An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

by Tiernan Morgan & Lauren Purje

August 10, 2016

Guy Debord’s (1931–1994) best-known work, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the “Spectacle,” Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.

Debord defines the spectacle as the “autocratic reign of the market economy.” Though the term “mass media” is often used to describe the spectacle’s form, Debord derides its neutrality. “Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term ‘media,’” he writes, “and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service.” Instead, Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable “degradation” of our lives.

Debord was a founding member of the Situationist International (1957–1972), a group of avant-garde artists and political theorists united by their opposition to advanced capitalism. At varying points the group’s members included the writers Raoul Vaneigem and Michèle Bernstein, the artist Asger Jorn, and the art historian T.J. Clark. Inspired primarily by Dadaism, Surrealism, and Marxist philosophy, the SI rose to public prominence during the May 1968 demonstrations during which members of the group participated in student-led occupations and protests. Though the extent of its influence is disputed, there is little doubt that the SI played an active intellectual role during the year’s events. Graffiti daubed around Paris paraphrased the SI’s ideas and in some cases directly quoted from texts such as The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967).

The first English translation of Debord’s text was published in 1970 by Black and Red Books. The book’s cover features J.R. Eyerman’s iconic photograph of the premiere of Bwana Devil (1952), the first 3D color film. Originally reproduced in LIFE magazine, the image captures the film’s audience gazing passively at the screen with the use of anaglyph glasses. In the foreground, a besuited, heavy-set gentleman watches the screen intently, his mouth agape. Eyerman’s photograph reduces the audience members to uniform rows of spectacled spectators. Although the image encapsulates Debord’s contempt for consumer culture, it reductively implies that his work was mediaphobic (Debord later adapted The Society of the Spectacle into his first feature-length film by utilizing footage from advertisements, newsreels, and other movies). If we were to judge The Society of the Spectacle by Black and Red’s cover, we might assume that the book is a straightforward critique of media-driven conformity. Debord’s insights however, were far more profound.

The Society of the Spectacle consists of 221 short theses divided across nine chapters. The first thesis reworks the opening line of Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867):

Marx: The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.

Debord: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.

By paraphrasing Marx, Debord immediately establishes a connection between the spectacle and the economy. The book essentially reworks the Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and alienation for the film, advertising, and television age. This concern is encapsulated by Debord’s fourth thesis (emphasis my own):

The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Debord observed that the spectacle actively alters human interactions and relationships. Images influence our lives and beliefs on a daily basis; advertising manufactures new desires and aspirations. The media interprets (and reduces) the world for us with the use of simple narratives. Photography and film collapses time and geographic distance — providing the illusion of universal connectivity. New products transform the way we live. Debord’s notions can be applied to our present-day reliance on technology. What do you do when you get lost in a foreign city? Do you ask a passer-by for directions, or consult Google Maps on your smartphone? Perhaps Siri can help. Such technology is incredibly useful, but it also engineers our behavior. It reduces our lives into a daily series of commodity exchanges. If Debord were alive today, he would almost certainly extend his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. Debord would no doubt have been horrified by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets. Did you tweet today? Why haven’t you posted to Instagram? Did you “like” your friend’s photos on Facebook yet?


To be clear, Debord did not believe that new technology was, in itself, a bad thing. He specifically objected to the use of perceptual technologies for economic gain. The spectacle, which is driven by economic interest and profit, replaces lived reality with the “contemplation of the spectacle.” Being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing. We no longer live. We aspire. We work to get richer. Paradoxically, we find ourselves working in order to have a “vacation.” We can’t seem to actually live without working. Capitalism has thus completely occupied social life. Our lives are now organized and dominated by the needs of the ruling economy:

The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object is expressed in the following way: The more [the spectator] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desires. – Thesis 30

The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. – Thesis 33

The proliferation of images and desires alienates us, not only from ourselves, but from each other. Debord references the phrase “lonely crowds,” a term coined by the American sociologist David Riesman, to describe our atomization. The Society of the Spectacle’s first chapter is entitled “Separation Perfected,” a quality that Debord describes as the “alpha and omega of the spectacle.” Referring to the Marxist concept of false-consciousness, Debord describes how the spectacle conceals the “relations among men and classes.” The spectacle functions as a pacifier for the masses, a tool that reinforces the status quo and quells dissent. “The Spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears,’” writes Debord. “It demands […] passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.”

Although he characterizes the spectacle as a singular and omnipresent “repressive pseudo-environment,” Debord also acknowledges its warring and contradictory nature. “Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one,” reads thesis 66. As spectators, we regularly experience advertisements for rival products — Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Delta and US Airways, The X-Factor and The Voice. Often we’re presented with conflicting desires or messages. For instance, a television drama depicting an AA meeting might be preceded by a glamorous vodka advertisement. Such logical inconsistencies are buried by the spectacle’s relentless proffering of goods and imagery. Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way. “Thus by means of a ruse of commodity logic,” writes Debord, “what’s specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves towards its absolute realization.” Put more simply, our fetishization of images and commodities leads us to overlook the spectacle’s contradictory qualities. “The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided,” Debord observes. “Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction.” Debord’s acknowledgement that the spectacle is comprised of competing agents and interests strengthens his critical stance, since it prevents detractors from accusing him of characterizing capitalism as a mindless, monolithic entity.

Debord defines two primary forms of the spectacle — the concentrated and the diffuse. The concentrated spectacle, which Debord attributes to totalitarian and “Stalinist” regimes, is implemented through the cult of personality and the use of force. The diffuse spectacle, which relies on a rich abundance of commodities, is typified by wealthy democracies. The latter is far more effective at placating the masses, since it appears to empower individuals through consumer choice. The diffuse spectacle of modern capitalism propagates itself by exploiting the spectator’s lingering dissatisfaction. Since the pleasure of acquiring a new commodity is fleeting, it is only a matter of time before we pursue a new desire — a new “fragment” of happiness. The consumer is thus mentally enslaved by the spectacle’s inexorable logic: work harder, buy more.

In his 1988 follow-up text, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord introduces a third form: the integrated. As its name suggests, the integrated spectacle is a combination of diffuse and concentrated elements. Debord bleakly concludes that the integrated spectacle now permeates all reality. “There remains nothing, in culture or nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted according to the means and interests of modern industry,” he writes. Today, the integrated spectacle continues to provide abundant commodities while defending itself with the use of misinformation and misdirection. According to Debord, it does this primarily through the specter of terrorism:

Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

Debord’s observation appears particularly prescient today when one compares the amount of media coverage that terrorism receives in comparison to climate change (the latter being the direct consequence of our relentless consumerism). First time readers of Debord’s work may prefer to read Comments first, since it is a brisker and more informal read than The Society of the Spectacle. Unlike his original text, Debord refers to contemporary events to illustrate his arguments, including the Iran-Contra affair, Manuel Noriega’s dictatorship of Panama, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.

Comments also examines the phenomenon of celebrity culture. Debord observes that fame “has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing.” Although The Society of the Spectacle largely focuses on broader themes such as alienation, Debord dedicates two extended theses to the subject of “stars.” He is particularly contemptuous of celebrities, branding them the “enemy of the individual.” The star markets a lifestyle of leisure, “compensat[ing] for the fragmented productive specializations that are actually lived.”

As embodiments of the spectacle, celebrities necessarily “renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify [themselves] with the general law of obedience to the course of things.” Their Individuality is sacrificed in order to become a figurehead of the profit-driven system. After all, celebrities not only peddle commodities, but are commodities themselves. They serve as projections of our false aspirations. For Debord, this makes them less than human:

The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. – Thesis 61

Debord had an equally withering attitude towards the art world. In Comments, Debord blithely declares that “art is dead,” describing current artistic practices as “recuperated neo-dadaism.” His conclusion is unsurprising given the anti-art stance he extolled as a member of Paris’ avant-garde scene. His attitude towards art and art history is exemplified by two key passages in The Society of the Spectacle:

The affirmation of [art’s] independence is the beginning of its disintegration. – Thesis 186

When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. – Thesis 193

Debord believed that Dadaism and Surrealism marked the end of modern art, describing them as “the last great assault of the revolutionary proletarian movement.” For Debord, art was another phenomenon that had been subsumed by the spectacle. Its commodification reduced art movements into “congealed past culture:”

Once this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes possible, it is also the end of the world of art. In this age of museums, when artistic communication can no longer exist, all the former moments of art can be admitted equally. – Thesis 189

Debord cites a study by Clark Kerr in which the economist suggested that industries involving the “consumption of knowledge” (i.e. arts, tech, and entertainment) would become the “driving force” in the development of the US economy. It marks another instance in which Debord’s observations appear to parallel our contemporary situation.

