In this, her first monograph, Emma Campbell observes that Old French hagiography is a privileged medium for examining how relationships function. She endeavors to show how saints' lives depict social and sexual relations in order to see how these texts represent a move beyond human systems, connecting human and divine, and strengthening communities of belief. In these texts, saints articulate a point of contact between the human and heavenly. The subject of the text, the saint-to-be, stands at the threshold between the earthly and celestial and is transformed and becomes holy, providing a connection between the audience of the saint's life and God.
Campbell reads a variety of saints' lives to analyze how this transformation occurs and argues that it is affected by way of the saint's participation in and renunciation of social relationships. Campbell explicitly chooses a theoretical rather than a historicist approach, using a variety of theories to lay bare these relationships and examine how they are transformed. These include anthropological theories of the gift, kinship, and community in addition to queer theory. The book's first half is dedicated to this analysis of the saints' negotiation of human and divine relationships. In the second half, Campbell focuses on the reception of the lives, examining how larger religious communities are built and strengthened by their relationship to the text. In the final two chapters, Campbell looks at how the saints' lives collected in two manuscripts might relate to one another, this time imagining a more specific audience: the possessors of the actual manuscript.
The first section of the book, “The Gift,” relies on anthropologist Marcel Mauss's work on the economy of the gift and argues that saints often demonstrate their withdrawal from human society and their commitment to God by refusing gifts given in a social context. This idea is already familiar to readers of the Vie de Saint Alexis, Campbell's first example text, where Alexis rejects the earthly father and the attendant social relationships, goods, and honors in favor of the heavenly Father and attendant spiritual gifts. Campbell explains that Alexis not only refuses human exchange but also engages in spiritual exchange instead: his self-denial and gifts to others act as gifts to God. Campbell shows that Guillaume de Berneville's Vie de Saint Gilles similarly demonstrates the “renunciative gift,” as Gilles, too, abandons his inheritance, lands, and social role. Instead of distributing his wealth as a lord in an earthly social and economic system, he relies on God's generosity for his survival. Again, the refused human gift performs as a gift to God, affirming a spiritual relationship that imitates and replaces the social relations abandoned by the saint. The ensuing analysis of the Vie de Saint Jean l'Aumônier shows that the system that enables one to interact with God requires not only “remissive gifts,” but ultimately the reassessment of how one perceives materiality itself. The believer must learn to see the material world in spiritual terms and recognize that the gift was never the saint's in the first place, but rather a gift of God. By returning what was never his, the saint acknowledges divine sovereignty. The second half of the chapter applies this approach to lives in which saints face literal rather than figural martyrdom, including Saints Lawrence, Alban, Foy, Andrew, and Georges. Here the saints' self-sacrifice performs as the remissive gift. In chapter 2, the second half of “The Gift” section, Campbell looks at the role that the saint's gender plays in the economy of the gift, pointing out that although all possessions are gifts of God, in order to give them up, the saint has to first be seen as possessing them in the human sense. As female saints have limited claims to social position and possessions to renounce, they often function more as objects than subjects of exchange, specifically as marriage objects. Refusing this social role often takes the form of virginity. Gender and sexuality are thus inextricably bound.
On rare occasion, Campbell stretches her interpretations too far, oversexualizing the text in her readings. In analyzing The Life of Saint Catherine, she states that the empress does not desire union with god but “longs for” and “desires” the saint. Later, when Catherine encourages the empress to take Christ as her husband as she herself has done, Campbell calls this “spiritual polygamy.” These, Campbell explains, are examples of hagiography creating spaces of “unlivable” and “queer connectivity” that build foundations for communal relations for the audience of saints' lives (113). Here hagiography is indeed “attempting to think beyond the limits of human relationships,” but it seems this space beyond is not so much an “environment in which queer desires and modes of connection become possible” as it is a spiritual sphere where sexual metaphors so clearly indicative of human limitations give way to a space beyond sex (i).
Despite this minor issue, Campbell's book is extremely useful. She has a gift for clear writing and always explains the theory in question before applying it to the texts. The only exception is chapter 6, where Campbell brings queer theory to bear most centrally. After reading this chapter, I am still not sure I understand neither how exactly its theoretical frame, based on Carolyn Dinshaw's idea of “the touch,” informs the texts at hand nor how it might allow connections between the medieval past and the postmodern present as claimed. Even so, Campbell's interpretation of the saint's lives examined in this chapter (two versions of The Life of Mary the Egyptian) is enlightening and convincing, as are the other examples of close readings in the book. Although the title Medieval Saints' Lives proves a bit broad, Campbell's claims to engage Old French hagiography as a whole are fitting, given the number of texts she examines. All those interested in hagiography, medieval kinship, and reading communities will read the book with interest.
