Christine Bourgeois: "When You’ve Read One, You’ve Read Them All; or the Rhetoric of Repetition in Medieval Saints’ Lives" 
 
Must RSVP by Oct. 16 to attend. 

If anything in the world of medieval hagiographical studies can be characterized as famous, James Earl’s 1972 assertion that “when you’ve read one saint’s life you’ve read them all” is surely a candidate. This observation sums up the difficulties that scholars continue to face. As anyone who has ever attempted to adapt saints’ lives to the undergraduate classroom can attest, Earl is not so far off in his surmise that saints’ lives are “so much alike that the student of literature finds, after three or four, that the genre begins to tax his tolerance.” While scholarly opinion now takes a more generous stance, treating the apparent intertextual monotony of medieval hagiography as a kind of ritual background noise, Bourgeois’ research proposes to treat it instead as a philosophically meaningful form through which readers from all walks of life were invited to engage with such complex questions as gender expression, sexual experience, and the metaphysical stakes of human craftsmanship.