Sainted Women of the Dark Ages

Duke University Press, December 1992. Paper Back. New. As Jo Ann McNamara points out in the introduction, 'It is rare for any age to preserve so large a group of sources dedicated to women's achievements and rarer still for a period so impoverished in sources of any kind.' Yet difficulties remain when it comes to the validity of early French hagiography. Hagiographers from following generations were accused of forging the stories to authenticate their own authority or highlighting similarities between the saints' lives and pagan legend. Fortunately, the Belgian Jesuit Hippolyte Delehaye validated the historical claims of many of these saints by applying sound archaeological and documentary scholarship to the texts. Originally written in Latin by contemporaries (several of whom knew the saints personally), these biographies portray the lives of eighteen Frankish women from the sixth and seventh centuries and represent a model of sanctity unique to that time. Three were queens. Several came from deeply political families. A few were part of the Irish missions to the pagan countryside, and others devoted their lives to the poor. While hagiography, as a literary style, hardly lends itself to originality, the light generated by these women is singular and compelling. Included (with medieval spellings intact) are Genovefa, Clothild, Moegund, Radegund, Eustadiola, Caesaria II, Rusticula, Glodesind, Burgundofara, Sadalberga, Rictrude, Gerturde, Aldegund, Balthild, Bertilla, Anstrude, and Austreberta.