Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion & Culture)

Gender and Holiness

This collection brings together two flourishing areas of medieval scholarship: gender and religion. It examines gender-specific religious practices and contends that the pursuit of holiness can destabilise a binary conception of gender. Though saints may be classified as masculine or feminine, holiness may also cut across gender divisions and demand a break from normally gendered behaviour. This work of interdisciplinary cultural history includes contributions from historians, art historians and literary critics. A wide range of topics is covered, including: • • • •

the cults of various saints and aspiring saints, such as Sts Margaret, George and Francis of Assisi Richard II’s quasi-virginal kingship sexualised tortures of female martyrs homoerotic responses to the body of Christ.

This collection will be of interest not only to medievalists, but also to students of religion and gender in any period. Samantha J.E. Riches has taught medieval history for the University of Huddersfield and history of art for the University of Leicester. She is the author of St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Sutton, 2000) and is currently researching a monograph on the cultural context of English medieval images of St George. Sarah Salih is a lecturer in medieval literature at the University of East Anglia. Her interests include medieval constructions of gender, sexuality and subjectivity, and she is the author of Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (D.S. Brewer, 2001). She is currently co-editing, with Anke Bernau and Ruth Evans, a collection of essays on medieval virginities.

Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture Edited by George Ferzoco, University of Leicester and Carolyn Muessig, University of Bristol

This series aims to present developments and debates within the field of medieval religion and culture. It will provide a broad range of case studies and theoretical perspectives, covering a variety of topics, theories and issues. 1 Gender and Holiness Men, women and saints in late medieval Europe Edited by Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih 2 The Invention of Saintliness Edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

Gender and Holiness Men, women and saints in late medieval Europe

Edited by Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2002 Editorial matter and selection Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih; individual contributors their own contribution All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gender and holiness : men, women and saints in late medieval Europe / edited by Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sex—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines— Middle Ages, 600–1500. 2. Christian saints—Europe—History— To 1500. I. Riches, Samantha. II. Salih, Sarah, 1967– BT708 .G46 2002 241'.66'0902—dc21 2001048666 ISBN 0-203-99460-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–25821–9 (Print Edition)

This collection is dedicated to our fellow gossips: Anne Dutton, Ailsa Holland, Anne MacDona and Nicole Schulman (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, 1990–91); and the honorary gossips who taught us all: Jeremy Goldberg and Felicity Riddy

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors List of abbreviations Introduction. Gender and holiness: performance and representation in the later Middle Ages

ix xi xiii

1

SAMANTHA J.E. RICHES AND SARAH SALIH

1 ‘The law of sin that is in my members’: the problem of male embodiment

9

JACQUELINE MURRAY

2 The role of patronage and audience in the cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch

23

WENDY R. LARSON

3 Virginal effects: text and identity in Ancrene Wisse

36

ANKE BERNAU

4 Pain, torture and death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea

49

MARTHA EASTON

5 St George as a male virgin martyr

65

SAMANTHA J.E. RICHES

6 Becoming a virgin king: Richard II and Edward the Confessor KATHERINE J. LEWIS

86

viii Contents 7 Female piety and impiety: selected images of women in wall paintings in England after 1300

101

MIRIAM GILL

8 Staging conversion: the Digby saint plays and The Book of Margery Kempe

121

SARAH SALIH

9 Gendering charity in medieval hagiography

135

P.H. CULLUM

10 Ecce Homo

152

ROBERT MILLS

Bibliography Index

174 194

Illustrations

2.1 ‘St Margaret emerging from the dragon and attacking the devil’, Latin Psalter, end of thirteenth century. London, British Library. 4.1 ‘The torture of St Felicula’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. San Marino, Huntington Library. 4.2 ‘The execution of St Blaise’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. San Marino, Huntington Library. 4.3 ‘The torture of St Lucy’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. San Marino, Huntington Library. 4.4 ‘The torture of St Anastasia’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. San Marino, Huntington Library. 4.5 ‘The torture of St Laurence’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. San Marino, Huntington Library. 5.1 ‘St George tortured with millstones’, mid-seventeenth-century illustration of mid-fifteenth-century glass, formerly at Stamford, Lincolnshire. London, British Library. 5.2 ‘St George threatened’ 1477–84. St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. 5.3 ‘St George dismembered and boiled’ 1477–84. St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. 5.4 ‘The torture of Empress Alexandra’, mid-fifteenth-century German life of St George. London, British Library. 5.5 ‘The obeisance of St George before the Virgin Mary’, 1477–84. St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. 5.6 ‘St George and the dragon’, from the fifteenth-century roodscreen at Somerleyton, Suffolk. 7.1 Watercolour of ‘St Anne teaching the Virgin to read’ (c. 1340). Painting in tomb recess above effigy of Sir Thomas de la Mare, Northmoor, Oxfordshire. Oxford, Bodleian Library. 7.2 ‘St Anne teaching the Virgin to read’ early fourteenth century. North wall of north aisle, Corby Glen, Lincolnshire. 7.3 ‘The Warning to Gossips’ with demons farting or defecating, mid-fourteenth century. North wall of nave, above north door, Eaton, Norfolk.

25 50 54 58 59 60

73 74 75 76 79 80

103 104

111

x Illustrations 7.4 Watercolour of ‘The Warning to Gossips’ with additional figure of solitary ‘good woman’ (c. 1340–60). North wall of nave, west of north door, Stokesby, Norfolk. 7.5 Detail of visiting the prisoner from ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’ mid-fourteenth century, south wall of south nave aisle. Potter Heigham, Norfolk. 7.6 Engraving ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’ (c. 1390–1410). South wall of south nave aisle, Ruabon, Clwyd. 10.1 ‘The crucifix embraces a layman’, Manuel des Péchés, fourteenth century, France. Robert H. Taylor Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 10.2 ‘The sponsa penetrates Christ’s side’, Rothschild Canticles (c.1320), Flanders or Rhineland. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 10.3 Maerten van Heemskerck, ‘Man of Sorrows’, 1532. Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

112

113 114

154

162 165

Contributors

Anke Bernau is an Associate Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cardiff University. She has worked extensively on medieval virginity and her current research focuses mainly on the figure of the hermaphrodite as well as issues of historiography, translation and gender in medieval and early modern literature. P.H. Cullum is a Principal Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. Her interests are principally in late medieval English social, religious and gender history. She has written on Yorkshire hospitals and charity, on northern women’s piety and on late medieval clergy, and co-organised the 2001 Conference on Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages. Martha Easton is a Lecturer for the History of Art Department of Bryn Mawr College, PA. She is currently working on an examination of the Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell and other appropriations and inversions of female anatomy in the iconography of medieval art. Miriam Gill has recently gained a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and is a part-time lecturer and researcher at the University of Leicester. Her main field of research is later medieval English wall paintings. Her recent publications include work on the role of wall paintings in monastic education and the textual sources of the Eton College murals. Wendy R. Larson is an Assistant Professor of Humanities in the College of General Studies at Boston University, MA. She is currently working on a history of the cult of St Margaret. Katherine J. Lewis is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (Boydell, 2000). Her current research revolves around concepts of sanctity in fifteenth-century England, with particular reference to gender and royalty. Robert Mills is a Lecturer in English at King’s College, London. His interests include constructions of pain, punishment and violence in medieval culture, medieval masculinities, and concepts of time and temporality in the Middle Ages. He is currently working on a study of erotic responses to the art and literature of medieval Christian devotion.

