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i. Plotting Rape in the Female Saints' Lives The specifically Christian transformation of sexual difference into subor­ dination occurs in slow and complicated patterns. Out of the early Chris­ tian rejection of corporal experience comes a new asceticism that grounds itself in an ideological subordination of women and a misogynist construc­ tion of femininity.1 Pauline doctrine on sexuality informs the patristic the­ ology that legitimizes the gradual exclusion of women from ecclesiastic structures, from sanctity, from the intellectual centers of monasticism, and eventually from the political spheres of daily life.2 Ironically, the period known asthe "Dark Ages," the nadir of European male civilization, constituted a time of great fecundity,promise, and power in medieval female culture. In the early Middle Ages, women were vitally necessary for the creation of a new society. They experienced legal, social, and intellectual advancement. As female roles expanded, medieval women exercised greater power than their counterparts in classical society.' But the empowerment could not last in the Januslikeface of Christian patriarchy. As the looser structures of early medievalsociety became better organized, as the strength of the Church and monarchic hegemony grew, women lost their brief moment of opportunity. When the millennium arrived, women had been excluded from the mainstream of monasticism, education, and government.4 The "renaissance" of female culture which Joan Kelly boldly pushed from the sixteenth back to the twelfth century had in fact long perished by that time.' Hagiographic discourse constitutes one of the few remaining traces available to study European culture in the first millennium.6 In the hagi­ ography of the early Middle Ages, the saint's martyrdom constitutes the apex of the narrative paradigm. Death is the climacticepisode in the hagi­ ographic text of the first millennium. Torture, hanging, burning, crucifix­ ion, starvation, or decapitation are the points of interest in the narration of the saint's legend. 22 Plotting Rape in the Female Saints' Lives The patristic understanding of female sexualitymakes itself apparent in the vitae.The female saint's life of the early Middle Ages contains a gender­ specific narrative structure. Before the climactic death episode, the story of the female saint may spin off onto its own narrative trajectory: sexual violence. There is a sexual plot peculiar to the female saint's legend. Rape, prostitution, seduction, and forced marriage are the signal varia­ tions in this gendered plot. The construction of sexual assault runs through hagiography like a shining thread in a tapestry, highly valued and useful. The sexual violence in female vitae has received little critical attention. Scholars have noted that the early ideal of the virgin­martyr saint gives way to other paradigms in the high and late Middle Ages (notably the queen or empress saint, and then the visionary or contemplative saint), but few have investigated the meanings of these generic paths to female sanc­ tity.7 The obvious explanation for the importance of rape in early Christian hagiography is that it corresponds to the new ideal of feminine virginity. The Church fathers are well known for calling women to a virginal life.8 Most patristic thinkers propounded the idea that woman is the objective correlative both of the sexual body and of human sinfulness. A woman could be saved from her inferior female nature only by renouncing sexual­ ity and becoming like a man, vir, through virginity.9 A woman accedes to sanctity by prizing her chastity so highly that she dies for it. Sexual assault is one of the preferred methods of promotion to female martyrdom in early Christian hagiography. Sexual violence takes a variety of forms and functions in the femalevitae. Four types of plots are most common in the literary shaping of feminine sanctity in early hagiography. The category of vitae in which the threat of rape is made explicit demonstrates that there does exist a language for rape in the hagiographic text. The heathen loses patience with the trappings of love­talk or marriage proposals and verbalizes his intention to violate the heroine. Such direct representation of rape is less common than sexforced through marriage or ravishment by a third party in a house of prostitution. But vitae referring openly to rape exist, such as the lives of Saints Lucia, Anastasia, and Euphemia.10 The topos of forced prostitution, with its potential for sensational erot­ icism and voyeurism, is a familiar choice in female vitae and is greatly prized by Christian hagiographers. In order to persuade the reluctant vir­ gin to yield to his sexual demands...

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