The Society of the Spectacle’s critical longevity can be partly attributed to Debord’s refusal to describe the spectacle’s form. By focusing instead on the spectacle’s ever-shifting qualities, Debord encourages the reader to scrutinize the world around them. It is for this reason that the book is routinely celebrated for its prescience. A contemporary reader can readily apply Debord’s analysis to the fracturing of the media industry, the rise of the internet, or to the use of social media. Note how Debord starts multiple sentences with the phrase “the spectacle is…”:

The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. – Thesis 49

The spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery. – Thesis 63

The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma. – Thesis 71

Debord’s aggressive use of repetition parallels the spectacle’s omnipresence and reinforces his critique. It’s a clever rhetorical device. Full of pithy aphorisms, The Society of the Spectacle reads less like an academic text and more like a manifesto — a call to arms against passive spectatorship. One of the book’s most cited passages is the ninth thesis: “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” As with the book’s opening sentence, the ninth thesis plays off the work of another philosopher. Debord’s aphorism is an inversion of a passage from the preface of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): “The false is a moment of the true.” The Society of the Spectacle is littered with both subtle and explicit references to the work of other thinkers. Aside from Hegel and Marx, Debord also references György Lukács, William Shakespeare, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Niccolò Machiavelli. This meta-textual approach places Debord’s work into a lineage of celebrated texts whilst also embodying the SI’s concept of détournement, a term variously translated as “diversion,” “detour,” “reroute,” and “hijack.”

The concept was initially devised by the Letterist International (founded by Debord) and later revised by the SI. In a 1957 essay entitled “A User’s Guide to Détournement” Debord and the artist Gil J. Wolman define the concept as:

The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersed[ing] the original elements and produc[ing] a synthetic organization of greater efficacy.

The SI championed détournement as a means of interrupting the fabric of the everyday — whether it be repurposing old film reels, subverting iconic images or slogans, or devising literature inspired by the works of other writers. The concept bridges the appropriating practices of avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, with the activist “culture jamming” of groups such as The Yes Men and the Billboard Liberation Front. In subverting and referencing the work of other authors, Debord uses The Society of the Spectacle as a means of demonstrating its practical use. The act of détournement imbues revered and historicized works of art and literature with new life, thereby overcoming their congealment at the hands of the spectacle. As Debord and Wolman write:

Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of real class struggle.

The concept of Détournement represented the synthesis of many of Debord’s ideas, particularly his anti-art and anti-commodity stances. He did however, acknowledge its weaknesses, namely that an act of détournement requires the viewer’s familiarity with the original, pre-détourned subject matter. Debord compensates for this in The Society of the Spectacle by preceding each chapter with a prominent quote, thereby alerting the reader to the meta-textual nature of his work. Despite its cultural influence, the concept of détournement raises a number of questions. For instance, how does one measure the efficacy of a détourned work? Can a détourned work be subsumed by the spectacle, and if so, how does one prevent such an action?

Although The Society of the Spectacle is recognized as an incisive indictment of the consumerist experience, readers may well reject Debord’s assertion that capitalism has inherently degraded our social lives. After all, how can society produce new services and products without some form of industrialization? On this particular point, Debord is unrelenting, arguing that capitalism — having already served our most basic survival needs (the means to food, shelter, etc.) — relies on fabricating new desires and distractions in order to propagate itself and maintain its oppression over the working classes:


The new privation is not far removed from the old penury since it requires most men to participate as wage workers in the endless pursuit of […] attainment … everyone knows he must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern commodities. – Thesis 47

At the heart of Debord’s critique is his belief that capitalism is an inherently uncreative system. The obsession with profit demonstrably works against human interest, especially when it comes to the protection of the environment. In Comments, Debord quotes Daniel Verilhe, a representative of Elf-Aquitaine’s chemicals subsidiary, who, at a conference regarding a ban of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) argued that it would take at “least three years to develop substitutes and the costs will be quadrupled.” “As we know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one and has no market value,” scoffs Debord.

The most significant criticism that can be leveled at The Society of the Spectacle is Debord’s failure to proffer any convincing solutions for countering the spectacle, other than describing an abstract need to put “practical force into action.” In his final thesis, Debord declares the pressing need for “self-emancipation” from the spectacle:

This “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is only possible where individuals are “directly linked to universal history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.” – Thesis 221

In 1994, six years after he described the spectacle as “the most important event to have occurred this century,” Debord killed himself at his home in the remote French village of Champot. A life of hard drinking had led to a diagnosis of peripheral neuritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition whereby the body’s nerve endings burn away. By most accounts, Debord had long since retreated from the French intellectual scene, spending his days drinking with friends and obsessively engaged in games of strategy (Atlas Press republished A Game of War, which Debord co-authored with his wife Alice Becker-Ho, in 2008). Andrew Hussey, a biographer of Debord, described his decline as “a slow suicide.” In an 2001 article for the Guardian, Hussey wrote:


It depressed him in his later years that [his] insight had long since ceased to be a revolutionary call to arms but the most accurate, if banal, description of modern life […] While Debord’s public life was predicated upon his revolutionary intentions, in private he sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism.


“Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best,” Debord quips in his 1989 memoir. “Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.” Indeed, for someone who wrote comparatively little, Debord cast a huge shadow over postmodern theory and discourse. His interrogation of capitalism and visual culture preempted the work of theorists such as Jean Braudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard, each of whom dedicated their work to the frenetic and orgiastic world of images in which we live.

Although the ‘spectacle’ has become a clichéd term for the modern condition, there is no denying the richness of Debord’s original text. The Society of the Spectacle is littered with tangential lines of enquiry such as the psychological impact of modernist architecture, or the nature of celebrity. Each successive reading unveils another layer of nuance. For instance, take this passage in which Debord reflects upon a quote by the sociologist Joseph Gabel:


The need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a completely different pathological level, “the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence.” – Thesis 219

Note the words “need” and “representation.” Ask yourself — what compels us to buy the latest tech gadget? Why do we spill our feelings out on Facebook, in posts that are archived on servers deep underground? Which is more important, the expression of the feeling itself, or the knowledge that it will be documented and seen by others? Why do we incessantly take selfies, or record our every moment for posterity? Are we afraid of being a nobody — of being on “the margin of existence?” If you’re concerned with how you appear, then are you really living? Even now, almost 50 years after its original publication, The Society of the Spectacle reads as if it were written for our time:

The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.” – Thesis 218

Related

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE - Libcom.org

The first version of this translation of The Society of the Spectacle was 

completed and posted online at my "Bureau of Public Secrets" website in 2002.

THE ROARING TWENTIES

The spectacular risk of cryptocurrency investing

Don't let Matt Damon neg you into losing all your money

Illustrated | iStock

RYAN COOPER
JANUARY 27, 2022

The biggest cryptocurrencies have had a rough few months. If you listened to Matt Damon's Crypto.com ad implying you're a sissy girly-man for not buying some crypto, which started running at about the market peak, you'd have lost nearly half your money by now. At the time of writing, both bitcoin and ethereum were down by about 45 percent compared to their highs from last November; BNB was down 42 percent.

Now, they may well go back up again at some point — crashes and recoveries have happened before many times. But it's an illustration of the incredible risk of cryptocurrency investment. These things are not a futuristic way to get guaranteed returns through the computer; they're a scammy, useless, and quite possibly doomed hot potato asset.

One amusing thing about the timing of the crypto crash is how it obliterates one of the concept's principal ideological underpinnings. Bitcoin "is ultimately the only long-term protection against inflation," wrote Tyler Winklevoss in a blog post in 2020, arguing that it is a better store of value than gold and predicting that it would eventually soar to $500,000. In reality, right now inflation is spiking to its highest levels in decades, and instead of a rush to crypto "safety," the top coins are all crashing in value — and not by 7 percent but by hundreds of percent on an annual basis.

This is largely because crypto is heavily tied to the functioning of the real economy. In particular, both the big coins eat up abominable amounts of both electricity and advanced computer chips. The "proof of work" system used by both bitcoin and ethereum to create new coins and validate transactions eats up roughly 109 terawatt-hours for ethereum and 204 terawatt-hours per year for bitcoin — or about what the Netherlands and South Africa use, respectively.

Now, ethereum developers have been promising to move to a more efficient "proof of stake" system for years (meaning you would need about $83,000 in ether at current prices to be able to participate as a validator), but they still haven't done it and there's no sign of them starting soon.

Bitcoin miners have therefore been chased all over the globe in search of the cheapest possible electricity, often from old, filth-spewing coal power plants, often in impoverished authoritarian countries where relevant officials can be bribed to look the other way at gigantic power overuse. China kicked them out in late 2021 both to cut down on power use and financial fraud.

The current decline of bitcoin is related to the government of Kazakhstan apparently cutting off its miners and eyeing new controls to cut down on their power usage. (Even a dictatorship is well advised to provide a reasonably consistent supply of electric power to keep its population quiescent.)

Major powers around the world are also cottoning onto the fact that the crypto craze is badly exacerbating the computer chip shortage, and thence the shortage of cars, appliances, consumer electronics, and everything else that needs chips, and thence the inflation that is deeply unpopular among voting citizens. Regulations are likely coming in both the United States and Europe that would address the absolute bonanza of scams and frauds in crypto, the resulting systemic financial risk, and also free up capacity at semiconductor fabs for real industries

That doesn't speak well of the immediate prospects for crypto prices.

