The problem of female sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780-920.

Adalhelm, bishop of Sees (c. 890), believed he owed his see and his life to St Opportuna. In gratitude, he compiled an account of the life and miracles of this virgin saint, who had lived a century or so before his own episcopate began.(1) In praising Opportuna, he also praised Christ, who "not only makes known to us through men the path of righteousness, but also shows to all those who love him exemplars of religious faith and good conduct through women and young girls".(2) Adalhelm proposed a careful distinction between the men who embodied the injunction to a life of righteous action and the women and young girls who demonstrated exemplary piety and decorum. His words echo biblical phrases, rooting his understanding of sainthood in scripture.(3) They also presume that a woman's sanctity was somehow different from a man's.

The Carolingian era does not commend itself to anyone wishing, as most historians do, to study expressions of sainthood within a saint's own social and cultural milieu, for Adalhelm lived in an age and a culture which preferred to ascribe sanctity to those who were long since dead. In the few exceptions in which a man or woman was venerated for holiness in the immediate aftermath of their death, this person's sanctity was never active, charismatic or acknowledged during their lifetime. Instead, venerated as witnesses to Christian tradition and honoured as intercessors, the saints of Carolingian Europe attracted commemoration and liturgical cult, and sometimes even manifested themselves through miracles at their tombs. This was a religious culture far removed from that of late antiquity which, like the high Middle Ages, needed "to experience the holy directly". In the high Middle Ages, saints "could be seen, touched and imitated".(4) The Carolingian era forms an interlude in the history of sainthood, for no charismatic ascetics, healers, prophets or visionaries made their mark on a church whose bishops were implacably hostile to any such form of religious expression. By contrast, the cults of the dead flourished as never before. The absence of holy men and women does not mean an absence of ideas about sainthood, however, for ideas were projected in writing on to those figures of the past whose cults were commemorated at the major shrines of the day. In Carolingian Europe, the dearth of the living holy or of recently deceased saints contrasted sharply with a plethora of hagiographical writings.(5) Carolingian understanding of sanctity was located in the past, not in the present.

Historians have been slow to realise that sainthood is as problematic as it is ubiquitous in the Middle Ages. As Frantisek Graus pointed out, the study of medieval hagiography and saints' cults has generally been constrained within implicitly Christian terms of debate, a debate whose terms often reflect antagonisms of confessional origin.(6) To frame a definition of sainthood in terms of those men and women honoured with a formal cult, or who were subjects of informal (even unauthorized) veneration simply perpetuates this. Such a statement evades a deeper issue: whether sanctity is amenable to definition in any terms other than those of Christian doctrine and belief or its institutional expression.(7) Medievalists have either tended to presume that sanctity within the Christian tradition is timeless, placeless, personless, or else to argue that its manifestations are ordered by the specifics of culture, person and place.(8) Alongside the poles of monochrome objectification or a reductionist functionalism have been attempts to frame an understanding of sanctity in sociological terms, by quantifying and tabulating the "vital statistics" that constitute sainthood.(9) Yet all these different approaches miss the point that sanctity is in the eye of the beholder, that it was negotiated, contested and shaped as much by the needs of the audience as by the experiences of the saint in question.(10) Since it is extremely rare that we possess a saint's autobiographical writings, we needs must accept that at all times we study sanctity through the opinions of others.

Carolingian hagiography offers a particularly good forum for exploring the ways in which sanctity was understood and constructed, precisely because it originated in a culture with ideas about sanctity but no direct experience of it. This was as true for female as for male saints. Carolingian hagiographers wrote about women against the backdrop of a hagiographical tradition far more commonly turned to celebrating male saints than female ones.(11) Within this tradition, or in response to it, they generated images of women chosen for literary commemoration. The women in question have nothing in common as a group, ranging as they do from the fourth-century empress Helena, whose career took her from Trier to Rome, Jerusalem and Constantinople, to the late ninth-century recluse Liutberga of Wendhausen, whose world was bounded by the confines of her cell. The coherence of this selection of texts stems instead from the fact that they are all attempts to formulate an understanding of female sanctity that were made by writers informed by the beliefs, ideology and cultural resources of the Carolingian church. Some of the authors in question were men (bishops or monks) known by name, others anonymous - and conceivably women.(12) Though the dates at which they wrote can only rarely be stated precisely, most of them certainly worked, as most hagiographers did, long after their subject's death; only a couple wrote within living memory of the commemorated saint. Yet all of them wrestled with the same dilemma: how could they appropriately represent these holy women? For the historian, the problem and challenge of female sanctity in this period is to understand what shaped those representations and, taking a cue from Adalhelm, to inquire whether female sanctity took its own distinctive forms.

I

HAGIOGRAPHY IN CAROLINGIAN EUROPE

Carolingian hagiography was closely associated with the Carolingian renaissance. Like so many other aspects of that rebirth, it built upon traditions whose roots stretched deep into the Christian past. Initially given great impetus by the gathering of scholars at Charlemagne's court and by the pressures towards ecclesiastical reform, the Carolingian hagiographical tradition had become rich and complex by the middle of the ninth century. Its last flowering may be located in the first two decades of the tenth century in the Low Countries, not long before renewed stirrings of monastic reform in Lotharingia prompted new hagiographical directions.(13) At the hands of some of the ablest writers of the age - Alcuin, Einhard, Jonas, Hilduin, Hucbald - the genre became marked by a striving for stylistic effect, historical complexity and theological depth. A saint's life might be a work of literature, edification, history or commemoration, and need not be associated with any liturgical cult. It could be a vehicle for a display of the skills of Latin composition, prose or verse; for shaping a vision of the past to suit the polemics of the present; for reflecting on moral values; for promoting a particular church and cult centre to new prominence. Although a huge number of anonymous texts (by no means always closely datable) written by local authors survive alongside the polished oeuvres of the Carolingian literary elite, the main features of the Carolingian hagiographical corpus are clear.(14) They provide the context in which we may subsequently locate the hagiography of women.

Most characteristically, Carolingian hagiography brought the saints of past ages into the present. A large proportion of the total corpus consists of revisions of older texts; behind authors' disclaimers that their intention is merely to "correct" the Latin and bring it into line with Carolingian norms, close textual reading often reveals subtle shifts of emphasis which adjust images of saintly behaviour to contemporary expectations.(15) Accounts of the passions of early Christian martyrs or of the lives of founding bishops and abbots, not previously commemorated, form another significant category. Fourth- and fifth-century bishops, in particular, often became the object of a liturgical cult for the first time, and much hagiographical talent was expended in outlining their careers in order to sanctify traditions of authority.(16) In other cases, relic cults gave impetus to compilations of post mortem miracle stories. These libri miraculorum testified that the saints of old - martyrs, bishops, monks - remained present at their graves, working miracles and extending their patronage to their flock.(17)

Only in one region was the focus of Carolingian hagiographical endeavour not confined to the distant past. In the areas north and east of the Rhine where Christianity and Carolingian authority had been only recently introduced, separately or together, hagiography helped establish tradition, authority and history in the wake of conversion. In these circumstances, the chronological gulf separating saint and hagiographer frequently contracted from several centuries to a few years, at most a couple of generations, and the typical hagiographer was the disciple of the saint. Nowhere else do we find such readiness to accept people as saints in the immediate aftermath of their death, or to commemorate them with appropriate liturgical cults and hagiographical memorials.(18)

Carolingian commitment to writing about saints extended to women also. For the most part, the corpus of texts concerned with female saints falls within the broad categories just outlined. Revisions of earlier texts (Balthild, Genovefa), composition of vitae of early saints hitherto devoid of hagiographical commemoration (Amalberga, Anstrude, Helena, Sadalberga and others), an interest in the post mortem miracle stories of a few female saints (Austroberta, Bertha, Opportuna, Regina, Walburga), and the impulse to write about recently deceased women on the northeastern fringes of Christendom (Hathumoda, Leoba, Liutberga): in all these respects writing about women saints mirrors more widespread hagiographical activity. The most significant divergence derives from the lack - naturally enough - of any counterpart to the Carolingian preoccupation with episcopal hagiography and its encoded values of sanctified succession to office.

The major distinctions between hagiography about men and about women in the Carolingian period concern not so much types of text as number and distribution. In contrast to the many hundreds of lives or miracle-books concerning male saints, only a handful have women as their subject and they constitute a small fraction of the total. In geographical terms too, a marked discrepancy becomes evident when we turn to assess the distribution of the places which produced saints' lives. Subtracting from the Carolingian hagiographical corpus the ubiquitous episcopal hagiography to which there is no female counterpart, the still substantial monastic residue derives mostly from the regions north of the Alps and the Loire.(19) In Carolingian Aquitaine, Provence and still more so in Italy, saints' lives concerned primarily bishops, occasionally monks, but certainly never women. To locate women's vitae composed in the Carolingian period, we have to turn to a small part of the area beyond the Loire and the Alps. The churches in which lives of women were composed mostly cluster in the zone between the Seine and the Meuse, but with outliers from the Rhineland and further north from the areas of missionary activity in Saxony. In contrast with the distribution of Merovingian women's vitae, no Carolingian lives come from Aquitaine or Provence. This distribution suggests that the practice of female hagiography only flourished in those areas where Columbanian and later Bonifacian monasticism had made greatest impact upon the organization of the religious life of women. It also suggests that lives of female saints may have served some political purpose, for the Seine-Meuse area was precisely the political "heartland" of the Carolingian empire in the later eighth and ninth centuries; furthermore, as the traditional power structures of the Carolingian empire crumbled in the later ninth century, Saxony emerged as one of the new centres of political gravity. The political implications of this distribution of women's vitae will become evident below.(20)

Writing about women thus has a straightforward context within the hagiographical concerns of the Carolingian age, even though in terms of sheer ubiquity, quantity and preoccupation with authority, the writings about male saints far exceed this small group of texts. This numerical imbalance simply perpetuates the hagiographical traditions of late antiquity and the Merovingian centuries. But how did this affect the images of saintly women proposed in the Carolingian age? To what extent were they indebted to the images of male sanctity? Or can they be described as autonomous? In order to answer these questions, we must first examine the pre-Carolingian history of female hagiography and the relationship of women's vitae to men's.