xii Contributors Jacqueline Murray is Dean of Arts at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She has published widely on questions of gender and sexuality in medieval society. She is editor of Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (Garland, 1999). She is currently preparing a study of the understanding of male sexuality and masculine embodiment in the Middle Ages. Samantha J.E. Riches has taught medieval history for the University of Huddersfield and history of art for the University of Leicester. She is the author of St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Sutton, 2000) and is currently researching a monograph on the cultural context of British medieval images of St George. Sarah Salih is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her interests include medieval constructions of gender, sexuality and subjectivity, and she is the author of Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (D.S. Brewer, 2001). She is currently co-editing, with Anke Bernau and Ruth Evans, a collection of essays on medieval virginities.

Abbreviations

Bible:

The Holy Bible: Translated from the Latin Vulgate and Diligently Compared with Other Editions in Divers Languages (Douay, AD 1609; Rheims AD 1582), London, Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1914. CCCM: Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis. CCSL: Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. EETS: Early English Text Society. es: extra series os: original series ss: supplementary series MED: Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn and others, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1952–. PL: Patrilogiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 217 vols, ed. J.P. Migne, Paris, 1844–64.

Introduction Gender and holiness Performance and representation in the later Middle Ages Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih Then he told [the assembled community] that, even though he was old and withered and weak, one of their nuns, sitting there present among them, had at the devil’s suggestion cast lustful eyes on him. Having said this, he threw off his long tunic which he had put on over his nude body and stood there naked before them, hairy, thin, and covered with scabs – a horrid sight. When he had turned himself around three times in order that he could be seen all over by everyone, he said: ‘Behold [indicating a crucifix], this is the man who ought to have been desired by a woman consecrated to God, by a spouse of Christ! Behold [indicating himself] the mean little body for which the poor wretch of a nun considered it worthwhile to lose her body and soul in hell!’1

According to Gerald of Wales, St Gilbert of Sempringham’s combination of preaching and striptease was entirely successful in curing the transgressive desire of one of his nuns. Gerald’s account of this incident can be interpreted in several different ways, but perhaps the most salient aspects of the episode relate to the probable date (Gilbert died in 1189, aged over 100, so this is clearly sited in the mid-to-late twelfth century), the overtly religious milieu (an enclosed foundation), and the ways in which the interplay between the genders is underpinned by a concern with sexuality. To modern eyes, there are some unfamiliar features of the scene. Here the male body is presented as the object of the female gaze, and also as abjected and repellent, although the man himself remains in complete control of what his sexed body signifies in the enclosed feminine space of the nuns’ chapter house. The extent to which these factors can be generalised is by no means clear: can this episode be used to uncover wider truths about medieval people’s religious sentiment and understanding of gender? On one level, it is impossible to discuss this kind of story with any degree of certainty, given the modern commentator’s distance in time and space in addition to the insurmountable problem of the impossibility of truly accessing another person’s subjective experience. However, this kind of evidence can, and we feel should, be explored with a range of possible readings in order to allow modern commentators as much insight as possible into the relationship between gender and religious culture in particular, as well as medieval understandings of belief systems in general.

2 Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih The chapters in this collection are an eclectic mix of chronology, geography and theme. They draw upon a wide variety of source materials – literary, historical and art-historical – but their common interest is a preoccupation with the nature of religious belief, practice and representation in the later medieval period, and the extent to which issues of gender played a significant role in these discourses. In some chapters the presentation of an individual saint is the central concern, whether in literary description or visual imagery, whilst other contributions focus on the devotees of a saint. Elsewhere, consideration is given to the place of religious experience in individuals’ gendered self-formations. The chapters are linked by a common interest in asking the mutually implicated questions of whether religious practice is inevitably mediated through discourses of gender and whether cultural concepts of gender are inevitably informed by religious sensibilities.

Women’s studies, men’s studies, medieval studies The study of medieval women, and medieval women’s religious practices, is now thoroughly mainstream, to the extent that some scholars argue that women are over-represented: ‘[t]o judge by the amount of interest that has been shown in them, the English religious landscape of the late Middle Ages was peopled largely by Lollards, witches, and leisured, aristocratic ladies.’2 The ever-increasing number of books and collections devoted to medieval women leaves no doubt of the continuing popularity of this area of scholarship. Most notably, the work of Caroline Walker Bynum has been influential in the definition of this field. Her totemic book Holy Feast and Holy Fast helped to place women on the map of medieval scholarship and led to the formation of a number of sub-disciplines.3 Since its publication its picture of a culture of female piety uniting canonised and uncanonised women in the practice of devotions which centre on the bodies of Christ and his female imitators has been sometimes praised and sometimes criticised, but rarely neglected. Bynum’s other works have often produced a similar reaction; her searching questions about the nature of the medieval erotic in ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg’ have provoked a range of answers.4 The chapters in this volume continue both to draw on and to critique Bynum’s work. Her influence is also apparent in the wider scholarly community in, for example, Elizabeth Robertson’s extension of the model of Holy Feast to anchoritic texts for women.5 More recently, the collection Gendered Voices is narrower in scope, setting out explicitly to test Bynum’s thesis by concentrating especially on the issue of how men write holy women, and in one case, how a woman writes a holy man.6 Disaggregation is central to this particular enquiry: mystical and hagiographic writings are treated as separate categories, as are female-authored and male-authored texts. Such distinctions usefully establish the non-monolithic nature of gendered pieties, demonstrating that in some cases the topos of the holy woman’s access to Christ through her suffering flesh appealed more to male hagiographers than to holy women themselves.7 The study of medieval gendered holiness is still most often the study of female holiness. There are many monographs and collections which declare themselves to be about medieval women, with an extra qualifier – women in communities, women

