Straight talk: Community, conflict, and critique in the lives of women saints in medieval England (Saint Katherine of Alexandria, Saint Margaret of Antioch, Saint Cecilia of Rome, Clemence of Barking, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Capgrave)

This dissertation analyzes the dramatization of political identity for medieval people of different classes and social conditions who are caught up in the central conflicts and contests between a saint and a tyrant in the virgin martyr narrative. Among the works about female martyrs analyzed in this study are those of Katherine of Alexandria, Margaret of Antioch, and Cecilia of Rome. These texts were written for audiences in religious houses, royal courts, and urban centers in England from the late twelfth through the early fifteenth centuries. I argue that authors from Clemence of Barking in the twelfth century through Geoffrey Chaucer and John Capgrave in the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries use the tropes of sexual difference to give dissent a sacred origin and legitimize certain kinds of political challenges in influential "domestic" spheres of the city and court. These authors address many of the same concerns about the nature and limits of sovereignty found in contemporary political treatises. By doing so, they make experimenting with critique in the public sphere integral to the devotional imagination and to the practices of vernacular poetics.