II

SOURCES AND MODELS

Early medieval saints' lives had a long literary pedigree. The conventions which came to govern the writing of hagiography had developed from a fusion of classical traditions - biography, panegyric of public figures, and aretology - combined with the influence of scriptural images of prophets and apostles and the martyr literature of the early church.(21) In developing ways of writing about those whose lives were especially holy, hagiographers such as Jerome, Sulpicius Severus and Athanasius (known in the West in Evagrius's Latin translation of the life of Antony) occupied a key role in the Latin-speaking world of Rome and Gaul, as did the sixth-century writings of Gregory the Great and Venantius Fortunatus. These writers offered a mould from which new images could be formed: the widespread diffusion of their work ensured that they remained the guiding spirits of all early medieval hagiography. That mould was notably episcopal or eremitic, celebrating in particular the bishops and monks who had helped to shape the spirituality and institutional organization of the Christian church of late antiquity.

Hagiography about women occupied a distinctive place within this literary tradition. In the Graeco-Roman world, women had never been the subject of biography or celebratory laudatio of their achievements. Lacking official public positions, they had no great deeds, no res gestae, to extol. If they won praise and commendation, it was as faithful wives and nurturing mothers. By contrast, in the first, second and third centuries, Christian faith, not social status or gender, made a martyr, and the early church celebrated female and child martyrs as readily as it did grown men.(22) The prominence of women within the martyrial literature was assured by one of the earliest martyr narratives, the passion of Perpetua, with its autobiographical accounts of the visions which the saint experienced as she awaited her death in jail.(23) But when, from the later fourth century onwards, hagiography became more a matter of celebrating a holy life than of commemorating an agonizing death, only in the Greek-speaking East were the life stories of pious women composed along similar lines to the lives of male ascetics.(24) In the Latin West, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine and others devoted attention to forming the moral character of pious women but, with the exception of the laudatory account of Paula's life which Jerome composed after her death, none of this literature took a form approximating to that of a saintly vita.(25) The Latin fathers' contribution was instead to ensure that chastity, or preferably virginity, became the central prerequisite for female piety. This emphasis rapidly permeated the martyr literature, for chastity became more central even than martyrdom in the accounts of early women martyrs composed in fifth- and sixth-century Rome.(26) By contrast, neither the Greek tradition of penitent prostitutes nor that of chastity preserved within marriage had much impact in the Latin West in the early Middle Ages.(27)

In short, when women did become the accepted subject of hagiography in sixth-century Gaul, there was no established Latin tradition of writing female vitae. Many of the implausible episodes in the earliest of these lives, the Vita Genovefae of c. 520 - episodes such as this virgin saint's repulse of the Hunnic siege of Paris or her responsibility for the grain supply to the city - can best be explained by the absence of any Latin hagiographical tradition other than a male one, episcopal or monastic.(28) More generally, the freshness and variety of content of women's lives in the later sixth and seventh centuries betokens the lack of clear expectations and conventions guiding these writers in their work. Not until the later seventh century did themes and topoi appropriate for literary recycling even begin to appear.

Although the Merovingian female vitae are much studied, and have recently become widely known in English translation,(29) we should not forget that any hagiographer working in the ninth century would not have had the same understanding of the Latin hagiographical tradition as that which I have just outlined. Recent critical scholarship on Merovingian hagiography has been little concerned with the diffusion of the texts under scrutiny; if we wish to know what vitae might have influenced the writing of female hagiography in the Carolingian period, we must ask what texts were readily available in ninth-century libraries. The answer is clear: a great preponderance of old passions, mostly about male martyrs.(30) To these we must add the late antique canonical vitae, especially Sulpicius Severus's life of Martin and several of Venantius Fortunatus's lives.(31) Only three Merovingian women's vitae circulated at all widely, the life of Genovefa of Paris (in various recensions), Venantius Fortunatus's life of Radegund and the life of Gertrude of Nivelles.(32) (The only other woman's vita widely available was the seventh-century Hiberno-Latin life of Brigid.(33)) In all other cases, the circulation of women's lives, Carolingian as well as Merovingian, remained overwhelmingly local. Indeed, many probably remained within the communities in which or for which they were written until at least the eleventh or twelfth century. Even the most conscientious ninth-century hagiographer would have found it hard to discern a distinct tradition of female hagiography.(34)

In this light we may turn to examine how Carolingian images of female sanctity were formed. Hagiographers never chose to situate their saintly subjects in the context of the women saints of Merovingian Gaul: they repeatedly barked back to the canonical texts of late antiquity. Although Adalhelm of Sees thought it appropriate to describe the dying Opportuna being summoned to heaven by the martyrs Cecilia and Lucy, the referents were most usually fourth-century saints.(35) When the ninth-century author of the Vita Sadalbergae proposed saintly role models for this seventh-century abbess, he chose the "patristic" figures of Melania, Paula and Helena but made no mention of the Merovingian saints Genovefa (d. 502), Radegund (d. 587) or Balthild (d. c. 680).(36)

Most influential of all, however, was Martin. He appeared in visions to two women, Hathumoda, abbess of Gandersheim (d. 874) and Liutberga, a recluse at Wendhausen (d. c.880). In both cases, the visions are described by bagiographers who knew their subject personally, and thus their accounts are likely to be reliable.(37) Hathumoda, we are told, knew from his vita exactly what Martin looked like, and she "venerated St Martin with an especial reverence, and was accustomed to invoke him in times of greatest need".(38) Hathumoda and Liutberga evidently accepted that their own monastic and ascetic vocation lay within a tradition epitomized by the premier (male) saint of late antique Gaul.

Not only had Hathumoda read Sulpicius's Vita Martini, so too had Agius, the author of her vita. His prose life of Hathumoda prefaced a metrical conversation in which he offered consolation to the grieving nuns of Gandersheim for the loss of their dearly beloved abbess. In casting this metrical part of the work as a dialogue, Agius deliberately invoked the precedents of Sulpicius Severus's Martinian Dialogues and of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great - two of the key works in the development of the Latin hagiographical genre.(39) But Agius did more than simply pay homage to great writers of earlier centuries. No early medieval hagiographer knew his subject as intimately as Agius knew Hathumoda: he is believed to have been her brother, he was certainly in close contact with her throughout her life, was present at her bedside during her final illness and death, and wrote the vita very shortly thereafter, while the image of the saint was still fresh in his memory.(40) And yet, in the key passage which described her holiness of character, he elaborated upon phrases and themes drawn from Sulpicius Severus's description of Martin.(41) The vignette is no slavish reiteration of its model, but nevertheless begs questions about the relationship of literary representations of sanctity to the real person underlying it. Agius could have given us an independent character-sketch had he so chosen, but hagiographical convention led him instead to project Hathumoda in a Martinian image. This deference to his model (which we may presume any well-educated reader would have spotted immediately) combines with Agius's intrusion of himself into the vita as an important dramatis persona to situate both Hathumoda and Agius within a centuries-old spiritual tradition.(42) We confront here the tension at the heart of all medieval hagiography, a tension between the individuality of any one person and the pressure to assimilate all saints into a single, exemplary model of holiness.

For all his closeness to Hathumoda, Agius nevertheless chose to present her in the Martinian mould. How then did those hagiographers cope who had much less knowledge of the saints being commemorated? Two other texts reveal the authorial strategies employed. The first is Rudolf of Fulda's life of Leoba. Leoba, Anglo-Saxon companion of Boniface and first abbess of Tauberbischofsheim, died c. 782 and was buried near Boniface in the monastery of Fulda. In 838, Rudolf composed her vita.(43) He had available to him preparatory notes towards an earlier attempt to write her life by the priest Mago, who had extensively interviewed four of Leoba's surviving pupils. Also to hand were the records made by other elderly monks who had known Leoba's disciples, together with whatever information Rudolf could garner by talking to people within the community.(44) It would seem as though he had enough material; yet in practice he drew heavily on a range of earlier hagiographical works (including both Sulpicius Severus's life of Martin and the Dialogues of Gregory the Great), and quoted so extensively from the late fifth-century life of Germanus of Auxerre that it is unclear how much relationship, if any, this image of Leoba bore to the real story of her life.(45)

Rudolf was well placed to know a considerable amount about Leoba, yet he submerged her within a traditional, male texture. The dependence upon the patristic hagiographical tradition becomes even clearer in the second example, the life of Bertila of Chelles, whose author had minimal knowledge of the saint in question. Bertila had been appointed abbess of this royal nunnery c. 660, but her vita was not composed until some time in the ninth century, probably by a nun at Chelles. All that was known of Bertila were the meagre scraps of information contained within the life of the founder of Chelles, Queen Balthild, and the fact that Bertila had been abbess for forty-six years. (That the hagiographer did not even know the day on which Bertila had died strongly suggests that there was no liturgical commemoration of her.) The author described her work as a praeclarum speculum, a mirror of exemplary conduct for ninth-century nuns and abbesses.(46) Its coherence conceals its method of composition: in effect, the author redeployed words, phrases, themes, episodes and whole structures borrowed silently from other texts. The accounts of both the saint's childhood and her death are taken verbatim from Venantius Fortunatus's Vita Albini; the circumstances of her appointment as abbess derive, of come, from the Vita Balthildis; her ascetic life is cobbled together from a range of sources, including Sulpicius Severus, Jerome and the Rule of St Benedict.(47) The author necessarily selected only material consistent with the demeanour expected of a Carolingian abbess - spectacular miracles, for example, have no counterpart here - but we obtain an image of sanctity which sews together pieces of an older, normative, male cloth.

Carolingian women's lives were constructed within the dominant hagiographical tradition - male, patristic, canonical - and it made little difference whether a writer had direct knowledge of, or at least reliable information about, a saintly subject. No conventions for the writing of female hagiography emerged in the early Middle Ages, partly because of the limited circulation of most women's vitae, but also because of the immense pull exerted by that most popular of texts, Sulpicius's life of Martin. Not only hagiographers but also, in the case of Liutberga and Hathumoda, the women themselves, found Martin's influence inescapable. Carolingian images of saintly women remained subordinated to the literary conventions established in the episcopal or monastic vitae of late antiquity.

