The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint (review)

The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint. By Gail Ashton. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 176 pp. $85.00.

Since the publication of Caroline Walker Bynum's seminal study, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987), hagiographies have become a crucial source for the study of medieval women's religious lives. Bynum brings together analyses of medieval women's own religious texts and those written by others about them. The latter most often take the form of saints' lives, usually written by men, which record religious women's words and deeds for the edification of their communities (sometimes as local a group as the woman's own convent, at other times ranging to include the whole of Western Christianity). As Bynum herself cautions, women-authored mystical texts and male-authored hagiographies can not be read in the same way. There are particular problems with reading hagiographic texts as historical sources, because, as Bynum argues, although they give us important information about what medieval people believed and thought worthy of recording, they do not purport to be "historical" according to the tenets of modern historical-critical method. Most important, as texts produced by a male clerical elite, hagiographic documents may in fact tell us more about the ecclesial establishment's views of women than about women's own lives.

I open with reference to Bynum's work and its methodological strictures because they form the background against which we can measure the strengths and weaknesses of Gail Ashton's recent work. Ashton's study analyzes a range of disparate texts produced in England between 1200 and 1500, among them Mirk's Festival, a collection of vernacular homilies from the early fifteenth century, John Capgrave's The Life of St. Katherine of Alexandria, the late thirteenth-century Early South-English Legendary, Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Caxton's version of The Golden Legend, and Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale," "Second Nun's Tale," and "Man of Law's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. As the inclusion of Mirk's homilies and Chaucer's tales suggest, Ashton is less interested in determining the specificity of hagiography as a genre (a project recently questioned by Felice Lifshitz), than in tracing certain hagiographic patterns that, Ashton argues, run through a variety of texts in different genres. (The project is rendered somewhat incoherent, however, by Ashton's tendency to claim that this pattern is itself a genre.)

The pattern is articulated most clearly at the outset of Ashton's study, where she argues that each of her disparate texts

focuses upon an idealized female subject whose saintly worth is validated through a series of external, immediately recognizable holy symbols, forming part of a particular code of saintliness--itself arising, in part, from a specific historical and cultural context. It is the imposition of that code, plus the hagiographer's intention to both venerate and offer the saint as exemplum, that tends to lead towards a text marked by control, suppression, and closure. Any potential transgressions conflicting with a cultural ideal of womanliness--such as moments of autonomous action or speech--are glossed, and a potentially subversive subject is brought back into the safe confines of hagiographic genre and the Church (12).

This dominating voice is, according to Ashton, masculine and consistently emphasizes "external behavior designed to sanctify the woman" (13).

Yet, Ashton goes on to argue, this dominating masculine voice is subverted or fissured by a feminine voice or discourse. Ashton thus divides her study into two parts: The first deals with the predominant masculine voice and the hagiographic pattern it repeatedly articulates within the vitae of religious women and other related stories, and the second attempts to mine the fissures within these texts for access to a feminine voice within them. The project is indebted to recent work...