The previous chapter, examining the concept of sanctity, was concerned with women and men who occupied the highest religious positions, extraordinary figures distanced from the ordinary by their relationship with God and their ability to perform miracles. This chapter, in contrast, will investigate the concept of the ‘sinful feminine’; it concerns non-saintly women who transgressed religious rules. It will study whether particular sins were explicitly associated by early Irish writers with women. If such a connection is made, it can be asked whether these sins are attached to women as women: whether being female was represented as the cause of their sins. It will also analyse whether women were represented as particularly sinful, or particularly virtuous, in comparison with men, and of what the penances assigned to each sex consisted. Finally, whether different types of sin were imputed to different types of women will be examined: whether representations of ‘sinful femininity’ vary according to women's social status or role. The primary aim of this chapter is to determine whether, in early Ireland, there was a concept of ‘feminine sinfulness’ as distinct from generic human sinfulness, or the sinfulness of men.

Scholarship already exists concerning women's own views of sin and sinfulness, and the ways in which women reacted to the ways in which they were viewed by the wider Church. This has, however, focused for the most part on periods either earlier or later than that under discussion here. For late antiquity, Lynda Coon has emphasised the way in which women's sin was represented as internal, made physical in the selfimposed claustration of early woman ascetics, while their male counterparts crossed deserts to fight actively against sin. Examining the Lives of holy women in Italy from 1200 onwards, Bell has posited a similar hypothesis, stating that ‘[for] women evil was internal and the Devil a domestic parasitic force, whereas for men sin was an impure response to an external stimulus’. Bynum, focusing on later medieval continental hagiography, has likewise suggested that women were perceived as susceptible to inner faults, while men were affected by outside influences (including the temptation posed by women). All of these arguments find their basis in the idea that women were more bound by the workings of their societies to traditional domestic spaces than were men, confined by societal expectation to such domestic roles as food- and textile-production.