III

THE MANLY WOMAN IN CAROLINGIAN HAGIOGRAPHY

The evidence which I have adduced thus far does not suggest that female sanctity was understood in any terms other than those of the dominant traditions of Latin hagiography, as developed from its patristic roots. This interpretation receives reinforcement from the ways in which Carolingian hagiographers adopted and extended patristic notions of the differences between male and female personality. Although Pauline Christianity had emphasized that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female: for you are all one in Christ" (Gal. 3:28), the equality envisaged was always eschatological, never immediate. In effect, patristic writers adapted to their own purposes a classical vocabulary which identified fight moral action with masculinity and deemed moral weakness a characteristic of women. By the fourth century, Seneca's distinctions between behaviour that was virilis or muliebris had acquired Christian resonance. Manly action manifested the strength and virtue necessary to pursue the ascetic life. This masculine language might also be applied to those women who devoted themselves to a life of Christian rigour, such as Paula or Melania. Hence - also harking back to the formidable women of the Hebrew Bible such as Deborah and Judith - Jerome and others elaborated the theme of the femina virilis or virago, the manly woman, whose ascetic prowess transcended her gender.(48) Venantius Fortunatus extended the trope in his life of Radegund, stressing the queen's moral glory and physical weakness; Carolingian hagiographers exploited it frequently, and some developed the theme still further.(49)

That ascetic discipline meant transcending femininity emerges clearly from the life of Liutberga, the recluse of Wendhausen. Liutberga had started out as a servant in a noble household. As a child, she was a virguncula, a "little virgin", and the "weakness of her sex" limited her in her study of scripture.(50) She grew up not to womanhood, but to be a pious virago.(51) In declaring her vocation as a recluse, Liutberga displayed a "masculine self-confidence".(52) Finally, after she had been immured, her sexual identity became irrelevant; she was now simply a "servant of Christ".(53)

In other cases, the maleness of ascetic discipline is explicitly linked to the preservation of chastity. After Aldegund of Maubeuge had been tempted by the Devil to renounce her ascetic vocation, she immediately received a vision of an angel, who exhorted her to "act like a man" by persisting in her virginity: this would win her an eternal crown.(54) Chastity, the obligatory prerequisite of all early medieval saints, male or female, could be expressed, as in Aldegund's case, through virginity or, as commonly, in chaste widowhood. After the murder of her husband, Rictrude (d. c.690) decided to take the veil in the face of royal efforts to persuade her to remarry. Her hagiographer, Hucbald of Saint-Amand, depicts her dramatic defiance of the king when she acted "not fearfully but firmly, not tepidly but fervently, not slothfully but sagaciously, not womanly but manly".(55) Rictrude's action in a male moral world is confirmed by her display of the four classical virtues of prudence, justice, moderation and fortitude.(56)

Rictrude also displayed her masculine virtues at a later crisis in her life, though not this time one of sexual status. Carolingian hagiographers had pushed the theme of the femina virilis into the realm of emotion and affect, juxtaposing women's tears and men's resilience. Rictrude, now in a monastery, endured the death one Christmas Day of one of her daughters, also a nun. Her behaviour was that of a "strong woman". Repressing her grief for three days while the Christmas festivities took place, "the manly strength of the spirit that was in her overcame the womanly emotion".(57) By the time that Hucbald wrote these words in 907, the original Stoic theme, with its Christian interpretation of ascetic fervour, had become extended still further. All that was "womanly" about female saints in the ninth century was their handiwork.(58)

Unswerving commitment to chastity, resolute behaviour in times of stress and (in the case of Bertila of Chelles) good governance of the convent under her charge might be construed in terms of an essentially male notion of sanctity.(59) Maintaining a religious vocation transformed the gender of all these women. Laywomen were exposed to the risk of sexual shame and dishonour and might thereby impugn the reputation of their menfolk, but the religious women landed for their sanctity had set aside their sexual nature. No longer female, they became effectively male.

IV

NARRATIVE AND POLITICS

Thus far, I have argued that women saints were portrayed in terms of an essentially male notion of sanctity. This argument explains only some of the main features of the Carolingian lives of women saints. It remains to consider equally significant divergences between Carolingian understanding of male and female sainthood. To chart these, we need to shift focus to consider the structure of these vitae. By interrogating the relationship between textual architecture and subject matter, it becomes evident that women's lives tended to lack the characteristic narrative structure of men's vitae, and that this reflects irreducible differences in the way women lived out their lives in the early Middle Ages.

The act of composing a written text orders words and thoughts. Early medieval hagiographers inherited two main models for doing this, initially distinct but in practice soon superimposed or blurred. One, indebted to classical biographical forms, put as much stress on the career structure and public deeds of the subject as it did on the qualities of character which those actions manifested. The other catalogued in discrete and episodic form the saint's miracles, connected by the constant of divine presence rather than by the chronology of consecutive narrative or career. Carolingian hagiography, it has been argued, evinced a preference for the former over the latter.(60) Hence the hagiographer of Willehad of Bremen portrayed the saint "not as a charismatic wonder-worker, but as a work-a-day administrator".(61)

However valid this generalization may be for the lives of prominent bishops and abbots, it cannot be sustained for lives of women. Of those under discussion here, only Helena and the Merovingian Balthild were acknowledged to have enjoyed anything approaching a career of public deeds and events. Hagiographers knew that both had, for a time, exercised the power, wealth and responsibility which came with being the wife and mother of rulers. But for Balthild, like Radegund before her, the route to sanctity had been away from the maelstrom of court politics, with all the prominence and power which that brought.(62) All other women's vitae presuppose life in the provinces, away from court. None offer a chronological narrative of the events which constitute a lifetime's work; most have a weak sense of the passing of time. In retaining an episodic structure lacking in clear consecutive sequencing of incidents, anecdotes and chapters, women's vitae are more reminiscent of many Merovingian texts than of Carolingian men's lives.

Although a notionally chronological structure framed by birth and death remains the underlying template, the only real chronological marker inside this framework is the moment of vocational commitment. For Hathumoda, abbess at the age of twelve, this occurred in her childhood. In most other instances, the decisive moment is rather the rejection of a suitor or the decision to take the veil in widowhood. (For Liutberga, the moment of decision came when the bishop agreed to wall her into a cell.) Such a turning-point certainly orders episodes into "before" and "after", but on each side of this crux the sequence of episodes is generally immaterial. Anecdotes could be rearranged without loss of effect: the portrait offered is synchronic, not sequential, static, not narrational. The absence of events cued in firm narrative sequence within the framing episodes of birth - vocational commitment - death undermines the biographical qualities of these vitae: they are more akin to portraits than to narrated careers.(63)

Embedded within this predominantly episodic structure, there are nevertheless occasional segments of text which do reveal a firmer narrative line. These fall into two clear groups: a note of where these occur underlines the distinctiveness of these women's vitae. The first consists of those passages where the focus of the text shifts to the saint's male relatives. In his Vita Opportunae, for example, Adalhelm devoted considerable space to recounting the sequence of events and plots which culminated in the murder of Opportuna's brother Godegrand, bishop of Sees (and therefore one of his own predecessors in the see). The story begins when Godegrand resigned his see to go on a lengthy pilgrimage, and entrusted its care to Grodobert, bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Exmes. But Grodobert turned out to be wicked and corrupt; he fleeced Godegrand's flock, and had himself installed as bishop. When Godegrand returned after seven years, Grodobert plotted to kill him without implicating himself. Opportuna, meanwhile, could only pray for her brother's return from pilgrimage and then prophetically foretell his death. Finally, she organized his burial in her nunnery: only at this point was she the main actor in the story.(64) Similar episodes of the betrayal and murder of a brother or husband also figure prominently in the lives of Rictrude and Anstrude; in the latter case, the saint too becomes a victim of an assassination attempt by her brother's killers. When attention switches to political intrigue, women become bystanders, potential victims or mourners, but not the central characters in a story.

The second situation in which chronologically ordered tales break into the episodic structure of women's lives concerns the negotiation and/or refusal of marriage. A king or prince might be involved as marriage-broker or arbiter, or even as suitor. In these situations too, women are potential victims; their spiritual resolve is tested but they do not initiate the action. The case of Amalberga makes the point: she took refuge in front of the altar of her chapel, prostrate, when the local ruler came to seek her for his bride; she preserved her virginity, but suffered a broken shoulder when he tried to force her assent.(65) In such cases, actions flow in a fast-paced story in which careful sequential disposition of the material is vital to both narrative and moral denouement.

Tales of marriage negotiations and of plots against brothers or husbands share in the world of men's careers, political intrigue and the marital politics of the royal court. A historically ordered sense of the passage of time thus does inform sections of some female vitae - but is confined to those passages where men's activities form both the focus of interest and the connecting thread from one chapter to the next. In Carolingian hagiography, women enter this world of narrated "historical" time only as pawns in the marriage market, or as bystanders of feuding. These are situations in which women respond, but do not initiate: they are not fully independent actors even in the narrative segments of their own vitae. The vitae of those women who never had to contend with an offer of marriage or with plots against a husband or brother, such as Bertila, Liutberga, Hathumoda, or the sisters Herlindis and Renula, accordingly lack such chronologically ordered segments. The association between men's politics and anecdotes connected to a historically structured narration is unmistakable. If a hagiographical narrative constructed on a secure chronological base presupposes either a public career or participation in the politics of the royal court and of marriage negotiation, then absence from court and from the marriage market renders narrative impossible. The result is biography without narrative. This suggests the limits of the adaptability of a hagiographical genre conceived from the fusion of classical and biblical literary traditions.(66)

Secluded from the world except when offers of marriage or political rivalries spilled over to affect them, these women resembled Anstrude, who "avoided the shipwrecks of this world like a careful sailor".(67) Those storms were the stuff of historians and chroniclers who charted the passage of time from the Creation to the Last Judgement. Far more than most of their male counterparts, women saints lived their lives within the regularities of liturgical time - the repetition of the psalter in monastic office and the remembering of the events of Christian history within the annual liturgical calendar. Gathered at the bedside of the dying Hathumoda, the sisters of Gandersheim measured her last moments by reciting the psalter from the beginning: she died (or so we are told) at the penultimate verse of Ps. 40: "But thou hast upheld me by reason of my innocence: and hast established me in thy sight for ever".(68) Psalm-singing assimilated each woman into the sacred time where Christian narrative fused with eternal message.

The predominantly episodic structure of women's vitae, broken only by chronologically ordered segments of political (male) import, marks out one of the major ways in which the hagiography of women diverged from the masculine norm. The reasons for this lie, I suggest, in the nature of the lives which early medieval women led both before and after becoming abbesses. Since women at most only intermittently entered - and in some instances never entered - the political sphere, the literary presentation of their lifetime activities reflected that fact. With this in mind, we may ask whether there were indeed ways in which Carolingian understanding of female sanctity differed from that of male sanctity.