Introduction 3 in towns, women and power, young women – but a book entitled Medieval Men, with or without such a qualifier, would still surprise: studying women is still, perhaps unconsciously, assumed to be a supplement to the study of men.8 However, in recent years collections examining men qua men – rather than men as a default category, as was the case in pre-feminist scholarship – have begun to redress the balance and to remind us that men too have gender.9 Men too, therefore, have gendered forms of holiness: as Richard Kieckhefer argues: ‘[a]mong the many services that Caroline Bynum and others have done is to make it possible now as never before to study men’s religion as men’s religion, not as religion simpliciter.’10 This is a fundamental issue: to leave masculinity unexplored would be to perpetuate the masculinist illusion that it is unproblematic. As Jacqueline Murray argues below, modern feminist scholarship may be complicit with the continued identification of the feminine as the marked category. Allen J. Frantzen’s argument that ‘women are not enough’,11 and that gender studies must include attention to the constructions and problematics of masculinity, is compelling. With this development, medieval studies share in the general transformation of women’s studies into gender studies and the rise of interest in constructions of masculinity. The studies of women, of gender, of masculinity and of sexualities have all successively and rapidly become productive, if sometimes still controversial, approaches. The chapters in this volume utilise a range of these perspectives; part of our motivation in bringing together this collection was to demonstrate that different ways of investigating and conceptualising medieval gender and sexuality can co-exist, enriching rather than superseding one another. Our selection process has, however, tried to redress the imbalance found in some works which ostensibly deal with gender. For example, the section ‘Saintliness and Gender’ within the collection Images of Sainthood in the Middle Ages,12 contains five essays, four of which centre on women. Some work on masculine forms of holiness is obscured because it never explicitly identifies itself as being concerned with masculinity: an example might be Denys Turner’s Eros and Allegory,13 a study which can be read as concerned with gender and sexuality but which represents itself as being about medieval theology. Of the chapters included in this volume, those of Jacqueline Murray, Sam Riches, Katherine Lewis and Robert Mills centre on masculine holiness, and those of Martha Easton, P.H. Cullum, Miriam Gill and Sarah Salih refer to it as a necessary adjunct to the study of female holiness. However, adding men to the study of gender – though an enjoyable reversal of the earlier phase of adding women to history – still does not provide a sufficiently flexible toolkit. Neither ‘men’ nor ‘women’ is a monolithic or self-evident category. Kathleen Biddick’s subtle and wide-ranging critique of Bynum argues that gender is most valuable as a critical tool if it is used in conjunction with others such as race, class and religion: thus gender should not be an overriding or privileged category.14 If the sexed body is not pre-discursive, as any developed theory of the constructedness of gender must acknowledge, then its entries into culture will always be multiple. Refusing to privilege gender as we know it allows unfamiliar gender identities – Anke Bernau argues below that ‘holy virgin’ may be such a category – to appear. We need also to acknowledge the difference that desires make to gender: if speaking of medieval homosexuals seems unacceptably essentialist, we can follow

4 Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih Simon Gaunt and identify ‘queer wishes’ in medieval texts, as Mills does in this volume.15

Gender, religion and history The privileging of gender in this collection is tactical only: gender is intercut with other categories such as literacy by Gill, sexuality by Mills, kingship by Lewis. Most importantly, it is intercut with holiness and with history: our intention is that none of the three be privileged as the grounding terms of the analysis. We are writing from the constructionist view of gender which can now be said to be consensual, and also from constructionist views of ‘holiness’ and of ‘the medieval’.16 Constructionist theories of gender need objects which are distanced in time or space in order to trace other constructions: it must be assumed that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are not constants. Medieval Christianity is an example of a discourse which frames the construction of genders which may not be entirely familiar to the modern reader. Several of the chapters suggest that the boundaries between ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ are permeable, and that individuals could move on occasion between genders or adopt the attributes of another gender. This process can sometimes be identified within the representation of an individual by a contemporary commentator, but at other times the gender slippage seems to have occurred as the result of the subject’s own production of self. Hence we find that Riches discusses the representation of St George as a transgendered martyr whilst Salih suggests that Margery Kempe may have drawn on both male and female saintly exemplars in her performance of apostolicism. Other chapters are more focused on specific aspects of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’. Cullum considers certain forms of feminised charity, Murray explores the difficulties of male embodiment: in each case, questions are raised about the contingent nature of gendered identifications relative to issues such as class and authority. It can be argued that the medieval period is the paradigmatic test case for studying the history of gender. Joan Kelly’s classic article ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ focused attention not only on the need to include gender as a category in historical writing but also on the Middle Ages as a period which challenges linear history and conventional periodisation by being ‘better for women’ than its successor. 17 That the picture of medieval women thus produced can now be identified as largely mythical is less important than the attention it drew to medieval gender systems at the time. The medieval can be constructed as showing both the alterity and the familiarity of historically-specific gendered processes and categories. The postmodern perhaps can be expected to have a special affinity with the pre-modern: the gendered fluidity found in some medieval religious contexts has been theorised by scholars in terms of the fluidity of postmodern gender theory.18 Holiness is no more self-evident than gender. It provides some of the clearest examples of the alterity of the medieval past: Bynum’s argument, for example, that medieval representations of Christ’s genitalia need not signify sexuality, which is critiqued by Mills below. John van Engen identifies two complementary misrepresentations of medieval religious culture: ‘a mythical golden age of Catholic

Introduction 5 Christianity or an equally mythical millennium of Indo-European folk religion’19 – we hope we have avoided both. As David Aers argues, ‘medieval versions (plural) of faith belong to particular communities and particular historical circumstances’.20 To take religion seriously does not mean reinforcing unhistorical pieties about the Age of Faith: we aim to look at religion as historically-situated material practice. All the chapters in this volume deal with aspects of orthodox Latin Christianity, although Wendy Larson puts this in the comparative context of the Eastern tradition. However, we are aware of the imperative not to accept orthodoxy on its own terms: Mills’s chapter, for example, is a penetrating interrogation of orthodoxy’s previously largely unquestioned claims to heteronormativity. Sanctity has a bearing on gender, and gender on sanctity.21 Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell have defined two gendered types of saint, the masculine ‘holder of temporal or ecclesiastical power, missionary to the heathen and fiery preacher of the word, champion of public morality, heroic defender of his virtue – a paradigm reflecting both societal values and church regulations’ and the androgynous type, characterised by ‘penitential asceticism, private prayer, mystical communion with the Godhead, and charity’.22 Bynum prefers to label the latter ‘feminine’.23 This distinction is a useful starting point to the analysis of gender in hagiography, but not an absolute boundary. As Weinstein and Bell acknowledge, men too can be saints of the androgynous or feminine type. There are also a number of women saints, particularly those of the early Middle Ages, who are closer to the masculine type: founding abbesses such as Hilda of Whitby, or devout and effective queens such as Margaret of Scotland.24 Individual saints might well operate in both modes, as did Hildegard of Bingen, who combined mystical experience with a public role; her hagiographers struggled with the resulting tension between two modes of sanctity, unsure whether to write her as aristocratic abbess or bridal mystic.25 The gendered types of hagiography refer to moments and to writing rather than to individual saintly careers in their entirety. This analysis, useful though it is, reifies gender by making it the fixed term of the pair. It can usefully be supplemented by the assumption that the influence works both ways; that if gender affects sanctity, so too does sanctity affect gender. Sainthood often works by breaking with normal social values, and gendered identity may be amongst these: constructing one’s gender identity differently may be a marker of holiness. Male holiness can be a kind of default position, due to male dominance of the Church, but it may also demand a radical break from the secular norms of masculinity, as Cullum discusses below. The chapters in this volume address both ‘sanctities’ – the production and representation of saints who are honoured as intercessors and role models – and ‘pieties’ – the performance by individuals of significant religious activities. This is, of course, an imperfect distinction. It can be aligned with a number of other, equally imperfect, binary divisions: that between extraordinary and ordinary morality identified by John Stratton Hawley;26 between the imitation and the admiration of saints; between the representation and the performance of sanctity. Our position is based precisely on the imperfection of such terms. We assume that the representation may both reflect and inform social practice, and that practice

