In the early seventh-century life of the harlot-saint Mary of Egypt, the holy woman first appears to a virginal priest, Zosimas, as a demonized apparition floating along the banks of the Jordan River. At the same time, her extraordinary physical appearance resembles that of the Son of Man from Revelation (1.14), “his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow.”² She is also the bride from the Song of Songs (1.5–6): “I am swarthy but beautiful, … Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has blackened me.”³ This hagiographical text...

Hagiography is an exalted discourse that has formulated the literary representation of saints in popular and elite imagination during the two millennia of Christian history.¹ The often allegorical lives (vitae) of the saints were recited by priests during mass,² read by literate audiences, and depicted in art for illiterate Christians. The vitae of Christian holy women and men served the important function of reminding medieval Christians of their otherworldly citizenship and anticipated celestial residence. Saints, as superhuman mortals, were venerated locally or even universally as martyrs, confessors,³ ascetics, pastoral administrators, and cloistered servants of God. While ordinary Christians were God’s...

As the most heavily scrutinized book of the medieval era, the Bible created the normative principles of medieval culture.¹ Biblical images of women encompass the entire spectrum of Hebrew and Christian spirituality. Pregnant women symbolize the heavenly prototype of the earthly community (Revelation 12.1), and maternal and bridal figures represent earthly Jerusalem and the church (I Samuel 1–2; Galatians 4.26–27; Revelation 19.7–8, 21.2ff). Hebrew women serve as the guardians of Israel (Judges 5.7) and personify human virtue (Proverbs 31.10–31), while powerful holy women possess the gifts of prophecy and political arbitration (Judges 4; Acts 21.9). Christian...

In the Hebrew Bible, God sends Ezekiel a vision about the dangers of consecrated, symbolic vestments. Yahweh instructs the prophet that “when they [the Hebrew priests] go out into the outer court to the people, they shall put off the garments in which they have been ministering, and lay them in the holy chambers; and they shall put on other garments, lest they communicate their holiness to the people with their garments” (Ezekiel 44.19).¹ The warning is conveyed that the clothing of the Hebrew priesthood, the sole reserve of the inner sanctum of the Temple and the altar, should not...

In Christian scripture, Jesus, like Elijah and Moses before him, purifies himself in the terrifying desert, and the wasteland of Palestine provides the battleground for Christ’s warfare with Satan: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came to him” (Matthew 4.1–3).¹ In the Hebrew Bible, Moses sojourns in the deserts of Sinai in order to receive God’s written revelation to the Israelites (Exodus 34.28). Elijah renews his spiritual potency in the wilderness around...

In the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, wealthy widows house, nourish, and finance the prophetic and apostolic missions of God’s most holy men. In Hebrew scripture, a wealthy woman from Shunem provides a sanctuary for Elisha: “So whenever he passed that way, he would turn in there to eat food. And she said to her husband, ‘Behold now, I perceive that this is a holy man of God, who is continually passing our way. Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that whenever he...

In holy scripture women express their piety through domestic service to godly men and the impoverished.¹ In John (12.1–2), Martha, the sister of Lazarus, feeds Jesus and the apostles: “Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him.” Early medieval hagiographers reproduce the biblical image of the faithful serving woman to underscore the conventional piety of female saints, such as Radegund of Holy Cross, who became the “new Martha” (nova...

Building on models in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian gospels established gender-based images of piety and faith that remained influential well into the modern period. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, those images were most powerfully and widely transmitted through the popular medium of hagiography. In part the product of their environment, the vitae of saints are thus a cornucopia of information for the historian about society, culture, and values in different times and places. To concentrate mainly on the historical “facts” of these texts, however, is to ignore their role as sacred fictions, as documents providing spiritual...