Christine Bourgeois

Christine V. Bourgeois specializes in the Francophone and Occitan traditions of the Middle Ages, with particular interest in the interconnections between medieval and modern narrative traditions. While her research has covered a range of topics from poetry to prose, from the medieval to the post-modern, her current book project is dedicated to hagiography (the lives of the saints), and particularly to the uneasy boundary in medieval culture between the secular and the sacred. Tentatively titled, Saintly Asceticism and the Literary Machine: Saint Anthony the Great and the Invention of Medieval Hagiography, this project is a literary history of sanctity from the end of the thirteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Based on the reception history of Athanasius’ enormously influential Life of Anthony, not as it was transmitted among the Latin-literate, but among readers of the vernacular, Saintly Asceticism explores the polyvalent ways in which lay Christians were encouraged to think through the relationships between divinity, daily devotion, secular art, and sexual experience in order to trace the significant–and often tacit–ways in which medieval hagiographical modes continue to inform modern understandings of the sacred, the taboo, and the beautiful.