Welcome to Minuscule Script, the infrequently published newsletter written by me, Abby Roberts, author of stories and essays that exist and can be read. This newsletter has some bona fide NEWS in it: “A Grumble of Goddesses” can be read in the 51st issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. If you have $7 burning a hole in your pocket, you can obtain this contemporary fantasy tale about a modern Minoan snake goddess encountering an unsettling Bronze Age entity.

January also brought an amazing surprise: my essay “What Lies and Threats: Nationalist Myth-Making in The Lord of the Rings” is on the longlist for the British Science Fiction Association’s Best Short Nonfiction Award. If you are a voting member of the BSFA, you can vote on it to advance to the short list! The piece can be read for free at Speculative Insight.

On to the essay.

Is This Medieval Saint’s Life Feminist?

Note: This essay discusses medieval sexism and quotes from texts expressing misogynistic views. It also briefly discusses medieval slavery.

Last year, I spent a lot of time detoxing offline. One of the things I did between August and October was translate the “Vita Sancte Ite Virginis,” or “The Life of Saint Ita the Virgin,” from Latin into English. This was challenging but not overwhelmingly so. The anonymous scribe’s Latin was elementary, and so is mine. I got practice while doing primary source research.

Saint Ita was the sixth-century founder of Cell Íte or Killeedy, a monastery in modern Co. Limerick, Ireland. With Saints Brigit, Monenna, Samthann, and Lassair, she is one of only a handful of medieval Irish women immortalized as the protagonists of hagiographic literature. The earliest surviving version of her “Vita” dates to the twelfth century, though parts of it may be as old as the seventh. Ita is also mentioned in two ninth-century martyrologies and credited as the author of the hymn “Ísucán,” which was also actually written around the ninth century, some three hundred years after her death. The fact that people kept writing about Ita for hundreds of years attests to her continued importance.

Hagiographies purport to narrate the lives of Christian saints, but aren’t biographies in the modern sense. Although these texts include supernatural and legendary material, they are important sources for pre-Norman Ireland, which lacked some types of documents available in England and Continental Europe, such as charters. In particular, the narratives about Ita and other holy women are important sources on gender and religion in early Irish society. They present a surprisingly independent and active portrayal of medieval nuns–a class of women stereotyped as cloistered and repressed. And while much of medieval Irish literature embraces the martial, sometimes macho values of aristocratic men, the saints’ lives present something very different.

Saint Ita, Girlboss

According to the “Vita,” the young Ita wishes to become a nun, but her father has promised her in marriage to a local nobleman. The young woman who defies male family members to become an ascetic is a common trope in hagiographic literature, and you also see it in the accounts of Saints Thecla and Brigit,¹ among others. Evidently, this conflict played out in the lives of ordinary, non-saintly women, too, as it caused tension with writers of the early Church who encouraged young women to consecrate themselves to God, yet were uncomfortable with daughters disobeying their fathers. In Ita’s case, the hagiographer portrays her father acquiescing after an angel tells him to let her go “wherever she may want to go to serve Christ.”² 

The disappointing neatness of this resolution notwithstanding, readers shouldn’t overlook its significance. Early Ireland was a patriarchal society in the most literal sense. Power lay not only in the hands of men, but overwhelmingly in the hands of fathers. A son was legally under his father’s authority until he inherited land. A daughter, who could only inherit land in the absence of sons, remained under her father’s control until she married—at which point she typically became her husband’s legal responsibility. While the Old Irish legal material is contradictory and some tracts permit exceptions, most medieval Irish women were legally dependent on male guardians. One tract spells out a woman’s legal position in the following terms:

Her father has charge over her when she is a girl, her husband when she is a wife, her sons when she is a [widowed] woman with children, her kin when she is a “woman of the kin” (i.e. with no other guardian), the Church when she is a woman of the Church (i.e. a nun). She is not capable of sale or purchase or contract or transaction without the authorization of one of her supervisors.³

So when Ita leaves home to go where she wants and do what she pleases, her hagiographer shows her exercising a freedom denied to most women in her society. Her vocation overrides her earthly father’s authority.

Emancipated, Ita takes the veil and searches for a place to found a monastery. She establishes Cell Íte in the territory of the Ua Connaill people, who grant her four fields to use as gardens. This is striking because the tract quoted above prohibits women from making contracts or transactions without a man’s permission. The exchange also binds her to the Ua Connaill as their patron and protector.

