Excerpt from
Women at the Table
Three Medieval Theologians
Marie Anne Mayeski

A Michael Glazier Book published by the Liturgical Press

© 2004 by the Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or any retrieval system, without the written permission of Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.

Contents

Preface

Biography was an important genre for the early Christian theologians. Major theologians such as St. Athanasius of Antioch and St. Jerome wrote biographies of the desert dwellers and St. Augustine used autobiography to explore the nature of God. For these early masters, writing the lives of the saints was a genuinely theological exercise. In spite of this, medieval hagiography has almost never been accorded careful theological scrutiny. Bring up the topic of medieval theology in a group of theologians, and everyone assumes that the conversation is about Aquinas or his scholastic predecessors. Theological work on the Christian tradition has focused almost exclusively on philosophical treatises and the on-going attempt to retrieve the tradition as it developed in the Middle Ages has virtually ignored the abundant sources in the hagiographical tradition. Such a concentration has forced women’s voices to the outermost periphery of theological interest. It has also significantly impoverished our present understanding of the tradition. This study will be a significant move to correct that trend in theological scholarship.

The first chapter will consider the reasons for contemporary theological neglect of hagiographical sources, especially in the light of the scholarship of social historians who find them both rich and persuasive. It will also consider the evidence that justifies a theological reading for hagiographical texts. This evidence includes the explicit intentions that medieval hagiographers give for their writing and their descriptions of its character. Finally, the first chapter will also suggest the methodological issues that govern a retrieval of the narrative sources.

Three case studies follow by way of example. The first in a theological analysis of Rudolf of Mainz’s life of St. Leoba in the context of the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. St. Leoba, an Anglo-Saxon missionary to Germany; her life exposes significant ecclesiological themes as well as related presentations of Christology and anthropology. The second case study focuses on the life of Margaret, Queen of Scotland, written in the very early twelfth century for her daughter, newly crowned queen of Norman England. In this study the major themes cluster around the issues of inheritance and genealogy, with questions about original sin, inherited virtue, and the redemptive character of childbearing. In the final study, the text is Baudonivia’s life of Radegunde, a queen of sixth-century Francia. This life is an exposition of a theology of power, as understood by those usually excluded from it, in the light of the cross of Christ.

I have chosen these three texts because, first, written closely in time to the saint’s actual life and contemporary sources, written or oral, they are identified in all three texts. This awareness of historicity by the original authors, even when their norms of what is historical differ significantly from our own, indicates their understanding of the importance of history in Christian theology. Second, they were all written during periods of significant theological transition, when external circumstances required significant adaptations of church tradition. The Christian tradition is an organic reality whose developments are always in response to the external stimuli of new contexts, new pastoral needs, and new cultural values. A new context means that institutions and beliefs that have been assumed and accepted become once again the matter for discussion.

Finally, I have chosen these texts because women played a part in their creation as well as being their subjects. Baudonivia, the author of the life of Radegunde, is one of the few named women authors in the early Middle Ages and, as such, deserves a very careful reading. Rudolf acknowledges and names the women whom he uses as sources for his text. They were women who knew St. Leoba personally. In the case of the life of St. Margaret, her daughter commissioned the text, and there is significant textual evidence that the author, a monk who served as St. Margaret’s chaplain, has her daughter in mind, particularly when crafting his descriptions of Margaret’s virtues.

The connection of these texts with the lives and world of women is important to this study. In these texts women play some part in the theological conversation that created them and subsequently arose around them. In Writing a Woman’s Life, a feminist analysis of women’s biographical writing, Carolyn Heilbrun gives a clear and helpful definition of power: “[It] is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter.” Among the many ways in which women have been denied power within the Christian Church has been their routine and consistent exclusion from the theological conversation. Denied ordination to significant places in ministry and habitually denied the education that would have enabled them to have significant influence, women could and did act on behalf of the Church. They could become holy and esteemed and create institutions within which churchmen could exercise their influence, but they could not enter easily into the theological discourse that shaped their lives and their faith. Their lives, however, were recorded in large numbers and if we understand that the texts that lauded their accomplishments were genuinely theological texts, then, through them and in them, they were “at the table” where theological conversations took place. In that sense, the women of these texts, whether they play the role of subjects, sources, author or intended audience, exercised some theological power in their formulation. They helped to shape the theology that is exposed in the texts, a theology that, although it is not exclusively about them, includes them in its discussion of central issues of the tradition.

