by Antonia Anstatt (Merton, University of Oxford) and Ed van der Molen (University of Nottingham)

The ‘Gender and Sainthood, 1100-1500’ Conference was held at the History Faculty of the University of Oxford on the 5th and 6th of April 2024, and was organised by Antonia Anstatt (University of Oxford) and Ed van der Molen (University of Nottingham). Bringing together scholars from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, and the US, the conference aimed to place the complex cultural categories of sanctity and gender into conversation with each other via the methodological lens of queer theory and trans studies. While the relationship between sainthood and gender has been well-trodden ground in the field for some time thanks to the work of scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Newman, and John Coakley, and the increasing awareness of medievalists of the possibilities that trans and queer theories offer to a wide range of areas of research made now an opportune time to revisit this familiar convergence of categories from a new and exciting angle.   

The conference took as its starting point the 2021 publication of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. This volume starts from the premise that ‘the co-incidence of medieval representations of non-normative gender with representations of holiness is no coincidence. There is a deep structural connection between these categories of exceptional life’ (p.13), and thus sets out to untangle and illuminate this connection. We felt that building on the excellent work of the contributors to this volume offered the possibility of continuing the momentum of this new approach to the study of sainthood, and also spoke to the contemporary political needs of the moment, in which the medieval past is increasingly weaponised by the Western political right as a period where categories of gender, sexuality and race were fixed and homogenous. Scholarly attention to the complexity and fluidity of these identities over the course of the Middle Ages offers a counter-narrative, and enables us to perceive the richness and diversity, both familiar and removed, of medieval lived experience. The insights offered by a more fluid and flexible understanding of medieval gender are by no means confined to those who explicitly cross or queer gender boundaries. We cannot understand the transcendence of gender if we don’t understand underlying expectations of gender, both masculinity and femininity. Queer and trans theories therefore have much to offer in terms of perceiving the constructions of masculinity and femininity that formed normative gender patterns in the Middle Ages, and how saints could explore the boundaries of these categories both for themselves and their worshippers. Hagiography and saintly iconographies can reveal much about how, in the imagination of their devotees and hagiographers, saints could explore, challenge, or confront medieval expectations of femininity and masculinity, by disrupting, disquieting, or altogether transcending them. The questions that all these approaches show, are of course: to what extent are the saints really challenging medieval expectations, and to what extent do they disrupt our own ideas of what the past ‘looked like’?  

Photograph of attendees in a seminar room at the Gender and Sainthood 1100-1500 conference, Oxford 5-6 April 2024. Photograph by Antonia Anstatt, all rights reserved (2024)

The conference consisted of seven panels with three papers each, spread out over the two days. Some of the papers conducted broader methodological approaches, others used a specific corpus or focused on one or two case studies. Their approaches to the question of gender and sainthood were rich and varied: some analysed the non-binarity or queerness of their case studies (panels ‘(Trans)cending Gender’ and ‘Queering Sainthood’), others studied how saints could contradict expectations of gender (panel ‘Transgressing Gender’) or talked about the variety and wealth of medieval expressions of gender and the construction of femininity or masculinity in different contexts (panels ‘Writing Gender’ and ‘Visualising Gender’). Some focused on the construction of specific roles within gender-based relationships (panel ‘Familial and Spiritual Relationships’). The case studies discussed ranged from late antique and early medieval martyrs and their later medieval reception to late medieval married and mystic saints, and to 20th-century approaches to gender and sainthood (panel ‘Modern Perspectives’). These seven panels were complemented by a keynote lecture by Alicia Spencer-Hall, ‘Who’s Afraid of Trans and Genderqueer Saints?’, in which she traced the initial responses to Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, both positive and negative, and demonstrated different methodologies of studying queerness in medieval hagiographies as well as the urgent need for a broader understanding of such approaches. 

