2 - The Gender of the Gift
from The Gift
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
As seen in the previous chapter, the saint's gifts in hagiography depend on the impossibility of possessing that which is given. However, these gifts still rely on an ability to give in human contexts that evokes the possibility of possession, even as it forecloses such a possibility in the act itself. As seen in the Vie de Saint Gilles, the saint abandons the land and property that make him a powerful lord in a human social setting, giving up both property and social position through this act of renunciation. The redefinition of the saint's relationship to society – and the concomitant transformation of the framing context for his identity – thus depend on the saint's rejection of that which he is considered to possess in a human context. One might therefore say that, although the notion of possession itself is rendered impossible by the attitude to the material world that the saint demonstrates through the renunciative gift, the act of giving up still relies on an ability to forsake those things that he or she ‘owns’ in human terms.
What this means is that, because the saint's gifts to god rely on an ability to renounce those things that determine his or her social identity in the first place, such gifts are inevitably conditioned by the gendered social position that the saint leaves behind. Insofar as sacrifice and the remissive gift depend on renunciation as a form of donation, they maintain in negative form a relationship to the terrestrial networks that define identities in the material world, even as they reject the validity of such networks as a source of meaning and value.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval Saints' LivesThe Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography, pp. 51 - 68Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008