Writing (with) knowledge

It is hardly an exaggeration to affirm that saints are their bodies, spiritual exer-cises, and ascetic practices as much as their hagiographies, legends, and stories. The process through which a saint's life is transformed into a text constitutes probably one of the most important mediums for the transmission not only of knowledge about the individual but also of knowledge of the meaning of Christian faith, embedded in the representation of the saint as a core example of Christian conduct, experience, and modeling of the self. This practice of textual codification allows for a specific way of embodied interpretation of the saint's text, in which the creation of a symbolic system forges a relationship between an individual performance, an author, and an audience that transcends the temporal and spatial confinement of the original text. In this paper, the author intends to examine the role of the hagiographer, the text-object, and the audience in the complex process of creation of female sanctity. Through the comparative study of three different hagiographical accounts regarding the Italian Saint Catherine of Siena's holiness, the author intends to demonstrate that the supposed authorial intention (if we are to accept what the author states to be his or her intention), the receptor of the textual embodiment of the saint's performance, the linguistic instruments employed in the construction of the text, and the author's background are factors that differently and in different degrees define, substantiate, and regulate the discursive strategies employed in the elaboration of the knowledge embedded in the text.