‘What man are you?’: Piety and masculinity in the vitae of a Sienese craftsman and a Provençal nobleman

Summary

As the historian Jacques Dalarun has written: ‘The saint is abnormal because he is a being of exception, but also because he places himself against the norms, separate from the world.’ Te norm for laymen in the Middle Ages was to marry and raise a family. They secured their livelihoods through landholding and farming, or mercantile enterprise and other worldly activities. As is well known, the majority of saints rejected this secular world – they became monks, tertiaries, hermits, and so on. However, several male saints married, and fathered and raised children. Many bought, sold, or manufactured goods. Saints from among the royalty and nobility had to uphold the law, even if it meant sentencing people to death; and men-at-arms had to participate in warfare. Several married saints were wealthy in money and chattels. Of course, some abandoned such secular lives to join religious orders, but others remained in the world as laymen, performing the duties associated with their stations in life as husbands, lords, merchants, artisans, or pursuing other means of livelihood. They lived ‘ordinary’ lives of laymen in their secular circumstances. However, they were hardly ordinary: they came to be viewed as saints. As such, their lives, motives, actions, thoughts, words and, above all, faith were understood to be exceptional and exemplary. Some biographies, vitae, of husband-saints who remained in the world, performing their duties as secular men while at the same time pursuing a religious calling, show that this paradox could have implications both for the individual's reputation of sanctity and for his performance as a secular man. My argument is twofold.