1

Theology and Narrative Sources: An Introduction

The Current Theological Neglect of the Lives of the Saints

In their investigation of the medieval period of the tradition, Catholic theologians have long privileged the scholastic texts and thinkers. There are many possible reasons for this privilege. The monumental accomplishment of the great scholastics such as Bonaventure and Aquinas has understandably drawn all eyes to their work and tends to dwarf other contributions. Leo XIII’s virtual anointing of Aquinas as the normative Catholic theologian in Aeterni Patris (1879) only reinforced the implicit consensus that Thomistic theology is the medieval tradition. Since Catholic theology after the Reformation retained, and indeed emphasized, its concern for the integration of theology and philosophy, it is logical that contemporary theologians would look to the philosophical sources of the Middle Ages and these, undeniably, are richest during the scholastic period.

But the theologian concerned to understand and build upon the fullness of the Catholic tradition must wonder whether the privileged position of scholastic writers might indeed have blinded us to the theological importance of other texts. To be more specific, one may question whether or not narrative sources, specifically the lives of the saints, have been ignored for the wrong reasons and to the detriment of the Catholic theological project. It is the question of medieval theological sources that this book will address.

To answer this question we must first consider some of the reasons that theologians ignore hagiographical texts. Then we must consider what medieval writers themselves might have thought they were doing when they composed such lives. That will enable us to look, finally, at some particular texts and attempt to give them a theological reading.

Possible Reasons for Ignoring the Lives of the Saints

Certain assumptions made about hagiographical texts contribute to their theological neglect. They are assumed to reflect only “popular religiosity” and, although this makes them valuable in documenting the religious and moral catechesis of the people of God in a variety of contexts, they are usually dismissed as “uncritical” and unrelated to the actual formulation of the tradition itself. The label of “popular religion” does, often rightly, identify the political motives of those who crafted the narrative texts; some are the work of those who sought to elevate the importance (and lucrative potential) of particular shrines or who hoped to control the behavior of the laity by giving them appropriate models of behavior. Such judgments have often been made, however, without careful attention to the provenance of each specific text and this failure is, in itself, seriously uncritical. Certainly the theological value of these texts is uneven, but, again, the value of each can only be determined by careful study.

Another assumption about medieval narrative texts is that they may be of interest to the field of history, but are problematic for the study of systematic theologians. Certainly historians have found in them rich evidence to document specific lives and communities, evidence that is particularly helpful in illuminating the lives of “the people,” ordinary Christians otherwise unnoticed. In a helpful essay entitled “Saints, Scholars and Society: The Elusive Goal,” Patrick Geary has identified recent trends in the historical analysis of the vitae sanctorum. He notes how historians have discovered the importance of such texts, not only for what he calls “incidental historical information” (p. 5), but also for the study of social values.

The importance of hagiographical texts in social history and their strength, particularly, in documenting otherwise neglected lives have brought them to the attention of feminist historians. Scholars like Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg have discovered that, “unlike many other sources of the Middle Ages, saints’ lives focus a great deal of attention on women: the vitae are directly concerned with female roles in the church and society as well as contemporary perceptions, ideals, and valuations of women.”

That the ideal of holiness proferred by the vitae sanctae was also shaped by gender concerns has not gone unnoticed. Jo Ann McNamara has, for instance, uncovered the textual tradition dependent upon the life of Helena, mother of Constantine. McNamara demonstrates that a feminization—and limitation—of royal power was strongly encouraged by a series of royal women’s lives. Similarly, Lois L. Huneycutt has studied how the biblical story of Esther was used to empower medieval Christian queens in their ambiguous position as intercessors with the king.

In all of these fine studies—and many others like them—the specifically religious element of the vitae sanctorum has been utilized in three specific ways. One, the Christian values and virtues proposed by the text are understood to reveal the social and religious values of a given Christian society. Two, the concrete historical details identifiable in the text have been used as windows into the religious activity of persons otherwise undocumented: ordinary Christians and, especially, women of all classes. Three, the religious ideology of Christian faith has been seen in the texts as empowering women and other marginalized groups to act beyond the usual social boundaries of their class and gender. But while the specifically religious content of hagiographical texts does reveal themes and conditions important to Christian history, it does not ensure that hagiographical texts will bear the weight of interest by systematic theologians, even those who seek to understand the full richness and extent of the Christian tradition.