The ultimate result of the conference was an increased awareness amongst all the participants of how studying the intersection of gender and sainthood through the lens of queer and trans studies can enrich our understandings of our subjects and sources, as well as point to their increasing relevance to the modern world. In our closing remarks, we pointed to three central themes that had come up repeatedly over the course of the conference, both in the papers themselves and the subsequent discussions. The first was the importance of undertaking this work now. As mentioned, the medieval past is increasingly abused as a source of right-wing cultural narratives (see for instance Albin et al. (eds.), Whose Middle Ages: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past), and so doing the work to push against these narratives is important, not just from the perspective of scholarly fidelity, but also because the politics in which the medieval is deployed affects real lives, and real people. This is not simply an academic exercise, but we must consider the cultural and political work that our scholarship, as much as our sources, undertakes. In the midst of a culture-war-fuelled debate over the ‘legitimacy’ of trans experience, it is incumbent upon us as historians to illuminate the vibrancy, complexity, and instability of medieval categories of gender, and remove the medieval past as a normative weapon from the arsenal of the right.  

The second theme that emerged from the conference was the nature of sainthood as a category. In her keynote, Alicia Spencer-Hall evoked the idea of gender as a mobius strip, around which one could be continually travelling, or settled at a specific point, or moving between different points. From the approaches taken by the papers, it became apparent that sanctity could be usefully thought of in a similar way. Rather than being a settled and coherent category, it can be better conceptualised as a constant process of transition, of movement, of endless becoming and unbecoming. The saint is always constructed, as Pierre Delooz argued in 1969, but they are also perpetually deconstructed, transitioning between versions and ideals. Taking this perspective, it then becomes useful to imagine gender and sanctity as two overlapping mobius strips, where different configurations and conjunctions can move a given figure to endless differing conceptualisations of gender, sanctity, or both, or even move them off one or both strips entirely. In connection with this, we can thus approach hagiography (and other literature of sainthood) as texts which unavoidably ‘trans’ their subjects. They necessarily depict processes of transition and movement along a spectrum between and against polarities, not just in terms of gender, but in terms of social status, the relationship between the human and the divine, the relationship of the saint to their cultural context, and many other aspects. Viewing the construction and deconstruction of saints through the perspective of trans studies is incredibly productive. 

Photograph of attendees during a break at the Gender and Sainthood 1100-1500 conference, Oxford 5-6 April 2024. Photograph by Antonia Anstatt, all rights reserved (2024)

A further theme was the consistent emphasis on the non-binary nature of medieval gender, and its prevalence in all spheres of medieval life. Saints offer a clear case study of how gender in the medieval period could be transgressed, transcended, or performed. The medieval reader of hagiography, or audience for a sermon, would have had the instability of gender laid plainly before them, and in many cases, used as the foundation for claims of sanctity. This in turn prompts us to question the status of saints as exemplars, and how this relates to wider medieval gender practices. We know that in many cases, the devotions of the saints (asceticism, Christological piety, etc) mirrored and intensified those of the wider culture – the same is likely true of gender. We can think about the way in which saints and hagiographers used gender as a means of considering how gender might have been practiced, challenged, and used in a wider medieval context. In this way, we progress beyond simplistic binaries, and open the door to a richer and infinitely more complex tapestry of medieval cultural practice.

Received from Anna Clark (St. John’s, University of Oxford)

Event Overview

‘Women and Worlds of Learning’ is an interdisciplinary conference focused on the place of women within higher and further education. It is taking place 12th-13th April 2024 at the University of Oxford.

Programme

Registration

by Thomas Leng (University of Sheffield)

In February 1973, an article appeared in Past and Present by a young American historian, with the deceptively prosaic title ‘The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community’. Here, the author traced the emergence of a succession of merchant groupings linked to changes in the structure of overseas trade which unfolded in the 80 years up to the outbreak of civil war, culminating in a cohort of ‘new men’ who rose from England’s early colonial exploits, and who differed from the traditional trading company merchants who preceded them. Whereas the latter would cleave to the crown which privileged them, in the civil war these ‘new merchants’ came to occupy a pivotal position parliament’s victory, ushering in a regime that supported their commercial goals. In the case of the merchant community at least, civil war allegiance was rooted in socioeconomic position.

