Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England (review)

In Her Life Historical, Catherine Sanok offers a penetrating review of the concept of exemplarity, using lives of female saints to articulate exciting new ideas about how exemplarity could function in later medieval culture. Given the unexamined assumptions usually in play when "exemplary" texts are read by modern critics, Sanok's elegant study is a much-needed analysis of the complex nexus of hagiographic, historical, and gender issues to be found in the popular genre of female saints' lives.

Although Sanok's work builds productively on the preceding generation of hagiographic scholarship, she also offers fresh perspectives that undermine earlier truisms about gender and history. Most fundamentally, she questions the paradigm that tends to put female vernacular spirituality at odds with historical reflection. Of the genre's supposed ahistoricity, she says, "The exemplarity of vernacular hagiography depends on the fantasy that gender ideology and Christian practice are continuous, even transhistorical, but this is clearly not true" (p. 22).

Her initial comparison in chapter 1 of the ways women readers "imitated" their saintly models—saints Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, Margaret, and Katherine—reveals that figures like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe or male writers of prescriptive texts in fact used such saintly models very flexibly. The feature to be imitated was often carefully selected from a range of narrative possibilities in the legend, leaving other features either explicitly or tacitly as unimitable. For example, the typical virgin saint's adamant rejection of marriage and sexuality, her challenge to male authority, or her defiant public preaching were rarely presented as traits the woman reader should mimic. Instead, such narrative features were often allegorized into ethical virtues that could be emulated.

Sanok traces the "incommensurability" of ethics and narrative, the continuities and discontinuities of history, through a variety of topics in the following chapters. Chapter 2 calls attention to the way female saints' lives "ask women to read as women" (p. 24), and this makes women visible within literary history as patrons and readers. As Sanok points out, saints' lives were the sole genre "universally endorsed as women's reading" (p. 27) throughout the late Middle Ages. However, she goes further with the poststructuralist insight that female saints' lives created "the very category of women's literature, and they helped to inscribe female readers in the discursive—and so in the historical—arena of late medieval England" (p. 32).

If hagiography allowed the imagining of women as an interpretive community, then the community defined by devotional literature could function as an alternative to other kinds of political (often male) communities, as Sanok demonstrates in chapter 3 on Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women. Devotional discourse directed to a celestial realm provides an explicit alternative to the discourses of the social world for Bokenham. Sanok argues that he sees the stability and beneficence of feminine spirituality as a protection from political instability and repression of the public sphere, which Bokenham denigrates as "outlawry." In particular, Bokenham represents both the female saints and his contemporary women patrons as literary muses so that "the ethical imperative in the legendary—as figured by his patrons' imitation of the saints—is literary production" (p. 81).

The remaining chapters focus on individual hagiographic works that illustrate the connections between imitating the saints and historical identities: English identity in Bradshaw's Life of St. Werberge (chapter 4), female holiness as challenge to dominant social ideologies in the Book of Margery Kempe and the Life of Christina of Markyate (chapter 5), and, conversely, the idealized feminine that underwrites royal authority in the 1501 entry of Catherine of Aragon (chapter 6). Whether examining well or lesser known texts, Her Life Historical will reward its readers with new and cogently articulated insights.