V

THE FAMILIAL CONTEXT OF FEMALE SANCTITY

A common trope in medieval hagiography is that of the man who leaves family, possessions and marriage to follow Christ.(69) Early medieval monks did indeed often travel far from home as preachers or missionaries; many men renounced secular office to become bishops. By contrast, Carolingian images of female sanctity do not operate around an antithesis between family and religious calling: they present their subjects in a predominantly familial context.(70) This leitmotif runs through the texts in several ways. Several vitae open with such a strong focus on family and kin (biological, adoptive or spiritual) that the subject of the vita is largely displaced from the forefront of her own life. Liutberga, in particular, cedes much of the first half of her vita to the aristocratic Saxon family in whose household she served before she became a recluse.(71) It is also particularly common to find that, even after taking the veil, women's lives remain shaped by their family cares and attachments. The space devoted to the murders of both Anstrude's and Opportuna's brothers points in this direction, as does the spiritual advice and admonition which veiled widows lavished on their children, often directing their lives from the cloister. Bertha, for example, had taken the veil after twenty years of marriage. Two of her daughters entered the convent with her, the surviving one did not. When a suitor tried to remove one of her daughters from the convent, Bertha used all her resources to thwart him, finally outfacing him at the royal court. When the third daughter suffered ignominious treatment as the wife of an Anglo-Saxon king, Bertha again stepped in and fetched her unhappy daughter home.(72) Not only mothers and daughters entered the religious life together; so sometimes did sisters. Adalhard and Grinuara gave their two daughters Herlindis and Renula a thorough education in scripture, psalmody, writing and embroidery and then founded a convent for them on their family lands.(73) Similarly, Aldegund was closely associated with her sister in her religious life at Maubeuge.(74) Gandersheim had been founded in 845 x 852 by Liudolf, count of Saxony, and his wife Oda as a family community, to be ruled by their daughter Hathumoda. When plague struck at Gandershelm, Hathumoda's mother, aunt and sisters all rallied to her bedside. Her mother soothed her dying daughter, read to her and promised never to leave her side; her sisters settled the pillows under Hathumoda's head, rubbed her hands, feet and stomach when she was shivering, or fanned her and wiped away the sweat when she was feverish.(75) Nothing could be more familial than this.

Commenting on the patterns detectable in the lives of late medieval religious women, Caroline Walker Bynum has noted that commitment to a religious life rarely signalled a decisive break with family and home for women in the way that it did for men. Continuity rather than abrupt conversion shaped late medieval women's understanding of their lives.(76) With due allowance for the different social and ecclesiastical context of the early Middle Ages, Carolingian hagiography permits of analogous conclusions: that the dominant representation of early medieval women religious projected them within an uninterrupted web of family bonds.

In sum, almost all the women at issue here are presented within a familial environment. Why should this be so? At this point, we are entitled to suspect that the reality of Carolingian women's monasticism informs these texts. Ever since the inauguration of formally organized monastic communities for women in northern Gaul in the seventh century, convents had been essentially family-based. Almost all remained closely associated with the aristocratic kin group which had established them; few achieved the degree of juridical or financial independence typical of the major male communities of the Carolingian church. Scanty though the historical record of female communities is, it accords in suggesting that conventual life almost always remained closely bound up with kin group interests, whether in the seventh-century Columbanian foundations of northern Gaul or in newly converted Carolingian Saxony.(77)

Indeed, women's monasteries were often vital to the politics of a kin group. The women's houses of Ottonian Saxony preserved and fostered the memoria of their kindred, and ninth-century Carolingian nunneries may well have been similar.(78) Here in the monastery, women might embody the identity of their kinsfolk far more safely than did their lay sisters. Outside the confines of the cloister, women's marriage alliances might bring trouble to the family; accusations of sexual misconduct might impugn their family's reputation. Inside the cloister, women represented the advantages of female kin without the disadvantages of their sex. In addition, women religious epitomized all the strengths of the bonds of kinship with none of their potential risks. The touching scene of Hathumoda's relatives carefully tending her on her sick-bed symbolizes the love, affection and concord of her family. There is no hint here of the harsh realities of early medieval kinship-driven politics, of feuding and competition for wealth and honours within families, of brother fighting brother.(79) At the core of images of female sanctity lay the ideal of peace and concord within the kin group, an ideal promulgated in just those parts of the Carolingian empire where political competition was most acute.

VI

CONVENT LIFE AND RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION

Carolingian representations of female saints were predominantly concerned with women of noble birth who had passed part or all of their lives within a monastic community, usually as abbesses.(80) It could hardly be otherwise in an age which did not attribute sanctity to the laity, men or women, and which allowed women no formal role in the life of the church except as nuns.(81) This much is well known: but how did this claustral setting affect hagiographers' understanding of female sanctity? Was the essence of women's religious life a distinctively female spirituality?

There is no need to dwell on those aspects of these women's religious life which are the commonplaces of all early medieval hagiography. An ascetic piety demonstrated in prayer, scriptural study, moderate fasting and the keeping of vigils, coupled with a dedication to chastity, are constants of Latin hagiography, male and female. These traits simply reflect both the characteristic features of western monasticism and also the powerful influence of literary exempla. Instead, it is to miracles and visions that we need to look to find the Carolingian understanding of female sanctity.

Many early medieval hagiographers were aware of the discordant patristic attitudes towards miracles as a token of sanctity, for the Church Fathers had not been unanimous in accepting miracle-working as a necessary sign of sainthood. Most Merovingian hagiographers, however, continued to regard Martin of Tours as the exemplary holy man and thaumaturge, whose spiritual energy, or virtus, was manifested in miracles worked during his lifetime as well as in post mortem miracles performed at his tomb. Some ninth- and tenth-century writers, on the other hand, were more sensitive to the ambivalences of the early church, and on occasion expressed their scepticism about the significance to be afforded to lifetime miracles. Their concern did not focus on post mortem miracles so much as on whether wonder-working was an appropriate activity to attribute to the saints during their lifetimes.(82) Was miracle-working an attribute of the early medieval holy woman?

Jerome's hagiographical writings offer an instructive point of departure. Miracles abound in his lives of Malchus, Paul and Hilarion, but his description of female holiness in the epitaphium of Paula makes no mention at all of miracles.(83) In making this distinction, Jerome must have been aware that the scriptural precedents for miracle-working all pertained to men. In this light, it is little surprise that half of this group of Carolingian women's lives do not present their subjects as miracle-workers. Helena's only miracle was the discovery of the true cross; none are attributed to Amalberga, Balthild, Hathumoda, Liutberga, Maura, Opportuna or Rictrude. Instead of commemorating these women as wonder-workers, their vitae presented them as exemplary lives - as Adalhelm said of Opportuna, models of "religious faith and good conduct".(84) In these instances, Jerome's portrait of Paula would seem to have set the tone. If we note that all those vitae whose authors were bishops (or monks working to episcopal commission) have no lifetime miracles in them, then it would seem that the Carolingian episcopate consistently refused to entertain the idea that women might work miracles.(85)

But what of those vitae which do present women as wonder-workers? Had Carolingian hagiographers needed precedents to reassure them that women could indeed be represented as miracle-workers, they need have turned no further than the two earliest Merovingian women's vitae, the anonymous life of Genovefa and Venantius Fortunatus's life of Radegund. Both assimiliated their subjects into the miracle-working tradition with explicit deference to the example set by Martin.(86) In particular, Genovefa's claim to fame in her own lifetime rested principally upon her thaumaturgy, for her vita depicts a crowded series of cures, exorcisms, resurrections of the dead and vengeance miracles, not to mention the miraculous provision of food to the populace of Paris starving during a siege, or the prevention of shipping calamities on the Seine. To Genovefa, as to Radegund, post mortem miracles were attributed immediately after her death.(87) Yet in Carolingian hagiography, Genovefa and Radegund found no imitators.(88) A starker contrast with the early Merovingian tradition could hardly be imagined. Genovefa's miracles were of the sort common in men's vitae, yet in those Carolingian women's vitae which do attribute lifetime miracles to their subjects, the miracles are few in number, exclusively conventual in setting and modest in scope.

Most commonly in these anecdotes, the saint provides for the well-being of her community of nuns by the miraculous provision of food or drink and by healing sisters stricken with illness. Leoba, for example, cured Williswind of her heavily bleeding haemorrhoids; Sadalberga's faith provided the yeast necessary to have beer brewed in time to serve her spiritual mentor, Waldebert of Luxeuil.(89) Alternatively, the saint's miracles protect the convent and its inhabitants from fire or confirm the saint's spiritual insight and purity.(90) In comparison with the miracles attributed to men, the gaps in this typology are immediately evident. There are no miracles of vengeance, only one claim to revive a dead person and, with the exception of the putatively third-century hermit Verena of Zurzach, no claims to either exorcism or conversion of pagans.(91) Carolingian female hagiography made no claims for a miracle-working sanctity that sought a public forum or changed the world. If hagiographers did permit themselves to attribute lifetime miracles to their subjects, they located them only within the intimacy of the convent and the community of those who inhabited it.

The clear patterning of miracles as matters of convent life provides a hagiographical reflection of the constraints on women's behaviour laid down by imperial and episcopal decrees. Carolingian legislation made every effort to remove women religious from interaction with secular society and with male members of the church. Were the provisions of reform synods (most notably in 813 and 817) to have been fully enforced, the only regular contact which nuns and canonesses would have had with anyone outside their own convent would have been strictly regulated visits from priests and the arrival of pilgrims seeking cures at the relic shrines tended by the community.(92) Forbidden to administer their convent's estates, to go on pilgrimage or to travel (except when the abbess received a royal summons to court) women religious were to be secluded behind the convent gates.(93) Whether the insistence on claustration derived from an intention to protect men from polluting temptation, or from the need to protect nuns from exploitation and assault, its message was unambiguous: women religious had no place whatsoever in the world.

If canonesses and nuns were forbidden to stir beyond their own precinct, then the sainted exemplars held up to them had also to shun a public audience. Most successful in this respect was Agius's account of Hathumoda of Gandersheim. Although he wrote just as the stringent legislative prescriptions of the early ninth century were beginning to be relaxed, his account may stand as an epitome of the environment within which Carolingian women religious lived and prayed:

The sisters shared a common life and had their meals together. Their clothing was very similar, neither too stylish nor too rough, and not completely made of wool. None of the sisters ate with her relatives or with any guests, and unless given permission, did not speak to them. They did not go outside the convent (as many nuns do) to visit either their relatives or the convent's properties. Unless sickness made it necessary, none of them was allowed to eat outside the common refectory at the common mealtimes. They all took their food together at the same time in the same place, they slept together, they came together in prayer at the canonical hours, they left together to do whatever work had to be done. They were not allowed to have their own cells outside the cloister, nor to have servants . . . They were so separated from men that not even priests entered their cloister unless illness made it necessary or unless there was reasonable cause to summon the offices of a priest. These are the things which Hathumoda shared in common with the other nuns.(94)

Female sanctity and its expression in miracles, if any, lay within the cloister, away from public scrutiny or popular enthusiasm.

