UCLA

A corpus of Anglo-French hagiography composed between 1135 and 1220 tells the lives of Biblical and Late Antique women with origins in the eastern Mediterranean: the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene who lived in Jerusalem, Margaret of Antioch, Catherine of Alexandria, and Mary of Egypt. These narratives circulated and gained a popular audience in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Normandy, England, and France. Hagiography scholars have focused on the ways in which vernacular portrayals of female saints reveal medieval ideas of gender; this study evaluates the extent to which ideology is indexed through both the gender and the geographical origin of the saints in question. It considers how the contexts of pilgrimage and crusade offer a new framework for the larger discussion of these texts. What is the nature of the link that twelfth-century Anglo-Norman hagiographers sought to establish with the wider, non-western world?

An inquiry into the provenance of these legends reveals that their underlying ideology often complicates or contradicts orthodox theological definitions of sainthood elaborated by twelfth-century Christian theologians. They maintain instead a connection to much earlier traditions developed in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. An examination of the departures from Latin source texts reveals the desire to appeal to the sensibilities of a vernacular audience composed of a nobility whose aspirations of conquest were increasingly trained on the lands of the southern and eastern Mediterranean.

Drawing on modern critical theory, as well as recent research in Mediterranean studies, The Saints of the Crusader Saints revisits the foundational moments of Anglo-French vernacular culture, in which distinctive modes of difference mediate definitions of sainthood. The legends of saintly women from the opposite shores of the Mediterranean participate in the ideological process that aimed for the Christian recovery of the Holy Land. By offering narratives that linked early Christian women with their medieval audience, hagiographers bolstered the claims of western Europe's feudal rulers who sought to position themselves as legitimate heirs to this land. Depictions of early Christian saints as ladies of the western European gentry appeal to the target readers and listeners as members of a feudal society eager to see their own nobility reflected in the heroines of sacred narratives. The members of this audience were equally ready to see themselves cast as the children of this sacred lineage, successors to a genealogy with direct roots in heaven.