The Latin Lives of 'Trans(vestite) Saints' in Context

• Applicant: Dr. Michael Eber
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523336488

This project will focus on an as-yet underutilized source for conceptions of gender and sanctity in the Early Medieval Latin West: the Latin lives of ‘transvestite saints’, i.e. saints who, at the beginning of their narrative, are described as female, but take on a male gender expression as part of an ascetic and/or monastic conversion. These narratives were very popular: Ca. 30 of them originated in the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean between the 5th and 9th century, and many were soon translated into Latin, often several times, with the oldest manuscript witnesses dating to the 8th and 9th centuries. From the 10th century onwards, translations into almost every Western European vernacular language also begin appearing. These narratives have been subject to vigorous scholarly debate for decades now. In the mid-20th century, psychoanalytical readings of these sources were popular; beginning in the 1970s, their transgressive potential was stressed. However, they have also been read as stabilizing a patriarchal gender binary, either by offering misogynist propaganda, according to which women could either be female or holy, but not both, or by providing a genuinely female vision of holiness below external masculinities. Some have seen these saints as liminal and/or grotesque figures; and recently, scholars working on queer history have pushed to at least take seriously the possibility of trans readings. The Greek originals have mostly been at the centre of these debates, followed by the vernacular translations. The Latin versions, by contrast, have received little scholarly attention, and if they did, it was mostly by editors interested in textual criticism. Filling the lacuna regarding the Latin transmission will entail analysing the multiple layers of réécriture, first from Greek to Latin, and then from one Latin version to the next, uncovering the subtle and not so subtle ways in which Western scribes tried to make these vitae fit their respective agendas. Equally important are the manuscript contexts in which these re-written texts are transmitted. Both in terms of which aspects are emphasized in each version and in terms of the ways in which they were contextualized by Early Medieval scribes, the project aims to uncover which of the possible readings listed above – or any other ones – seem to have been dominant to the people writing, re-writing and reading them in the Early Middle Ages. These issues will be tackled both quantitatively, by building up a database of the contents of all pre-13th century manuscripts transmitting such vitae, and qualitatively, resulting in a several in-depth studies of individual manuscripts and texts.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position