This was not Robert Brenner’s first publication- in the previous year he had published a revisionist interpretation of English commercial expansion in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods as driven by the search for imports to feed an expanding domestic market. But his Past and Present article bought this analysis to bear on what was then one of the chief scholarly battlegrounds on which competing grand narratives were pitted against each other: the debate on the causes and nature of the English Revolution. In doing so, Brenner launched what remains as its last major Marxist interpretation. Last November, twenty or so historians met at The University of Sheffield, supported by the generosity of the Past and Present Society, in order to discuss this work on its fiftieth anniversary (in fact 2023 was a double anniversary for Brenner, it being 30 years since he presented his ‘new social interpretation’ of the Revolution in full, in his book Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, published by Cambridge and Princeton). That this work is still capable of generating discussion attests to its enormous range, and the enduring significance of the questions that it raises.

Cover of Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso edition, 2003), cover image all rights reserved

Reflections on landmark publications such as this provide an opportunity to assess how scholarly priorities have changed over time, and certainly the field of civil war history looks very different now than it would have done in 1973. At that time, the world-historical importance of England during ‘Tawney’s Century’ (1540-1640) was widely accepted, at least within Anglophone academia. As the festschrift later published by Past and Present for Brenner’s doctoral supervisor, Lawrence Stone, put it, this was the crucible from which the world’s ‘first modern society’ emerged, the English Revolution its undoubted climactic. Three years later, Brenner would publish another even more impactful Past and Present article on the agrarian origins of capitalism in preindustrial England, prompting the well-known Brenner debate largely conducted in the pages of the same journal. It was here that Brenner would flesh out his classically Marxist vision of capitalism as rooted in the social relations of production and first realised in England. Although his field of interest increasingly turned to twentieth century political economy, Brenner would restate this position in the face of scholarly turns which switched attention to the development of capitalism as a world-system, or placed the ‘great divergence’ between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth century, long after ‘Tawney’s Century’.

But already in 1973 debates were underway (Stone having been an early participant) which would ultimately bring to question the English Revolution’s role in this story, even its status as a ‘revolution’ at all. By 1993, Brenner had to take into account a historiographical terrain transformed by revisionism, which questioned socioeconomic interpretations of civil war allegiance and emphasised short term causes over deep seated structural changes. In many senses, however, Brenner’s account of the agrarian origins of capitalism in the English countryside had little need for a Revolution which, in his reading, broke out in an essentially already capitalist society. Why, then, did Brenner go to such lengths to incorporate the English Revolution into his account of the emergence of capitalism? Given that he had developed his account on agrarian capitalism during his Masters thesis, Brenner’s switch of focus to the English Revolution for his doctorate might appear a digression. This was an issue which participants in the workshop grappled with as we struggled to reconcile what essentially, in its fullest form, became three books in one: an account of the rise of new social interests associated with early English colonialism; a study of their role in the course of London politics in the 1640s; and a new grand narrative of the English Revolution as a contest for control of the state in an already capitalist society (the biggest claim, but given the least amount of space in Merchants and Revolution). To some participants, at least, the civil war appeared to be something of a red herring which only muddied Brenner’s explanations for the emergence of capitalism.

