Baking the Bread and Roasting the Meat: Dorlandus's Saint Lawrence as a model for Carthusians

The two sermons on Saint Lawrence by the profilic Carthusian author Petrus Dorlandus survive in a manuscript from the charterhouse in Louvain, which was used for reading at table. Dorlandus’s development of the well-known tale about this martyr is geared to this practice. Inviting his fellow Carthusians to both corporeal and spiritual mastication, Dorlandus focuses on the body of the saint as being inviolate and virginal, and, in a very literal sense, food. These sermons challenge hagiographical gender studies by showing how the male body could be as consistently intact as a female virgin’s and how framing the saint as food and thus as similar to Christ was as relevant to a male Carthusian audience as to any female one. Therefore it invites a re-evaluation of gender in hagiography. How male or female is a saint? Or should saints be seen as being beyond gender?