newsletter spring 2002

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Paul Lerner: Let me start with a belated welcome to USC and by saying how pleased I am—and I know everyone is—to have you here with us at SC in History and Gender Studies. So I thought the first thing I would ask you is to talk about how you got here and where you were before, and to give us a sense of the institutions you've been at.

Lisa Bitel: As you know, I came here with my husband Peter Mancall who was hired as a senior Americanist. But before this I spent twelve years at the University of Kansas where I had a joint appointment in women's studies and history and that grew out of a visiting appointment in Western Civ and women's studies, which, in effect, was like being half in boy's studies and half in girl's studies, because they way I started teaching at KU was by teaching the required Western Civ course which was teaching everything western from the dawn of time until now, and to complement that I created a course on women in premodern history, which was a runaway cult course at KU, and I hope will become the same thing here. The interest in women's studies or feminist methodology, I think, comes from way before I was in college at Smith.

PL: What first got you interested?

LB: Oh a really disaffected state of mind, disconnection from my family, all sorts of terrible events in childhood . . .

PL: . . .that's true of all of us . . .

LB: . . .which turned me into a feminist—and thank god, not a psychokiller—and I went to Smith. And while I was there I had a number of female mentors, and tried to join the women's student union and was rejected because I wasn't a radical separatist lesbian. But I also participated—and this is what really did it—in a large research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation that involved female scholars—and also some male scholars—in a variety of disciplines, and it was called the Project on Women and Social Change. I was hired as a research assistant. You had to apply and compete for these positions. And I actually worked with a woman from U Mass who was working on the folklore of women in Jewish communities in India.

PL: Wow.

LB: Like their spinning songs and their lullabies and things like that. Which was a real eye opener. The idea that you can use a literary and an anthropological background to study historical questions from a multidisciplinary perspective. All the students and researchers working on that project gathered together to exchange data and talk about each other’s research, and it was the first I ever saw of feminists working together and assuming some pedagogical, methodological and political commonalties among them all. At least in the retelling of my personal history that was a real source of inspiration. And I met Natalie Davis in that context. And Joan Scott. Herb Gutman. It was pretty exciting.

PL: That must have been exciting for a college student.

LB: Yeah, it’s more exciting in retrospect, I think, but it was exciting at the time.

PL: Because now you know who those people are.

LB: And how influential they were.

PL: And then when you went on to graduate school . . . let me put it this way, which came first, the gender interest or your interest in medieval Ireland?

LB: When you go to Harvard, I think, any kind of feminist impulses are squashed. At least, you have to be a much stronger person than I am to pursue a feminist agenda in scholarship. Back in those days anyway, in the late 70s and 80s. And I did a very mainstream degree. Consciously not feminist and consciously not Celtic studies, but Medieval history. So that I could get a job. Before I went to Harvard, and while I was at Harvard, several times I had fellowships and spent quite a lot of time in Ireland. This was not only during the period when divorce and abortion were illegal, but also contraception was illegal. Women's health clinics were underground. You had to go to a feminist underground health clinic to get not only birth control, but I went there for gynecological checkups and everything.

PL: Jesus. . .

LB: Yeah, yeah, it was a fascinating time, and to see sort of a medieval patriarchy in action in Ireland in the 1970s and 80s was certainly inspiring.

PL: Eye opening too.

LB: Yeah, you know, and when I wrote the dissertation, which was on Irish saints and monastic communities, I got to the end, and I’d actually already published a couple articles on women in Ireland by then—women and gender, well, actually in those days, probably just women—and I’d left women out of the book, out of the dissertation and out of the book, so then I decided I’d better write another one.

PL: Was that an intentional strategy to get through Harvard?

LB: No, no, not at all. Because my advisor at that point was just coming out with, or had just come out with, two books on women in medieval society then—David Herlihy—on women's work and on family and kin, which was a lot about women, in the middle ages. He was quite open, if not to radical feminist approaches, to encouraging me to work on women, to send things off to Signs to get published for example. The field of Irish history, early Irish history, was certainly not open to women or the study of women, except, you know, in categorizing the kinds of marriage that existed in early Ireland or in really primitive questions of status.

PL: Early kinds of “compensatory” social history. . .

LB: Yeah, you know, looking for queens and things like that. So yeah, it was about trying to measure up to the standards of the field of early medieval history and especially Irish history that made pursuing questions about women difficult while in grad school. But once you get published and have a job, then you can do whatever you want.

PL: You can do whatever you want, yeah exactly.

LB: And then I went back to the study of women. And working on a second book, which was about women in early Ireland, I spent a year, a year and a half, reading feminist literary theory, and by then I was in women’s studies at KU and there was a whole community of people doing relevant, modern, up to date useful things on women.

PL: I know you’re now finishing your book on women in. . .

LB: Oh, that’s done. I did a book on women in early medieval Europe, which is about to come out. And that was a huge labor. I had to go back and retrain. I also tried to incorporate, to consciously incorporate, feminist methodologies and current issues of gender, gender studies and gender relations.

PL: Is there a set of theories or historians whom you found most useful?

LB: No, in fact, I tended to find anthropology, and especially feminist literary theory more useful. So that those early feminist literary scholars like Carolyn Merchant, and the people who work on Victorian literature, and more recently people like Donna Haraway, I found particularly useful for struggling with the problems of working with texts that are about women or about gender, but not authored by women, and trying to figure out whether there are, you know, contested or submerged voices in the text, stuff like that. I mean, there weren’t too many historical models that I found useful.

