The primary aim of this chapter is to answer a single question: was there a distinctive form of saintliness within early Irish hagiography which could be described as ‘feminine’? As throughout this work, ‘femininity’ is defined as a trait or a set of traits assigned to a woman because of her biological sex: it is a social construction. Within the main question are contained other, related but distinct, questions: did Irish hagiographers represent their protagonists as specifically ‘male’ or ‘female’, or simply as ‘saints’? Did they problematise the concepts of sex and gender? If there is differentiation, in what aspects of the saints’ lives is it expressed? This chapter does not aim to document the social history of ordinary people as represented in the hagiography, a process which has resulted in much contention as to the historical, or ahistorical, nature of these documents. Instead it seeks to investigate the ways in which extraordinary people, saints, were represented, and through this the ways in which sanctity itself was understood.

There has been some investigation into the concept of a specifically ‘feminine’ form of sanctity relating to later periods than that of this study, and to countries other than Ireland, notably in Caroline Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast and John Kitchen's Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender. Bynum's work focuses on the importance of eating, fasting, and food provision in the Lives of later medieval women saints. She emphasises the idea that the provision and withholding of food, being traditionally ‘female’, was one of the few aspects of society over which women had control. Through it, women saints could exert their sanctity while remaining within a ‘feminine’ sphere. It will be informative therefore to investigate whether early Irish hagiographers similarly placed the activities of their female protagonists within a ‘feminine’ context. Kitchen looks at the sixth-century Merovingian Lives of Venantius Fortunatus and Gregory of Tours, alongside the nun Baudonivia's Life of St Radegund to assess whether men writers wrote differently about men and women saints, and whether men and women writers wrote differently about women saints. He notes that both Fortunatus and Gregory, in their prefaces, problematise the female sex – when describing female saints, both explicitly mention that God was working through an ‘inferior’ female vessel – while Baudonivia does not.