8 - Re-membering Saintly Relocations: The Rewriting of Saint Congar’s Life within the Gendered Context of Romance Narratives

Summary

In his introduction to Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, Jeffery Jerome Cohen argues that ‘gender, like time and space, is continually negotiated, continually in the act of becoming’. In his discussion of ‘how ideas and ideologies of masculinity were regarded and elaborated in the Middle Ages’ he suggests that such elaborations offer ‘moments in which we can observe the performance of masculinity and masculinity in performance’. This essay proposes that the twelfth-century vita of the sixth-century Saint Congar, dismissed by the Oxford Dictionary of Saints as ‘concocted at Wells’ and as ‘a hotch-potch of hagiographical and folkloric elements mainly drawn from the Lives of other Welsh saints’, provides just such an opportunity. The representation of Congar – the obscure eponymous saint of Congresbury in Somerset – within this vita will be explored in terms of his rejection and/or appropriation of differing masculinities in his ‘life-journey’ as he establishes himself as a successful and powerful saint within the terms and context of the narrative. The twelfth-century dating of the text places the narrative in a liminal space on two sets of significant boundaries – a chronological boundary between the Anglo-Saxon and Norman eras in Britain, and a literary boundary between the genres of romance and hagiography. The notion of liminality, as developed by the social anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, is therefore a powerful concept here, as it illuminates the nature of those processes in the narrative where conflict and/or connection between different systems give rise to change and development and the creation of new identities. As Victor Turner suggests:

The attributes of liminality or liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classification that normally locates states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.

In this present essay, Congar is viewed as a liminal figure in the ‘betwixt and between’ of significant boundaries, in a narrative that has been formed, transformed and relocated across time and through a variety of memorializations, retellings and purposeful re-creations. What appears to be a simple unsophisticated narrative is in fact a palimpsestic, multilayered record which repays close attention.