It's worth emphasizing that all that electricity and all those computer chips are being used up to do things that are explicitly pointless. The entire idea is to force crypto participants to expend useless effort to make it difficult to attack the system (something that is already accomplished quite well on the internet). Here we have the fire of the gods — a fundamental force of physics harnessed to do the bidding of humanity — being created in unimaginable quantities by burning the dirtiest fuel available. And here we have that power driving some of the most sophisticated objects ever made, wearing them out by the train car-load in order to … guess random numbers a quadrillion times a second.

The waste, pollution, and damage to the climate are beyond nightmarish. It's as if there were a trillion-dollar baseball card or Beanie Babies collecting frenzy, but every time you wanted to create, trade, or sell one, you had to throw an entire litter of kittens into a wood chipper.

And contrary to Winklevoss's arguments about gold: While that metal is hugely overvalued on any rational business basis, it does have legitimate industrial uses, plus thousands of years of history as a real currency, and (most importantly) it actually physically exists in a hefty and eye-pleasing form that is nice for jewelry or decoration.

Cryptocurrencies, by contrast, are imaginary computer funny money with operations that are totally incomprehensible to the layman and a substantial portion of the crypto enthusiast base alike. As Dan Olson argues in a brilliant investigation of the cryptocurrency and NFT space, crypto is not good at anything it sets out to do. As the wildly gyrating value shows today, it is not a good store of value. It is a horrendous medium of exchange: It's very slow compared to the dollar payments system and dramatically more expensive, with just one transaction costing at least a few bucks and up to hundreds of dollars, depending on conditions.

Finally, crypto is exceptionally vulnerable to most kinds of hacking, because it's virtually impossible to reverse a transaction on the blockchain, and most lack elementary security features other services take for granted. For instance, you can "airdrop" a malware NFT into certain kinds of ethereum wallets without needing permission, and if its owner ever clicks on it, you will receive all the contents of the wallet immediately.

Crypto is ultimately a greater fool scam where the only way to profit is by passing off the hot potato to the next sucker. It has a snazzy techno gloss of cryptography that is hooked into libertarian notions about hard money and general suspicion of the financial sector, but that is only a facade. The only reason cryptocurrencies have value is the general conviction that in future, the line will keep going up. That has made a few people rich beyond the dreams of avarice, because scams can be very profitable if you get out in time.

But as we see today, the line does not in fact always go up. And if a critical mass of crypto owners ever lose faith at once, bitcoin, ethereum, and all the rest are toast.

Why Experts Think This New Crypto Is A Scam

by Emma Newbery | Published on Jan. 28, 2022

Image source: Getty Images

A new LGBTQ token called MariCoin raises concerns.

Key points

• A new LGBTQ token in Spain promises to create an ethical and transparent form of payment.
• Critics have raised a number of concerns, such as the lack of a whitepaper.

One of the many potential benefits of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology is it can empower marginalized communities. Cryptos can build communities, increase financial accessibility, and help people escape stigma.

Unfortunately, the lack of regulation and proliferation of scams also means there's little to stop unscrupulous players attempting to exploit those potential benefits. Which is exactly what some fear a new Spanish LGBTQ token called MariCoin could be trying to do.

MariCoin isn't the first LGBTQ crypto project

Before we get into the reasons experts are concerned about MariCoin, let's touch on some positive ways cryptocurrency and blockchain could help the LGBTQ community.

• There's a blockchain marriage certificate project that helps couples in countries where same-sex marriage is illegal.
• Launched in 2021, the Pride token (PRIDE) wants to create a payment system capable of funding meaningful change.
• The LGBT Token (LGBT) that launched in 2018 aims to harness the economic potential of the LGBTQ economy and put some of the proceeds back into the community.
• The anonymous nature of the blockchain could help people who live in countries where same-sex activity is criminalized to move money freely and avoid having their assets frozen by authorities.

Why MariCoin raises red flags

According to its website, MariCoin will be, "A social, ethical, transparent and transversal means of payment." The idea is the tokens would work as a form of payment in various businesses that have signed up to an equality manifesto. The coin completed a week-long pilot in Madrid before it launched in 2022.

Co-founder Juan Belmonte told Reuters, "Since we move this economy, why shouldn't our community profit from it, instead of banks, insurance companies or big corporations that often don't help LGBT+ people?" The idea itself sounds great. But as a potential investment, it raises a lot of red flags.

1. The name plays on a homophobic slur

The name MariCoin comes from an offensive homophobic word in Spanish. Now, it could be an attempt to reclaim the term -- as the founders told CoinTelegraph it was. But if that's the case, given the token's mission and the unfavorable responses on social media, it seems misguided.

2. It doesn't have a whitepaper

When you're evaluating a cryptocurrency, one of the first ports of call should be its whitepaper. This is where you'll find information about what problems the token plans to solve, and how it plans to do it. Responding to criticisms, on Jan. 7, MariCoin's co-founder Juan Belmonte promised CoinTelegraph the first version of its whitepaper would be available "next week." But over two weeks later at time of writing (Jan. 24) there's no sign of the whitepaper.

3. There are errors on its website

The website is pretty basic. In fact, there's really only one page and you'll get more information from the Reuters and CoinTelegraph articles than from the site. Even the basic navigation doesn't add up. For example, there are three 'waiting list' buttons. One goes to a Google form where you can sign up to the new extended waiting list, and the other two go to a page that says the waiting list is closed. Moreover, Google Forms is not the most professional way to do a token pre-sale.

The other links go to a Change.org petition that hasn't yet received 200 signatures and an email contact form. Given the project says 10,000 people signed up to the initial pre-sale waiting list, this itself is suspect -- it means less than 2% of them signed the petition. Though this could be because it isn't clear what the petition is trying to achieve.

The slightly odd English can be attributed to sub-optimal Spanish translation. But, there's also no information about the team, no details on how the token will work -- such as how many will be issued, and no info on which merchants will accept the token. Finally, it claims to be the first coin aimed at the LGBTQ community, but it isn't.

Buyer beware

MariCoin raises a number of red flags, even if you're trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. On the plus side, it received an Algorand (ALGO) accelerator program grant, which gives it more legitimacy. It could be a genuine project run by people who aren't super familiar with the crypto world. There's a chance they've rushed to get something to market, and not realized a crypto token with no whitepaper and a poor website would cause concern. However, there's also a chance there's something more concerning going on.

Its website says the coin will be released on main cryptocurrency exchanges in February and offers people the chance to reserve MariCoins beforehand at the starting price of $0.025 by joining the extended waiting list. This seems like an extremely risky proposition. Nobody knows what will happen to MariCoin's price when it (and if) is released on crypto exchanges. There's no info about how many tokens will be issued, how many are owned by MariCoin's founders, and where it might be traded.

If you want to support MariCoin, the best bet is to wait until there's a lot more information available. You need to see its whitepaper and understand the details of how the token works before you spend a cent. Try not to get blinded by the project's ideals and evaluate it as an investment. If it didn't promise to do something good for the LGBTQ community, would you give it a second glance? I know I wouldn't.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emma Newbery

Emma owns the English-language newspaper The Bogota Post. She began her editorial career at a financial website in the U.K. over 20 years ago and has been contributing to The Ascent since 2019.

The US Supreme Court is a bastion of unearned privilege

Ryan Cooper, National correspondent
Fri, January 28, 2022

The Supreme Court. Illustrated | iStock

The Supreme Court is set to hear a pair of cases about racial preference in college admissions, or "affirmative action." As Nicholas Lemann writes at The New Yorker, it's highly likely that the court will ban the practice as part of their general assault on civil rights.

One case, in classic right-wing troll fashion, is suing Harvard for discriminating against Asian-Americans' applications. Now, as Jay Kaspian Kang points out at The New York Times, there actually is quite strong evidence this has happened. That's indefensible and should be rectified immediately.

But it is ludicrously unfair to use that alleged fact to abolish affirmative action entirely. Elites enjoy their own system of affirmative action that is a hundred times more powerful than the halting and halfhearted efforts at prestigious universities to make their student bodies somewhat more diverse. Wealthy conservatives want to make the system even more unfair than it already is through judicial rule-by-decree.

Just look at the Supreme Court itself. For most of the court's recent history, almost every justice has gone to Harvard or Yale for law school — the sole exception today is Amy Coney Barrett, who went to Notre Dame. Indeed, there are two justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who went to the same prep school. There are about 27,000 high schools in this country; it simply beggars belief to argue that of the nine "best" legal minds in the country, 22 percent of them just happened to come from the same one. Come on. (Also, if Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing was any guide, Georgetown Prep would seem to be a place where our future judicial overlords learn about utter moral debauchery and early-onset cirrhosis instead of Aristotle or whatever.)

Let's not be children about this. The pipeline from Georgetown Prep to Yale or Harvard Law to the federal bench is a system of privilege. High-status people use their money (Georgetown Prep's tuition is $60,000 a year, though there is some financial aid) and influence to place their family and friends into exclusive institutions where they more or less succeed automatically, even if you're — to pick a completely random example — a handsy beer-swilling moron. See also Jared Kushner, a titanic dullard who got to go to Harvard despite atrocious grades and test scores because his father made a strategic $2.5 million "donation."

