International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2009 - Space/l'Espace
Abstract

This paper will investigate the connections between place, knowledge, and identity in Old French hagiography. As remarked by Michel de Certeau, hagiographic literature revolves around a depiction of place that demonstrates and locates a certain form of truth. Saints’ lives’ ideological aims thus rely upon an epistemology of place as opposed to time, drawing connections between knowledge and symbolic space also attested elsewhere in medieval culture. More recently, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has linked the discursive construction of place as a mode of epistemology to sexuality and desire. The ‘epistemology of the closet’ that Sedgwick explores is a discursive and epistemological construct that relies on a certain conceptualisation of enclosed, private, closeted space – a conceptualisation that paradoxically seems to make knowable and public the sexuality of certain individuals.

Drawing on the work of Sedgwick and others, I will argue in this paper that, in the case of certain female saints, the hagiographic epistemology of place is connected to sexual identity. In La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and La Vie de Sainte Marine, monastic enclosure accompanies the female saint’s adoption of male disguise, thereby associating the saint’s alternative sexual and social positioning with her change in physical location. On one level, this is a spatial expression of a certain relationship to gender and sexuality with which the saint is associated from the outset. On another level, this spatial framing provides a means of organising and re-ordering knowledge of saint’s identity among the text’s readers or listeners. Location in these texts is a means of making visible what is taken to be a spiritual reality from the start: it is part of the spatial reorganisation that makes manifest the saint’s identity as such. The paper will thus explore how saints’ lives construct a form of ‘closet’ that defines the gender and sexual identity of the female saint as well as knowledge about that identity. It will also consider how this closet reorganises the modes of knowledge and desire that underpin response to the saint.