Near Tuam in the west of Ireland, a partial wall stands in an otherwise empty field (Figure 1). It forms an arch of big, rough rocks. A passerby who looks through the arch will see more fields marked by a recent low wall meant to keep in the cattle. If she looks through the other way, she will also glimpse fields. The farmer who owns the land has neither knocked down the arch nor preserved it. Cows graze around it. Nineteenth-century surveyors noted it on ordnance survey maps. Modern tourists who stray into the field to confront the arch—and...

A young woman eschews all mortal ties to unite herself irrevocably with a man who has been dead for centuries yet has nevertheless managed to lure countless women into this suspect arrangement: a polygamist on a grand scale. Although it may sound like something right out of Edgar Allan Poe, I am, of course, alluding to the traditional understanding of the consecrated virgin as bride of Christ—a concept so intrinsic to female spirituality and so familiar to medievalists that it is difficult to imagine a time when it was otherwise. But there was such a time: a time when...

Until quite recently, the belief that human beings are divided into two distinct sexes has been accepted by society in general and by scholars of past and present more particularly. The two sexes, male and female, have been defined by their biological differences. Physical characteristics, such as musculature and genitalia, distinguish male and female across species. Thus, sex is primarily related to physical characteristics and the role of each in the process of reproduction. Gender refers to the social roles that society assigns to men and women as being appropriate to each sex. Thus, the facts that men emit semen...

The relatively new scholarly field of masculinity studies has established that masculinity, like femininity, is a construct that varies across cultures and over time. Scholars do not agree, however, about how we decide what constitutes masculinity at a given time. Is it a norm defined by what men actually do, or an ideal? This fundamental interpretative question is particularly relevant to the study of the clergy in the Middle Ages. Clearly the ideal for the clergy (enforced more stringently after the reform movement of the eleventh century) was chastity. Active engagement in sexual and reproductive activity, however, is an important...

Among the ninth-century posthumous miracle cures attributed to the Merovingian Saint Glodesind, abbess of the monastery of Subterius in Metz (ca. 600), is that of a certain woman named Imma. She had been ill for a long time and finally decided to set out for the saint’s tomb and ask for her assistance. According to the vita, “As soon as she entered the monastery walls, she began giving thanks to almighty God for there she deserved to feel a little strength.... As soon as she went through the gates of the monastery, she felt the sickness recede from her. The...

Not all litanies are litanies of the saints. Liturgists define “litanies” rather broadly, both as repetitive supplications for divine aid and as the processions in which those supplications may be enacted.¹ Before the seventh century (at the earliest), such repetitive supplications were not addressed to saints but rather to the persons of the Christian Trinity or to Jesus’ mother Mary. The appearance of litanies of saints’ names in Continental Latin churches dates from some time during the eighth century.² Beginning at the very end of that century, compilers of litanies of saints’ names began to organize the saints according to...