This paper considers the ways in which sanctity and gender are articulated in—and as—translation. Hagiography is a fundamentally translational genre. When we meet saints in our sources, we always already meet them in translation, even if we read their lives in the original language. Translation looms especially large in the scholarly historiography of trans and gender non-conforming saints. Faulty translation, both literal and metaphorical, has elided the queer potentialities—the queer realities—of their lives, until only very recently. Against this backdrop, I theorize translatio transvesti. This term describes trans and genderqueer hagiography as a corpus of textual and translated artefacts that serve as a conduit for the ceaseless articulation of transness throughout history. It also refers to a particularly medieval kind of translational praxis and analytical methodology that attends to the ways in which gender, and sanctity, are constructed—for better and for worse—through our interaction with premodern sources as scholar-theologians. The potency of translatio transvesti for excavating otherwise invisible—or invisibilized— queer histories is explored, all too briefly, in an examination of gender slippage in the lives of local Cornish saints.
Alicia Spencer-Hall (Fri,) studied this question.