van der Molen, Edmund
(2025)
The diocesan inquest into Jeanne-Marie de Maillé: saint-making, value, and social creativity in fifteenth-century France.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis examines the process of saint-making in the later Middle Ages, through a study of the diocesan inquest into Jeanne-Marie de Maillé (1331-1414). Thinking with David Graeber’s theory of value, the saint is interpreted as a means of realising, negotiating, and manipulating value, and, through this, as a technology for the exercising of social creativity – for creating new social worlds. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has been content with the saint as ‘socially constructed’, or has bypassed the saint themselves in favour of literary readings of the sources, a value-theory approach leads us to view saints as a total social phenomenon, representing a particular, culturally bounded form of social creativity.
Chapter One considers how miracle narratives work to realise and manipulate value, offering a framework that accounts for the polyvalent properties of the miracle and the cultural work it undertakes. Chapter Two approaches the Life of Jeanne-Marie as an attempt to regulate the value of saintly performances by constructing them as aesthetic displays, and thus dependent upon the taste of the audience. Chapter Three likens the saint to Graeber’s re-interpretation of the fetish, arguing that Jeanne-Marie functions as a material token of value which can be used to underwrite projects of social creativity. Chapter Four examines the different constructions of Jeanne-Marie contained within the inquest dossier, and suggests that these are based on different constellations of value(s), and are directed at different audiences – different visions of society.
I conclude that the saint embodied value, providing a mechanism for medieval people to enact their own value projects and to bring into being new societies and new worlds, whether in imagination or in reality. Through this thesis I offer a new theoretical framework for the analysis of medieval religion, one that privileges creativity, the political nature of religious projects, and the material media of religious action.
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