Indeed, for several hagiographers, the essence of women's sanctity lay not simply within the cloister walls, but within the individual soul. In this respect, Carolingian understanding of female sanctity found its sharpest divergence from the male norm. An interior spirituality expressed in visions is the most distinctive aspect of Carolingian hagiographical writing about women. Apart from the common trope of deathbed visions of an angelic summons to heaven or of a ladder stretching to the skies, Carolingian men's vitae do not (with a single exception) inscribe holiness in a visionary relationship with the deity.(95) For women it is often a central theme. The visions of Martin which Hathumoda and Liutberga enjoyed have already been mentioned; other women too are reported to have enjoyed an enduring dialogue with one or more saints, with Christ or the Virgin Mary.(96) Most notable in this respect is the life of Aldegund of Maubeuge (d. c.684). The earliest surviving recension (probably dating to the early ninth century) draws on accounts of visions which the saint herself is stated to have dictated to a priest at Nivelles. The vita presents her life as a complex and rich sequence of visions and of dialogues with Christ, St Peter, the Devil and messengers from Mary, through which she finds her vocation, is challenged and then confirmed in it.(97) The language of these visions is direct, personal, freed from hagiographical cliche and permeated by biblical resonances. No other vita describes quite so many visions in such fresh and vivid detail, but an acceptance of women's visionary spirituality nevertheless recurs sufficiently often to allow its significance to be stressed.

A recognition of, even emphasis upon, women's "perpetual interior life" may be traced back to the first half of the seventh century.(98) In his Vita Columbani, Jonas of Bobbio included detailed accounts of the visions experienced by several of the nuns of Faremoutiers; a similar compilation of visions made in the late seventh-century Anglo-Saxon nunnery at Barking was known to Bede; Gertrude had visions at Nivelles which were preserved in her vita, and here too Aldegund's visions were first committed to writing.(99) Faremoutiers, Barking and Nivelles were all seventh-century foundations deeply indebted to the inspiration of Columbanus (d. 615) and his followers.(100) The stringent discipline of Columbanian monasticism evidently provided an environment within which women might develop a visionary spirituality; equally importantly, the bishops and abbots who supervised these women's communities accepted and advertised this visionary insight.

Why? As a form of direct access to the divinity, visionary dialogue between women and angels enjoyed the most powerful sanction possible, the biblical precedent of Gabriel's annunciation to Mary. Yet visions are the most solitary and personal form of religious experience, requiring no social interaction and no audience. Visions could be private, so much so that Hathumoda would not reveal some of hers even to her sister or mother.(101) If they ever reached an audience outside the monastic community, it was through written, Latin accounts whose content could be manipulated and whose dissemination could be directed by the clergy.(102)

There is a marked contrast between the apparent readiness of Carolingian churchmen to accept the private visionary insights of women religious and their harsh condemnation of other forms of female religious expression. We hear, for example, of the "false prophetess" Thiota, who was condemned and flogged in 847 for claiming to know when the world would end, and for attracting a large following of clergy and laity.(103) A twelve-year-old girl who fasted for three years after receiving the sacrament one Easter attracted incredulous attention in 825, and in the early 840s, the bishop of Langres was concerned about women who fell to the ground in paroxysms of writhing in front of the relics of an unknown saint.(104) Hagiographical accounts of women's visionary experiences stand in counterpoise to such tales of dangerously public religious enthusiasms. These vitae mark out exemplary female piety as inner, private and mystical, and thereby fundamentally different both from laywomen's behaviour and from male sanctity.

Whether expressed through visions or by working miracles, female sanctity was safely domestic and familial. It shunned, or was excluded from, any audience beyond the saint's immediate circle of intimates. No wonder, then, that the two women whose personal experiences were formed by the expectations of the ninth-century church, Hathumoda and Liutberga, both shut themselves away far more completely than any Merovingian abbess had ever done, Hathumoda within her community, Liutberga walled inside her cell. No wonder, either, that historians have found Carolingian women so elusive and difficult to study.

VII

THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE SANCTITY

Agius's Vita Hathumodae is in many ways the high point of Carolingian hagiography about women. He situated his portrait of the abbess of Gandersheim within a literary tradition of great depth and subtlety, and played upon his readers' sensitivities by inviting them to share his emotions and grief at her early death. He stressed the family bonds which shaped her monastic life and asserted her adherence to the most rigorous standards of Carolingian claustration. He understood Hathumoda's spirituality in terms of visions alone, and never miracles. Here Agius found a way of marking out her own spiritual identity. Or did he? The emphasis on Martin as the subject of so many of her visions suggests a self-conscious renewing of the Sulpician debt, a stylistic marriage of the female visionary tradition and the patristic legacy.

What then was the problem of female sanctity for a writer as capable as Agius? One aspect was the issue of authority: how to shape a woman's life out of the stuff of male hagiographic convention and its deference to patristic auctores. The hagiographer had to tailor literary representations of sanctity to balance the inimitable and the exemplary in an age which needed hagiographical mirrors of saintly conduct for women religious but which was hostile to any living wonder-workers. Behind the representational difficulties of constructing a text was the additional question of whether sanctity presupposes an audience to appreciate the exceptional holiness of the person to whom it is attributed, for Carolingian legislation effectively denied women religious access to the secular world. Women could not perform miracles where they would be seen and noticed. Their world was the world of kin and cloister, not of politics and power. But, with the example of Genovefa readily at hand, sanctity could be seen to become power even when the saint in question was a woman. Here, then, was the crux of the matter. Could women be regarded as saints in the same way that so many men were? Or was there a way of expressing women's search for religious identity that turned their energies inwards, that side-stepped the need for audience and the attraction of the miracle-worker?

This complex problem was especially acute because the Carolingian church would not tolerate manifestations of religious charisma. Carolingian bishops strenuously opposed any living thaumaturge, preferring descriptions of sainthood to any first-hand experience of it. In addition, bishops monitored new cults of dead saints in a concerted effort to maintain episcopal control over the power that manifested itself through holy relics. In this environment, the vitae of the holy men and women of the past became a particularly sensitive vehicle for describing the world as it ought to be, rather than as it actually was. Women ought to be at the centre of the family, united in bonds of affection and in remembrance of their ancestors; they ought to be unblemished in their reputation for chastity; they ought to care for their dependants within the convent; and they ought to hold God in their inner self, privately. The women saints venerated by the Carolingians bore a heavy freight of ascribed meaning, a meaning that was consonant with the needs of the age in which their vitae were composed. Male saints, by contrast, represented other needs: the tradition of episcopal authority in a see, the imperative of conversion, the ascetic withdrawal of an individual or even sometimes the public activity of the miracle-worker. And yet, to represent their understanding of women's sanctity, Carolingian hagiographers turned time and again to the authoritative patristic accounts of male sanctity. The sanctity ascribed to women in Carolingian Europe had its own distinctive forms, but lacked its own distinctive vocabulary.

1 Adalhelm of Sees, Vita et miracula S. Opportunae, liber miraculorum, ch. 2 (ed. G. Henschenius, Acta Sanctorum [hereafter AA.SS.], Aprilis, iii, Antwerp, 1675, p. 68). Adalhelm wrote the Vita et miracula in 885-8; his tenure of the bishopric of Sees cannot be dated more precisely: Louis Duchesne, Fastes episcopaux de l'ancienne Gaule, 3 vols. (Paris, 1894-1915), ii, pp. 231, 233.

2 Adalhelm of Sees, Vita et miracula S. Opportunae, prologus (ed. Henschenius, p. 62): "non solum per viros viam iustitiae nobis patefecit, verum etiam per feminas et iuvenilis netatis puellas, exemplam religionis et bonae imitationis cunctis se amantibus ostendit".

3 For the phrase viam iustitiae, cf. Prov. 8:20, Matt. 21:32. The phrase exemplam religionis et bonae imitationis contains reminiscences of 1 Tim. 4:12, Titus 2:7 and Jas. 1:27.

4 Avaid Kleinberg, Prophets in their own Country (Chicago, 1992), p. 25.

5 Cf. the explanations of this dichotomy proposed by H. L. Mikoletsky, "Sinn und Art der Heiligung im fruhen Mittelalter", Mitteilungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, lvii (1949), pp. 83-112; Pierre Riche, "Les Carolingiens en quete de saintete", in Les fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe-XIIIe siecle) (Collection de l'Ecole francaise de Rome, cxlix, Rome, 1991), pp. 217-24.

6 Of Jewish origin and writing in Prague, Graus stationed himself apart from the mainstream of French and German work on the saints of the early Middle Ages: F. Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger (Prague, 1965), pp. 25-39.

7 This question has only recently begun to receive either theological or historical consideration: Richard Kieckhefer, "Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition", in Richard Kleckhefer and George D. Bond (eds.), Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 1-42; Lawrence S. Cunningham, "A Decade of Research on the Saints, 1980-1990", Theol. Studies, liii (1992), pp. 517-33. For a call for an understanding of the "history of holiness" within Catholic tradition, see Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, 23 vols. (London, 1961-92), iii, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger, pp. 99-101.

8 See the brief remarks in Julia M. H. Smith, "Early Medieval Hagiography in the Late Twentieth Century", Early Medieval Europe, i (1992), pp. 69-76.

9 Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago, 1982).

10 Kleinberg, Prophets, esp. ch. 1; Peter Dinzelbacher, "Heiligkeit als historische Variable", in Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (eds.), Heiligenverehrung in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Ostfildern, 1990), pp. 10-17.

11 Cf. the general (but sometimes inaccurate) remarks of Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg, "Saints' Lives as a Source for the History of Women, 500-1100", in Joel T. Rosenthal (ed.), Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History (Athens, Ga, 1990), pp. 285-320.

12 A case has been argued for presuming female authorship of many of the anonymous texts under discussion here: Rosamond McKitterick, "Frauen und Schriftlichkeit im Fruhmittelalter", in Hans-Werner Goetz (ed.), Weiblicher Lebensgestaltung im fruhen Mittelalter (Cologne, 1991), pp. 99-105.

