Gender and Sanctity in the Middle Ages

This review essay examines recent trends and developments in the study of medieval sanctity and gender, looking at the range of approaches which have been and are being taken by both historians and literary scholars to a wide variety of hagiographic texts. Two recent studies of medieval hagiography are reviewed, John Kitchen, Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography and the collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters edited by Catherine Mooney. These works are representative of differing approaches to the issue of male authors' representations of female sanctity and concomitant issues of gender ideology.