The Lady as Saint

Résumé du livre

But unlike the courtly lady -- and unlike the male subjects of saints' lives -- the female saint is explicitly corporeal. Spirituality is most often evidenced or expressed in the saint's battle to preserve her virginity; at some point in each of the lives, the saint is displayed stripped of her clothing and her naked body is mutilated by her tormentors. Cazelles argues that the violence in these stories demonstrates the sacrificial import of the portrayals. Further, she contends that the entire corpus of thirteenth-century French hagiographic romance is, in effect, a violation of the female body.