Epistemology of the Cloister: Knowledge, Identity, and Place in Old French Saints’ Lives

What is it about?

This article investigates the connections between place, knowledge, identity and desire in Old French hagiography. As remarked by Michel de Certeau, hagiographic literature revolves around a depiction of place that locates a certain form of truth. Saints’ lives’ ideological aims thus rely upon an epistemology of place as opposed to time, drawing connections between knowledge and symbolic space also attested elsewhere in medieval culture. More recently, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has linked the construction of place as a mode of epistemology to sexuality and desire. The ‘epistemology of the closet’ that Sedgwick explores relies on a conceptualisation of enclosed, private, closeted space which (paradoxically) makes knowable and public the sexuality of certain individuals. Drawing on such work, I argue in this article that, in the case of certain female saints, the hagiographic epistemology of place is connected to identity and sexual desire. In La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and La Vie de Sainte Marine, monastic enclosure accompanies the female saint’s adoption of male disguise, associating the saint’s alternative sexual and social positioning with her change in physical location. On one level, this is a spatial expression of a certain relationship to gender and sexuality with which the saint is associated from the outset. On another level, this spatial framing provides a means of organising and re-ordering knowledge of saint’s identity among the text’s readers or listeners. Location in these texts is a means of making visible what is taken to be a spiritual reality from the start: it is part of the spatial reorganisation that makes the saint's identity manifest. My article consequently explores how saints’ lives construct a form of ‘closet’ that defines the gender and sexual identity of the female saint as well as knowledge about that identity. It also considers how this closet reorganises the modes of knowledge and desire informing responses to the saint.

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