Wondering at the Saints: Gendered Admiration in Medieval Hagiography

Many medieval hagiographies direct their readers to “wonder” at the seemingly incredible feats of holiness performed by their saintly subjects. These exhortations occur most frequently in the biographies of holy people who engaged in somatic spiritual practices—practices that would generally be inaccessible to the reader. As scholars have noted, these wonderful practices are gendered: ascesis is more likely to be found in the biographies of holy men, while extraordinary physical manifestations of devotion, including redemptive illnesses, are more likely to be found in women. In both cases, however, these exhortations to wonder keep the holy person at a rhetorical distance from the reader. While purporting to encourage imitation, they are folded into a gendered interpretive framework that preserves the holy woman, in particular, as a spectacle for the edification of the reader.

 This paper explores the rhetoric of admiration in medieval  hagiography, focusing on the Lives of holy women produced in the diocese of Liège in the thirteenth century. Engaging with recent work on exemplarity in, especially, the vitae of female saints, I will explore counter-exemplarity: the uses of inimitable women to harden or  delimit masculine monastic identity. To what extent does the male monastic interest in Liègeois women actually serve the reification of a “masculine” sense of internally oriented, volitional, intellectual sanctity, even within the affective space of Cistercian spiritual practice? The spectacle of the extraordinary woman is thus double-edged, at once affirming possibilities for women and hardening the hierarchies that implicitly define them as Other.