ABSTRACT
The terms ‘hagiography’ and ‘saint’ can still carry connotations of devout uniformity; the full picture is more complex. Massam shows how the picture of sainthood under the weight of feminist analysis has become less concerned with moral codes or even stable personalities and extended to embrace ‘the depths of the ordinary’. A shift towards the recognisable complexity of life rather than otherworldliness has been especially pronounced for contemporary women saints. This chapter traces the ripples of a widening circle of female sanctity from the misunderstood heroine of everyday life, Thérèse of Lisieux canonised in 1925 and reinterpreted through the century, through the waves of social movements that challenged stereotypes of femininity and womanhood as well reshaping understandings of martyrdom and of sanctity, to the cascade of scholarship and art from the 1970s that has freshened earlier icons, reclaiming the voices of forgotten women whose lives remain transparent.