6 Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih itself may imitate and be imitated in representation. Holiness is a habitus in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense: an ideology perpetuated in embodied practice.27 However, ‘perpetuated’ does not imply ‘static’: as Judith Butler argues, such signifying practices may comprise subversive repetitions.28 Salih argues that Margery Kempe’s apostolate is one such self-formation, underlining the fundamental point that what devout medieval people do with their religious models is not always predictable. By ‘piety’ we refer to a wide range of religious practices, both interior and exterior. These may be continuous to – or even identical with – those of sanctity, but the term ‘piety’ allows us to include the activities and writings of individuals who make no claim to more than ordinary holiness. These pieties may take saints as exemplars but are not limited to such objects for imitation. Gill’s chapter discusses the selfrepresentation of the medieval laity in terms of personifications and abstractions of virtue and vice. Her chapter, which concentrates on wall paintings – a particularly difficult source of evidence due to problems of loss and damage – also foregrounds the issue of the survival of evidence and the way in which uneven patterns of survival can shape scholarly perceptions of medieval religious culture. Verbal and visual representations of sanctity are more easily accessible than representations of less ambitious pieties. Written and visual hagiography, because of its sheer bulk, can come to seem both irresistible and obvious: John Kitchen makes an interesting analysis of the over-privileging of hagiography in early medieval studies,29 and some of his arguments can be adapted to our rather different purposes here. The combination of studies in this volume aims to juxtapose sanctities and pieties, historical, literary and visual sources, in order to resist the production of a false consensus derived from reading any one aspect of religious culture at face value. Larson’s chapter provides a timely reassessment of an individual saint cult, and warns against the assumptions of historicisation.

Interdisciplinary connections In bringing these chapters together we have aimed to give the reader a sense of the wide range of possibilities which are open to the researcher in medieval gender, culture and religion, not only in terms of the actual evidence used, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through the range of approaches employed. This broad scope provides intimations of possible cross-currents between written texts, the visual arts and lived experience. Hence, Easton’s chapter, which is largely concerned with the impact of visual representation of torture, forms a useful companion piece to Murray’s discussion of textual evidence of men’s ‘dis-ease’ with their own bodies: to what extent, one wonders, were problems of body image influenced by visual and written formations of the abject, suffering body, and to what extent were these representations informed by the problematic nature of embodied experience? Another interesting cross-current is suggested by Lewis’s work on the nature of Richard II’s kingship and Bernau’s discussion of anchoresses: in each case, it appears that gender identity could be qualified to some extent by an attribution of the status of virginity. To what extent did Richard’s (and his court’s) concept of kingship rely upon the special qualities of the holy virgin, and to what extent was the concept of

Introduction 7 virginity itself linked to ideas of secular or religious authority? The collection poses many questions, not all of which can yet be answered satisfactorily, but it is hoped that this volume will stimulate further research in several fields. For example, Larson’s reassessment of the significance of St Margaret, affirming the recent arguments of Karen Winstead and Katherine J. Lewis that female virgin martyrs are essentially multivalent,30 but significantly extending this argument into the experience of the Eastern Church, may indicate that other saints have been similarly misrepresented, with their original polysemic nature gradually eroded over time. Riches’s recent work on St George has indicated that he is an example of an ostensibly male saint whose medieval cult was based upon a wide range of meanings, which could include the borrowing of markers of female sanctity,31 but how many other examples are as yet undiscovered? Lewis’s chapter provides a radical reappraisal of Richard II’s construction of the role of the monarch, but this surely leads to a questioning of the extent to which the medieval concept of kingship in general was predicated on the gender identity of the monarch: was this rationale peculiar to Richard and/or his courtiers, or more widespread in chronology and/or geography? Other readers will have other questions, including no doubt many we have not anticipated: we hope that the collection will inspire further redefinition of this shifting area of scholarship.

Notes 1 Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church: A Translation of Gemma Ecclesiastica by Giraldus Cambrensis, trans. J.J. Hagen, Leiden, Brill, 1979, p. 188. 2 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992, p. 2. Work on Lollards can also focus on women. See, for example, S. McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. 3 C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. 4 In C.W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, Zone, 1992, pp. 79–118. 5 E. Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1990. 6 C.M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 7 In particular A. Hollywood, ‘Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and her Hagiographer’, in C.M. Mooney, Gendered Voices, pp. 78–98 and K. Scott, ‘Mystical Death, Bodily Death: Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua on the Mystic’s Encounter with God’, in Mooney, Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 136–67; see also Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. 8 D. Watt (ed.), Medieval Women in their Communities, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1997; E. Uitz, Women in the Medieval Town, London, Barrie and Jenkins, 1990; M.C. Erler and M. Kowaleski (eds), Women and Power in the Middle Ages, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 1988; K.J. Lewis, N.J. Menuge and K.M. Phillips (eds), Young Medieval Women, Stroud, Sutton, 1999. 9 C.A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994; J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in

8 Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

the Middle Ages, New York, Garland, 1997; D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe, London, Longman, 1999; J. Murray (ed.), Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, London, Garland, 1999. R. Kieckhefer, ‘Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints’, in R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T.K. Szell (eds), Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 288–305, p. 291. A.J. Frantzen, ‘When Women Aren’t Enough’, Speculum, 1993, vol. 68, pp. 445–71. R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T.K. Szell (eds), Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991. D. Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1995. K. Biddick, ‘Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible’, Speculum, 1993, vol. 68, pp. 389–418. S. Gaunt, ‘Straight Minds / “Queer” Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1995, vol. 1, pp. 439–57. Acknowledging, however, that constructionist views of gender are themselves constructs: see D. Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York, Routledge, 1989, for a defence of ‘tactical essentialism’. J. Kelly, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1977, pp. 175–202; reprinted in Kelly, Women, History, and Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 19–50. M. Rubin, ‘The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily “Order”’, in S. Kay and Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 100–22; K. Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and Sighs between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in the Book of Margery Kempe’, in L. Fradenburg and L. Freccero (eds), Premodern Sexualities, New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 175–98. J. van Engen, ‘The Christian Middle Ages as Historiographical Problem’, American Historical Review, 1986, vol. 91, pp. 519–52, p. 537. D. Aers, ‘Faith, Ethics and Community: Reflections on Reading Late Medieval English Writing’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1998, vol. 28, pp. 341–69, p. 350. For a fuller treatment of this material, see S. Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2001, pp. 42–50. D. Weinstein and R.M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom 1000–1700, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 237. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 26. For an overview of these legends see D.H. Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 206–7, pp. 283–4. B. Newman, ‘Hildegard and her Hagiographers: The Remaking of Female Sainthood’, in C.M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 16–34, p. 19. J.S. Hawley, ‘Introduction’, in Hawley (ed.), Saints and Virtues, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. xi–xxiv, p. xvi. P. Bourdieu, ‘Structures and the Habitus’, in Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 72–95. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 147. J. Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 3–22. K.A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997; K.J. Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2000. S. Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth, Stroud, Sutton, 2000.

