As holy examples of Christian perfection, saints were frequently treated or promoted as patterns for ideal behaviour – either for male or female religious, but also for lay audiences in late medieval England. It is not surprising that this ‘ideal’ was also gendered, as it was believed that men and women should occupy different positions and perform different roles within society, no matter how much or little this view accorded with the complexities of lived reality. They were constructed as different (and differently) by a range of discourses, from medical to romance texts, as well as by hagiography. While many of the authors or translators of saints’ lives in late medieval England still tended to be male as well as clerical, this chapter will show that the way in which gender and sexuality are represented is far from monolithic.

Hagiography deals with the lives of holy individuals representing a wide range of gendered lay and religious positions: male and female virgins, widows, wives, husbands, eunuchs, transvestites, queens, kings, hermits, bishops, popes, monks, nuns and so on. Sexuality is equally multiple: husbands and wives are either living within chaste marriages or have numerous children; virgins are either sexually aroused and must fight temptation or have already overcome fleshly desires; eunuchs raise the question as to whether their seeming absence of sexual desire is a spiritual accomplishment or a by-product of their physical state; prostitutes copulate extravagantly until they repent, often also extravagantly.

The work of feminist, gender and queer theorists in the past two to three decades has shown that gender and sexuality must be understood as cultural and historical constructions, rather than natural, stable, self-explanatory categories. They are shifting, mutable terms, whose definitions are dependent on numerous factors, such as who is writing and when, what genre is being written in, what tropes are being used, which audience is being addressed, and so on: such factors are addressed in other chapters of this Companion. While gender and sexuality are not synonymous or interchangeable terms, they are nonetheless fundamentally interconnected. Simon Gaunt states that they ‘are not the same thing, but nor can they be theorized separately. Like gender, sex is not ahistorical; the value and meaning given to sexual acts and desires evolves according to historical circumstance.’