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This paper will look at how John of Ephesus dialectically looks at the Empress Theodora as the pinnacle of Christendom while also seeing her as a subversive force in relation to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Looking at how John understands her religiously and morally in conversation with Procopius’s Anecdota, we see how hagiographies can construct and deconstruct moral identities within religious spaces. I will play these sources off each other to elucidate the hagiographic method that John applies to earthly power and further understand how people can create hagiographic identities during a person’s life. This paper will look at how the fractured nature of John’s Theodora narrative offers a different lens through which to witness hagiographic identity.
Virtually every study of the monastery of Helfta remarks on the significance of its thirteenth-century Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn (1223-92) to the extraordinary literary flourishing that took place during her forty-year tenure [N6:6:1, 205] when the Helfta nuns collaboratively composed the largest body of women’s religious writing of the thirteenth century. When scholars have turned to the Helfta writings, their attention has for the most part alighted on the visionaries at the literature’s center, Mechtild of Hackeborn (the Abbess’ biological sister) and Gertrude of Helfta, her younger contemporary. My paper focuses on the Abbess Gertrude to argue that the Helfta literature presents her as embodying the piety the cloister sought to promote, with its focus on loving well.
The tenth century canoness, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, drew from hagiographic legenda in search of extraordinary figures, particularly women, to serve as protagonists in her dramas, crafted in the style of the Roman playwright Terence. This is aptly demonstrated in her work, Dulcitius, adapted, with no substantial changes in the plot, from the story of three sisters found in The Passion of Saint Anastasia. While the play begins with these women sentenced to death, the multiple attempts by the agents of the Roman empire to humiliate or assault them are subverted in particularly humorous ways, rendering the men in power and the empire they represent ridiculous. This paper will analyze the levels of transgression found in Hrotsvit’s Dulcitius arguing that a transgressive message of laughter “from below,” as outlined by Jacqueline A. Bussie, can be reclaimed from the work as humor uniquely disrupts dominant ideologies of empire and patriarchy.