That Brenner evidently did see it as important to provide a social interpretation of the English Revolution is itself indicative of the status this event once possessed in English grand narratives of all stripes. Producing an account of the transition to capitalism without the Revolution was perhaps, for him, out of the question. If he had been commencing his studies today, would Brenner have felt the same urge? Early modern English history has by-and-large been dethroned from its status as ‘master-subject’ of modernising narratives, leaving its Revolution as an event of local significance, perhaps, at best. But if this had led to the crumbling if not collapse of Brenner’s new social interpretation of the Revolution, then perhaps the foundations on which it was built can be revealed in new light. Throughout the workshop, participants were reminded that Brenner’s work did uncover developments which were indeed momentous. More than any of his contemporaries, Brenner was conscious of the interconnections between domestic political crisis, colonial development and commercial expansion, including of course the emergence of an English slave trade, pioneered by his new merchants. Brenner’s work sketched out a vast terrain which remains fully to be explored, and which the workshop ranged across freely (if at times following several directions at once). Certain themes emerged that participants will no doubt pursue in their own work. Whereas Brenner’s account of the emergence of agrarian capitalism centred on the English countryside, colonial plantations were revealed as key sites for the assertion of individual property rights and the application of innovative methods of labour management- including, of course, coerced labour and ultimately slavery- with ramifications for developments in England. Domestically, the Stuart crown appeared as itself heavily implicated in agrarian transformation and commercial innovation. But the deployment of political power to achieve such ends was universal, putting some pressure on Brenner’s category of ‘politically constituted property’ as characteristically pre-capitalist, both in terms of commercial organisation (monopolistic privileges) and agricultural production (coercive powers of surplus-extraction). Indeed the phrase is ambiguous in Brenner’s own work, which acknowledges that the ‘free market’ in land and labour rests ultimately on political power in the form of state-backed property rights. Brenner as a Marxist fully conscious of the compulsive character of free market competition would surely appreciate how coercive labour practices could be concealed through notions of consent. His ‘new merchants’ were deeply associated with the traffic in indentured servants and their deployment in plantation labour at the same time as they were arguing in favour of greater freedom to access global market opportunities, not to mention the defence of English freedoms in the civil war. That these efforts would coalesce on the establishment of England’s Caribbean colonies as slave-based plantation machines, politically secured by the Republic’s warships, is a grim irony: the Revolution played its part in enshrining this ultimate form of ‘politically constituted property’ at the centre of England’s nascent empire. Here if anywhere might rest the claim of the English Revolution as an event of world historical importance. Any historian wishing to challenge the poet John Dryden’s assertion that the civil wars ‘brought nothing about’ would do worse than to start by reading Brenner.

Received from Dr. Laura Flannigan (St. John’s College, Oxford)

Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity – one-day online workshop (3rd April 2023)

Join us for an exciting online workshop exploring Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity. This one-day event will feature short papers and discussion on the study of law and litigiousness from new and established researchers in the field.

Kindly supported by a workshop grant from The Past and Present Society, papers will be given in person at St John’s College, Oxford. Due to limited capacity at the venue for this event, additional attendees are invited to register to watch the papers, and to join us for questions and discussions, through a virtual platform.

Registration

Provisional programme:

10am – Welcome

10:15 – Panel 1

Mike Kipling (PhD, Oxford) – ‘Elizabethan Merchants and the Court of Requests’

Mabel Winter (Postdoctoral research associate, Sheffield) – ‘Through ‘advice & promocion’: legal knowledge and mill disputes in the Court of Exchequer’

Chloe Ingersent (PhD, Oxford) – ‘Defrauding the Elizabethan judiciary’

Jason Peacey (Professor of History, UCL) – ‘Power and Practices: Litigants as Petitioners in Early Stuart England’

11:30 – BREAK

11:45 – Panel 2

Brodie Waddell (Senior Lecturer in History, Birkbeck)- ‘Voices and Hands: The Composition of Petitions to Judicial Authorities’

Hannah Worthen (Postdoctoral research associate, Hull) – ‘The role of space and place in early modern justice seeking’

Daniel Gosling (Principal Legal Records Specialist, The National Archives) – ‘Limiting Litigants in the early modern period? The effect of court abolition on access to justice’

12:45 – LUNCH BREAK

2:00 – Panel 3

Sue Wiseman (Professor of History, Birkbeck) – ‘Not work: Law, Labour and Lament in Seventeenth-Century Writing’

Sung Yup Kim (Associate Professor, Seoul) – ‘Local Magistracy and Popular Expectations of the Law in Early New York’

Clare Egan (Lecturer in Literature, Lancaster) – ‘‘Libellous Articles’ and ‘Scandalous Interrogatories’: Defamatory Uses of Popular Legal Knowledge in Early Modern England’

3:00 – BREAK

3:15 – Panel 4

Joanna McCunn (Senior Lecturer in Law, Bristol) – ‘‘You tickled the points o’the’law’: depicting legal language in early modern English literature’

Imogen Peck (Assistant Professor, Birmingham) – ‘Keep sure your wrytynges’: The Family Archive as/and Legal Knowledge in Early Modern England’

