Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
This study has sought to challenge an understanding of female saints as passive recipients of social and spiritual influence by locating authority within the context of vision, language, and performativity. Chapter 1 charted the physical movements of the female saints in their lives; at times the women are directed in their movements by those around them, by their (spiritual or biological) fathers, their (would-be) suitors, their aggressors, their confessors, their superiors in the monasteries in which they live, and by divine force, whilst on other occasions they control their own actions and movement in space. A consideration of the lives alongside an analysis of the complexities of medieval vision theory, however, has brought to light clear examples of the ways in which (paralleling the increasing bias towards an understanding of space as experienced sensorially) physical control is destabilised by ocular politics – that is, vision as bound up with the application, preservation, and negation of power.
In the female saints' lives (as in tales of knight-errantry and the sentimental romance), with vision comes desire: the virgin martyr narratives invariably begin with the young maiden being spied by a would-be suitor or being hidden from view (that of Barbara, the virgin of Antioch, Petronila); and when the women are assaulted by pagan aggressors, the attacks often include elements of torture centred upon spectacle, as they are stripped naked, tortured in view of townspeople, and paraded through town centres, their bodies offered to all to be ravaged (as is the case with Barbara, Agatha, Marina, Christina, and Euphemia).
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- Women from the 'Golden Legend'Female Authority in a Medieval Castilian Sanctoral, pp. 129 - 136Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011