Kavanaugh even had legacy preference at Yale because his grandfather went there (which he lied about under oath), and that was even more important in the 1980s than it is today. They don't make hypocrisy more egregious than this guy almost certainly ruling against race-based affirmative action.

It is obviously the case that without consistent pressure against it, the power of the rich will undermine the integrity of any supposedly "neutral" process. Base admission simply on test scores, and you run into the fact well-to-do parents can afford testing prep services, re-tests, tutors, and so forth (not to mention actual bribes to admission officers).

Base it on more nebulous criteria like essays, letters of recommendation, sports, or community service (as is now standard in most college admissions), and it's even easier for the rich to squirm in with expensive consultants and careful preparation. Indeed, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out some years back, this style of application originated in a literal anti-Semitic conspiracy. Too many high-achieving Jews from working-class families were getting into the Ivy League in the early 20th century, so the WASP elite at the time had to invent some way to discriminate in a plausibly-deniable fashion.

The power of money shows even in affirmative action systems today. As Kang details, diversity initiatives in many schools have greatly increased the share of minority students, but have overwhelmingly selected from the wealthiest members of those groups.

Fundamentally, there is no way to avoid making a choice about what kind of student body a school wants, and hence establishing some kind of preferential system. Even if it were possible to measure academic ability with perfect accuracy (it isn't), making that the sole criterion for admission would entrench the privilege of the rich. A different system that ensures a supply of students from under-represented or lower-class backgrounds is simply a different choice — one that is a lot fairer than the current system of tests, application consultants, and straight-up bribery.

If I were in charge, I would do college admissions for a big national school through a demographically-adjusted lottery. Set up a reasonable test score threshold for applications, and then draw names such that the resulting class is as close to representative of the country as a whole as possible — including race, gender, income, and geography. That would be facially fair, less easy for the wealthy to cheat, and abolish the Byzantine nightmare of college applications today.

But in any case, in the likely event that the reactionary legal clerics who lord over this country decide to abolish affirmative action for college admissions, don't be fooled. They'll just be further insulating the power of a narrow elite clique against any kind of challenge.

The Sexual Shame of the Chaste:
‘Abortion Miracles’ in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives

Zubin Mistry

First published: 27 October 2013

 

https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12040 

PDF

In the early Middle Ages, gender distinctions commonly expressed ideas of polarity and hierarchy. In one widely circulated Latin etymology, man (vir) derived from strength (virtus) and woman (mulier) from softness (mollities). Virtus and mollities denoted moral as much as physical difference; as one notable source for the commonplace emphasised, this difference justified the subjection of woman to man.1 But the history of medieval gender is not straightforwardly the story of a stable system of polarity, hierarchy and subjugation. Gender was amenable to varying ends and interacted with different political, social and religious impulses.

Some medieval historians have drawn attention to the complexity of medieval gender by identifying distinct groups which did not conform to conventional roles, from late Roman and Byzantine court eunuchs to thirteenth-century dowagers, as third genders.2 Like recent work on medieval masculinities, the interest in putative medieval third genders is a gauge of medieval historians’ evolving study and use of gender in ways which increasingly sharpen the distinction between the history of gender and women's history.3 The interaction between gender and religion in medieval thought and practice has also been a rich, if still developing, forum and here, too, historians have identified third genders. For the early Middle Ages, Jo Ann McNamara has argued that ‘monastic theorists tended to conceptualize a third gender, apart from the two sexually active genders’. This third gender enacted a ‘spiritual parity’ which did not endure beyond the earlier centuries of monasticism.4 If not all historians have found it germane to see the clergy or religious in this way, this is not because of a lack of critical interest in the interaction between gender and religion. Ruth Mazo Karras has seen fit to apply Ockham's razor, arguing that ‘genders should not be multiplied beyond necessity’ in her own analysis of the distinctiveness of post-Gregorian clerical masculinity.5

Whether or not early medieval monks, nuns and, more complicatedly, clerics constituted a third gender, the ideologies and practicalities governing religious and clerical life distinguished them from the laity. Their lives were defined, in part, by the mundane and celestial possibilities opened up by religious profession, and also by the different routes which men and women took towards this goal. The memory of what these men and women relinquished was not entirely forgotten in the delineation of their new roles and the gender permutations of religious life found varied expression. In the thought of the Anglo-Saxon monastic theorist Aldhelm (c.639–709), for example, religious men and women partook, in Emma Pettit's words, of a ‘shared invisible spiritual identity heavily indebted to masculinity’. Monks and nuns alike were enjoined to contend ‘manfully’ (viriliter) in the battle against vices. The visible dimensions of religious life, however, from dress to demeanour, retained clear gender distinctions, and for Aldhelm the transition to religious life entailed a more dramatic break for men than for women.6 Elsewhere, hagiographers drew on different models of sanctity in characterising the transition to female religious life, from the transcending of gender through virile asceticism to the transformation of gender through spiritualised motherhood. Often, as Simon Coates has shown in his study of the vitae of the sixth-century abbess Radegund of Poitiers, hagiographers blended elements from these models.7

Across the diversity of early medieval models of sanctity (and their modern interpretations), chastity was a crucial sign of religious distinction. But chastity was also fragile, an ‘unstable condition and easily lost among the pitfalls of the world’.8 From early Christianity onwards, sexual lapses were rude reminders to individuals and communities of the gender roles which religious orientation sought to reconfigure. When, in the early third century, Tertullian critiqued an emergent custom in Carthage for virgins who had renounced marriage to stand unveiled in church, he noted acerbically that after uncovering their heads many ended up covering their bellies in shame or resorting to abortion to prevent public disclosure of sexual sin.9 From punitive retribution to the remedy of penance, responses to such lapses endeavoured to recover the communal experience of chastity and to contain the turbulence of sexual sin in communities of the chaste.

This article focuses on questions of chastity and sexual sin in examining an unusual ‘abortion miracle’ motif in the Latin hagiography of early medieval Ireland. It is found in the vitae of Brigit of Kildare and two male saints, Áed mac Bricc and Cainnech of Aghaboe: the saint encounters a nun who has breached her vow to chastity and become pregnant but, through the saint's intervention, the pregnancy miraculously disappears. The motif has not been as thoroughly scrutinised as other episodes in Irish hagiography. David Herlihy situated the miracle in the interplay between native paganism and nascent Christianisation. For Herlihy, such stories glistened with the ‘aura of archaism’ from a ‘strange, occasionally savage world, still largely influenced by traditional heathen customs, still only slightly touched by a crude Christianity’.10 Other readings have focused on attitudes to abortion and the lives of early medieval women. Noting that ‘abortion took place, if not commonly, then at least often enough to appear without comment in both secular and ecclesiastical sources’, Lisa Bitel has suggested that such miracles reflect a ‘blasé attitude toward abortion’.11 Most recently, Maeve Callan has argued that hagiographic depictions of ‘abortionist saints’, virginal restoration and the birth of Irish saints from incestuous or illegitimate unions ‘reflect a remarkably permissive attitude toward … traditionally taboo acts’, an attitude shared by some prescriptive texts. Callan has also provided a gendered reading of the motif and the hagiographic handling of reproduction: male incursions into reproductive matters, like those of Áed and Cainnech, were failed attempts to appropriate control of a female zone of reproductive labour, in which women turned to other women for their needs, and prescriptive texts, which explicitly refer only to female abortionists, ‘represent the morality of “ordinary” Irish Christians’.12 While these readings, especially Callan's, are of much interest, the question of how the erasure of a nun's pregnancy could be represented as a mark of saintly sanctity has not been fully explored. This paper will approach the miracle lying at the heart of the motif in light of a critical juncture between early medieval gender and religion, namely the promotion and protection of chastity.

Early Irish hagiography

Irish saints’ lives emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries, to which the vitae of three famous saints from the fourth to sixth centuries can be placed: two of Patrick, one of Columba and two of Brigit. The Brigidine vitae were one by Cogitosus (Cog.), a monk of Kildare, and the so-called Vita Prima (VP), which earns its name from the order in the Bollandists’ early modern edition in the Acta Sanctorum. The Bollandists believed that it was the oldest Brigidine vita, a matter still debated among scholars. These early works each drew distinctively on some continental hagiography, scripture, apocrypha and secular stories to create narratives of Christian sanctity designed to resonate in Irish milieus.13

Hereafter, the picture becomes more complicated and the following summary leans towards simplification. In subsequent centuries, vitae of new saintly subjects, together with redactions of older vitae, were produced in Latin and, from around the ninth century, Old Irish. Beyond the earliest works, these Latin vitae have only survived in three later medieval compilations produced after the thirteenth century, which Richard Sharpe has called the Dublin, Salamanca and Oxford manuscripts in his fundamental study of early Irish hagiography. The two principal modern editions of these vitae draw differently on these compilations: Charles Plummer has edited the Dublin vitae (and unique Oxford ones) while William W. Heist has edited the Salamanca vitae.14 These editions contain different redactions of the vitae of Áed and Cainnech, including intriguing differences in the ‘abortion miracle’ motif.

