Women and Anglo-Norman Hagiography- Source Suggestion!!

Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn. “’Clerc u lai, muine u dame’: Women and Anglo-Normal Hagiography in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Women and Literature in Britain 1150-1500. Ed. Carol M. Meale. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996. 61-85. Print.

I used this article when writing my last paper and while I don't find that it's extremely helpful for my longer paper, I do think that a couple of papers might find this to be a helpful source (Catherine maybe??) I think it gave a lot of insight about the culture that women were surrounded with in the Medieval period, since hagiography would have been something that they would have been exposed to. Just thinking through the saints' lives that Doug has read to us over the course of the semester, very few of them have been written about women, and I can only imagine that there would have been even fewer of them present during the Middle Ages, given the fact that women were considered subordinate to men. I also think that it's interesting to look at this article in the context of Canterbury Tales - The Man of Law's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale are both versions of Saints' Lives, which I find interesting because of the fact that both of these tales are saints lives of female saints, which this article says there weren't a lot of. I think it will also be interesting to think about this article going into the N-Town plays, particularly the Mary plays. While I haven't read for tomorrow's reading on the Mary plays yet, I think it will be interesting to see how females are portrayed in the plays versus how this article says that female saints were discussed in saints' lives literature. 

Here are the main points. If this sounds like a source you want to use and can't find it online, let me know and we can work something out.

-Three texts in the Anglo-Norman hagiographic corpus that are written by women, two of which were definitely nuns with it being likely that the third also was.

-Saints lives have implications for a wider range of women than it first appears – women would have heard and sometimes read saints lives in religious communities but would have also heard them as a part of a secular household

-Very few saints lives were written about women since very few women were canonized in the high Middle Ages… and they are not representative of married women with children until the late 13^th century

-The major category of the female saint is the Virgin Martyr, the second is the repentant harlot

-Hagiography has a lot to say to women on the ideas of career virginity/chastity

-Hagiographic model of the chaste spouse can be seen as part of the debate within and between competing lay and ecclesiastical models of marriage as these evolved in both theory and practice in the 12^th and 13^th centuries

-The implications of marriage as a sacrament à Canon law insisted (but didn’t actually always follow through with) on the free and mutual consent of both spouses and the importance of female consent in both marriage and chastity

-The presence of three women writers among the producers of Anglo-Norman saints’ lives shows that women could and did write hagiography in 12^th and 13^th century Britain