Queer Genealogy and the Medieval Future: Holy Women and Religious Practice

Queer Genealogy and the Medieval Future: Holy Women and Religious Practice Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Caitlyn Teresa McLoughlin, MA Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2019 Dissertation Committee Karen Winstead, Adviser Jennifer Higginbotham Ethan Knapp 1 Copyrighted by Caitlyn Teresa McLoughlin 2019 2 Abstract This dissertation reconsiders hagiographic narratives about holy women, arguing that medieval conceptions of community, sexuality, and devotional practice are future- orientated and queer. Using The Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria, The Book of Margery Kempe, and The Life of Dorothea of Montau, I argue that hagiography is not a closed genre governed by strict conventions, but instead a literary “place” in which social, institutional, and textual boundaries are tested. My research expands a queer historical and literary archive by examining medieval narratives that allow affective recognition between queer individuals and communities across historical periods. My research specifically traces the development of queer futures in medieval religious writing, identifying the political and textual affordances provided by the presence of these futures to nonnormative individuals and communities in the medieval period as well as the present. My dissertation foregrounds queer practices and relationships in medieval narratives, thereby expanding current understandings of medieval culture and sexuality. Reconsidering holy women through a queer lens challenges modern understandings of history that essentialize sexual identity in order to legitimize racist and sexist ideologies. My dissertation extends medieval sexuality beyond binary gender categories to account for religious representations of nonnormative sexuality and gender within the textual relationships between hagiographers and their subjects. iii Acknowledgments One of the claims of this dissertation is that “family” can be expansive. I am lucky to have families of various forms who have supported me throughout this process. Mom, thank you for always encouraging me towards personal fulfillment and happiness. Dad, you have made so much in my life possible and I wouldn’t be where I am today without you. Colleen and Caroline you are the best friends I’ve ever had and I am so grateful for the both of you. Clare, truly this dissertation would not exist as it does without your feedback, interest, reassurance, and enthusiasm. Lou, Colleen, Pritha, Zach, Sean, and Drew, my OSU crew, thank you for being the ones on this ride with me, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I also want to thank my committee members Dr. Ethan Knapp and Dr. Jennifer Higginbotham for their guidance and encouragement throughout the dissertation process. My adviser, Dr. Karen Winstead, has been nothing but a source of support throughout my time in grad school and I can barely comprehend how lucky I am to have worked with her. To the rest of my friends and family in Los Angeles, Boston, D.C., San Diego, and San Antonio, I love you and am so thankful. iv Vita 2012……………………………………………B.A. English, University of California, Los Angeles 2013-14………………………………………..University Fellow, The Graduate School, The Ohio State University 2015…………………………………………...M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2014–present…………………………………..Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English v Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. iv Vita ...................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Katherine of Alexandria ................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2. Margery Kempe ............................................................................................... 83 Chapter 3. Dorothea of Montau ....................................................................................... 152 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 208 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 220 vi Introduction An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. –Virgina Woolf, Orlando This dissertation examines the intersection of female spirituality, social communities and institutions, familial connections and generation, and devotional practice in the late Middle Ages. I argue that The Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria by John Capgrave, The Book of Margery Kempe, and The Life of Dorothea of Montau by Johannes Marienwerder belong in a queer archive accessible for trans-temporal “touching” by modern queer individuals and communities. Establishment and expansion of this archive works against monolithic and monocultural nostalgia for the Middle Ages by dismantling evidence of the supremacy of “normative” social practice. Through historical and literary analysis, this dissertation shows that diversity and nonnormativity were important, existing parts of premodern society that validate and legitimize modern queer identity and its right to a secure future through the provision of a historical past. Inclusion of various diverse identities in the medieval archive opens up the past by encouraging affective connections that span temporal boundaries, linking individuals and communities through nonnormative recognition. This type of historical identification expands the possibilities for those in the present imagining their futures. 1 Methodologically, this dissertation adopts a queer conception of temporality, production, community, and pleasure. Time is traditionally measured in terms of progress; a historical move “towards modernity” signals cultural advancement, while individual “success” relies on professional and personal advancement. Elizabeth Freeman terms this concept “chrononormativity,” where time organizes individual human bodies toward productivity and “properly” temporalized bodies are linked to narratives of movement and change.1 Queer temporality refers to movements of time deemed regressive or unsuccessful, time that operates “off the designated biopolitical schedule of reproductive heterosexuality.”2 Queer time is inherently linked to expectation and its failure to fulfill social requirements. Reevaluation of the intrinsic positivity afforded to notions of production and progress is a prerogative of queer recognition across time. Heather Love explains the construction of modernity as fundamentally linked to the identification of “backwards” figures: If modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century aimed to move humanity forward, it did so in part by perfecting techniques for mapping and disciplining subjects considered to be lagging behind–and so seriously compromised the ability of these others ever to catch up. Not only sexual and gender deviants but also women, colonized people, the nonwhite, the disabled, the 1. Freeman also elaborates that “institutional forces come to seem like …forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege…which in turn organize the value and meaning of time,” Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 2. E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, “Introduction: Becoming Unbecoming, Untimely Mediations,” Queer Times, Queer Becomings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 1-18. 2 poor, the criminals were marked as inferior by means of the allegation of backwardness.3 Temporality and chronological movement require an articulation of past and present that is often oversimplified and detrimental to individuals, communities, and other “inferiors” of the past. Within medieval studies the historical archive should be extended to include various diverse identities. Carolyn Dinshaw collapses the temporal divide between past and present through theorizing “touches across time” in queer history, embracing an affective connection with the past, suggesting, “…queers can make new relations, new identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality.”4 For Dinshaw and others, queerness is an absence of meaning determined by relative cultural and social positions rather than a firmly defined set of characteristics or qualities.5 Dinshaw specifies that, “Queerness articulates not a determinate thing but a 3. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 6. 4. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities:

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