Vita "homophila" sanctae Brigitae: Understanding intimacy in the life of Saint Brigit - INSTÄLLT!

Abstract

The popular movement over the later two decades to ‘recover’ lost figures in queer history has reframed St. Brigit and her protégé Dar Lugdach as archetypes of same-sex love within the early Church. Attempts to mine hagiography for evidence of early Christian queer archetypes are not new, with both scholarly and popular discourses ultimately stemming from the origin of the ‘medieval queer’ discourse in John Boswell’s forward-thinking, but tragic Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994). Such an understanding of Brigit, however, while founded in an established wider discourse, faces a number of methodological hurdles, namely, (a) the nature of the evidence available within the text, (b) the textual history of Brigit and Dar Lugdach themselves, and (c) theoretical frames necessary to understand queerness in an early medieval context. This paper parses the material found in the anonymous seventh-century Vita prima sanctae Brigitae, and presents a reading of Brigit grounded in the current discourse on medieval queer history.