Sharpe's study has established that, whereas the compiler of the Dublin manuscript often edited and amended material, the Salamanca codex was the work of a more conservative compiler. Thus the Salamanca codex (and Heist's edition) appears to contain some redactions of vitae which are older than their Dublin counterparts (and Plummer's edition). Further, Sharpe has argued that within the former, nine or ten vitae including those of Áed and Cainnech, the so-called O'Donohue group, named after a scribal annotation, represent an original collection which pre-dates the later compilation of the codex. The vitae in this group as preserved in the more conservative Salamanca codex, he argues, can plausibly be dated to c.800.15 This summary yields a tentative working chronology for the ‘abortion miracle’ motif from emergence and recycling to later dissipation. It probably originated in the earliest Brigidine vitae (or in a lost exemplar) in the seventh century; it was adapted in the vitae of Áed and Cainnech perhaps in the late eighth or ninth century; and it was subsequently amended or excised in some later redactions of all of these lives.

The Brigidine vitae

Brigit (c.452/6–524/6/8), abbess and founder of the influential monastery at Kildare, was one of the pre-eminent Irish saints.16 From the late nineteenth century, Brigit the saint became entwined with Brigit the goddess through a confluence of scholarly trends and their popular receptions. Brigit appealed to those interested in excavating the native mythologies of a putatively matriarchal prehistory and in exhuming personas around whom the energies of nationalist identity could coalesce.17 She endures as an icon in feminist spirituality and neo-paganism, epitomised by works such as Mary Condren's engaging but methodologically problematic study of Irish religious history.18

Brigit's enduring popularity demonstrates the possibilities for both convergence and divergence between scholarly and popular thought. As Christina Harrington has put it, ‘in very few areas of modern life is scholarship so influential on so many people's daily religious life – but it is Victorian scholarship, not contemporary work’.19 Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, scholars have relocated almost all of the sources previously understood to contain layers of pre-Christian traditions within the distinct cultural dynamics of a Christianising early Ireland.20 Scholars sometimes still use the goddess-saint connection to illuminate the Brigidine vitae; but their focus has shifted, if not entirely, to the forms, purposes and contexts of that distinctly Christian genre, the hagiographical vita, and away from the history of Brigit the saint in the fifth and sixth centuries or the prehistory of Brigit the goddess.

The ‘abortion miracle’ motif emerged, then, in texts with a vested interest in shaping the past for the present. The earliest texts to include the motif were Cogitosus's vita and the Vita Prima. The precise origin is unclear and no comparable motif survives in earlier Christian literature.21 Whether it originated with Cogitosus's vita, which can be reasonably dated to c.680, the Vita Prima, which could pre-date Cogitosus or have been composed as late as c.800, or a now-lost vita, is uncertain.22

Nonetheless, Cogitosus's vita is a useful starting point. Aside from a prologue outlining her career and extensive accounts of posthumous miracles, the bulk of this vita is comprised of short nature miracles: the diverting of rivers, relocation of trees and mastery over animals. A few miracles, however, touched on the promotion or protection of religious chastity. In one, Brigit cured a young girl born mute by asking her whether she wanted to become a veiled virgin or be given away in marriage. The girl's first utterance resonated with religious obedience: ‘I do not want to do anything except what you want’.23 In another, Brigit came to the aid of a ‘chaste woman who was her follower’. After entrusting a silver brooch to this woman for safekeeping, a deceitful man secretly took it back and flung it into the sea. He insisted, ‘for the guilty gratification of his lustful whims’, that because she had lost it the woman should become his slave. Brigit was deliberating over how to help her when a man delivered a fish he had caught and the brooch was found within it. The inadvertence of the miracle conveyed rather than compromised Brigit's sanctity: she had saved the woman from sexual slavery and the episode culminated in the man's confession and reorientation towards a life committed to God.24 Like these miracles, the ‘abortion miracle’ motif touched on religious life:

With a strength of faith most powerful and ineffable, she faithfully blessed a woman who, after a vow of integrity, had fallen into youthful concupiscence, whose womb was now swelling with pregnancy: and, after the conception disappeared, without childbirth or pain she restored her healthy to penitence.25

The same motif also appeared in the Vita Prima:

On another occasion, through the most powerful strength of God, Saint Brigit blessed the swelling womb of a woman: when the conception disappeared, without childbirth or pain she restored her healthy to penitence. She was healed and gave thanks to God.26

These two vitae were very different, first, in terms of politico-religious subtext. Whereas Cogitosus was staking a claim for Kildare's pre-eminence as a pilgrimage site, the Vita Prima was written in the absence of Brigit's relics and located her activity more widely across the religious landscape of Ireland, possibly in the context of a changing political situation and increased tension with Patrician Armagh to the north.27

Second, the Brigits of these vitae differed in detail and emphasis. Like so many saints, Cogitosus's Brigit, ‘whom God foreknew and predestined according to his own image’, was marked for sanctity from her conception and through her precocious childhood.28 When her parents desired to marry her off ‘according to the custom of the world’, Brigit approached the bishop Mac Caille, ‘inspired from above and wanting to devote herself as a chaste virgin to God’. Struck by her ‘love of chastity’, he placed the white veil over her head. The wood of the altar which she touched at her consecration, Cogitosus noted, was still visited by pilgrims seeking relief from afflictions.29 Though the number of ‘folkloric’ miracles wrought was unusual by continental standards, she was nonetheless, in Lisa Bitel's words, a ‘holy woman of such stereotypical virtues that her vita might have been written in Gaul or Rome … virtuous, tireless and humble to the point of seeming passivity’.30

The Brigit of the Vita Prima was also devoted to chastity. When her father and brothers began pressurising her into marrying, she prayed for a deformity to stave off suitors, whereupon one of her eyes burst.31 But, more unusually, the Brigit of the Vita Prima was peripatetic and evocative of Irish heroic traditions, and the depiction of her commitment to chastity was coloured with these distinctive traits. Her birth story marked her sanctity from the womb when a druid prophesied her future eminence upon encountering her pregnant mother, the slave-girl Broicsech, and father, Broicsech's master Dubthach.32 She attracted fellow virgins to the religious life on her wanderings north to territories in the orbit of Patrick and his disciples.33 On one such visit, Brigit resolved a paternity dispute. A council of bishops was adjudicating the matter of a professed virgin who alleged that she had given birth to the child of a bishop from among Patrick's followers. Patrick entrusted an initially reluctant Brigit with ascertaining the truth. Disbelieving the woman's account, Brigit marked a cross on the woman's mouth, causing her head and tongue to swell up, and blessed the infant's tongue before asking him who his father was. The infant disclosed the accused bishop's innocence and revealed that his father was a ‘certain fellow who is sitting furthest away at the very end of the council-hall’; the woman repented.34 Like Cogitosus's Brigit, however, she was not a virile ascetic who transcended her gender but a chaste woman who, as a holy man visionary recognised in one encounter, was a ‘type of Mary’, a physical virgin and symbolic mother.35

The vitae of Áed and Cainnech

The motif is one of several shared between the Brigidine vitae and the vitae of the sixth-century male saints Áed and Cainnech, which were composed, following Sharpe's arguments, around the turn of the ninth century. The vita Aidi presented a peripatetic national saint not associated with any particular ecclesiastical centre or political dynasty.36 Several miracles showcased Áed's friendships with female religious communities which received him with hospitality. In a miracle directly preceding the motif, three female religious were ambushed and decapitated by robbers, who stole off with their heads. Seeing this in a vision, Áed arrived at the women's mourning community and pursued the robbers, whose flight was stalled by divine intervention. Reproached by the saint, the robbers underwent penance. Returning with the women's heads, Áed revived them.37 In other stories he miraculously replenished a meal served by an impoverished female community and contended with a king reluctant to free his slave-girl to take the veil.38 In the context of the vita, the motif reemphasised Áed's affiliations with female religious life:

On another day, making a journey, Áed came to a place of other holy virgins called Druimard and was received with great joy in hospitality. But gazing upon the virgin who was serving him, holy Áed saw that her womb was swelling and carrying a child. Immediately he stood up without [eating] food to take flight from that place. Then she confessed before all that she had secretly sinned and did penance. And holy Áed blessed her womb, and immediately the infant in her womb disappeared as if it did not exist.39

Finally, the motif appears in a slightly different guise in the vita Cainnechi:

A certain virgin living in a place close to him secretly fornicated, and her womb swelled up with a child. She asked holy Cainnech to bless her womb as if it were swelling from some illness. When he had blessed her, immediately the infant in her womb disappeared without showing.40

Where the authors of the vitae obtained the motif from is not entirely certain. The vita Aidi contains elements derived from both Brigidine vitae: the foretelling of his sanctity at birth bears comparisons to Brigit's birth story in the Vita Prima, while the story of the recovered brooch in Cogitosus finds a parallel when Áed came to the aid of a religious woman entrusted with a king's gold and silver ornament.41 It seems likely that the motif was adapted from a Brigidine source. The author of Cainnech's vita, however, may have adapted the motif from the vita Aidi. Máire Herbert has argued that it drew on the vita Aidi as a source on the basis of paralleled motifs and an episode in which Cainnech comes to the aid of Áed in rescuing a sister abducted by a king.42 It is plausible, then, that the author of the vita Aidi adapted the motif conscious of a gender switch from female to male saint, while the vita Cainnechi adapted the motif as the miracle of a male saint.

