Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100 by Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg

Abstract

Forgetful of Their Sex. Female Sanctity and Society, ca 500-1100. By Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 587. $40.00.) This book represents nearly twenty-five years of research into the lives of female saints for the years 500 to 1100. In addition to the introduction which outlines her methodology and sources, Schulenburg describes the various aspects of saintly women in eight chapters before her concluding epilogue titled Celestial Gynaeceum. As might be expected, the saints from this time in the early Christian Church became saints because of local, popular support rather than through a formal process of papal canonization. In her identification of over 2,200 female and male saints in western Europe reviewed by the author to write this book, Schulenburg found that about one in seven were women or around fifteen percent of the total for the years of her study. But the book is more than just animbus count, although the statistical data are there for those who are interested. If Schulenburg's account about holy women sounds familiar it's because portions of Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 appeared in previously published collections of essays. The author was drawn to the field of hagiography with its disadvantages and limitation as source material because her focus on women's history for the early medieval period is one where documentation on women is notably scarce. Schulenburg acknowledges the problems of authenticity but claims that social historians can find in these holy vitae incidental facts that are impossible to find from any other source. Moreover, the sheer volume on the holy dead provides rough data that can be useful to make comparisons between saints both male and female over the time period of the book's focus. Schulenburg argues that she was more successful by studying the vitae collectively rather than in isolation, but she needed to apply textual criticism when reading each life as well as comparing information from other sources like calendars and liturgies when available. Early Church Fathers are cited by the author to establish the standards required of women to be saintified. Practices on fasting,vigils, and enclosure were expected and numerous examples were provided testifying that holy women followed those standards. In particular, women needed to guard their virginity both physically and spiritually. If nuns remained spiritually chaste, the fathers were willing to accept the loss of virginity due to rape, but some female religious preferred to remain physically pure by resorting to self-disfigurement such as cutting off their noses and lips as defense against would-be rapists. …