Gender, the Body, and Holiness in the Middle Ages

Rachel Smith, Willemien Otten, Bernard McGinn, Barbara Newman, and Ryan Coyne on February 27, 2025 at the University of Chicago's Swift Hall. How does the gendering of images work to render Thomas of Cantimpré’s portraits of holy women vivid, compelling, desirable? How is gender undone in his hagiographies, its expectations countered? How does gendering the saint work together with other elements of Thomas’s theology of sanctity? How is the hagiographer gendered in relation to the saint? In what ways might we see the limits of gender as a category of analysis in Thomas’s hagiographical works? How does gendering work in the context of vitae that use apophatic strategies to compose their saintly subjects?