1

‘The law of sin that is in my members’ The problem of male embodiment Jacqueline Murray But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members. (Romans 7:23)

The study of the human body in the Middle Ages has received increased attention in recent years. This is not surprising in light of contemporary society’s preoccupation with sexuality and identity and the challenges that have been posed to traditional sexual mores. In the contemporary world, moreover, there are shifts and fissures in our understanding of phenomena previously understood to be essential and immutable, so that even something popularly thought to be stable, such as the sexed body, has come under new scrutiny in light of the experiences of transsexual and transgendered persons. Certainly, the notion of the instability of the body meshes nicely with the theory of social construction, even as it troubles those with faith-based concerns about the complex relationship between embodiment, morality and holiness. For medieval people, too, the relationship between the body and holiness was tense, indeed, fraught, as they sought to reconcile the inherent goodness of the body, as exemplified in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the Body, with the antimaterialist critique proffered by dualism.1 For the average member of the laity, the secular sexual practices of daily life, focused around love, sexual passion and the generation of children, would have seemed far removed, indeed, from the religious discourses of bodily control.2 Moreover, theological discussions of embodiment tended to focus on ‘the flesh’, an approach to human embodiment that somehow appears to be gender-neutral. This medieval tendency to discuss the body as if it were human and unsexed, or to assume the male body as the universal norm, has served ironically to obscure male as much as female embodiment. Furthermore, this perspective is still found in modern discussions of the body and it continues to obfuscate the importance of sex difference in embodiment.3 In recent years, the study of the body has received a great deal of attention from scholars, in particular from medievalists.4 The dramatic, indeed revolutionary, influence of feminist scholarship underlies most of these studies, although the influence of postmodern theory is equally as evident in many approaches to the study of

10 Jacqueline Murray the body. This is particularly true for literary studies, which have tended to distance us from real human bodies by focusing on bodies as texts and texts as bodies.5 Furthermore, our contemporary feminist perspective, while highlighting how medieval thought constructed women as Other, is nevertheless complicit in scholarship’s perpetuation of women as the marked category. A cursory glance at research into medieval gender and sexuality would, until very recently, have left the overwhelming impression that only women had gender and only women had bodies. This is the case not only for avowedly feminist studies but also underlies the work of scholars who try to approach questions of embodiment from a gender-neutral perspective.6 Indeed, recent studies of the body have tended to reinforce the medieval notion that women had specific, sexed, marked bodies whereas men had human bodies. For example, even the brilliant insights of Caroline Walker Bynum, in her reply to Leo Steinberg’s study of The Sexuality of Christ, tend to obscure men’s bodies by stressing the humanness of Christ’s embodiment and minimising the significance of the sexed nature of that body.7 At least, by focusing on the genitals, Steinberg tried to direct our attention to the maleness of Christ’s body.8 Thus, many scholars’ well-intentioned and necessary desire to integrate women into the category of humanity has served to perpetuate the medieval tendency to naturalise and universalise bodies as ‘flesh’, ‘the body’ or ‘the human body’ and consequently to obscure the sexual specificity of embodiment.9 It is necessary, then, to interrogate the body from a more critical and gendered perspective. Indeed, an examination of some of the questions surrounding the male body in the Middle Ages highlights the necessity of re-evaluating our understanding of male embodiment and exposes the dissonance between theoretical discussions and men’s lived experience. It is this ‘lived experience’ which has eluded both medieval commentators and modern observers of masculine embodiment. For both the medieval and the modern observer, text separates experience from perception of experience. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways to approach problems and texts about bodies. One is the literary and metaphorical ‘reading of the body’, the other is a more historical analysis that consciously keeps in the forefront the people behind the text: the real people who experienced real bodies. Two examples can serve to illustrate the differences between these two equally useful approaches. With the recent interest in the study of men and masculinity, medievalists have once again focused on the remarkable life of Abelard. He is an ideal subject for an examination of the meaning of masculinity, given his public and dramatic emasculation and his penchant for writing about it. For a number of scholars, Abelard’s castration is a metaphor for his intellectual prowess. His reassertion of his intellectual superiority subsequent to his castration is read as a successful ‘remasculinization’,10 just as his celebration of his sexual adventures with Heloise reinforced his masculine virility despite his physical emasculation.11 Other scholars have re-examined Abelard from a more historical perspective, for example, by seeking to understand the physical consequences and social liabilities which confronted Abelard as a result of his castration.12 My own research asks how Abelard, as a man, made sense of his experience.13 All these interpretations take the

The problem of male embodiment 11 same texts as their starting point. What varies widely is the perspective, methodology and intention. Some authors are more concerned with the text, others with attempting to reconstruct the experience behind the text. A similar bifurcation is apparent in a number of recent studies on the medieval understanding of nocturnal emissions. This was an area of male experience that received attention from medieval monastic and ascetic writers, along with theologians and moralists. Some research has focused on how the discourse surrounding nocturnal emissions and its moral evaluation can be understood to symbolise or mirror changing social values. For example, the differing interpretations of the polluting effect of emissions have been interpreted as reflecting the Church’s changing circumstances, from persecuted community to official religion,14 or to indicate the evolving understanding of power and who could be trusted to rule.15 A psychological approach to nocturnal emissions has examined how the moral responsibility for emissions shifted gradually from men and their sexual fantasies to demons who tricked them. In the process, clerical sexual anxiety is revealed.16 My own historical approach to the problem examines how the concern about bodily emissions was projected by the clergy onto laymen, and even women and young boys, reflecting an increasing concern about the sexuality of the laity.17 The examples of Abelard’s castration and of nocturnal emissions indicate how there are various approaches to the study of embodiment. Some, more abstract and metaphorical, focus on the internal dynamics of the text and its meaning. The other, historical, approach seeks to place texts in their social context and not to lose sight of the real people and real bodies behind the texts. It is understanding these historical circumstances and people, however imperfectly reflected in the texts interposed between then and now, that is the intent of this exploration of the interplay between male embodiment and the pursuit of sanctity. Even though medieval writers did not often articulate this interplay explicitly, it nevertheless informs obliquely much that men wrote about themselves and others. Medieval theological writers were, for the most part, concerned about women’s bodies. This was due to many of the attitudes and values that were incorporated into Christian teaching from secular Roman society and Jewish law. Thus, writers were preoccupied with issues pertaining to women’s reproductive capacity, with menstruation, lactation and childbirth, with questions of blood taboos and ritual purity, and with the appropriate regulations and prohibitions that should be placed on women in order that their bodies neither harm men nor pollute sacred space. Formally, at least, men’s sexed bodies did not receive equivalent attention.18 For the Middle Ages, this should not surprise us given some modern scholars’ conclusions that masculinity is an essentially negative identity, in part ‘because it is grounded in male body alienation’.19 Among the platitudes and conventional affirmations about the body as the temple of the lord,20 that believers are the body of Christ,21 and the admonitions to keep the body chaste, there is minimal discussion about a body that is specifically sexed male and explicitly differentiated from either human or female bodies. Yet there were many problematic aspects of the male body that should have received closer examination. Just as women’s bodies threatened notions of purity and sanctity, so, too, men’s bodies challenged notions such as the primacy

