of the family to the medieval period, I would argue that the prevalence of familial terms to describe God, Jesus, and Mary serves as evidence that the members of the church are viewed as a family. Biblical formulations, such as 'children of light' (Eph. 5:8), and 'son of man' (particularly as direct address in Ezekiel) support this reading. The monastic vows belonging to a religious order, particularly those in the first and second orders, in effect serve as a declamation and denouncement of the structures of the family for the new monastic, church family, whose hierarchy mirrors familial structures. A familial conception explains the liminality of those in the tertiary orders, who fully belong to neither group are required to constantly negotiate between the two.
Indeed, one of the features of the third orders in the Middle Ages was the presence of married or widowed individuals. Though every married individual would have to undertake the arduous work of negotiating between competing familial boundaries and intersections, I would argue that this is especially problematic for married saints because of the increased pressure to belong to the church family. An especially striking example comes from Elizabeth of Hungary's life, as she was required to renounce her children as proof of her ardent devotion to the church. Such an act is similar to other totalizing initiation rituals such as baptism, thought of as taking on a new being and dying to the old life of sin. Acts such as these serve as membership rites, ways of marking the individual as distinct from the rest of society and securing a place in a different order.
While I do not pretend to have definitive knowledge of medieval conceptions of the family or that this concept can be read back over the centuries, I do think that a theoretical framework like this can account for some of the startling acts of societal separation performed by saints. Dramatic acts of renunciation are required because of the strength of the bond among family members and among members of the church family. The stronger the tie, the greater force required to sever it. Framing the saints' acts of renunciation (including leaving the family) in terms of this conflict model allows for a new way of thinking about the structures of saints, the family, and society.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Welcome and Comments on Saints: Studies in Hagiography
Hello,
Welcome to Hagiagraphy, a blog where I write about my readings on the topic of saints and musings on hagiographical theory. As some Greek-savvy readers may have guessed, the name refers to my focus on female saints, as well as my continuing interest in gender and religion.
For this first post, I'm writing about selected essays in the book Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca and published by Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies in 1996. The book arose from a Binghamtom University conference on 'The Cult of the Saints', a reference/homage to Peter Brown's classic of the same name (Brown himself has no articles in the book). Though the entire book seems quite promising, because of a project I'm working on I'm concentrating on a few articles and the volume's preface.
From the volume, I recommend "Imitatio Helenae: Sainthood as an Attribute of Queenship" by Jo Ann McNamara, and "Saint Francis, a Saint in Progress" by Chiara Frugoni. The first is an analysis of Christian queens/empresses from Helena, Constantine's mother, all the way to one of my favorite saints, Elizabeth of Hungary, the 13th century princess/landgravine (or duchess) of Hungary. The second traces, through art and literature, how treatment of Francis' stigmata changed. It seems that Bonaventure places more emphasis on the stigmata than earlier writers. I'm not entirely convinced by Frugoni's argument, but it definitely makes for fascinating reading. I would recommend Patrick Geary's piece, "Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal" but it appears to have been taken from Geary's earlier book Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, with only slight modifications.
The preface, by the editor, is a 'state of the field' sort of piece, one with an elegaic tone of lost promises and unfulfilled potential. Sticca sets up a dichotomy between those historians who scorn hagiography and those striving to unlock the troves of material in the (mostly) unexamined hagiographical corpus. Perhaps following the lead of a disappointed Geary, who characterizes research on the topic as 'disappointing', Sticca posits that this volume can actually reach a new pinnacle of hagiographic study, at long last distancing the modern scholar from the Bollandists' (a group of Jesuit scholars dedicated to compiling critical versions of saints' lives or vitae) deep concern for truth in the sources. Appropriately praising the Bollandists' work and that of Hippolyte Delahaye, publisher of Essai sur le culte des saints dans l'antique and perhaps the most famous of their number, the preface ends with suggestions for the future of the field.
I always read introductions or prefaces to collections of articles or essays. They provide an enlightening angle into the circumstances of composition, the issues on the table at the time of publication/writing, summarize the books' content, and help to situate the reader in the appropriate intellectual milieu. In works on hagiography, introductions are also useful for pointing to what kind of approach the book will take to the 'truth issue'. I often find that scholarly approaches to facticity in this context fall roughly into two camps, perhaps best visualized as along a continuum The first, a rather out-of-date approach, is that saints' lives should be treated like silt in a Gold Rush riverbed, sifted until valuable nuggets of historical fact emerge. The other, influenced by a post-modern aesthetic, is that because all of history is arbitrarily constructed and the product of subjective academic decisions, there is no reason to distinguish hagiography from history. Michel de Certeau, the historian also of fan studies fame, is a sterling example of this perspective. In this introduction, Sticca is clearly aligning himself and the writers in the volume with the latter camp, choosing to use vitae to illuminate the surrounding society and religious context. Saints' memory reveal the matrices of power and circumstances in which they are constructed.
I find the second approach, saints as windows into history, primarily useful because it allows me to escape the panning operations that can tie scholars up into knots. Trying to discern which parts of a vita are 'authentic' and directly from the saint as opposed to inserted by the hagiographer seems to be a mostly futile process. I approach saints' lives in a manner similar to the Bible - the book as we have it, the [NT] textus receptus, is sanctified by church tradition if not by originality. That is, whether or not we have what Jesus actually said, we do have what the church believed he said. Likewise, saints' lives show what was thought about them, whether or not that 'actually happened'. The perceived religious truth of their existence ultimately trumps the factual truth, to borrow another approach from Biblical studies.
