The Sexual Shame of the Chaste: ‘Abortion Miracles’ in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives

In the early Middle Ages, gender distinctions commonly expressed ideas of polarity and hierarchy. In one widely circulated Latin etymology, man (vir) derived from strength (virtus) and woman (mulier) from softness (mollities). Virtus and mollities denoted moral as much as physical difference; as one notable source for the commonplace emphasised, this difference justified the subjection of woman to man.1 But the history of medieval gender is not straightforwardly the story of a stable system of polarity, hierarchy and subjugation. Gender was amenable to varying ends and interacted with different political, social and religious impulses. Some medieval historians have drawn attention to the complexity of medieval gender by identifying distinct groups which did not conform to conventional roles, from late Roman and Byzantine court eunuchs to thirteenth-century dowagers, as third genders.2 Like recent work on medieval masculinities, the interest in putative medieval third genders is a gauge of medieval historians’ evolving study and use of gender in ways which increasingly sharpen the distinction between the history of gender and women’s history.3 The interaction between gender and religion in medieval thought and practice has also been a rich, if still developing, forum and here, too, historians have identified third genders. For the early Middle Ages, Jo Ann McNamara has argued that ‘monastic theorists tended to conceptualize a third gender, apart from the two sexually active genders’. This third gender enacted a ‘spiritual parity’ which did not endure beyond the earlier centuries of monasticism.4 If not all historians have found it germane to see the clergy or religious in this way, this is not because of a lack of critical interest in the interaction between gender and religion. Ruth Mazo Karras has seen fit to apply Ockham’s razor, arguing that ‘genders should not be multiplied beyond necessity’ in her own analysis of the distinctiveness of post-Gregorian clerical masculinity.5 Whether or not early medieval monks, nuns and, more complicatedly, clerics constituted a third gender, the ideologies and practicalities governing religious and clerical life distinguished them from the laity. Their lives were defined, in part, by the mundane and celestial possibilities opened up by religious profession, and also by the different routes which men and women took towards this goal. The memory of what these men and women relinquished was not entirely forgotten in the delineation of their new roles and the gender permutations of religious life found varied expression. In