12 Jacqueline Murray of reason, control of the flesh, and masculine superiority in creation. The consequence was that, cushioned among the many assertions of masculine superiority, especially with regard to the control of the flesh, there are also faint echoes of men’s dis-ease with their own bodies and the chasm that separated their own lived experience of a male body from the ideal of chastity and bodily control that was established as an essential aspect for salvation. This dis-ease can be identified as early as Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which the apostle laments: ‘But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members.’22 This tension, expressed so early on in Christian history, endured through the medieval discussions of the body and sexuality. While, again formally, Church Fathers and theologians from Jerome and Augustine through to Aquinas all affirmed the inherent dignity and goodness of the body, as exemplified in the doctrines of the Incarnation and Resurrection, nevertheless, they had difficulty giving the body more than a nod of approval. Dualism, both neoplatonic and gnostic, exercised great influence on a religion that maintained the inextricable integration of body and soul, while still denigrating the body and the mortal dangers inherent in embodiment. The focus of medieval men’s dis-ease with their bodies is apparent in discussions of gluttony and drunkenness, condemnations of the pleasures of all five senses, but most of all in discussions of sexuality and the sin of lust. There were a number of tensions inherent in the Church’s insistence on chastity and its decided preference for virginity. But beyond this, and even more difficult, were the constant admonitions that the control of the flesh, an essential characteristic of holiness, meant the eradication of desire and the ‘movements of the flesh’. This requirement put an almost insurmountable weight on the shoulders of men, especially those who sought assiduously to put precepts into practice. It was they who were indeed ‘at war with their members’. The anxiety occasioned by movements of the flesh is wonderfully illustrated by two early thirteenth-century writers, Jacques de Vitry and Caesarius of Heisterbach. Both men used exempla and retold popular stories to enliven their moral exhortations; in the process they have much to say about how men’s bodily movements and seminal emissions were perceived. In one of his sermons, Jacques de Vitry told the story of a priest who considered a nocturnal emission to be a worse sin than fornication. When one of his parishioners confessed that he had been polluted in his sleep, the priest asked why he had not purged himself of the wicked humours by going to a prostitute rather than incurring such a sin.23 On the surface, Jacques’s goal was to rectify what he viewed to be an erroneous imbalance in the evaluation of the relative seriousness of sins. Nevertheless, this little story shows that the belief that nocturnal emissions were more serious for a man than was fornication with a prostitute resonated sufficiently, whether among the clergy or the laity, for Jacques to believe that he could deploy the exemplum effectively in a sermon.24 Caesarius of Heisterbach was not so lenient in his Dialogus miraculorum. Lest any man think that nocturnal emissions were a private matter and a secret sin, Caesarius recounts how men who experienced such emissions could be publicly exposed.

The problem of male embodiment 13 A monk named Monoldus had the temerity to enter a church without having confessed and cleansed himself of his nocturnal pollution. A demon immediately recognised the monk’s impure state and denounced him.25 Even worse, however, than the fear of the exposure of a secret sin, were the potential negative supernatural ramifications of ‘wasted seed’ from spontaneous or nocturnal emissions and from masturbation. Caesarius reports that: ‘demons collect all wasted seed, and from it fashion for themselves human bodies, both of men and women, in which they become tangible and visible to men’.26 While the secretions of women’s bodies might pollute sacred space or even, according to some observers, harm the men with whom they had intercourse,27 the fluids that flowed from men’s bodies were significantly more heinous, facilitating the work of demons.28 Not only were seminal emissions a clear sign of the absence of holiness, they had the potential to result in abject evil. Yet, given that nocturnal emissions are a natural aspect of male physiology, they were not something a man could eradicate.29 Consequently, men were regularly reminded of their fallen state and rendered uncomfortable with their own body and its movements and experiences. Gerald of Wales, in a similar vein, reinforced the connection between semen, willed sexual responses and the work of demons. In the Gemma ecclesiastica, Gerald quoted extensively from a letter written by Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, to William, abbot of St Vincent’s at Laon, about the troubles of one of William’s monks. Hildebert wrote: You say that when your confrere is prostrate for the sake of praying, an evil spirit approaches him, places its hands on his genital organs, and does not stop rubbing his body with its own until he is so agitated that he is polluted by an emission of semen. . . . This experience takes place while he is praying and is done by [what seems to be] truly a man’s hand.30 It is not only the modern observer, attuned to the psychology of sexuality, who identifies this as pertaining to masturbation. Hildebert continued, condemning the monk: Aside from this, I do not know by what reason I could call him a virgin who you affirm is polluted by an emission of semen through masturbation. . . . Let the members of his body over which the enemy dares (beyond belief) to triumph be fortified and protected by the impression of the cross upon them and let them be sprinkled with blessed salt.31 So, according to Hildebert, even if the problem were the man engaging in masturbation, a fairly minor sin, rather than actually being assaulted by a demon, the solution lay in anointing the genitals, as if both cause and effect were rooted in the man’s body rather than his mind or in an external supernatural force. The fragility of male flesh was abundantly and easily apparent to medieval men. According to Odo of Cluny, in his vita of Gerald of Aurillac, the devil ‘insistently suggested to him sexual desire which is his first and greatest strength for leading