The vita of Ciarán of Saigir

The motif of male saints performing such a miracle can be compared to a lengthier episode in the vita of Ciarán of Saigir, which, like its subject, cannot be dated securely.43 Ciarán's mother had established a female religious community next to his monastery at which a group of women ‘imitated the life of the saints’, among them a ‘noble and very beautiful girl’ called Bruinech, whom a local king, Dimma, abducted. ‘Loathing the immensity of so great a crime’, Ciarán set off on a rescue mission. Dimma laid down a challenge: he would return Ciarán's ‘disciple’ if the saint could awaken him the next morning through the cooing of a cuckoo (unlikely in the middle of winter). Nonetheless, a cuckoo awoke a startled Dimma at dawn and, having broken his resolve, Ciarán recovered Bruinech. But not without a disturbing revelation:

After the man of God returned to the monastery with the girl, she confessed that she had conceived in her womb. Then the man of God, stirred by a zeal for justice, not wanting the serpent's seed to come alive, by making the sign of the cross on her belly made it empty.44

The story did not quite end there. Dimma returned to the monastery to abduct Bruinech once again and she dropped dead at the sight of him. Through his prayers, Ciarán revived her and the feud with Dimma ended when Ciarán miraculously saved his son from a fire. Dimma finally repented and consecrated both of his sons to Ciarán.

Ciarán's miracle puts the gender permutations of the motif in the vitae of Áed and Cainnech into sharper relief. In Ciarán's miracle, Bruinech's body became, in Callan's words, the ‘battlefield for a war waged between religious and secular male authority … [and] little more than the site of one man's effacement of another's virility’.45 The miracles of Áed and Cainnech were not coloured with the same concern to underline religious male authority. Ideas condensed in three words recur across them and the Brigidine versions: the swelling (tumescere) by which the nun's pregnancy was beginning to show and the disappearance or evanescence (evanescere) brought about by the saint's blessing (benedicere). But certain differences are visible too. Unlike Brigit, the male saints are distanced from reproductive matters. In Áed's case, his enigmatic response upon realising that the nun was pregnant, dramatically leaving the table, hints perhaps at a sense of pollution and his blessing only came after the nun's confession to her community. In Cainnech's case, the penitential theme is almost absent. Like the story of Brigit and the brooch, this was something of an inadvertent miracle and there is even a whisper of deception: it is not altogether clear that Cainnech knew what he was doing.46 These differences condense how the social experience of reproduction interacted with both gender and religious status, and typify attempts by the male clerical hierarchy to wrest greater ideological control over reproduction.47 But, understanding the significance of the motif, what made it miraculous, gravitates around gender in a different sense.

Complications: making the text disappear

This understanding must first navigate the potentially distorting effect of the motif's fate in the hands of later medieval redactors and early modern editors. It evidently scandalised nineteenth-century Catholics. In Migne's edition of Cogitosus's vita in the Patrologia Latina, one can read of the preceding miracle, the transformation of water into ale for lepers, an allusion to Christ's miracle at Cana, and the subsequent one, the turning of stone into salt at a poor man's request. But the motif is nowhere to be seen: Brigit's miraculous undoing of the nun's sexual lapse was sufficiently unsettling for it to have disappeared leaving only an elliptical trace.48 Similarly, John O'Hanlon's influential ten-volume Lives of the Irish Saints published in 1875 synthesised the multiple vitae of saints into single narratives. As he made explicit in his preface, his syntheses excluded ‘no statement of importance, judged consistent with sound morals and doctrine, or Christian edification’. Less explicitly, elements not consonant with this aim were excised, including the motif.49

The story of the motif in the hands of later medieval compilers is more complicated, though here too one can detect editorial adjustments. In the Dublin redaction of the vita Aidi, the story became about the spiritual, but not physical, consequences of sexual sin: the saint ‘realised that one of them had fallen into sin. Then aware that the holy bishop had learned of her sin, she confessed her guilt in front of all, and did penance’.50 The story was completely excised from the vita Cainnechi as represented in Plummer.51 Curiously, in the case of Ciarán, the redaction in Plummer's edition brought the moment when Bruinech was disburdened of her pregnancy closer to the more candid versions of Áed's and Cainnech's miracles: ‘The man of God, seeing that [Bruinech's] womb was swelling with a child, blessed her womb with the sign of the holy cross, and her stomach immediately shrank, and the child in her womb disappeared’.52

Similarly, in a later life of Brigit, based on the Vita Prima and edited by Sharpe, the story of the pregnant nun was omitted by an editor sensitive to ‘passages of a remotely scandalous nature’. Perhaps the scenario of a pregnant nun caused as much offence as the hint of abortion: the story of Brigit's involvement in the paternity dispute referred simply to a woman (mulier) rather than a female religious (virgo). Additionally, some manuscript copies of Cogitosus's vita also omitted the story.53

If these editorial adjustments and the impulses which appear to underlie them make it tempting to read modern dynamics into the motif – they, like us, seem to detect a tolerant attitude to sexual sin and abortion – it ought to be remembered that the motif was retained in at least some manuscript copies of the Brigidine vitae, the Salamanca vitae and the Bollandists’ early modern edition. Not all subsequent readers of the miracle necessarily saw in the motif what, we presume, certain anxious editors did. The adjustments suggest that the motif needs to be historicised and understood in early medieval terms.

The miraculous in the motif: gender and chastity

Sean Connolly has implied that the authors of the motif, writing with ‘delightful naïveté’, did not quite realise what they were representing.54 But, in fact, the motif was included in vitae with diverse political and ecclesiastical subtexts, suggesting that hagiographers saw something edifying in it which transcended these other impulses. As Dorothy Bray has noted, the ‘possibility that [early Irish] miracle stories might have a moral or spiritual lesson to offer is frequently overlooked or dismissed’.55 Hagiographers crafted their works for an ‘ecclesiastical public’ frequently, but not exclusively, monastic and receptive to their layered meanings.56 Saints’ lives were, in Lisa Bitel's words, ‘liturgical drama[s]’, often read out with accompanying ritual on feast days, which invited audiences to ‘learn from the example of a life led piously, meditate on the life journey of the saint, catch certain thematic links, conceive of a deeper meaning to the order in which events occurred … and receive other encoded messages’.57

The ‘moral or spiritual lesson’ lying at the heart of the motif concerned the reconciliation and healing of individuals and, by implication, their communities, following the disruption of sexual sin. In a monastic context, pregnancy through fornication was both a spiritual and physical affliction from which the lapsed virgin emerged ‘healthy’, in part, through the medicine of penance. To an audience which encountered other miracles concerning chastity within the vitae, the motif enacted expiation and reintegration within communities.58 Maeve Callan has rightly drawn attention to the possibility for restored virginity in prescriptive ecclesiastical texts. Here, the importance of Ireland in the broader history of penance is significant.59 The mid- to late sixth-century Penitential of Finnian, one of the oldest surviving penitentials or handbooks for confession, held out the possibility for reconciliation after sexual lapses by vowed virgins and clerics alike. After a canon on abortion or infanticide, which gave a half-year penance to any ‘woman who has destroyed someone's child by her maleficium’ (a term which connects magic and poisoning), the author immediately turned to any professed virgin whose ‘sin becomes manifest’. After six years of penance, she would be ‘joined to the altar, and then we can say that she can restore her crown and put on the white robe and be declared a virgin’. Likewise, a cleric who had fathered a child would regain his office in the seventh year. Produced in a monastic setting, this penitential viewed sexual sin through the lens of communal visibility. It treated nuns and clerics whose sexual sin had become publicly disclosed through the birth of a child more stringently than those whose sin remained hidden.60

The miracle motif perhaps played on the intelligibility of recourse by the religious to conceal sexual sin, though it should also be stressed that the penitential dimension publicised the sin. Moreover, its audiences might well have been familiar with stricter ecclesiastical rulings against abortion. The Collectio canonum Hibernensis, an important Irish collection of canon law composed in the late seventh or early eighth century and which later proliferated on the continent, addressed abortion in a section on religious, rather than lay, women. It reiterated patristic and conciliar rulings against abortion which left the possibility of remedial penance open but which broached abortion in terms less mitigated by consideration of communal visibility. For instance, a quotation from Jerome's famous letter on asceticism to Eustochium rebuked professed virgins who conceived in sin, drank potions to have abortion and often died in the process: such women would be triply damned as ‘suicides, adulterers against Christ and parricides of their unborn children’.61 The possibility of such familiarity is given further, albeit later, support when we bear in mind that the Brigidine vitae circulated and, indeed, survived on the continent. In the ninth century, a Carolingian reader who consulted the oldest surviving manuscript containing the whole of Cogitosus's vita would also have been able to read Halitgar of Cambrai's penitential, which incorporated condemnations of abortion from earlier penitentials and canon law with an original canon singling out abortionists, namely the ‘apothecary, male or female, [that is] killers of children’.62

