2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

To recall Joan Scott’s famous dictum, historians must study women in relation to men.  Perhaps few types of sources in the pre-modern period lend themselves to this topic as well as hagiographical sources.  Jessica Barr’s study, on how traditionally-understood female somatic experiences served to reinforce ideals of masculinity, uses hagiographical texts to look at clerical understanding of femininity and its possibly unintended effects on the construction of masculinity in Liege.  Mary Doyno’s paper builds on the work of others, such as John Coakley, to explore the relationship between female saints and male confessors.  In doing so she not only adds to our knowledge about male appropriation of female sanctity, but addresses how this specifically affected women lay saints and how the saints’ legacies were reinvented a century at least after their death for the Franciscan Order.  Finally, Maeve Callan’s examination of St. Brigid’s Life connects the religious arena to the political.  She challenges the historiography of Brigid as a virago, or “masculine woman,” to argue for Brigid’s female agency and to question assumptions about the views of male Christians regarding holy women and their actions in medieval Ireland.  Although focused on medieval Europe the panel is geographically comparative.  The Hagiography Society, an international organization that is both geographically and chronologically inclusive, would like to sponsor this proposed panel since it will contribute to discussions beyond those limited to the premodern past about women and religion, power and authority, masculinity and femininity, and male understanding and manipulation of female experiences.