Regendering Radegund? Fortunatus, Baudonivia and the Problem of Female Sanctity in Merovingian Gaul

Abstract

In the prologue of herDe vita sancti Radegundis, Baudonivia, an inhabitant of Radegund’s community of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, adopted a phrase from Venantius Fortunatus’Vita Hilariito express her unworthiness for the task: ‘I can as easily touch heaven with my fingers as perform the task you have imposed on me.’ Baudonivia, the first female hagiographer in Merovingian Gaul, was here drawing from theLifeof a male saint to introduce her work. She was thus, like all hagiographers, not alone in her task. This was doubly the case, since immediately prior to the composition of her own work Venantius Fortunatus had himself composed aVitaof the saint. Radegund was thus a focus of both male and female interest. This paper will examine the twoLivesfrom a gendered perspective, exploring the manner in which gender, a constructed rather than a physiological form of sexual differentiation, may illumine Radegund’s sanctity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.