Hagiographic authors may have been more disciplined by awareness of what abortion was understood to entail, physically and morally, than historians have recognised. Ciarán's miracle, for example, wrought because the saint did not want the ‘serpent's seed to come alive’, was rhetorically crafted in manipulation, rather than disregard, of emerging ecclesiastical strictures on abortion which calibrated penances according to varyingly defined stages of fetal development.63 Likewise, the authors of the motif very deliberately described something which was not, in fact, quite an abortion. This is not to deny that they were conveying the intelligibility of recourse to abortion by those with a stake in keeping sexual sin secret. But it is to recognise that, on early medieval understandings, abortion did not avoid parturition but rendered parturition premature in the bloody flux of miscarriage. One penitential composed on the continent in c.800, but drawing heavily on Irish material, described abortion in an earlier stage of pregnancy as ‘destruction of the liquid matter of the infant’.64 A more graphic visualisation comes from seventh-century Spain. In replying to a priest troubled by the problem of whether Christ's blood splattered at his scourging had been restored to him at his resurrection, Braulio of Saragossa turned to the unpleasant superfluities of menstrual blood, semen and miscarriage to defuse these concerns. ‘Why should it not be believed’, he asked, ‘that human blood is drawn off and perishes when the humour of generation and blood, as well as the miscarriage (aborsus), are not restored in the resurrection to either parent, if indeed one can speak of a parent, whose disgusting fluid or inanimate foetus is poured forth?’65 By speaking of uterine evanescence, the previously swelling womb emptied of a child which vanished as if it had never been, hagiographers were not elaborating a euphemism for abortion, but were carefully describing the ends of abortion without quite describing the means. What was truly miraculous about the motif was that the pregnant nun has her fornication erased, enters into reconciliation and avoids the bloody, premature parturition of abortion.

The impetus behind this, more than ‘pagan’ custom fossilised in a Christian text or a broader permissive attitude encoded in the miracle, lay in the symbolism of chastity. While no regulae or rules for early Irish nuns have survived, the symbolic connotations of what chastity allowed women to avoid within the delineation of female religious identity can hardly be overstated. Many monastic theorists used the uglier toils of marriage, sexuality and childbearing to illuminate the beauty of consecrated virginity. In the seventh century, Leander of Seville counted the ‘weight of the pregnant womb’ and mortality in childbirth in which the very ‘function and fruit of marriage perish’ among the ‘primary dangers’ of marriage in his regula for nuns addressed to his sister Florentina.66 Similarly, in a poem on virginity, Venantius Fortunatus wrote that, for virgins, the ‘stiffening womb does not press down with a fetus shut within’ in a kind of prenatal depression.67 A comparable symbolic dimension is implicit in other episodes within the vitae and in the different versions of the motif. It is also explicitly inscribed upon the Brigidine versions in which the nun's pregnancy disappeared ‘without childbirth or pain’. This may have been a subtle hint at a kind of female collaboration absent in the miracles wrought by Áed and Cainnech; significantly, as Callan notes, it is Brigit who spares the nun from the pain of childbirth and the VP's version, in which the nun ‘gave thanks to God’, yields the only evocation of the nun's own perspective.68 But the allusion to ‘childbirth or pain’ also bears a crucial symbolic weight, referring to the curse in Genesis 3: 16 by which God committed Eve and her female descendants to the pain of childbirth as a symbol of original sin.69 It was not simply that the miracle averted the painful birth of an unwanted child – it averted the unwanted symbolism of having that child.

Conclusion

If religious life did not allow early medieval women to transcend conventional gender roles altogether, chastity and the avoidance of marriage, sexuality and childbearing certainly represented a crucial dimension of how religious life transformed gender. Sexual sin, however, threatened a reversion back from this transformation: the nun who had fallen into fornication risked lapsing into the ways of the world she had left behind. The miracle wrought by Brigit, Áed and Cainnech, however, allowed the sinning nun to remain distinct from her unprofessed counterpart even in the aftermath of her sin. These saints remedied such sin for individuals and their communities by allowing the nun to avoid the physical and symbolic degradation of both childbirth and abortion. Paradoxically, then, in early medieval religion, chastity could transform gender – sometimes even when it was breached.

Notes

I am grateful to the participants of the colloquium for their responses and discussion; to the anonymous reviewer for comments; and to Katherine Cross for reading the article.

1 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae XI.ii.17–19, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1911), unpaginated.

 

2 Re eunuchs, see Kathryn M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); also Shaun Tougher, ‘Social Transformation, Gender Transformation? The Court Eunuch, 300–900’, in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 70–82. For dowagers, see Linda E. Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England, 1225–1350 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

 

3 See Dyan Elliott, ‘The Three Ages of Joan Scott’, American Historical Review 113 (2008), pp. 1390–1403.

 

4 Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 120–229, quotations on pp. 144, 148. For comparable later medieval arguments, see R. N. Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, in Dawn M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 160–77; Jacqueline Murray, ‘One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?’, in Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (eds), Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 34–51.

 

5 Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Thomas Aquinas's Chastity Belt: Masculinity in Medieval Europe’, in Bitel and Lifshitz (eds) Gender and Christianity, pp. 52–67, here p. 53.

 

6 Emma Pettit, ‘Holiness and Masculinity in Aldhelm's Opus Geminatum de Virginitate’, in Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 8–23, quotation on p. 18.

 

7 Simon Coates, ‘Regendering Radegund? Fortunatus, Baudonivia and the Problem of Female Sanctity in Merovingian Gaul’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Gender and Religion, Studies in Church History 34 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 37–50. See also Giselle de Nie, ‘“Consciousness Fecund Through God”: From Male Fighter to Spiritual Bridegroom in Late Antique Female Sanctity’, in Anneke Mulder-Bakker (ed.), Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 101–61.

 

8 Jo Ann McNamara, ‘Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours’, in Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (eds), The World of Gregory of Tours (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 209.

 

9 Tertullian, De virginibus velandis, 14.2–9, ed. E. Dekkers, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL) 2 (1954), pp. 1224–5.

 

10 David Herlihy, ‘Households in the Early Middle Ages: Symmetry and Sainthood’, in Robert McC. Netting, Richard R. Wilk and Eric J. Arnould (eds), Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 389–90.

 

11 Lisa Bitel, Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 77.

 

12 Maeve B. Callan, ‘Of Vanishing Fetuses and Maidens Made-Again: Abortion, Restored Virginity, and Similar Scenarios in Medieval Irish Hagiography and Penitentials’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 21 (2012), pp. 282–96.

 

13 Kim McCone, ‘An Introduction to Early Irish Saints’ Lives’, Maynooth Review 11 (1984), pp. 26–59; Clare Stancliffe, ‘The Miracle Stories in Seventh-Century Irish Saints’ Lives’, in J. Fontaine and J. N. Hillgarth (eds), The Seventh Century: Change and Continuity (London: Warburg Institute, 1992), pp. 87–111.

 

14 Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, ed. Charles Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), hereafter Plummer; Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae ex codice olim Salmanticensi nunc Bruxellensi, ed. W. W. Heist (Brussels: Société de Bollandistes, 1965), hereafter Heist.

 

15 Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

 

16 On Brigit's dates, see Lisa Bitel, ‘Body of a Saint, Story of a Goddess: Origins of the Brigidine Tradition’, Textual Practice 16 (2002), pp. 209–28, here p. 210.

 

17 Catherine McKenna, ‘Apotheosis and Evanescence: The Fortunes of Saint Brigit in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Joseph F. Nagy (ed.), The Individual in Celtic Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 74–108.

 

18 Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989).

 

19 Christina Harrington, Women in the Celtic Church: Ireland, 450–1150 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 6–16, quotation on p. 11, including pp. 7–8 on Condren's methodology.

 

20 Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1990); Joseph F. Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Motifs of Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), pp. 68–80, counters ‘exaggerated claims … made about the degree of power and freedom enjoyed by women in early Irish society’ (p. 68).

 

21 See Giles Constable, ‘Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women, Studies in Church History, subsidia 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pp. 205–26, for a comparable but more elaborate twelfth-century episode.

 

22 The debate is ongoing: two important contributions with contrasting arguments are Richard Sharpe, ‘Vitae S. Brigidae: The Oldest Texts’ and Kim McCone, ‘Brigit in the Seventh Century: A Saint with Three Lives?’ Peritia 1 (1982), pp. 81–106, 107–45 respectively. Nathalie Stalmans, Saints d'Irlande: Analyse critique des sources hagiographiques (VIIe–Xe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003), pp. 59–67, 269–87, provides a more recent overview.

 

23 Cog.12, tr. Sean Connolly and J.-M. Picard, ‘Cogitosus's Life of St Brigit: Content and Value’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 117 (1987), p. 16. In what follows, I quote from this translation and Connolly's translation of the VP (see note 26 below) except where the Latin, taken from the Acta Sanctorum (AS), is of interest.

