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T he importance of vision in saints’ lives has been a widely recognized, if not always explicitly discussed, element of a genre that both represents and invites particular kinds of “visual” response. This is perhaps especially the case in accounts of martyrdom, where the martyr’s suffering not only bears witness to his or her belief in the divine, but also articulates a demand to be seen and recognized as such. 1 Partly because of this emphasis on spectacle, the treatment of vision in saints’ lives has received a certain amount of attention from feminist scholars, most notably in relation to the lives of female martyrs. In this criticism, the gaze is often considered to be complicit with patriarchal hegemony, performing an intrusive appropriation or even violation of the body of the female saint through a voyeuristic engagement with the depiction of her assault at the hands of male attackers. Thus, in making an argument for seeing female saints’ lives as thinly veiled narratives of rape, Kathryn Gravdal claims, “hagiography affords a sanctioned space in which eroticism can flourish and in which male voyeurism becomes licit, if not advocated.” 2 Although arguing for the metonymic function of virginity and the unrepresentability of rape in female saints’ lives, Kathleen Coyne Kelly also asserts that “these tales of near-rape skew the narrative focus toward the virgin’s body in a way that invites readers and listeners to situate themselves as voyeurs or victims (depending on their subject position).” 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
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