The main problem with seeing the saints as windows/mirrors of their circumstances is one of aesthetics. It deprives saints' lives of their status as literary productions, read for devotional purposes and perhaps even as stories, with plot and narrative and excitement (what creative self-harm will they come up with next??). Reading them purely to learn about the circumstances of production minimizes this aspect is fundamentally selective, and reduces the saints to functional objects. Essentially, though I am definitely still thinking this through, saints' lives should be read as literature, but with a few important exceptions. The sacred character of their composition as well as the elements of propaganda should be carefully noted. Saints' lives were at least partially intended to convince the audience of the subject's holiness - these vitae are serious business for the hagiographer. As such, the vitae should be read in their totality with an eye (or I suppose many eyes-go team Revelation!) toward all of these concerns. Really, part of the fun of vitae is their amenability towards all kinds of analysis.
Welcome to Hagiagraphy, a blog where I write about my readings on the topic of saints and musings on hagiographical theory. As some Greek-savvy readers may have guessed, the name refers to my focus on female saints, as well as my continuing interest in gender and religion.
For this first post, I'm writing about selected essays in the book Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca and published by Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies in 1996. The book arose from a Binghamtom University conference on 'The Cult of the Saints', a reference/homage to Peter Brown's classic of the same name (Brown himself has no articles in the book). Though the entire book seems quite promising, because of a project I'm working on I'm concentrating on a few articles and the volume's preface.
From the volume, I recommend "Imitatio Helenae: Sainthood as an Attribute of Queenship" by Jo Ann McNamara, and "Saint Francis, a Saint in Progress" by Chiara Frugoni. The first is an analysis of Christian queens/empresses from Helena, Constantine's mother, all the way to one of my favorite saints, Elizabeth of Hungary, the 13th century princess/landgravine (or duchess) of Hungary. The second traces, through art and literature, how treatment of Francis' stigmata changed. It seems that Bonaventure places more emphasis on the stigmata than earlier writers. I'm not entirely convinced by Frugoni's argument, but it definitely makes for fascinating reading. I would recommend Patrick Geary's piece, "Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal" but it appears to have been taken from Geary's earlier book Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, with only slight modifications.
The preface, by the editor, is a 'state of the field' sort of piece, one with an elegaic tone of lost promises and unfulfilled potential. Sticca sets up a dichotomy between those historians who scorn hagiography and those striving to unlock the troves of material in the (mostly) unexamined hagiographical corpus. Perhaps following the lead of a disappointed Geary, who characterizes research on the topic as 'disappointing', Sticca posits that this volume can actually reach a new pinnacle of hagiographic study, at long last distancing the modern scholar from the Bollandists' (a group of Jesuit scholars dedicated to compiling critical versions of saints' lives or vitae) deep concern for truth in the sources. Appropriately praising the Bollandists' work and that of Hippolyte Delahaye, publisher of Essai sur le culte des saints dans l'antique and perhaps the most famous of their number, the preface ends with suggestions for the future of the field.
I always read introductions or prefaces to collections of articles or essays. They provide an enlightening angle into the circumstances of composition, the issues on the table at the time of publication/writing, summarize the books' content, and help to situate the reader in the appropriate intellectual milieu. In works on hagiography, introductions are also useful for pointing to what kind of approach the book will take to the 'truth issue'. I often find that scholarly approaches to facticity in this context fall roughly into two camps, perhaps best visualized as along a continuum The first, a rather out-of-date approach, is that saints' lives should be treated like silt in a Gold Rush riverbed, sifted until valuable nuggets of historical fact emerge. The other, influenced by a post-modern aesthetic, is that because all of history is arbitrarily constructed and the product of subjective academic decisions, there is no reason to distinguish hagiography from history. Michel de Certeau, the historian also of fan studies fame, is a sterling example of this perspective. In this introduction, Sticca is clearly aligning himself and the writers in the volume with the latter camp, choosing to use vitae to illuminate the surrounding society and religious context. Saints' memory reveal the matrices of power and circumstances in which they are constructed.
I find the second approach, saints as windows into history, primarily useful because it allows me to escape the panning operations that can tie scholars up into knots. Trying to discern which parts of a vita are 'authentic' and directly from the saint as opposed to inserted by the hagiographer seems to be a mostly futile process. I approach saints' lives in a manner similar to the Bible - the book as we have it, the [NT] textus receptus, is sanctified by church tradition if not by originality. That is, whether or not we have what Jesus actually said, we do have what the church believed he said. Likewise, saints' lives show what was thought about them, whether or not that 'actually happened'. The perceived religious truth of their existence ultimately trumps the factual truth, to borrow another approach from Biblical studies.
The main problem with seeing the saints as windows/mirrors of their circumstances is one of aesthetics. It deprives saints' lives of their status as literary productions, read for devotional purposes and perhaps even as stories, with plot and narrative and excitement (what creative self-harm will they come up with next??). Reading them purely to learn about the circumstances of production minimizes this aspect is fundamentally selective, and reduces the saints to functional objects. Essentially, though I am definitely still thinking this through, saints' lives should be read as literature, but with a few important exceptions. The sacred character of their composition as well as the elements of propaganda should be carefully noted. Saints' lives were at least partially intended to convince the audience of the subject's holiness - these vitae are serious business for the hagiographer. As such, the vitae should be read in their totality with an eye (or I suppose many eyes-go team Revelation!) toward all of these concerns. Really, part of the fun of vitae is their amenability towards all kinds of analysis.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)