14 Jacqueline Murray astray mankind’.32 When this had no effect, the devil attacked him with his own senses. He caused Gerald to gaze upon a beautiful girl. Although ‘[h]e turned away his eyes . . . the image impressed on his heart through them remained. And so he was in anguish, seduced and scorched by a blinding fire.’ Odo continues that ‘At last vanquished, he sent to the girl’s mother to tell her that he would come in the night.’ Clearly Gerald believed that his position as overlord allowed him sexual rights to the girl and, however reluctantly, her parents appeared to agree.33 The passage continues: Coming to the arranged place, the girl entered the room. Because it was cold he stood beside the fireplace, facing her. Now divine grace looked on Gerald. For then the girl seemed to him deformed, so that he would not believe her to be the one he had seen, although her father assured him she was. Gerald then came to his senses, realised the enormity of what he had proposed to do, and left. Odo observes that: ‘Perhaps too much cold attacked him who had allowed himself to burn for the whole night, so that clearly an icy severity would punish a tepid pleasure.’ Thus, Odo hints that Gerald became frigid, one might even speculate impotent, which could explain why and how he remained unmarried though a layman living in the world and, what is more, a nobleman who was expected to marry and produce an heir. Gerald of Aurillac was unable to reconcile his desire to lead a holy life with the sexual demands of his body and the expectations of married life. Moreover, it is possible to conclude that it was Gerald’s own tortured mind that rendered the girl deformed; this was his desperate attempt to overcome his lust. The trauma of this struggle of the flesh played itself out on Gerald’s own body, rendering him blind and impotent, able neither to be aroused nor satisfied sexually. Had he been a woman, he would no doubt be characterised as hysterical. Much of the tension between men’s bodies, the control of sexual desire and its relationship to holiness, a tension exemplified in this story about Gerald of Aurillac, emanated from current medical theory, in particular, the belief that the male constitution was hotter than that of women and the belief that to maintain health the body must purge itself of superfluous humours. It is not coincidental that so many writers used metaphors of heat – the flames of desire, the fires of lust, warming, burning, and so on – to discuss sexual desire. By virtue of their hotter complexions, men were more susceptible to sexual desire than were women, despite conventional ideologically based statements to the contrary.34 These medical opinions informed how men viewed themselves as sexual, embodied creatures. For example, Robert Grosseteste showed that a knowledge of the humours could influence a man’s understanding of his own body and its unique sexual responses. In a self-revelatory discussion of how, on occasion, he was not incited by a sexually stimulating sight, Grosseteste observed: [I]f perhaps an emission doesn’t occur, it doesn’t reflect well upon me, because I am cold by nature. . . . Sometimes, although the emission doesn’t occur in a

The problem of male embodiment 15 great quantity, nevertheless, afterwards I have felt the humour dissipate a little bit, which on occasion happens without the warming and even without pleasure.35 So Grosseteste recognised that, having a colder complexion, he was by nature less prone to stimulation than were other men. Consequently, he states that not experiencing a seminal emission did not necessarily reflect a superior moral character. This passage also shows the recognition that pent-up humours had to be expended and that the vicissitudes of nature were such that this could happen unwilled, unanticipated and without enjoyment. Not all men, however, were comfortable consigning these kinds of movements of the flesh to the body’s natural functions and its need to expel superfluous humours in order to maintain good health. Theologians from Cassian onward had written of the necessity to eradicate seminal emissions, spontaneous or nocturnal, as part of a man’s spiritual progress.36 This could lead men to adopt extraordinary measures to try to put an end to seminal emissions. For example, Gerald of Wales incorporated a story about the hermit Godric into his Gemma ecclesiastica. Apparently, despite heroic fasting, Godric ‘was unable to extinguish the illicit urgings [of his passions]. In fact, his flesh frequently burned with such ardent desire that many times the seminal fluid was seen discharging itself through natural channels.’37 This led Godric to embrace even more rigorous ascetic practices, including hiding a barrel of frigid water in his cell, so that he could immerse himself in it and quench the fires of his lust as needed. Nor was Godric’s response the extreme reaction of a single individual; the same is reported about Aelred of Rievaulx. Walter Daniel wrote that Aelred built a small chamber of brick under the floor of the novice-house, like a little tank, into which water flowed from hidden rills. . . . Ailred [sic] would enter this contrivance, when he was alone and undisturbed, and immerse his whole body in the icy cold water, and so quench the heat in himself of every vice.38 What is important is not whether Godric or Aelred actually jumped into the icy water at every sign of physical, sexual desire but rather that this is the action that was expected of a holy man to overcome and restrain his body and quell its heat and balance its humours. The process of balancing the humours was easier for women than for men. Menstruation may have rendered women subject to various blood taboos and caused them to be viewed as polluting; however, it was not perceived to have a spiritual effect.39 For men it was more difficult. In antiquity, judicious intercourse had been prescribed to men as a means to balance the humours, advice which continued to be disseminated through medieval medical texts. For example, Constantine the African, one of the leading medical authorities, in his treatise De coitu, which was devoted exclusively to male sexuality, advised that ‘no one who abstains from intercourse will be healthy. Intercourse is without doubt beneficial and an aid to health.’40

16 Jacqueline Murray The notion that sexual intercourse was vital to the maintenance of good health was in direct contradiction to the holy man’s need to maintain perfect chastity.41 Indeed, there are a number of medieval examples of men who had to decide whether to prolong their lives by risking their souls and submitting to therapeutic intercourse. Two twelfth-century stories illustrate this dilemma. The first involves Thomas, archbishop of York. In 1141, while he lay dying, the doctors informed him that sexual intercourse would cure him. His advisers urged the celibate bishop to avail himself of this treatment, arguing that God would forgive the sex act since it was done for medical rather than lascivious purposes. Naturally, the archbishop refused.42 Gerald of Wales recounts a similar story about Louis VII of France, who was told that he would die as a result of an illness brought on by prolonged sexual abstinence. Louis called for the queen, but she was not at the court. All his advisers, lay and cleric alike, agreed that another woman should be brought so that the king could have intercourse. Louis refused; he was ultimately cured, however, because God sent a divine remedy to him because he had preferred to die chaste rather than to live as an adulterer.43 Thus, voluntary celibacy or prolonged abstinence could prove life-threatening; the body’s needs could threaten a man’s physical and spiritual health. Furthermore, if intercourse was so powerful that it could cure disease and prolong life, it could be fatal as well. In his Historia Pontificalis, John of Salisbury included an account of Ralph, count of Vermandois, a man who had married three times. Shortly after his third marriage, while recovering from a serious illness, doctors advised Ralph to avoid intercourse. John reports, however, that ‘he disregarded this warning, for he was very uxorious. When the doctor detected from his urine that he had done so, he advised him to set his house in order, as he would be dead within three days.’44 John adds his own assessment that ‘this man perished through the vice by which he was most passionately enslaved, for he was always dominated by lust’. Of particular note in this passage is not only the lethal power of intercourse but also John of Salisbury’s characterisation of legitimate conjugal relations as a ‘vice’. Sexual intercourse was understood to be harmful to both body and soul. By extension, sex was something best avoided by all men, even those united by the sacrament of marriage. If the natural vicissitudes of the body or, as in Gerald of Aurillac’s case, the simple sight of a woman, could put men at sexual risk, touch did the more so. For example, there is an incident recorded in Jacques de Vitry’s vita of Mary of Oignies which says much about the prevailing anxiety about men’s bodies and their ability – or inability – to control them. After many years of abstinence, Mary ‘did not feel even the first stirrings of lust rise against her’.45 Because of her own innocence and trust in men, she thought that they were all like her: ‘For this reason when one of her close friends clasped her hand from an excess of spiritual affection because he was very close to her – although in his chaste mind he thought no evil – he felt the first masculine stirrings rising in him.’ Mary was unaware of this but heard a voice saying ‘Do not touch me’. She could not make sense of this and so told her friend. ‘[H]e understood what it was and the more carefully guarded himself against other such occasions and gave thanks that his weakness had not been discovered.’ This incident presents,

