Download PDF | Martin Homza - _Mulieres suadentes_ - Persuasive Women_ Female Royal Saints in Medieval East Central and Eastern Europe-Brill (2017).
274 Pages
Acknowledgements
The original idea for this book dates back to 1995/1996, while I was studying at the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. The figure behind it was my supervisor at that time, prof. Gabor Klaniczay. Its outcome was an Ma thesis focusing on St. Ludmila of Bohemia. Many of the ideas that paper dealt with continued to inspire me in the following years resulting in various partial studies focusing on saint female rulers in Central and Central-Eastern Europe. Most of them were later revised and updated, and in 2002 became part of my first book Mulieres suadentes: Studies from the history of female ruler sanctity in Central and East Europe in the tenththirteenth centuries.!
This book is an expanded and more elaborated English version of the mentioned papers in Slovak. The new ideas in it are mainly the merit of Professor Hedwig Réckelein with whom I worked closely for one whole year in the frame of a study program at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Georg-August University in Géttingen (Seminar fiir Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte at Georg-August Universitat Géttingen) in 2007 and 2008 on a KAAD scholarship. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Igor S. Filippov from the Faculty of History at Moscow State University for his stimulating suggestions concerning the study of the Hagiography of East-female rulers and, once again, to Prof. Gabor Klaniczay for reading the draft prior to its publication.
For the translations of the different papers into English I thank Castor E. Sanchez, Stanislava Kuzmova, Zuzana Orsagova, Nora Malinovska, and Martina Fedorova who did the final language editing.
Special thanks to Professor Florin Curta for his offer to publish this book within the series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450.
Finally, I thank my wife Martina as well as my daughters Klara Fedora, Tereza Fedora and Gréta Fedora for their support in writing this book, but also for making my knowledge of womanhood more than merely theoretical.
Introduction
This book maps the hagiography of female rulers in East Central and Eastern Europe from the tenth to the thirteenth century, in some particular cases up to the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. It builds mainly on the examples of St. Ludmila, St. Olga and Adelaide who lived (or allegedly lived or existed at least as literary figures) during the tenth century in the Principalities of Bohemia, Kievan Rus’ and the Kingdoms of Croatia and Hungary. It aims to reveal the intricate logic that characterised the beginnings and early development of the political imagination (ideology complex) of the above mentioned countries and respective dynasties.
Our studies mirror the extensive research on saintly male rulers and founders of dynasties and monarchies, but shifting the emphasis to their female consorts, mothers, daughters and sisters, whose saintly reputation played—at least according to the different literary learning tradition—a considerable role in the conversion of their respective countries to Christianity.
The causa scribendi for creating the very early literary model of a female ruler saint in East Central and Eastern Europe constitute deliberate efforts to enhance the prestige of the respective families, i.e. bestow sanctity upon their dynasty. Later this may have taken the form of a well-developed cult of a dynasty which, just like in Western Europe, was further strengthened and mediated through sacral memorial complexes, particular monastic orders and the Church in general.
Once the local dynasties in East Central and Eastern Europe were well established, their respective claims to sainthood also grew stronger. The trend initiated in the tenth century by the queens and princesses of East Central and Eastern Europe blossomed especially in the thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries (for instance, St. Hedwig of Anjou, even as late as the fourteenth century) when female saints played a particularly important role in the history of the local dynasties of East Central and Eastern Europe.
The cult of a particular female (saint) ruler underwent an intricate process. From its establishment and development, reflecting the needs and demands of a specific conductor operarum, it usually experienced periods of prosperity and decline with many factors contributing to the final form of a functioning cult of a saintly female ruler, which could play a mediating function in the intricate social relations of the given country.
To be a female ruler at that time involved controlling a less apparent, yet more profound, spiritual level of society. Women of ruling dynasties, surrounded by their spiritual advisers— monks or churchmen—were the protectors of the texts and images that played a decisive role in forming the complex identity symbols of the respective countries with them becoming their patron-saints.
The phenomenon of female royal saints and their cults in the region of East Central and Eastern Europe represents a rather specific question. It might have originated under the influence of the Byzantine and Merovingian empires or even the Carolingian kingdom, but also as a latter reflection of Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian practices. In this respect, this book may also be viewed as a contribution to the growing body of works on cults of female saints of aristocratic or royal origin (saintly Roman patricians or the holy empress Helena) and regarded as a continuation and contribution to the line research opened by Gabor Klaniczay on female royal saints in the tenth and the eleventh centuries in East Central and Eastern Europe.
Besides the scholars studying medieval hagiography, this book will appeal to those interested in the techniques of remembering, their evolution and their role in mediating social relations. Equally interested may be those studying the ways of making history in any given place or era, especially scholars concerned with modern practices of media and propaganda. A different group of readers may find something of value in this book, namely those interested in gender history, particularly in the role of women in politics, culture, religion, and economy.
From that perspective, our book offers some innovative ideas about the role of medieval female saints of high-ranking origin as agents of charitable work, dispute mediators, and “lobbyists” who assert the interests of particular groups and use different ways of negotiation to reach consensus. It is, in particular, the latter role that made us choose Miroslav Labunka’s wordconstruct for the title of our book—mulieres suadentes.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no comparable book available in English. Our goal is to make use of the abundant literature on history-related gender studies produced in Western Europe and the vu.s. over the last few decades, as well as of less known works by scholars in Russian and Slavicspeaking countries in East Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. We aim to provide a synthesis of the current research as well as a bibliographical guide for future research on the relations between Western, East Central and Eastern Europe, in terms of cults of female saints.
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