This project examines medieval vernacular hagiography as a resource for understanding emerging racial discourses in England (1100-1450). Building on the work of Geraldine Heng, Cord Whitaker, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and others who affirm religion as the primary site for the construction of medieval race, “Shades of Sanctity” investigates hagiography as a crucial location for racial worldmaking. A term borrowed from Mark Jerng, “racial worldmaking” describes narrative and interpretative strategies in popular fiction that prompt readers to notice race at the level of place, space, and time. Analyzing selected figures, such as Mary of Egypt, Margaret of Antioch, Thomas Becket’s legendary mother, Alisaundre, and the cluster of mothers in the hagiographic romance, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale,’ I focus on how, when, and why race is salient in hagiography. Furthermore, through a comparative approach to various manuscripts, like the South English Legendaries (Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 108, Ashmole 43, and Rawl. Poet. 225) and the Katherine Group (MS Bodley 34), I consider how the raced worlds of the hagiographic imagination are concomitantly shaped by authors, intended readers, and the sociocultural landscape of medieval England. For example, subsequent Middle English accounts recast Mary of Egypt as white, Margaret of Antioch as black, and Alisaundre Becket as Jewish. The shifting nature of when, how, and why race signifies in the hagiographic imagination demonstrates that holy narratives also mediated racial meanings from the social world of medieval England.
Drawing on the work of Black and Chicanx scholar-activists, including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Chela Sandoval, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, my project analyzes the intersection of racial formations with other locations of oppression, such as gender, sexuality, and class. These contemporary feminist reappraisals of identity provide an important starting point for understanding how the hagiographic imagination deployed racist and sexist representations of the Other, some of which still haunt our present. As my scholarship will show, premodern critical race studies and women-of-color feminisms challenge the images of holiness, blackness, womanness, and otherness in the hagiographic imagination, both as sources of oppression and radical possibility.
Working Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. British Library, London. Cotton Julius E.vii. c. 1002.
Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints. ed. and trans. by Johanna Kramer, Hugh Magennis, and Robin Norris. Harvard University Press, 2020.
The Auchinleck Manuscript. National Library of Scotland. Adv MS 19.2.1. c. 1330.
The Katherine Group. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS. Bodley 34. c. 1240.
South English Legendary. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS. Laud Misc. 108. c. 1280.
South English Legendary. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS. Ashmole 43. c. 1300.
South English Legendary. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Rawl. Poet. 225. c. 1450.
South English Legendary: Lives of Saints, and Temporale [Passion of Christ]. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Tanner 17. c. 1400.
Old English Homilies. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 303. c. 1110-1199.
The Taymouth Hours. British Library, London. Yates Thompson MS 13. c. 1325-1340.
Secondary Sources:
Akbari, Suzanne C. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450. Cornell University Press, 2009.
Ashton, Gail. The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint. Routledge, 2000.
Bassett, Molly H., and Vincent W. Lloyd, eds. Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh. Routledge, 2015.
Blurton, Heather and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. eds. Rethinking the South English Legendaries. Manchester University Press, 2011.
Byron, L. Gay. Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature. Routledge, 2002.
Calkin, Siobhan Bly. Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript. Routledge, 2005.
Davis, Kathleen and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008.
Hahn, Thomas. ed. A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Hayes, Michael E. Margaret’s Monsters: Women, Identity and the Life of St. Margaret in Medieval England. Routledge, 2020.
Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Hollander, Aaron T. “Discussing the Discipline: Hagiography Unbound: A Theory of Making and Using Holy Media.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2021, 89.1 86.
hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989.
Jerng, Mark C. Racial World-Making: The Power of Popular Fiction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Kaplan, Lindsay M. Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Khanmohamadi, Shirin A. In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Lampert, Lisa. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Lavezzo, Kathy. Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000-1534. Cornell University Press, 2006.
Lifshitz, Felice. “Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical” Texts as Historical Narrative.” Viator, vol. 25, 1994. 95-114.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.
Magennis, Hugh. The Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002.
Mills, Robert. “The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language, and Belief. In The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, eds. K. Bell and J.N. Couch, 197–221.
Pages, Meriem. Chaucer and Becket’s Mother: The Man of Law’s Tale, Conversion, and Race in the Middle Ages. Arc Humanities Press, 2023.
Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket’s resilient, Muslin, Arab mother in the South English Legendary.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 10. 3, 293–303.
Ramey, Lynn T. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages. University Press of Florida, 2014.
Salih, Sarah. ed. A Companion to Middle English Hagiography. DS Brewer, 2006.
Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Scheil, Andrew P. “Bodies and Boundaries in the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt.” Neophilologus 84, 2000.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. Routledge, 1990.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.
Vernon, Matthew. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave, 2018.
Whitaker, Cord. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Weever, Jacqueline de. Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic. Routledge, 1998.
Williams Boyarin, Adrienne. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Young, Helen. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. Routledge, 2016.
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