The traffic in saints : the social and sexual economies of Old French hagiography

Description

Social and sexual systems play a key role in medieval hagiography; this thesis explores the various ways in which these systems are implicated in the narrative and ideological functioning of Old French saints' lives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The thesis divides into four chapters.Chapter One examines hagiography's treatment of exchange and social contract. Drawing on theories of the gift in anthropological writing and in the work of thinkers such as Derrida, I argue that saints' lives privilege a particular form of exchange between the human and the divine exemplified by the saint's relationship to God; this relationship has its own economic character, a character that, in being based on a particular notion of the gift, both evokes and transforms the world of human economic activity.Chapter Two investigates the implications of such transformations for the kinship networks that rely on human systems of exchange. Saints' lives raise the question of what kind of desire is possible in a system which lacks the temporal, emotional and economic boundaries of human social networks. Engaging with the work of Lacan and Butler on death and ethics, I suggest that saints' lives construct a sphere of ethical activity situated beyond the human social world, a sphere that is thereby associated with a form of death-in-life. Human kinship is thus seen in contrast to the forms of desire sanctioned within an alternative set of spiritual kin relations. Spiritual kinship, in being permanently in excess of human norms, may recuperate relations and desires that would be transgressive in human terms and thus redefines the law and its constitutive exclusions in line with a network of relationships that are located at (andjust beyond) the limits of terrestrial kinship.Chapter Three develops the suggestion that saints' lives transform human relationships through the recontextualisation and reinterpretation of such relationships within an alternative sphere of spiritual connections by considering how community is constituted in and by hagiographic literature. The chapter explores how communities might be represented by and involved in hagiographic texts through a form of what Althusser might term `interpellation'. I investigate the possible effects of such processes both for medieval audiences and for modem readers, considering in connection with work of Dinshaw, Agamben and Nancy how hagiography invites reflection on nature of community and its constitution and conceptualisation in the present.Chapter Four considers some of these conclusions in relation to three medieval collections containing saints' lives. This chapter looks at how community might be articulated intertextually, through certain combinations of texts. As well as considering how the ideological aims of these collections (and the saints' lives they contain) are served by such textual juxtapositions, I also explore how larger recueils might work against the interpellation of Christian community while simultaneously attempting to confirm the elements on which community is based.