PL: And what are you working on now?

LB: I’m struggling with this thing that I got the Guggenheim for. It’s a study of the history of the cults of St. Brigit of Ireland and St. Genevieve of Paris and more generally what gender in the very early centuries of Christianization in Europe had to do with the building of churches, the changing of landscapes, the reorganizing of people on the landscape and whether, in fact, gender might be a vocabulary for modes of Christianization. Maybe whether Christianization is a vocabulary for gender. I haven’t exactly figured out the nexus of landscape, gender and Christianization, or architecture, gender and Christianization for Northern Europe.

PL: So you can use some of your anthropological approaches.

LB: Yes, and the stuff I did in the very first book and have been doing recently. Archaeological reports, you know, which is another area where gender has just begun to seep in in the last twenty years.

PL: I don't know anything about this, so can you say something about the cults of St. Brigit and St. Genevieve?

LB: Genevieve was the patroness of Paris, and she lived in the fourth/fifth century, and Brigit was the patron of the southeast of Ireland, and she was an abbess nun in Kildare, which is in Leinster. And she lived in the sixth century. What started me on this project is that even though there’s no official connection between the churches of Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries and the Church of Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries, there are interesting connections in the written lives of these women: the first life of Genevieve was written about a generation after she died, and the first life of Brigit was written a hundred years after she supposedly died, but both of them are the earliest saints life of a women from their cultures. Both of these women became trans-regional or national saints. Both of them were extra-territorial patronesses. Both of them had flourishing cults which went up and down in the middle ages but have endured to the present day. And on top of that what really obsessed me about these two documents is that both of the women were portrayed as women who traveled the countryside, establishing Christian communities, and they both built major churches. Or in Genevieve’s case, she actually supposedly found the body of St. Denis, the patron of France, and built a church over him and then died and had a basilica built over her, and in Brigit’s case, when she died, a major church or basilica was built around her. All these things, if you know the context of early Christian writing, are hugely unusual for women. Women didn’t travel a lot, women didn’t Christianize actively, women certainly didn’t build major churches. Women didn’t wield the kind of spiritual authority that both of them wielded. So I think in both cases the Christians in both territories were working out the question of how can a woman be a saint and how can a woman wield spiritual authority, and I think the answers have something to do with: well, they can do it if it’s not intellectual, if it’s tied to land, to building, to body, to, you know, to questions of practice rather than theology. That’s as far as I've gotten.

PL: Wow, that sounds fascinating. So did Christianization . . .how did it change the role of women in Irish society?

LB: Vastly. This is one of the underlying questions of the project. . . for a long time, the Irish historiography and the medieval historiography have treated Ireland as completely different from the rest of Europe. I think that’s more a product of nineteenth and twentieth-century politics than it is of anything that was going on in the early middle ages. And the way Ireland’s been characterized both by Irish historians and by outsiders is that they’re Celtic, their brand of Christianity is very different and that the women wielded a lot of power compared to the rest of Europe. And I think one thing studying these two female saints shows is that in fact that’s total nonsense, that certain conditions affected gender relations throughout early medieval Europe, and that it was extraordinary anywhere for a woman to gain spiritual authority and people worried about how women should and did wield authority in or out of the church. So one of the underlying questions I've been dealing with is this whole “Celticity” question. Especially now that anthropologists and archeologists are questioning whether or not there were any people we could call Celts, this becomes a pretty interesting question. You know what else, it’s amazingly relevant. They just had a vote in Ireland, a referendum modifying the constitutional prohibition of abortion,

PL: Yeah, I saw that in the paper.

LB: and the referendum was on whether to turn to a stricter version of that, whereby women who are suicidal might be excused from penalties on abortion, and fortunately the forces of the left prevailed, if you can call it the left in Ireland. And the constitutional position is not being made more strict than it was. But in debating this whole issue in the Irish press, a couple of scholars wrote in about the fact that St. Brigit supposedly performed the first recorded abortion in Irish literature. That refers to a miracle in the life of Brigit, this first one written around 650, in which St. Brigit is approached by a pregnant woman, I think it's a pregnant nun, who says, “I have this problem,” and Brigit miraculously makes the fetus disappear. In fact, it’s not the only instance of that in the Irish saints lives.

PL: What happens to the nun?

LB: Oh she's all healed and she goes back to the community.

PL: Without consequence?

LB: No consequences. Which was a problem. You see it in other sources in the early medieval literature. But these people wrote into the Irish Times to say, “Brigit would have voted against the referendum.” And then of course a whole slew of people wrote in to say, “Ah, but other saints would have taken a position for the referendum,” you know. People wrote in to say that Brigit was a fertility goddess. I mean, there’s all this stuff. And so, a sixth century or fifth century saint becomes an icon for a current debate over abortion rights in the Irish Republic.

PL: Wow.

LB: Totally cool. Plus this morning I got an e-mail from the Waco Herald
Tribune. They want to know what I think about St. Patrick.

PL: Oh, they're getting ready for St. Patrick's day.

LB: Yeah, [they want to know] what can I tell them about St. Patrick?

PL: So early Irish history. . .

LB: It’s happening.

PL: Great. Well, thank you very much.