Cell Íte was not a cloistered convent. The hagiographer doesn’t portray Ita as retreating from the world but as actively engaged with it. She contracts with a carpenter who erects buildings for her, in return for land and her sister’s hand in marriage. She accepts a donation of silver from a wealthy man, who asks her about the spiritual purpose of gift-giving. “It is in a person's power to give one’s wealth for worldly honor or to give oneself to God for eternal life,” she answers.⁴ Ita’s role as an abbess includes not only economic dealings with local laypeople but also spiritual counseling and teaching. 

Similarly, the abbot Brendan asks Ita what three works please God and what three works displease Him. “True belief in God with a pure heart, a simple life in sanctity, [and] generosity with charity: these three are sufficiently pleasing to God,” she replies. “But speaking curses at people, a persistent state of evil in the heart, [and] confidence in riches: these three are displeasing to God.”⁵ The hagiographer notes that Brendan and everyone else present approve of this answer, even though early Irish canon law did not permit women to instruct men on matters of religion.

Spiritual authority brings Ita not only economic power and respect as a teacher, but also a role in justice and conflict mediation. When a man kills his brother, she spares him from execution. Ita takes responsibility for the man’s legal and moral conduct, and he does penance for his crime.

The entanglement of Ita’s spiritual and secular power culminates in an anecdote about a nun of her community who becomes pregnant. Ashamed, the woman slips out of the monastery and wanders through the neighboring province of Connacht, where she is captured and enslaved. Ita, becoming aware of this, sends Abbot Brendan to Connacht to secure the freedom of the woman and the daughter she has given birth to. Brendan brings them back to Cell Íte, where they are welcomed by the monastic community and live out the rest of their days. 

The sympathy shown by Ita and her hagiographer to the unnamed woman is striking, even if all you know about nuns is that they typically disapprove of extramarital sex. In the context of medieval Irish laws and attitudes towards women, it’s even more interesting.

Women in Early Irish Society

Early Ireland was not a uniquely misogynist society, but the well-being of women and girls was not highly valued, as shown by the legal sources on honor-prices—a fee paid to a person or their guardian in the case of injury or death. All children younger than seven had high honor-prices, with one legal tract claiming a young child’s honor-price was the same as an adult cleric’s. At age seven, when a child was typically fostered out, their honor-price dropped to half that of their father. At fourteen, the age of legal adulthood, a boy became entitled to the full honor-price allotted to his social class, but a girl’s honor-price remained the same. When she married, it became half that of her husband.

Tracts on sick-maintenance—legally mandated care provided to wrongly injured parties—likewise make clear that women’s bodies were valued less than men’s. An ill or injured woman was legally entitled to half the food provided to men, unless she was nursing or able to conceive at the time of her injury. Of course, enslaved women were not entitled to honor-prices or sick-maintenance. The Old Irish term for an enslaved woman, cumal, was also a common unit of value or currency used in the exchange of land and other property.

In addition to the legal material, it’s not difficult to find misogyny in early Irish literary sources. Even elite secular women were not always respected, as shown by the literary treatment of Queen Medb of Connacht, the adulterous, sword-toting antagonist of the Táin Bó Cuailnge. Medb, seeking a stud bull equal in value to an animal owned by her husband, invades the province of Ulster. Medb and her army size the bull, but the campaign ends in disaster thanks to the intervention of the hero Cú Chulainn. As Medb flees with the shattered remains of her army, she gets her “gush of blood” and steps outside the shield wall to relieve herself.⁶ Cú Chulainn appears, sword in hand. “If I killed you dead, it would only be right,” he says to Medb, as she squats half-naked in the dirt. But, “not being a killer of women,” he spares her.⁷ Medb is humiliated, her army is destroyed, and her prize bull soon kills itself in a fight with another.

“We have followed the rump of a misguided woman,” says Fergus, Medb’s lieutenant and lover. “It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.”⁸ Fergus and Medb are fictional characters, and real warrior queens were rare in early Irish society. But it would be naive to think opinions such as this were only expressed in fiction and never by real men seeking to control real women.

The Weird World of Medieval Gender

When compared to the wisdom or saga literature, the “Vita Sancte Ite Virginis” appears almost “modern,” almost feminist, in its treatment of women. Ita’s independence and initiative, her defiance of traditional gender roles, are celebrated by the narrative. Ita lives under no earthly authority but her own. Powerful men such as Abbot Brendan do her bidding without question. The abbots Luchtitern and Lasren even scold a young monk who scoffs at the idea of “philosophers and great men” like themselves wanting to visit the “old hag” Ita.⁹

Later, Ita humiliates the same monk in front of his superiors, who plead for forgiveness on his behalf. The hagiographic narrative is clearly on her side. The “Vita” even passes the Bechdel Test, as it depicts Ita conversing with other nuns without men’s presence. 

