ABSTRACT
Hagiography and sexuality—can two notions be more contrasted, more incompatible? Hagiographical works present the entire life or an episode in the life of a holy man or woman or a group of men and women, or posthumous miracles at their tombs or shrines, in order to provide he reader with a moral paragon and instruction on how to devote one’s whole life to God. Hagiographical works present, usually in a sequence of episodes. the system of Christian values, among which chastity naturally holds a place of honor. The gist of the hagiographical message is that the body and its “impure” desires should be suppressed and the sexual drive eliminated. The hero as to forget, in his or her claim to holiness, what sex he or she was given. A hermit in the desert is deprived, for a casual observer, of any marks of his sex, and a woman in disguise enters a monastery and bravely exercises her piety among the epresentatives of another sex. 1 Angels had no sex; in visionary dreams they resemble eunuchs, and the monastic community, an ideal of hagiography, was an angelic, that is, epicene society. 2
