ABSTRACT
In all the excitement surrounding Christina of Markyate’s recent rise to the moderate heights of academic stardom and a level of celebrity only made possible by C. H. Talbot’s pioneering first printed edition of the Life of Christina of Markyate in 1959, the Life itself increasingly seems to be a casualty of her success. It is Christina’s own remarkable historicity that seems to appeal to students and teachers alike, the seeming immediacy of her presence and personality in the milieu of twelfth-century St Albans. To that historicity the Life itself is often adduced merely as a witness, an inert and not always very cooperative testimony to the existence of an extraordinary individual, and not, as it deserves to be, as a text that is extraordinary in its own right – and of which Christina’s charisma is only a product, and not (in any sense that can be proved) the cause.2 In operation here is a variety of what literary theorists call the ‘biographical fallacy’, the notion that texts are only meaningful in relation to the people who produced or inspired them – an assumption that often results in all too comfortable conclusions about how discourses are constructed and how they should be read. As Christina’s presence in source-books, anthologies and university courses becomes more and more assured, her individuality seems ever more independent of her biography, to the point that there even seems to be a tendency now to read her as, in some sense, the victim of her own written Life – a living female ‘experience’ contained and enclosed by the dead, patriarchal ‘auctoritee’ of the written word.3 It does not help that the Christina who has recently acquired such a presence in the historical landscape apparently speaks perfect English, the English of Talbot’s translation – which is all too often the only means by which her ‘personality’ is accessed – rather than the often awkward or damaged Latin of Talbot’s necessarily tentative edition. Whether or not Christina’s character was really as remarkable as the author of her Life thought it was – and that is not a question that we will ever be in a position to judge – we need to pay more attention to the play of language and imagination that makes the Life itself, even in the slightly blurred form in which we have it, the real star of the show.
