Please join the Friends of the Saints on Friday, December 9, at 7 p.m. in the Pearl Kibre Medieval Study (Room 5105) of the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave.) for the following paper and our customary pot-luck refreshments:
The Legend of Saint Eugenia: Beyond Gender in the Legenda Aurea 
Alexander Baldassano 
Department of English
CUNY Graduate Center
While legends of the so-called cross-dressed saints share much in common with each other, the tales were constantly shifting to meet what Mary Ann Stouck calls changing ideals of sanctity. Indeed, the multiple versions of Saint Eugenia’s legend exemplify how the presentation of gender shifted with correlation to these changing ideals. With specific attention to the development of the tale in its earliest forms to its thirteenth-century instantiation in the Legenda aurea, this paper focuses on the saint’s self-presentation and on the interactions between the saint and other characters. These variations suggest the ways the legendary presents multiple possibilities for presentations and perceptions of embodiment and gender performance that transcend the strictly spiritual or metaphorical. Fantasized as spiritual ideal and didactic symbol, Eugenia, through her interactions with other characters, points to the possibilities for the lived experiences of people whose performed genders and identities would not have been easily resolvable or nameable with binarily gendered linguistic descriptors. Jacobus de Voragine, I argue, streamlines much of the nuances that would allow for the more transgressive elements of Eugenia’s self-identity as he presents the tale in the context of an anti-Cathar Dominican agenda.