| Summary: | Individual cases of sexual abstinence ascribed to medieval rulers have been discussed by scholars from various standpoints and understood as a peculiar dynastic policy, a deliberate “monastification” of rulership, or as the result of problems with an individual’s reproductive system. This article carries forward the research on the interrelation between regality and sexual abstinence through the example of Henry II (973-1024), emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and his spouse Cunigunde (c.980-1033), both canonised saints, who were believed to live in an innocent matrimony. The development of the image of the royal marriage is traced first in their contemporary self-representations, then in post-mortem historiographic and polemical narratives, and finally in their hagiographical traditions until c.1250, revealing multiple, often contradictory, understandings of the royal sexual abstinence: as the sign of a succession crisis, as moral impurity, or as the highest saintly virtue. Contrary to the idea that Henry II was imagined as a “virgin king” from his canonisation in 1146 onwards, this article suggests that until the beginning of the thirteenth century the sexual abstinence of Henry II was speculated about though never explicitly stated, even in his hagiographic tradition. Only with the papal acknowledgment of Cunigunde as a holy virgin in 1200 did an image of the perpetually chaste marriage gradually come into being, in which Cunigunde was given equal agency and her husband Henry was defined as a male virgin. The analysis of elaborated hagiographic programs, devised by members of the Bamberg ecclesiastical community to praise Henry and Cunigunde, reveals the forms in which the sanctity, regality, and sexual behaviour of Henry and Cunigunde were conceptualized, negotiated, and represented, while at the same time the hagiographic traditions were adapted to contemporary concepts of chastity and abstinence.
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