La représentation des sens de la religieuse : de la construction d’un imaginaire genré à la mortification virile

Abstract

This paper analyses two Portuguese devout biographies and one eighteenth-century hagiography. In a first part, it focuses on the construction of models of feminine perfection and on how social representations of women influenced that very same construction. It then looks at a set of elements that might be considered as a rhetoric of restraint, which is quite noticeable in these works as far as vision and touch are concerned. As for hearing, smell and taste, the gender dimension is less obvious but still detectable at the level of an imaginary clearly forged on gendered logics. Finally, this paper deals with what was called the mortification of the senses, the active dimension of which gives us examples of extreme asceticism. Even if the mortification of the senses is not exclusively feminine, it seems to be more intense and more decisive in the Lives of women than in those of their male counterparts. This work on the body is often perceived as something excessive and unsuitable for the “fragile sex”, an aspect that will prove essential to understanding why some of these women were considered “virile”.

Keywords

• female sanctity
• rhetoric of restraint
• mortification of the senses
• virile women
• gender
• eighteenth century