Jonathan McGovern (Professor, Xiamen University) – ‘A booke bynders shope in Estchepe’: Popular Knowledge of Statute Law in the Reign of Henry VIII’

4:15 – BREAK

4:30 – Roundtable: ‘What was ‘Popular’ about Law in Early Modernity?’ featuring Amanda Bevan (Head of Legal Records, The National Archives), Tom Johnson (Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History, York), Deborah Youngs (Lecturer in Medieval History, Swansea), and Ian Wiliams (Associate Professor, Faculty of Laws, UCL)

5:30 – Conference end

by Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary, University of London)

What is solitude? The question tends to stop people in their tracks. The commonsense definition – an absence of other people – clearly won’t do, first because one can be wrong about this, that is be in the presence of others when one thinks one isn’t, but also because being with others is for many people the most solitary condition of all. Isolation, seclusion, privacy: none of these are solitude, although some may be preconditions for it. Sometimes aloneness is lonely – for some people unbearably lonely: ‘Solitude,’ the poet John Donne wrote after a period of confinement with illness, ‘is a torment which is not threatened in hell it selfe’. For other people – especially but not exclusively religious solitaries – solitude is a privileged site of intimate connection, an always-accompanied condition. ‘Never less alone than when alone’; ‘[nothing] so companionable as solitude’; ‘Alone in a crowd’; ‘solitude is best society’…The famous epigrams say it all; the language of solitude is crammed with such paradoxes.

Solitude is a human eternal that is nonetheless historical, its meanings and valuations varying over time. Its history is one of controversy: from antiquity on people have argued about the relative merits of solitude versus sociability, the active life as opposed to the contemplative life, retirement versus public duty. Solitude has been widely perceived as egoistical, slothful, and psychologically debilitating. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ the Oxford don Robert Burton counselled in his compendious 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, for those that are solitary risk ‘feare, sorrow, suspition…discontent, cares, and wearinesse of life’ [sic]. And still today a marked preference for solitude tends to be perceived as eccentric and/or neurotic.

Exploring this long, complex history is challenging, not least because the historiography is thin. This is now changing, but when I first began my research (on Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, two solitude-lovers) relevant studies were hard to come by. My familiarity with 18th Century ideas about selfhood and subjectivity made my work slightly easier, but the 17th Century was entirely new terrain. Sometimes a book makes all the difference. Frances Harris’s prizewinning Transformations of Love: the Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (2002) is not a study of spiritual solitude but it is rich in sources for such a study. I was fortunate enough to get to know Frances, who sadly died in 2021. For over a year I learned from her, shared my ideas with her, and was taught by her how to read John and Margaret’s copious correspondence. My article “Solitude and Soul in Restoration Britain” in Past & Present No. 262 is dedicated to her.

The ‘soul union’ between John and Margaret was rooted in a mutual passion for a numinous solitude that both expressed and disguised a deep emotional entanglement that, in John’s case, clearly had an erotic component. It was both an enriching and parlous connection, lived out in the steamy, seedy atmosphere of the Restoration court. This was a period when secular and spiritual solitude were, in related ways, flashpoints of contention. A deeply intellectual man, steeped in the classical tradition, John publicly intervened in debates over the merits and demerits of the solitary life. By contrast, Margaret’s reflections on solitude were private, shared only with John himself.

Godfrey Kneller “John Evelyn 1687”, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Women’s relationship to solitude has always differed from men’s. In Margaret’s day they were perceived as exceptionally vulnerable to solitude’s perils, including diabolic seduction, while lacking the mental and moral resources to take advantage of the vita solitaria. In fact her commitment to solitude was well-informed and thoughtful. Nonetheless, her six-year relationship with John provides a valuable case-study of the complex relationship between gender difference and solitude.

Matthew Dixon “Margaret Godolphin 1673” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While ‘seraphic friendships’, as these relationships were also known, were not unusual in the Restoration elite, John and Margaret’s passionate fraught liaison provides a unique window into the early modern history of solitariness. I welcome comments on my treatment of this and the historiography of solitude more generally.