The female saints of the medieval era were dab hands at self-mutilation. St Jeanne de Valois pushed silver nails into her breasts. St Margaret Mary Alacoque cut her chest with a knife and injured it with fire. St Angela of Foligno drank water that had been polluted by cuts of flesh from a leper. The young woman who longed for a more perfect relationship with Christ would ‘cut off her hair, scourge her face and wear coarse rags’, wrote historian Rudolph Bell in his classic study, Holy Anorexia. She would stop eating, walk about with sharp stones in her shoes, beat herself with her own fists. All so that she might become ‘more beautiful in God’s eyes’.

The chief target of these holy hysterics’ self-mortification was their own womanhood. They feared and detested the arrival of sexual maturity. They shaved their heads, squashed their breasts beneath ill-fitting hairshirts, scalded their vaginas with pork fat. They were determined to become, in the title of Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg’s 1998 book on female sanctity in the pre-modern era, Forgetful of Their Sex. Their ‘rigorous repudiation of their own sexuality’ had one aim, writes Schulenburg – to push them towards ‘perfect manhood’.

Virginal, breastless from starvation, their locks shorn, their faces cut, they became more like men, the true saints, than fertile, buxom, sinful women. In ‘amputating from nature and spirit what made them female, even destroying their identifying physical characteristics through self-mutilation and self-denial’, they became more ‘male’ and thus more godly, wrote Lisa Bitel in her 1996 study of the early saints of Ireland. It is this woman, the woman who wrenches herself, violently if necessary, from her own womanhood, who shall be called holy, said St Jerome in the fifth century: ‘[She] will cease to be a woman and will be called man.’