8 - St Eufrosine’s Invitation to Gender Transgression

Summary

Abstract

In the Old French Vie de sainte Eufrosine (c. 1200), gender transgression is central to the poet's pedagogical techniques. The fusion of masculine and feminine elements in Panuze's lamentations and in the roles he assumes demonstrates the depth of his virtuous love for his daughter. The poet imitates Panuze, both showing the audience how to cultivate virtuous love and involving them in the transgression of gender to do so. Throughout, the poem presents masculine and feminine traits as equal. Eufrosine's transgressive models offer modern readers the opportunity to rethink medieval orthodoxy and, consequently, the history behind modern identities and inequities.

Keywords: St Euphrosine, St Alexis, gender, exemplarity, hagiography, medieval, Old French

What if the queerness of medieval saints was meant to be imitated, and not just by those called to a saintly or celibate life? In the medieval French and English traditions, we have long recognized that St George's submission to tortures that penetrate his body, St Catherine's bold and effective preaching, and St Margaret's violent slaying of a dragon (to name only a few) all reflect behaviours that transgress modern ideas of pre-modern gender ideologies. The last few decades of scholarship on gender identities and roles among the clergy, monks, nuns, and others have suggested that such transgressions are, in fact, simply extreme forms of not uncommon ideals among the celibate, and perhaps even among the merely chaste. However, even as we recognize a broader circle of potentially transgressive imitators of the saints, the belief endures that, in medieval European cultures, gender ideologies were essentially hierarchical and normative.

The tension between the atypical gender behaviour of the saints and modern conceptions of medieval gender ideologies is perhaps most noticeable in scholarship on the group of legends about holy people designated as ‘transvestite’ or ‘cross-dressing’ saints or as monachoparthenoi (monkvirgins). Surviving in many languages and composed from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, these narratives, many of which lack a verifiable historical basis, tell of a pious young person who grows up female for a time and later dresses in masculine clothing to pursue a religious calling; other characters then perceive the protagonist as a man until they or the saint eventually identify the saint as female, generally close to the saint's death.