Lay religious cultures in the legend of St Julien, 1220-70

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My DPhil project, 'Lay religious cultures in the legend of St Julien, 1220-70', is a historical exploration of thelegend of St Julien "The Hospitaller" funded by the OOC-AHRC-DTP in collaboration with the ClarendonFund and the Oxford-Richards scholarship at Wadham College, Oxford. Though the literary qualities of someSt Julien texts have proven fertile ground for academic debate, the legend of St Julien has heretofore remainedunexplored from historical perspective. With my DPhil research, I hope to bridge this scholarly gap for thefirst time.In 2021, Ogden called for a diversification of our hagiographical source materials in order to avoidperpetuating one dominant 'single interpretative stance' (ecclesiastical misogyny) on female and gendertransgressive saints. My DPhil project is in part a response to this call, as through my research I hope toprovide historians interested in thirteenth-century lay religious cultures with a textured case study of a modelof sanctity alternative to the eremitic and monastic models otherwise dominant in this period. In the Julienlegend, sanctity is instead grounded in the institution of marriage and expressed within a lay communitycontext. I contend that the legend's explosion in popularity in France through 1220-70 thus provides avaluable way-in to the religio-cultural preoccupations, interests and values of contemporary lay audiences.My research project will draw on a range of closely contemporaneous images, texts and objects, all associatedwith the Julien legend and produced between 1220-70. This includes the vernacular verse Vie de Saint Julien(preserved in MS 3516, fos. 84r-96r of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal), which was the subject of my MStresearch project, and related Julien texts such as the vernacular prose La Vie Saint Julien martir, and theLegenda Aurea. I will also draw on stained-glass sequences of the legend, such as those displayed in thecathedrals of Rouen and Chartres, and investigate other visual sources (e.g. the relief at 42 Rue Galande,Paris), and related religious sites (e.g. churches of St Julien).Through close-reading of these sources I hope to explore how interactions with other cultural codes - such asthose pertaining to gender and social grouping - shaped the articulation of piety in non-monastic settings.The question of how one might live a holy life "in the world" (when so many contemporary hagiographicalexamples were predicated on one's removal from it), for instance, is one to which the legend of St Julien ispoised to provide a range of potentially fruitful answers.I also intend to unpack the significance of the figure of Clarisse, Julien's wife, whose present obscurity is aconsequence of her non-inclusion in the legend's nineteenth-century literary revival, and thus misrepresentsthe legend's significance to thirteenth-century audiences. In correcting this distortion, my research will openup further discussion of the legend's complex gendered and sexual connotations, and thereby help to enhanceour understanding of the religious role of laywomen in this region and period.Though I am primarily interested in how contemporary interactions with this legend can be used to illuminatequestions of cultural-historical significance, my work sits in interdisciplinary dialogue with literary andtranslation study scholarship, as well as with histories of religion, art, gender, and sexuality. It also takessignificant inspiration from the microhistorical tradition. My research methodologies will consequentlyinvolve close-reading, an 'insistence on context' (Ginzburg:1993), a concern with the 'social embeddedness'(Gagnier:1991) of historical agents, and the use of intersectional and intersubjective lenses of analysis