Holy Asexualities: Discursive Constructions and Late Medieval Religious Women's Asexual Embodiment

This thesis traces multiple strands of late medieval asexuality and compulsory sexuality that inflected the lives of holy women. Reading the sexuality of these holy women through the lens of asexuality adds another dimension to the study of medieval virginity, and challenges the presumption that virginity was always a struggle. It also has the radical potential to disrupt the naturalization of sex in both modern and medieval periods. This thesis begins by examining medical and natural philosophical discourses, which constructed a gendered iteration of compulsory sexuality by naturalizing lust as an inherent feature of women’s bodies. It next examines hagiography, in which a category of “holy asexuality,” in which a moment of divine intervention was thought to purify these women’s bodies from a state of carnal sin to perfection, contrasted with the utterly non-sexual concerns represented in their own revelations and visions. Holy asexuality was thus generated underneath the umbrella of compulsory sexuality, and depends on it, even as the religious women themselves resisted its normative forces. The final chapter demonstrates how holy women lived in and through the category of holy asexuality through the letters of advice that they wrote. While “holy asexuality” was prescriptive, late medieval holy women’s embodiment constitutes another sort of holy asexuality. They resisted the demands of compulsory sexuality and established their unique connections to the divine through asexuality. Their understanding of asexuality opens up possibilities for reading the category as something other than the absence by which asexuality is typically defined.