 

24 Cog.25, tr. Connolly and Picard, pp. 21–2. For secular parallels, see Ludwig Bieler, ‘Hagiography and Romance in Medieval Ireland’, Medievalia et Humanistica new series 6 (1975), p. 16.

 

25 ‘Potentissima enim et ineffabili fidei fortitudine, quamdam feminam, post votum integritatis, fragilitate humana in juvenili voluptatis desiderio lapsam, et habentem jam praegnantem ac tumescentem uterum, fideliter benedixit: et evanescente in vulva conceptu, sine partu et sine dolore eam sanam ad penitentiam restituit’, II.13, AS Feb I. col.136F; translation adapted from Cog. 9, tr. Connolly and Picard, p. 16.

 

26 ‘Alio autem tempore S. Brigida, per potentissimam Dei virtutem, cujusdam mulieris tumescentem vulvam benedixit: et evanescente conceptu, sine partu et dolore eam sanam ad pœnitentiam restituit. Illa vero sanata est, et Deo gratias egit’, 16.100, AS Feb I. col.133C. In the AS's Latin, the woman is not explicitly a nun. Connolly's translation from an unpublished critical edition based on 26 full manuscripts, however, refers to a ‘woman who had fallen after a vow of integrity’: VP 103, tr. Sean Connolly, ‘Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: Background and Historical Value’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 119 (1989), p. 45.

 

27 Bitel, ‘Body of a Saint’. See also Stalmans, Saints d'Irlande, pp. 100–08.

 

28 Cog.1.1, tr. Connolly and Picard, p. 13. The scriptural allusion is to Jeremiah 1: 5.

 

29 Cog.2, tr. Connolly and Picard, p. 14.

 

30 Bitel, ‘Body of a Saint’, p. 214.

 

31 VP 19, tr. Connolly, p. 18. On female self-mutilation or psychosomatic illness to avoid marriage in early medieval hagiography, see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, c.a. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 144–55.

 

32 VP 2, tr. Connolly, p. 14; Bitel, ‘Body of a Saint’, pp. 216–22.

 

33 VP 20, tr. Connolly, p. 18.

 

34 VP 39, tr. Connolly, p. 23.

 

35 VP 17, tr. Connolly, p. 17. On Brigit's Marian associations, see Diane Peters Auslander, ‘Gendering the “Vita Prima”: An Examination of St. Brigid's Role as “Mary of the Gael”’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 20/21 (2000/1), pp. 187–202.

 

36 Stalmans, Saints d'Irlande, pp. 206–9, 235–6.

 

37 Vita Aidi 16, Heist, pp. 172–3. See also Lisa Bitel, ‘Saints and Angry Neighbours: The Politics of Cursing in Irish Hagiography’, in Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (eds), Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 123–50, here p. 131.

 

38 Vita Aidi 20, 37, Heist, pp. 173–4, 178.

 

39 ‘Quadam autem die, Aidus, iter agens, venit ad aliarum sanctarum virginum locum, qui dicitur Druimm Ard, et cum magno gaudio in hospicium receptus est. Intuens autem sanctus Aidus virginem que sibi ministrabat, vidit quod uterus illius, partum gestans, intumescebat. Et cito surrexit ille sine cibo, ut ab isto loco fugeret. Tunc illa coram omnibus confessa est quod occulte peccasset et penitentiam egit. Sanctus autem Aidus benedixit uterum eius, et statim infans in utero eius evanuit quasi non esset’, Vita Aidi 15, Heist, p. 172.

 

40 ‘Quedam virgo in vicino sibi loco habitans occulte fornicavit, et uterus eius partu intumuit. Que a sancto Kannecho postulavit ut uterum suum, quasi aliquo dolore tumescentem, benediceret. Cumque ille benedixisset eam, statim infans in utero eius non apparens evanuit’, Vita Cainnechi 56, Heist, p. 197.

 

41 Vita Aidi 1, 33, Heist, pp. 167–8, 177.

 

42 Vita Cainnechi 32, Heist, p. 190; Máire Herbert, ‘The Vita Columbae and Irish Hagiography: A Study of the Vita Cainnechi’, in John Carey, Máire Herbert and Pádraig Ó Riain (eds), Studies in Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 31–40.

 

43 The Salamanca codex may not represent an older text: Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, pp. 293–6.

 

44 ‘Revertente vero vir Dei cum puella ad monasterium, confessa est puella se conceptum habere in utero. Tunc vir Dei, zelo iustitie ductus, viperium semen animari nolens, impresso ventri eius signo crucis, fecit illud exinaniri’, Vita s. Ciarani 5, Heist, p. 348.

 

45 Callan, ‘Vanishing Fetuses’, p. 290.

 

46 A miracle attributed to Radegund, in which she healed a nun swollen (tumefacta) with dropsy by immersing her in chrism so that the ‘illness left no trace in the womb (utero)’ and ‘no damage to the stomach (ventris)’, suggests that the prevarication was not wholly implausible: Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis 80–1, MGH Auct. ant. 4.2, p. 93.

 

47 Bitel, Land of Women, pp. 80–83, Callan, ‘Vanishing Fetuses’, p. 295.

 

48 PL 72, col.780c. See also Danuta Shanzer, ‘Voices and Bodies: The Afterlife of the Unborn’, Numen 56 (2009), p. 352 n.103.

 

49 Quoted in McKenna, ‘Apotheosis and Evanescence’, pp. 91–2.

 

50 ‘vir Dei cognovit unam earum tunc cecidisse in peccatum. Tunc illa sciens quod noverat peccatum eius sanctus episcopus, confessa est culpam suam coram omnibus, et egit penitentiam’, Vita Aedi, Plummer, I, p. 38. See also Dorothy Africa, review of Dorothy Ann Bray, A List of Motifs in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints, Speculum 71 (1996) p. 131.

 

51 See the note in Heist, p. 197.

 

52 ‘Videns autem vir Dei quod uterus illius femine partu intumescebat, signo sancte crucis benedixit vulvam illius, et venter eius exinde decrevit, et partus in utero evanuit’, Vita Ciarani de Saigir 9, Plummer, I, p. 221. See also David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 32; Bitel, Land of Women, p. 77; Callan, ‘Vanishing Fetuses’, p. 290 n. 30.

 

53 Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, pp. 153 n. 73, 200 n. 187, quotation at p. 213. The version in the AS without explicit allusion to religious profession (see n. 28) may reflect a similar sensitivity.

 

54 Connolly, ‘Cogitosus's Life of St Brigit’, p. 7. This is quoted from Connolly's introduction to the translation by Connolly and Picard.

 

55 Dorothy Ann Bray, ‘Miracles and Wonders in the Composition of the Lives of the Early Irish Saints’, in Jane Cartwright (ed.), Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 136.

 

56 Herbert, ‘Vita Columbae’, p. 39.

 

57 Bitel, ‘Body of a Saint’, p. 213.

 

58 See Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church, pp. 88, 150–54. On penance as medicinal, see John T. McNeill, ‘Medicine for Sin as Prescribed in the Penitentials’, Church History 1 (1932), pp. 14–26.

 

59 Allen J. Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), pp. 19–59.

 

60 P. Vinniani cc. 20–21, ed. and tr. Ludwig Bieler, The Irish Penitentials (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963), pp. 78–81 (my translation). For a more detailed reading, see Zubin Mistry, ‘“Alienated from the Womb”: Abortion in the Early Medieval West, c.500–900’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University College London, 2011), pp. 104–10.

 

61 Collectio canonum Hibernensis 45.3–5, ed. F. W. H. Wasserschleben, Die irische Kanonensammlung (Giessen: J. Ricker'sche Buchhandlung, 1874), p. 210; Jerome, Ep.22.13, PL 22, cols. 401–2.

 

62 P. pseudo-Romanum 2.16, 5.1–2, 11.22, ed. F. W. H. Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche (Halle: C. Graeger, 1851), pp. 366–7, 369, 375. This manuscript (Paris, BN, MS lat. 2999) was written in the first third of the ninth century in northeastern France. The manuscript has been mutilated and most of the vita is lost. An index survives, however, including the heading, ‘About a pregnant [woman] blessed without pain’; see Mario Esposito, ‘On the Earliest Latin Life of St. Brigid of Kildare’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 30 (1912–13), pp. 313–4, with Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, p. 18 on dating and provenance.

 

63 See Mistry, ‘Alienated from the Womb’, pp. 125–6 on Irish conciliar material and the Old Irish Penitential.

 

64 P. Bigotianum, IV.2.2, Bieler, Irish Penitentials, p. 228.

 

65 Ep. 42, PL 80, cols. 687d–688d.

 

66 Regula 1, PL 72, col. 879c.

 

67 Carmina 8.3, MGH Auct. ant. 4.1, p. 189.

 

68 Callan, ‘Vanishing Fetuses’, pp. 291–2. I am also grateful to Michelle Sauer for underlining this aspect during discussion at the colloquium.

 

69 A rare scriptural allusion, as Stalmans, Saints d'Irlande, pp. 171–2 notes.