13 There is much on the relationship of hagiography and reform ideology in John B. W. Nightingale, "Monasteries and their Patrons in the Dioceses of Trier, Metz and Toul, c.850-1000" (Univ. of Oxford D.Phil thesis, 1988); on the impact of Lotharingian reform on women's communities, see Michel Parisse, "Die Anteil der 1otharingischen Benediktinerinnen an der monastischen Bewegung des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts", in Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (eds.), Religiose Frauenbewegungen und mystische Frommigkeit im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1988), pp. 83-97.

14 Carolingian hagiography has received minimal historical investigation and there is no general survey of the huge corpus. An indispensable guide to the dating and authorship of many texts is W. Wattenbach and W. Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter: Vorzeit und Karolinger, ed. H. Lowe, 6 vols. (Weimar, 1952-90), esp. vols. v-vi. Selected texts are also discussed in more detail by Walter Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, iii (Stuttgart, 1991), devoted to "Carolingian biography". Detailed studies of selected groups of texts (each offering a contrasting approach) have been made by Deug-Su I, L'opera agiografica di Alcuino (Biblioteca Studi medievali, xiii, Spoleto, 1983); Theodor Kluppel, Reichenauer Hagiographie zwischen Walahfrid und Berno (Sigmaringen, 1980); Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orleans, 800-1200 (Cambridge, 1990).

15 Jacques Fontaine, "De la pluralite a l'unite dans le 'latin carolingien' ", Settimane di studio sull'alto medioevo, xxvii (1979), pp. 765-805. For close textual analysis of the process of revision, see Wandalbert yon Prum: Vita et miracula Sancti Goaris, ed. Heinz Erich Stiene (Leteinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters, xi, Frankfurt-on-Main, 1981); Deug-Su I, Opera agiografica di Alcuino, pp. 73-165; G. Sanders, "Le remaniement carolingien de la Vita Balthildis merovingienne", Analecta Bollandiana, c (1982), pp. 411-28.

16 This has been studied in detail only for Italy: Jean-Charles Picard, Le souvenir des eveques: sepultures, listes episcopales et culte des eveques en Italie du Nord des origines au Xe siecle (Bibliotheque des Ecoles francaises d'Athenes et de Rome, cclxviii, Rome, 1988). It was taking place elsewhere too: see, for example, Wattenbach and Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, ed. Lowe, v, pp. 537-8, 622-3.

17 Reginald Gregoire, Manuale di agiologia: introduzione alla letteratura agiografica (Bibliotheca Montisfani, xii, Fabriano, 1987), pp. 155-62; Martin Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Religuienkultes (Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental, xxxiii, Turnhout, 1979).

18 Jan N. Wood, "Missionary hagiography in the eighth and ninth centuries", in Karl Brunner and Brigitte Merta (eds.), Ethnogenese und Uberlieferung: Angewandte Methoden der Fruhmittelalterforschung (Vienna, 1994), pp. 189-99.

19 Joseph-Claude Poulin, L'ideale de saintete darts l'Aquitaine carolingienne (Quebec, 1975); Picard, Souvenir des eveques; Walter Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, ii (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 171-3.

20 See pp. 27-8 below.

21 For general surveys of this vast subject, see Martin Heinzelmann, "Neue Aspekte der biographischen Literatur in der lateinischen Welt (1.-6. Jh.)", Francia, i (1973), pp. 27-44; Claudio Leonardi, "I modelli dell'agiografia latina dall'opera antica al medioevo", in Passaggio del mondo antico al medioevo: da Teodosio a San Gregorio Magno (Atti del convegni Lincei, xlv, Rome, 1980), pp. 435-77; Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley, 1983). The older survey of Rene Aigrain, L'hagiographie: ses sources, ses methodes, son histoire (Paris, 1953), remains useful.

22 The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. H. Musurillo, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1979), passim.

23 See most recently Brent D. Shaw, "The Passion of Perpetua", Past and Present, no. 139 (May 1993), pp. 3-45.

24 Evelyne Patlagean, "L'histoire de la femme deguisee en moine et l'evolution de la saintete feminine a Byzance", Studi medievali, 3rd ser., xvii (1976), pp. 597-63, repr. in E. Patlagean, Structure sociale, famille, Chretiente a Byzance (London, 1981), ch. 11; Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Women in Early Byzantine Hagiography: Reversing the Story", in Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane and Elisabeth W. Sommer (eds.), That Gentle Strength (Charlottesville, 1990), pp. 36-59.

It should be noted that although a Latin translation of Gerontius's life of Melania the Younger was made very soon after its composition in 453, the Latin version remained virtually unknown in the medieval West: see the editor's introductory comments in The Life of Melania the Younger, ed. Elizabeth A. Clark (New York, 1984), esp. p. 2.

25 Jerome, Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae: Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, ed. Isidor Hilberg, 3 vols. (Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, liv-lvi, Vienna, 1910-18), ii, pp. 306-51 (no. 108). On late antique virginity literature in general, see John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay on the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague, 1975); Averil Cameron, "Virginity as Metaphor: Women and the Rhetoric of Early Christianity", in A. Cameron (ed.), History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (London, 1989), pp. 181-205; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988).

26 Franca E. Consolino, "Modelli di santita femminile nelle piu antiche passioni romane", Augustinianum, xxiv (1984), pp. 83-113.

27 The Greek lives of female ascetics and penitent prostitutes which became attached to the collection known as the Vitas patrum became available in Latin translation at some point in the early Middle Ages. The Latin versions of the lives in the Vitas patrum have not been edited or studied since the 1615 edition by Heribert Rosweyde, and have never been studied as a group. See Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa (Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 57-9. P. Petitmengin (ed.), Pelagie la penitente: metamorphoses d'une legende, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), provides a detailed textual study of the life of Pelagia and confirms its widespread ciculation in the West, but I have detected no influence of this or any other life of a penitent prostitute in Merovingian or Carolingian hagiography.

28 I follow Ian Wood's interpretation of the Vita Genovefae: I. Wood, "Forgery in Merovingian Hagiography", in Falschungen im Mittelalter, 6 vols. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica [hereafter M.G.H.], Schriften, xxxiii, Hanover, 1988-90), v, pp. 369-84, at pp. 376-9. The date of the first recension of the Vita Genovefae is provided by Martin Heinzelmann and Joseph-Claude Poulin, Les vies anciennes de Sainte Genevieve de Paris: etudes critiques (Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Hautes Eludes, IVe section, cccxxix, Paris, 1986).

29 For a recent critical discussion with full references to the earlier literature, see Maria Cristiani, "La saintete feminine du haut Moyen Age", in Fonctions des saints darts le monde occidental, pp. 385-434. English translations of seventeen vitae written between the sixth and the tenth centuries are availiable in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, trans. Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg and E. Gordon Whatley (Durham, N.C., 1992).

30 "Throughout history, the content of legendaries remains predominantly masculine and archaic": Guy Philippart, Les legendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques (Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental, xxiv-xxv, Turnhout, 1977), pp. 27-44, quotation from p. 43.

31 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini (Vie de Saint Martin, ed. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols., Sources chretiennes, cxxxiii-cxxxv, Paris, 1967-9, i, pp. 213-25). For the manuscript tradition of the lives by Venantius Fortunatus, see B. Krusch, "Fortunati Vita Germani", in M.G.H., Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum [hereafter S.R.M.], vii, pt 1 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1920), pp. 347-63; B. Krusch, "Venanti Honori Clementiani Fortunati presbyteri italici opera pedestria", M.G.H., Auctores antiquissimi, iv, pt 2 (Berlin, 1885), pp. v-xxi.

32 The earliest version of the Vita Genovefae (recension A) circulated widely in the early Middle Ages, as did the mid-eighth-century version, recension C. Three further redactions were made in the ninth century. See Martin Heinzelmann, "Manuscrits hagiographiques et travail des hagiographes: l'exemple de la tradition manuscrite des vies anciennes de Sainte Ganevieve de Paris", in M. Heinzelmann (ed.), Manuscrits hagiographiques et travail des hagiographes (Beihefte der Francia, xxiv, Sigmaringen, 1992), pp. 9-16. On the manuscript tradition of the lives of Radegund, see B. Krusch, "De Vita Sanctae Radegundis libri duo", in M.G.H., S.R.M., ii (Hanover, 1888), pp. 360-1; for the life of Gertrude, see B. Krusch, "Vita Sanctae Geretrudis", ibid., pp. 447-51, and B. Krusch, "Vita Sanctae Geretrudls [Appendix]", in M.G.H., S.R.M., vii, pt 2 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1920), pp. 791-3.

33 For the circulation on the continent of both the life of Brigid by Cogitosus and the anonymous Vita prima, see Richard Sharpe, "Vitae S. Brigitae: The Oldest Texts", Peritia, i (1982), pp. 81-106. Unresolved disagreements about the sequence in which the various lives of Brigid were written do not affect the fact that, in the Middle Ages as a whole, her life was probably the most frequently copied of all the vitae of early medieval women saints. Its influence on continental hagiography was nevertheless minimal.

34 At St Gall, where c.900 an industrious librarian collated the contents of all the collections of saints' lives and passions in the monastery's possession and listed them in calendrical order, only 42 women were included out of a total of 262 saints. Of these, 37 are early Christian martyrs; the remaining 5 are Genovefa, Brigid, Radegund, Gertrude and Odilia (a saint of the Alsatian ducal family whose cult was at Hohenburg): Emmanuel Munding, Das Verzeichnis der St Galler Heiligenleben und ihrer Handschriften in Codex Sangall. No. 566 (Texte und Arbeiten, i, pts 3-4, Beuron, 1918), pp. 3-13.

35 Adalhelm of Sees, Vita et miracula S. Opportunae, ch. 20 (ed. Henschenius, p. 67). Cecilia and Lucy were both widely commemorated in the early Middle Ages.

36 Vita Sadalbergae, ch. 25 (ed. B. Krusch, M.G.H., S.R.M., v, Hanover and Leipzig, 1910, p. 64), with Krusch's marginal annotations of the chronicles underlying this passage.

37 Agius of Corvey, Vita et obitus Hathumodae, chs. 13-14 (ed. G. H. Pertz, M.G.H., Scriptores, iv, Hanover, 1841, p. 171); Vita Liutbergae, ch. 35, ed. Ottokar Menzel, Das Leben des Liutberg: Eine Quelle zur Geschichte der Sachsen in Karolingerzeit (Deutsches Mittelalter, iii, Leipzig, 1937), p. 43. The life of Liutberga appears to have been written c.880, shortly after the saint's death. Its author may have been a cleric serving the monastery of Wendhausen or on the staff of the bishop of Halberstadt. On Agius of Corvey, author of the Vita Hathumodae, see the following paragraph.

