The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to Dean Maxine Beach, my colleagues in the Theological School and Caspersen School of Graduate Studies of Drew University, and the Association of Theological Schools LillyTheological Research Grant: their combined assistance enabled me to take a break from teaching and committee duties during fall 2001 in order to complete a draft of this book. I thank Elizabeth Clark, Rebecca Lyman, Patricia Cox Miller, and Philip Rousseau for their support of my project during the process of grant applications , and Michael Nausner and Nicole Roskos for their willingness to stand in for me in the classroom and for the dedication and expertise they brought to the pedagogical task. I also owe much to my students. Every fall I teach a required course in ancient and medieval church history for (primarily but not exclusively Protestant) Master of Divinity students; their consistent enthusiasm for hagiographical writings has surprised and delighted me year after year and is in no small part responsible for my own continued fascination with such texts. The members of my hagiography seminar in spring 1999 helped me focus the agenda for this book and taught me much about how to read for sex in the Lives of Saints. Also crucial was an earlier interdisciplinary seminar team-taught with Dorothy Austin on "Writing Gay and Lesbian Lives." Repeated guest lectures in Otto Maduro's "Gay and Lesbian Liberation Theologies " seminars have provided opportunities for me to work through my thoughts regarding the implications of Foucault's History of Sexuality for the study of ancient Christian eroticism. Invitations to speak at Theological and Religious Studies graduate colloquia allowed me further to test the formulation of my arguments. I was able to present material from the first two chapters at the American Society of Church History, the North American Patristics Society, Princeton University, Syracuse University, the Graduate Theological Union, and the University of California at Berkeley. In each case, I profited from the responses of careful listeners. A slightly earlier draft of Chapter i appeared as "Queer Lives of Saints: Jerome's Hagiography," Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001) 442-479. Reprinted by permission of the University of Texas Press. The section "Confessing Monica," in Chapter 2, was originally drafted as part of an essay by the same name, coauthored with Catherine Keller, in Feminist Interpretations of Augustine, edited by Judith Chelius Stark, Rereading the Canon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming). This text was initially submitted for publication with Stanford University Press, and I benefited greatly from the helpfully incisive critique of an anonymous reader for that press, as well as from the expert guidance and generous—indeed courageous—support of my editor, Helen Tartar. I am very pleased indeed to be working now with the University of Pennsylvania Press and am particularly grateful to my "new" editor, Jerry Singerman, whose energy, enthusiasm, and insight have graced both this book and the "Divinations" series in which it is lodged with the hope of new beginnings. Scholarly writing is for me an intensely pleasurable, as well as a painfully difficult, practice. The sensualjoy—jouissance—that has lured and sustained me through the writing of this book has derived not only from the excitement of my encounter with the hagiographical texts but also from the stimulation of a number of extraordinarilyrich intellectualfriendships. Sharon Betcher and Karen Torjesen have always been willing to lend a sympathetic ear to even my most inarticulate mutterings. David Brakke, Elizabeth Castelli, Marion Grau, Robert Gregg, Paul Harvey, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Derek Krueger, Patricia Cox Miller, and Eric Thurman have offered insightful readings of portions (or in some cases all) of the text. In particular , Daniel Boyarin, Catherine Keller, Karmen MacKendrick, and Stephen Moore have challenged, encouraged, and improved my thinking and writing immeasurably. Their generosity as both scholars and friends has taught me much about saintly love. 2 1 6 ...