Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

of women’s dedicated life have never been grasped. For the first time, this thesis has
compared the circulation of the Caesarian manuscripts, and demonstrates that a fixed and
stable collection of his writings for dedicated women, including three letters (of which
two were in fact erroneously attributed to Caesarius) and two sermons, was circulating in
a number of copies prior to the ninth century. This collection circulated separately from
Caesarius’ rule, and in a larger number of manuscripts. From this, it is evident that there
was strong demand for Caesarius’ writings for dedicated women that were of an
ideological rather than a prescriptive nature. By the eighth century, women devoting their
lives to God had more need of ideological works which left them free to find their own
practical paths to holiness, than of rules which governed the minutiae of their existences.
The existence and circulation of these texts indicate that female religious life remained in
a strong state, throughout the early middle ages, and that such a life could be lived
beyond the bounds of the monastery wall. No previous study has brought together
codicological evidence with that of other sources to discuss the nature of early medieval
dedicated life for women.
The third new approach of this study is to highlight the fluidity of the gender of
the texts under discussion. While previous work on gender has been concerned with its
social or rhetorical construction, this study returns to re-examine the original grammatical
meaning of the term by focusing on the gendering of the text itself. The same collection
of letters and sermons circulated for men: that is to say, the same collection circulated,
with largely just the essential grammatical changes made to make them suitable for men.
This is a simple but fundamental point: the circulation of Caesarius’ writings indicates
that the same texts were considered suitable for both genders. This study refines the
historiographical norm of discussing the ideologies of male and female dedicated life as
two separate and fixed entities. The focus of this study is on women’s religious life, but
the textual basis of that life was often not so rigidly gendered.
A fourth approach is just as fundamental. This study, framed through the use and
re-use of Caesarius’ writings, has deliberately taken a non-Benedictine perspective. That
is to say, rather than adhering to the teleological but oft-made assumption that the
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