Vashti and the Golden legend: A pagan queen turns saint?

2014

Hagiographic texts establish a narrative template for shame, avoidance of shame, what looks like death wish in courtly literature. Scenes of shame and its avoidance through death are adapted and folded into romance and other genres and affect how characters behave and are described and gendered. This article treats saints' lives as literary texts and identifies the language used for female saints in the Old French and Old Occitan versions of the Legenda aurea and uses that codified language to compare the hagiographic text with a vernacular Jewish narrative: the Occitan Romans de la reina Ester, written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets by Crescas Caslari in 1327. This codification gives ins…