ABSTRACT
The narrative skill of the author of The Life of Christina of Markyate, whoever he was, has been undervalued. This outstanding storyteller brought to life the account of Christina’s experience in a highly dramatic narrative style that retains its power to startle and a vigour that implores the reader to respond to the text on the level of biography. In the absence of the customary prefatory discourse on the occasion of and circumstances behind the text’s composition, the author’s robust claims to authenticity, supported by the text’s highly autobiographical flavour, have generally been accepted at face value.2 Scholars have tended to follow Talbot’s lead in discounting the significance of the text’s patently hagiographic qualities, thereby discouraging the search for less obvious ones.3 Yet beneath the text’s literal surface there exists a fundamental bipartite structure deploying two closely related hagiographic traditions, in which experience is selected and grouped thematically. In the first, Christina’s endeavours to escape her suitor, her parents and the ecclesiastical authorities, is closely modelled on the literature of the virgin martyrs. In the second (occupying the final twothirds), her trials and privations in the anchorhold and the fruit of enclosure, amicitia with the hermit Roger and Abbot Geoffrey, and spiritual charisms, are patterned on the tradition of ascetic martyrdom.
