Abstract
At some point in the very late sixth or early seventh century, Asomewhere in what had been late antique Gaul and would be early medieval Francia, two anonymous monastic woman enjoyed a correspondence that celebrated both their affection and their shared command of Christian literacy. Only one letter of this friendship survives: it appears in a single ninth-century manuscript, St. Gall 190, in conjunction with a letter of Saint Jerome to Marcella and (more significantly) a fragment from Baudonivia’s contemporary vita of Saint Radegund of Poitiers.1 The anonymous letter may well have originated in the same monastic house, or at least in a similar cultural milieu.
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Notes
C.P. Caspari, ed., Briefe, Abhandlungen und Predigten aus den zwei letzten Jahrhunderten des kirchlichen Atertum unde der Anfang des Mittelalters (Christiania: Mallinschen, 1890), 178–82.
Michelle Thiébaux, The Writings of Medieval Women: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1984), 127–30.
Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), especially 108–27.
Theodora Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 6–10. Compare Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 8.
The story of the revolt is narrated in Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks 10.15, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1974), 567–75. The incident is discussed, with particular attention to its engagement with gender and sexuality, in Nancy F. Partner, “No Sex, No Gender,” Speculum 68 (1993): 419–43.
Maria Caritas McCarthy, The Rule for Nuns of Saint Caesarius of Arles: A Translation with a Critical Introduction (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960).
F. Leo, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Auctores Antiquissimi (Berlin: Weidman, 1991), 271–79.
Rosamond McKitterick, “Women and Literacy in the Early Middle Ages,” in Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms (London: Ashgate, 1994), 1–43.
C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 31.
Lisa Weston, “Elegiac Desire and Female Community in Baudonivia’s Life of Saint Radegund” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 85–99.
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© 2011 Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt
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Weston, L.M.C. (2011). Virgin Desires: Reading a Homoerotics of Female Monastic Community. In: Giffney, N., Sauer, M.M., Watt, D. (eds) The Lesbian Premodern. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117198_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117198_7
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