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88 T he affective sensibility exhibited in the relationship between Christ and female saints in late medieval vernacular hagiographies looks back to the tradition of twelfth-century spirituality, where we first see evidence of a new emphasis on Christ’s humanity. The valorization of Christ’s flesh inevitably came to encompass and elevate the maternal body that had borne him. This more favorable view of womanhood helps to explain the coexistence of intellectual and bodily female ideals in that most cerebral and somatic of saints, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. It has become de rigeur of late to specify the saint’s gender as a way of explaining the corporeal emphasis of late medieval female sanctity. Caroline Bynum, for example, argues that gender is overlooked in traditional discussions of eucharistic piety among lay and religious women from the thirteenth century on.1 In this chapter I shall argue, with close reference to the Czech Life of Saint Catherine, that one ought to consider the monastic denomination of the author, the gender of his audience, and that of his chosen saint as a syncretic unity. Just as in late medieval art the male figure of Christ often merges mystically with his mother Mary, so is there frequently a deeply affective bond between a male author, his chosen subject, and the female audience for whom he writes his vita. Such an affective bond is particularly strong in the case of male religious who served women as confessors. In this chapter, I shall maintain that the probable author of the Czech Life of Saint Catherine was a Dominican friar, university professor, courtier , and confessor to Emperor Charles IV and his family. Although there is little extrinsic evidence to support this claim, a great deal of textual authority points to Dominican authorship. I shall argue that the author’s status as a member of the Dominican order is as significant to our understanding of the text as the audience for whom it was intended. I detect an important connection between the author’s secular and religious concerns as a courtier-priest and the ideals of virginity and maternity propagated in the course of the legend. As we shall see, these ideals tell us a great deal about how the author perceived female sanctity and the religious and social role of his (partly) female audience. CHAPTER 6 ✣ The Radiant Rose Female Sanctity and Dominican Piety in the Czech Life of Saint Catherine Saint Catherine of Alexandria Catherine of Alexandria was one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, beloved in the eastern and western churches alike. According to legend, she was martyred in A.D. 307. In the eighth century her body was discovered by Egyptian Christians and translated by them to the monastery on Mount Sinai. This monastery was founded by Saint Helen (c. A.D. 250–330), the mother of the emperor Constantine, and was embellished by the emperor Justinian I and renamed in Catherine’s honor in A.D. 527. Here her bones were said to exude the heavenly oil with which her wounds were miraculously healed.2 The earliest versions of the legend were written in Greek, but from the eleventh century on we find Latin adaptations of the Greek sources. All of these stories deal exclusively with the martyrdom and the debate with the pagan scholars. At a later point, two other episodes (Catherine’s conversion through the agency of a hermit and her mystical marriage to Christ) were added to the core story of the debate and martyrdom.3 The cult of Saint Catherine was one of the most popular in medieval Europe. Numerous images and literary representations of her life and martyrdom survive, most of them based on the immensely popular Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine.4 The presence of her relics at the Abbey of SainteTrinit é-du-Montin Rouen in the first half of the eleventh century probably inspired several of the Latin versions of her life. In fact it was the Abbey of Sainte-Trinité in Rouen that was largely responsible for disseminating the cult of Saint Catherine in northern Europe.5 Her renown as a teacher and protector increased, the former aided no doubt by the spread of schools, such as the Sorbonne, of which she became the patron saint. Her cult was also important in England, where her legend was one of the most frequently represented subjects in late medieval churches.6 Several versions of her life are extant in English, ranging...

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