Yet I wouldn’t call the “Vita” a feminist text in the modern sense. First of all, the term is anachronistic and inaccurate. Figures such as Ita and Brigit didn’t work to achieve the liberation of women as a class, and sometimes their empowerment came at the expense of other women. When Ita gives her sister in marriage to the carpenter, for example, Harrington argues that the saint acts as the patriarchal head of a kin group. Second, the “Vita” becomes less anomalous in the context of early and medieval Christian religious literature, as well as what we know about medieval Irish nuns generally.

Saints, by definition, are extraordinary people. Early and medieval Christians viewed the will of God as superseding human laws or customs, sometimes including gender roles. Many female saints¹⁰ are portrayed as dressing in male clothing or living as men. Ita fits securely into a tradition of gender-transgressing Christian saints.

In the medieval Irish context, however, more is going on than the elevation of saintly protagonists. Close reading of the hagiographies and other medieval Irish religious texts, such as the martyrologies of Óengus and Tallaght, reveals many minor holy women enjoying some of the treatment afforded to Ita and other saints. These women live independently, travel alone or with others, attend synods, establish churches, and buy and sell land. They interact affably with male ecclesiastical colleagues who respect them and value their contributions. Because these obscure female figures aren’t saints or abbesses—some aren’t even named—and the texts treat them offhandedly, historians such as Christina Harrington and Lisa M. Bitel assert they may represent something like the lived experience of real Irish nuns in the early Middle Ages. Both Harrington and Bitel hold that nuns were treated, to an extent, as “exceptional” women who received privileges not afforded to others.

In large part, nuns’ privilege resulted from their rejection of the roles embodied by most medieval Irish women, those of wife and mother. To twenty-first-century Western observers, especially those from a Protestant tradition, it may seem surprising that a culture as religiously Christian as early medieval Ireland would encourage women not to get married and give birth. However, to writers of the medieval Latin West, a nun’s rejection of an earthly husband and children signified a mastery over her body and desires that elevated her above married laywomen. This mastery was considered a masculine trait, as women were believed to be generally more susceptible to lust and desire for bodily comforts. So, medieval religious literature often praises holy women in masculine terms. For example, the Martyrology of Óengus describes “ten shapely holy virgins, with the passion of a manly host.”¹¹

Medieval nuns didn’t only push the envelope of gender on paper. Legally, nuns were treated as “more” than women—though they certainly weren’t treated as men, either. The legal tract quoted above holds that nuns lived under the authority of the Church, but sometimes, this authority was embodied by the women themselves. Other hagiographic texts, such as Cogitosus’ “Vita Brigidae,” the “Vita I” of Brigit, and the “Bethu Brigte,” portray holy women living or traveling alone and making decisions without men’s presence; male ecclesiastical authorities are often portrayed as physically distant figures unable to micromanage nuns’ day-to-day lives. Certainly, Ita is portrayed as the authority over her nuns and other legal dependents, some of whom are men.

Harrington argues that nuns fell into a gray area between the laws governing women and those governing clerics. Judges applied one or the other or both, depending on the individuals and circumstances. Obviously, holy women from wealthier, more powerful families were more likely to be taken seriously by the authorities. Abbesses in particular could receive considerable legal privileges. Irish canon law stated that a woman could not stand surety (act as a legal witness and enforcer of oaths) unless she was a “lady” or a “holy virgin.” Harrington argues that “holy virgin” in this use meant a hermitess or abbess, as ordinary nuns, like ordinary monks, would have required their superior’s permission to participate in legal matters. However, the word used in the canons for “lady,” the Latin “domina,” was also a title used by abbesses.

I’d argue nuns occupied a liminal space on the medieval Irish gender continuum.¹² Although the medieval Irish conception of gender was, in a broad sense, binary, nuns were treated as a class distinct from laywomen, subject to different rules and warranting different treatment.¹³ So, when we read the “Vita Sancte Ite Virginis,” we aren’t looking at a text that argues for gender equality. We’re reading a text describing people who filled a unique space in a broader patriarchal gender system—albeit not quite comfortably.

Primary Sources:

Kinsella, Thomas, translator. The Táin: From the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cuailnge. Oxford University Press, 1969.

Stokes, Whitley, editor. Félire Óengusso Céli Dé: The Martyrology of Oengus the Culldee. Harrison and Sons, 1905. HathiTrust Online Library.

“Vita Sancte Ite Virginis.” CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College, Cork, 2008.

Secondary Sources:

Bitel, Lisa M. Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland. Cornell University Press, 1996.

Harrington, Christina. Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland 450-1150. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Sheehan, Sara, and Ann Dooley, editors. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.