The Construction of Male Sanctity in Early Anglo-Saxon Hagiographies

Hagiographical writing was an important tool in the conversion-period England to show to the audience that it was possible for them to achieve Christian perfection in a world that was different to the Biblical one. Early Anglo-Latin Lives often achieved this effect by writing about and embedding allusions in the stories of the founders and leaders of the English Church, to demonstrate that they did re-enact the holiness recorded in the Bible and patristic writings. In this case, they should have been able to shed light on the relationship between religious ideas and social reality in early English society. Yet apart from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Aldhelm’s treatise on virgins, these texts focus on male saints, and thus receive little attention in the research on gender in the conversion period, given that earlier studies are mainly concerned with women’s history. This thesis studies five of them to show that by extending the research to the study of men’s history, it is possible to use them to explore the implications of Christianity for gender norms and gender relations in this period.

This thesis discusses the following examples in turn: the Whitby Life of Gregory, the Lindisfarne Life of Cuthbert, Bede’s metrical Life and prose Life of Cuthbert, and Felix’s Life of Guthlac. It examines their distinctive representations of the male saint’s roles and relationship with other male and female characters, and discusses the Biblical and patristic contexts of these representations, along with the social ones, especially regarding the intersections of the Church and family. It concludes that these representations reflect how when Biblical and patristic ideas were used in conversion-period England to conceptualise Church organisation; that they opened new roles for men, redefined or affirmed their traditional roles, and framed their relationship with women according to these roles.