Gender and Sainthood c. 1100 -1500

This conference aims to put two immensely complex cultural categories, those of gender and sanctity, into conversation with one another. Both are multivalent, unstable categories of being, capable of both enforcing and disrupting hegemonic cultural and social structures and extending beyond themselves to unsettle and re-invent wider categories of meaning. Since the 1980s and the field-defining work of Carol Walker Bynum (1982) and Barbara Newman (1987, 1995), medievalists have embraced the importance of viewing sanctity and holiness through a gendered lens. More recent work (Bychowski and Kim, 2019; Spencer-Hall and Gutt, 2021) has expanded the methodological and conceptual toolkit with which we can approach the intersection of gender and sanctity and made clearer the political and ideological stakes of undertaking such research.