Hagiography Is Not a Heteronormative Genre

Medieval East Roman saints’ lives celebrated their heroes’ rejection of cross-sex romance and marriage, childbearing and childrearing. Saintly men renounced household roles including assuming authority over wives, children, and slaves. Saintly women abandoned husbands and even children or they avoid their parents’ plans for their marriage altogether. Most found community with members of their own gender, either in monasteries or in monastic pairs, while some lived alone as hermits. Tales of transmonks and cross-dressing nuns challenged the gender binary even as they tended also to reify it. All these forms promoted celibacy, disrupting expectations about sex and sexuality. By some estimates, one percent of the population joined monasteries, with a higher percentage in the capital, and men outnumbered women in monastic life by perhaps four to one. Monastics were marginal, but their stories were not. The impact of hearing tales of holy people in liturgical, public, or private settings meant that, for most Christians, the pervasive heteronormative expectation of the society at large were regularly in tension with narrated religious ideals. Was hagiography entirely out of step with society’s conceptions of gender and sexuality? Or was Byzantium perhaps, not as pervasively heteronormative as scholars have expected? In light of modern debates about heteronormative and its effects on the formation of identity, how should we understand the challenges to heteronormativity that characterize the Christian Middle Ages most popular literary genre?