ABSTRACT
When women change the form of their lives, by, for example, entering convents in widowhood, they do so when they are finally freed to follow their own longstanding inclinations towards virginity.2 In such a case, the woman remains internally consistent, although the forms of her outer life may change according to her circumstances. The lives of female saints and holy women are thus more likely to be narrated as stories of a single, legible subject, one whose present is continuous with her past. It is also claimed that holy women are continuous with secular women; that female saints translate the common concerns of their gender into religious meaning. Citing Bynum, Gail Ashton argues that ‘women writing of themselves construct texts marked by continuity which enhance, or continue, ordinary experience and ordinary lives’.3 The female is thus marked as self-identical, a gender category which overrides religious status.