38 Agius of Corvey, Vita et obitus Hathumodae, chs. 13, 14 (ed. Pertz, p. 171).

39 Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, iii, p. 352 n. 37; Peter yon Moos, Consolatio, 4 vols. (Munstersche Mittelalterschriften, iii, Munich, 1971-2), i, pp. 146-84.

40 For details of Agius's life, see Wattenbach and Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, ed. Lowe, vi, pp. 872-5.

41 See Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, iii, p. 353; Agius of Corvey, Vita et obitus Hathumodae, ch. 7 (ed. Pertz, p. 169): "Nulla in verbis eius procacitas, nulla incontinentia, lascivia fuit . . . Nullus earn aliquando rixantem, nullus maledicentem, nullus iurantem, nullus detrahentem, nullus mentientem audivit. Nemo eam iratam, nemo turbulentam, nemo multum et inhoneste ridentem vidit". ("There was no pertness, lack of self-restraint or wantonness in her speech . . . No-one ever heard her quarrelling, cursing, swearing, spreading slander, or laughing immoderately and dishonourably.") Cf. Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, ch. 27 (ed. Fontaine, i, p. 314): "Nemo umquam illum vidit iratum, nemo commotum, nemo maerentem, nemo ridentem; unus idemque fuit semper . . . Numquam in illius ore nisi Christus, numquam in illius corde nisi pietas, nisi pax, nisi misericordia erat". ("No-one ever saw him angered, disturbed, grieving, or laughing. He was always one and the same . . . There was never anything on his lips except [the name of] Christ, never anything in his heart except reverence, peace and mercy.")

42 For a demonstration of how such a text might have been read, see the analysis of Walter Daniel's account of the death of Ailred of Rievaulx by Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988), pp. 72-122.

43 Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae abbatissae Biscofesheimensis (ed. G. Waitz, M.G.H., Scriptores, xv, pt 1, Hanover, 1887, pp. 121-31).

44 Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae, praefatio (ed. Waltz, p. 122).

45 For details, see Wattenbach-Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, ed. Lowe, vi, pp. 709-10.

46 Vita Bertilae, ch. 9 (ed. W. Levison, M.G.H., S.R.M., vi, Hanover and Leipzig, 1913, p. 109).

47 See the list of sources identified by W. Levison, "Vita Bertilae" (ibid., p. 98) and the marginal annotations to his edition, passim. Such "plagiarism" was not confined to lives of female saints; instances in the Carolingian corpus of male hagiography are too numerous to mention.

48 Elena Giannarelli, La tipologia femminile nella biografia e nell'autobiografia cristiana del IVo secolo (Studi storici, cxxvii, Rome, 1980), pp. 18-25; Marie-Louise Portmann, Die Darstellung der Frau in der Geschichtsschreibung des fruheren Mittelalters (Basler Beitrage zur Geschichtswissenschaft, lxix, Basel, 1958), pp. 19-20.

49 Discussed by Marc van Uytfanghe, Stylisation biblique et condition humaine dans l'hagiographie mirovingienne, 600-750 (Verhandelingen van de koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Kl. Letteren, xlix, no. 120, Brussels, 1987), pp. 190-1.

50 Vita Liutbergae, chs. 3, 5 (ed. Menzel, pp. 12, 13).

51 Ibid., chs. 4, 5 (ed. Menzel, p. 13).

52 "Virilis superegredientis animi fiduciam": ibid., ch. 15 (ed. Menzel, p. 20).

53 Ibid., chs. 24, 30 (ed. Menzel, pp. 27, 35). Although frequently tempted by the Devil in her cell, it is noteworthy that none of the temptations were ever sexual.

54 Vita Aldegundis, ch. 8 (ed. L. d'Achery and J. Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, 9 vols., Paris, 1668-1701, ii, pp. 806-15, at p. 810). The date of this recension is open to debate, but is widely accepted to be early ninth-century.

55 Hucbald of Saint-Amand, Vita Rictrudis, ch. 14 (ed. D. Papebroch, AA. SS., Maii, iii, Antwerp, 1680, p. 84): "non trepide sed constanter, non tepide sed ferventer, non segniter seal sagaciter, non muliebriter sed viriliter".

56 Ibid., ch. 13 (ed. Papebroch, p. 84).

57 Ibid., ch. 20 (ed. Papebroch, p. 86): "Virilis tamen, quod ei inerat, animi robur muliebrem superavit affectum". Anstrude of Laon coped with the murder of her brother in similar fashion: "In potentia virtutis eius nec iam femineo, sed virili more consolabatur" ("she took comfort in her potent strength in manly, not womanly fashion"): Vita Anstrudis, ch. 9 (ed. W. Levison, M.G.H., S.R.M., vi, Hanover and Leipzig, 1913, p. 70).

58 Liutberga's hagiographer comments on her skill at "muliebris operibus": Vita Liutbergae, ch. 6 (ed. Menzel, p. 13). The "woman's work" par excellence was embroidery: see, most notably, Vita Herlindis et Renulae, chs. 5, 12 (ed. G. Henschenius and D. Papebroch, AA.SS., Martii, iii, Antwerp, 1668, pp. 387-8). The early embroideries surviving at Maaseik have been associated with these two sisters: Mildred Budny and Dominic Tweddle, "The Maaseik Embroideries", Anglo-Saxon England, xiii (1984), pp. 65-96.

Embroidering ecclesiastical vestments was also a chief occupation for Maura of Troyes, if the short life attributed to Prudentius of Troyes (d. 861) can be trusted. There are, however, many reasons for doubting its date and attribution: Prudentius of Troyes (?), Vita Maurae (ed. C. Suysken, AA.SS., Septembris, vi, Antwerp, 1757, pp. 276-7).

59 Vita Bertilae, ch. 5 (ed. Levison, p. 105): Bertila governed well, "viriliter cum summa sanctitate et religione" ("like a man, with great holiness and piety").

60 Friedrich Lotter, "Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischer Erkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen", Historische Zeitschrift, ccxxix (1979), pp. 298-356, at pp. 308-13; cf. Clare Stancliffe, Saint Martin and his Hagiographer (Oxford, 1983), pp. 90-102; Heinzelmann, "Neue Aspekte"; Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes, p. 97.

61 Thomas F. X. Noble, "Secular Sanctity: Forging an Ethos for the Carolingian Nobility" (forthcoming).

62 For Altmann's life of Helena (written at the request of Hincmar, archbishop of Reims), see Altmann of Hautvilliers, Vita seu potius homilia de S. Helena and Historia translationis ad coenobium Altivillarense (ed. J. Pien, AA.SS., Augusti, iii, Antwerp, 1737, pp. 580-99 and 601-3 respectively). On status inversion and the rejection of wealth as the central theme in Merovingian women's vitae, see Cristiani, "Saintete feminine". The revision of the Vita Balthildis effected c. 833 diminishes, but cannot efface, the original's emphasis on her political career: Sanders, "Remaniement carolingien de la Vita Balthildis", passim.

63 Even first-hand knowledge of the saint makes little difference; for all his intimate friendship with Hathumoda, Agius's Vita Hathumodae conforms to this pattern until his account of the abbess's last illness, death and funeral. Only here, when the hagiographer himself had participated in the events he described, did he establish a firm story-line: Agius of Corvey, Vita Hathumodae, chs. 23-5 (ed. Pertz, p. 174).

64 Adalhelm of Sees, Vita et miracula S. Opportunae, chs. 8-15 (ed. Henschenius, pp. 64-5).

65 Radbod of Utrecht, Tomellus seu sermo de vita et meritis Amalbergae (ed. J. B. Du Sollier, AA.SS., Julii, iii, Antwerp, 1723, pp. 88-90). Amalberga may have died c. 772.

66 The Ottonian solution to this dilemma was the development of a hagiography of women rulers whose saintliness lay in their responsible exercise of public power and wealth: Patrick Corbet, Les saints ottoniens: saintete dynastique, saintete royale et saintete feminine autour de l'an mil (Sigmaringen, 1986).

67 Vita Anstrudis, ch. 3 (ed. Levison, p. 67).

68 Agius of Corvey, Vita Hathumodae, ch. 24 (ed. Pertz, p. 174). On the antithesis between historical and hagiographical concepts of time, see further Michel de Certeau, "Hagiographie", in Encyclopedia Universalis: Corpus, new edn, 18 vols. (Paris, 1985), ix, pp. 68-73.

69 Cf. van Uytfanghe, Stylisation biblique et condition humaine, pp. 72-4.

70 Only three saints lacked a family context: the third-century hermit Verena of Zurzach, purported to have followed the Theban Legion from Egypt to the Alps; Genovefa, fifth-century virgin saint of Paris; and Balthild, initially an Anglo-Saxon slave in Francia.

71 Vita Liutbergae, chs. 1-14 (ed. Menzel, pp. 10-20). Cf. Vita Sadalbergae, chs. 1-8 (ed. Krusch, pp. 50-4); Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae, chs. 2-6 (ed. Waitz, pp. 123-4).

72 Vita Berthae, chs. 14-18, 21-4 (ed. J. B. Du Sollier, AA.SS., Julii, ii, Antwerp, 1721, pp. 52-3). The life of Bertha with its accompanying miracle collection was composed shortly after 895. The widowed Rictrude took a similar interest in organizing her offspring's lives: Hucbald of Saint-Amand, Vita Rictrudis, chs. 23-4, 25-7 (ed. Papebroch, pp. 86-7).

73 Vita Herlindis et Renulae, chs. 3-8 (ed. Henschenius and Papebroch, pp. 386-7).

74 Vita Aldegundis, chs. 4, 21-2 (ed. d'Achery and Mabillon, pp. 808, 813).

75 Agius of Corvey, Vita Hathumodae, chs. 15-16, 20-1 (ed. Pertz, pp. 171-2, 173).

76 Caroline Walker Bynum, "Women's Stories, Women's Symbols: A Critique of Turner's Theory of Liminality", in R. L. Moore and Frank E. Reynolds (eda.), Anthropology and the Study of Religion (Chicago, 1984), pp. 105-25, repr. in C. Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York, 1991), pp. 27-51.

