Rewriting Radegund of Poitiers: Shifting Models of Women’s Sanctity and Gender Expectations from the Merovingian Era to the Twenty-first Century

This project explores the life and “afterlife” of Radegund, a Merovingian queen, monastic leader, and saint, through almost a millennium and a half of history from the sixth century to the twenty-first. By focusing on specific consolidating moments in the development of Radegund's cult throughout Europe, this study offers a historically critical perspective on the appropriation and reinterpretation of a figure whose versatility ensured her lasting relevance as an important symbol suited to a myriad of political, theological, and social agendas. After her death on August 13, 587, Radegund became the object of a popular cult in Poitiers, which gradually expanded throughout the French- and German- speaking regions of Europe, into Sicily, across the channel into England, and even into France’s colonial possessions. As her cult became a global phenomenon, the two original sixth-century Merovingian biographies composed by individuals who personally knew her soon became the basis for new interpretations of Radegund in various social, religious, political, and geographic contexts. Throughout fourteen centuries, Radegund was "rewritten" by dozens of authors, artists, and devotees who used this figure as a vehicle to promote their different messages, concerns, and interests. Over the course of her afterlife, many different “Radegunds” were created and recreated that often projected contradictory meanings: she was envisioned as a stalwart virgin and an accommodating wife, a royalist rallying point and a republican national treasure, an accomplished queen and a self-effacing recluse, a healer that employed both medicine and miracles, a protectress of the harvest, of cities, and of the nation, a victim and a heroine, to name just a few. My research considers how her various identities shaped and were shaped by shifting needs on both the individual and communal level, by gradual structural changes and transformative events. My analysis of the Radegundian texts, art, and traditions covered in this study relies on methodologies derived from gender studies, global studies, and recent theories from memory studies and the reception of the Middle Ages. While most scholarship on Radegund is typically limited to an analysis of her two sixth-century biographies, my project is the first to feature post-medieval sources and cultic practices. Most of these sources, which range from Latin and vernacular vitae to monumental artistic programs to accounts of propitiating Radegund with packets of oats in rural French towns, have never been addressed in scholarship before or have never been discussed in terms of gender and their relation to women’s history. In this innovative study, I use Radegund's afterlife as a case study for exploring the fluctuating dynamics of the cult of the saints and to better understand how these forces operated in relation to women's history. Gender and the role of women are central considerations as I trace the themes of changing expectations and behavior for women both inside and outside the convent, conventions of elite and royal women's spirituality, as well as attitudes towards marriage and sexuality. My research makes a unique and valuable contribution to scholarship on Radegund, the cult of the saints, and the history of women’s spirituality by incorporating a considerably wider scope and type of sources than has hitherto been attempted. Ultimately, by tracing and analyzing the development of Radegund’s cult in this way, Rewriting Radegund contributes to a greater understanding of the roles saints have played – and continue to play – at the intersection of gender and politics