77 Jean-Marie Guillaume, "Les abbayes de femmes en pays franc, des origines a la fin du VII siecle", in Michel Parisse (ed.), Remiremont: l'abbaye et la ville (Nancy, 1980), pp. 29-46; Jean Verdon, "Notes sur le role economique des monasteres feminins en France dans la seconde moitie du IXe et au debut du Xe siecle", Revue Mabillon, lviii (1970-75), pp. 329-343; W. Kohl, "Bemerkungen zur Typologie sachsischer Frauenkloster im Karolingerzeit", in Untersuchungen zu Kloster und Stift (Veroffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts fur Geschichte, lxviii, Gottingen, 1980), pp. 112-39; Michel Parisse, "Les femmes au monastere dans le nord de l'Allemagne du IXe au XIe siecle: conditions sociales et religieuses", in Werner Affeldt (ed.), Frauen in Spatantike und Frahmittelalter: Lebensbedingungen - Lebensnormen - Lebensformen (Sigmaringen, 1990), pp. 311-24, with important commentary by Janet L. Nelson, pp. 331-2.

78 K. J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), pp. 72-3; Janet L. Nelson, "Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages", in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Studies in Church Hist., xxvii, Oxford, 1990), pp. 53-78.

79 A point made throughout by Leyser, Ottonian Saxony, but see esp. pp. 11-12 for details of tensions within Hathumoda's kin group, the Liudolfings. Recent studies which stress the conflicts within the Carolingian aristocracy are: Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992); Julia M. H. Smith, Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 4.

80 Only two women were not nuns, the Empress Helena and the Merovingian holy woman, Genovefa. Even the third-century Verena of Zurzach is implausibly presented in the Vita Verenae as establishing a community of nuns in the midst of the pagan invasions of Alemannia: Die heilige Verena von Zurzach: Legende, Kult, Denkmaler, ed. A. Reinle (Basel, 1948), pp. 26-37. On the composition of this Vita at Reichenau, 881-96, see Theodor Kluppel, Reichenauer Hagiographie zwischen Walahfrid und Berno (Sigmaringen, 1980), pp. 60-81.

81 On the controversial first lay saint of the Middle Ages, the tenth-century count Gerald of Aurillac, see most recently Stuart Airlie, "The Anxiety of Sanctity: St Gerald of Aurillac and his Maker", Jl Eccles. Hist., xliii (1992), pp. 372-95. Women's informal contributions to the life of the church have been made clear by Janet L. Nelson, "Les femmes et l'evangelisation au IXe siecle", Revue du Nord, lxviii (1986), pp. 471-85.

82 Marc van Uytfanghe, "La controverse biblique et patristique autour d'un miracle, et ses repercussions sur l'hagiographie darts l'Antiquite tardive et le haut Moyen Age latin", in Hagiographie, cultures, societes, IV-XII siecle (Paris, 1981), pp. 205-31; Giulia Barone, "Une hagiographie sans miracles: observations en marge de quelques vies du Xe siecle", in Fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental, pp. 435-46.

83 As pointed out by van Uytfanghe, "Controverse biblique et patristique autour d'un miracle", p. 215.

84 See n. 2 above.

85 Radbod of Utrecht, Tomellus seu sermo de vita et meritis Amalbergae (ed. Du Sollier, pp. 88-90); Altmann of Hautvilliers, Vita seu potius homilia de S. Helena (ed. Pien); Prudentius of Troyes (?), Vita Maurae (ed. Suysken, pp, 275-8; but see n. 58 above on the uncertain authenticity of this); Adalhelm of Sees, Vita et miracula S. Opportunae (ed. Henschenius, pp. 62-7); Hucbald of Saint-Amand, Vita Rictrudis (ed. Papebroch, pp. 81-9), written at the request of Stephen, bishop of Liege.

86 Radegund: Jacques Fontaine, "Hagiographie et politique de Sulpice Severe a Venance Fortunat", Revue de l'histoire de l'eglise de France, lii (1976), pp. 113-40; Genovefa: Martin Heinzelmann and Joseph-Claude Poulin, Les vies anciennes de Genevieve de Parts: etudes critiques (Paris, 1986), pp. 127-32.

87 Vita Genovefae, chs. 54-5 (ed. B. Krusch, M.G.H., S.R.M., iii, Hanover, 1896, p. 237); Baudonivia, Vita Radegundis, chs. 24-6 (ed. B. Krusch, M.G.H., S.R.M., ii, Hanover, 1888, pp. 393-4).

88 Though it should be noted that the four eighth- and ninth-century recensions of the Vita Genovefae do not attempt to alter the overall image of the saint as wonder-worker.

89 Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae, ch. 15 (ed. Waitz, p. 128); Vita Sadalbergae, ch. 20 (ed. Krusch, p. 61). See also ibid., ch. 19 (ed. Krusch, p. 61); Vita Aldegundis, chs. 24, 27 (ed. d'Achery and Mabillon, p. 814); Vita Austrobertae, ch. 16 (ed. J. Ghesquiere, Acta Sanctorum Belgii selecta, 6 vols., Brussels 1783-94, v, p. 441).

90 Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae, chs. 12, 13, 14 (ed. Waitz, pp. 127-8); Vita Aldegundis, chs. 21, 27 (ed. d'Achery and Mabillon, pp. 813-14); Vita Sadalbergae, chs. 15, 21 (ed. Krusch, pp. 58-9, 62); Vita Austrobertae, chs. 10, 16 (ed. Ghesquiere, pp. 436-7, 441).

91 Vita Anstrudis, ch. 20 (ed. Levison, p. 74); Vita Verenae, ch. 7 (ed. Reinle, pp. 27-8).

92 On the siting of relic shrines within nunneries, see the Marquise de Maille, "Les monasteres columbaniens de femmes", in the Marquise de Maille, Les cryptes de Jouarre (Paris, 1971), pp. 13-57, esp. pp. 26-7, 55-6. Miracles worked at tombs and shrines within nunneries are noted in Vita Anstrudis, chs. 23-37 (ed. Levison, pp. 75-8); Miracula Austrobertae (ed. J. Bollandus, AA.SS., Februarii, ii, Antwerp, 1658, pp. 419-23); Liber de miraculis et translatione Berthae, chs. 1-4 (ed. J. B. Du Sollier, AA.SS., Julii, ii, Antwerp, 1721, pp. 54-5); De virtutibus Geretrudis abbatissae (ed. B. Krusch, M.G.H., S.R.M., ii, Hanover, 1888, pp. 464-74); Vita Herlindis et Renulae, chs. 20-5 (ed. Henschenius and Papebroch, pp. 390-1); Liber de miraculis Sanctae Waldburgis (Ein bayerisches Mirakelbuch aus der Karolingerzeit: Die Monheimer Walpurgis-Wunder des Priesters Wolfhard, ed. Andreas Bauch, Quellen zur Geschichte der Diozese Eichstatt, ii, Regensburg, 1979).

93 The synodal legislation is summarized by Wilfried Hartmann, Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit ira Frankenreich und in Italien (Paderborn, 1989), pp. 424-7. See also Jane T. Schulenberg, "Strict Active Enclosure and its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience, 500-1100", in John A. Nichols and Lillian T. Shanks (eds.), Medieval Religious Women, 2 vols. (Cistercian Studies, lxxi-lxxii, Kalamazoo, 1984-7), i, pp. 51-86.

94 Agius of Corvey, Vita Hathumodae, ch. 5 (ed. Pertz, p. 168). On the relaxation of the strict claustration of the earlier ninth century by the Council of Mainz in 888, see Hartmann, Synoden der Karolingerzeit, p. 363.

95 The exception is Rimbert, Vita Anskarii (ed. G. Waitz, M.G.H., Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, Hanover, 1884). Visions as a mark of sanctity are significant, however, in male hagiography of the seventh century from Irish or Hiberno-Frankish circles: Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, ii, pp. 108-9.

96 See n. 37 above; and for others of Hathumoda's visions, see Agius of Corvey, Vita Hathumodae, chs. 11-12, 16, 18 (ed. Pertz, pp. 170-1). For other accounts of visions, see De virtutibus Geretrudis abbatissae, ch. 4 (ed. Krusch, p. 458); Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae, ch. 8 (ed. Waitz, p. 125); Vita Odiliae, chs. 12, 17 (ed. W. Levison, M.G.H., S.R.M., vi, Hanover and Leipzig, 1913, pp. 44, 46).

97 Vita Aldegundis, chs. 5-18 (ed. d'Achery and Mabillon, pp. 809-12).

98 The phrase "interiorem vitam ac perpetuam" is applied to Gertrude in the collection of miracles compiled shortly after her death: De virtutibus Geretrudis abbatissae, ch. 1 (ed. Krusch, p. 464).

99 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, ii, 11-22 (ed. B. Krusch, M.G.H., S.R.M., iv, Hanover and Leipzig, 1902, pp. 130-43); Bede, Historia Ecclesiastics, iv, 7-11 (ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1969, pp. 356-8); De virtutibus Geretrudis abbatissae, ch. 4 (ed. Krusch, p. 458).

100 Faremoutiers and Nivelles: Friedrich Prinz, Fruhes Monchtum im Frankenreich (Munich, 1965), pp. 142-3, 185-8; Barking: Ian N. Wood, "Frankish Hegemony in England", in Martin O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-West Europe (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 240-1.

101 Agius of Corvey, Vita Hathumodae, chs. 16-17 (ed. Pertz, p. 172).

102 For a clear example of this, see Shaw, "Passion of Perpetua", pp. 30-45. The life of Aldegund of Maubeuge offers an early medieval parallel, for successive later recensions reduce the visionary accounts to ever briefer statements, and direct speech gradually gives way to indirect reports: Vita secunda Aldegundis (ed. J. Bollandus and G. Henschenius, AA.SS., Januarii, ii, Antwerp, 1643, pp. 1035-40); Vita tertia Aldegundis (ed. J. Bollandus and G. Henschenius, ibid., pp. 1040-7).

103 Annales Fuldenses, a. 847, ed. F. Kurze (Hanover, 1891), pp. 86-7.

104 Annales Regni Francorum, a. 825, ed. F. Kurze (Hanover, 1895), p. 168; letter of Amolo of Lyons to Theodbold of Langres (ed. E. Dummler, M.G.H., Epistolae, v, Berlin, 1889, pp. 363-8).

Julia M. H. Smith Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut

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Author:	Smith, Julia M.H.
Publication:	Past & Present
Date:	Feb 1, 1995
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