The problem of male embodiment 17 first, an example of the popular recognition that men were not as able as women to control and repress sexual desire successfully. Second, this story presents evidence that it was believed that the mere touch of a woman’s arm was enough to rouse sexual desire in a chaste and holy man. Significantly, these conclusions appear to be at odds with the conventional evaluation of the theologians, which attributed greater lust and less self-control to women. Perhaps the differing contexts can account for this distinction: theologians tended to be cloistered away from women and so they theorised about their nature, whereas Jacques de Vitry lived in the world and had first-hand experience of the sexual nature and behaviour of both men and women. The vulnerability of this chaste and holy man, innocently touching his equally chaste and holy friend’s arm, allows us to understand better the extreme, even dramatic, reaction of other men in similar, seemingly innocuous, circumstances. For example, the young Hugh of Avalon, later bishop of Lincoln, when newly ordained and assigned to parish work, was pursued by a flirtatious parishioner. One of his hagiographers reports that she ‘sorely tempted Saint Hugh’s mind [but] [n]either her beautiful features nor her voluptuous dress nor the manifold signs of her favour could pierce him with the flame of enticement’.46 Then, one day, she touched the young man’s arm; Hugh was so struck by shame and anger that he cut out the portion of his flesh she had touched. The hagiographer continues: ‘By this means mad passion was overcome.’ This conclusion, however, would appear to have been prematurely optimistic. Hugh’s immediate response was to abandon parochial work and enter the Carthusians. Even so, his sexual passions were not thereby contained. As a 40-yearold man, he experienced lust and sexual temptation so great that, according to one hagiographer, ‘he would have preferred to endure the torments of Hell, rather than the violence of his own desires’.47 Another vita reports that: ‘The furnace of the enticement set his vitals on fire, and the very depth of his heart was challenged by overpowering heat.’48 This experience was so profoundly disturbing to Hugh that in a dream he saw himself mystically castrated and ‘from that time on he did not feel any movement of the flesh strong enough to prevent him from easily checking it’.49 This is surely a similar, if psychologically more extreme, response to the body as Godric and Aelred’s barrels of freezing water and Gerald of Aurillac’s psychogenic impotence. Nor was this notion of mystical castration merely a psychological refuge for men desiring to control the flesh. There was a practical aspect to it as well. The whole problem of the body was perceived to be located in the male genitals. Once they were removed, it was believed that the problem of lack of control of the flesh would simply disappear.50 Origen was the paradigm for this ultimate means of selfcontrol,51 but other men found the removal of the genitals equally appealing. For example, in trying to come to terms with his violent castration, Peter Abelard developed quite a different understanding of his own sexual nature and the meaning of his castration.52 First, he used his castration to excuse his continuing contact with Heloise, reminding his detractors that ‘my present condition removes suspicion of evil-doing so completely’.53 He repeatedly invoked the necessity for a final solution

18 Jacqueline Murray to what he now perceived to be his uncontrollable lust. He characterised his mutilation as ‘that wound which was wholly beneficial’54 and ‘cut me off from the slough of filth in which I had been wholly immersed in mind as in body’.55 For Abelard, however, castration was more than a punishment or a means of expiating his sins; it was also a cleansing process. Only thus could I become more fit to approach the holy altars, now that no contagion of carnal impurity would ever again call me from them. How mercifully did he want me to suffer so much only in that member, the privation of which would also further the salvation of my soul without defiling my body.56 This rewriting of the meaning of his castration is encapsulated in Abelard’s rhetorical question: ‘[W]hen divine grace cleansed rather than deprived me of those vile members . . . what else did it do but remove a foul imperfection in order to preserve perfect purity?’ Thus, for Abelard, castration became a positive act of divine grace that freed him from the sexual demands of his imperfect male body and ensured his ability to lead henceforth a holy life. Abelard’s words highlight the extent to which anxiety inhered in the male genitals. They were perceived to be the source of the problem. Once the genitals were excised a man was secure, his body cleansed, free from imperfection, able to remain in perfect purity, guaranteed of salvation. From this perspective, there was a natural impediment to salvation inherent in the male body. Medical science corroborated this in its complicated discussions of the humours and men’s naturally hot complexion. There are hints, as well, that theologians and churchmen, those well-schooled in the theology of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, those who should have been able to articulate the inherent goodness of embodiment and the inextricable interdependence of body and soul, were also troubled, perhaps even unconvinced, by the doctrines they embraced. For example, Gerald of Wales quoted a passage he attributed to Jerome: ‘We are made of flesh and therefore cannot be continent nor abstain from the works of the flesh.’57 This absolute pessimistic statement summarises the hopelessness of one of Christianity’s most pessimistic theologians. Jerome’s statement, apocryphal and decontextualised as it may be, points to the anxiety and tension that lingered in men’s minds and tinged their experience of embodiment with guilt, frustration, even anguish. And, as Paul had so neatly summarised the situation, the problem was inherent to male embodiment: ‘the law of sin that is in my members’. The story of the medieval body, then, is not only the story of women’s life-giving, lactating, menstruating, polluting bodies. It is also the story of men’s bodies and their ‘vile members’ which so often seemed to have a will of their own. It is the story of superfluous humours, spontaneous erections, seminal emissions, nocturnal pollution and castration anxiety. It is the story of a fundamental dis-ease with the male body and with the masculine experience of human embodiment.

The problem of male embodiment 19

Notes 1 A useful summary of these issues is found in F. Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom, London, Lepus Books, 1979. See also J.F. Keenan, ‘Christian Perspectives on the Human Body’, Theological Studies, 1994, vol. 55, pp. 330–46. 2 For a discussion of the tension between ecclesiastical and secular values surrounding sexual activity see J. McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150’, in C.A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 3–29; and J. Murray, ‘Hiding behind the Universal Man: Male Sexuality in the Middle Ages’, in V.L. Bullough and J.A. Brundage (eds), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, New York, Garland, 1996, pp. 123–52. 3 For example, see C. Vagaggni, The Flesh: Instrument of Salvation: A Theology of the Human Body, trans. C.U. Quinn, Staten Island, Alba House, 1969. 4 See the important work of C.W. Bynum including ‘Why all the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 1995, vol. 22, pp. 1–33. 5 See, for example, L. Lomperis and S. Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, which is exclusively literary in nature. 6 For example, despite his attempt to focus on the ‘human’ body, in the section devoted to the medieval and Renaissance periods, Keenan discusses women’s bodies exclusively. The body that is sexed male is not mentioned. Keenan, ‘Christian Perspectives on the Human Body’. 7 C.W. Bynum, ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg’, Renaissance Quarterly, 1986, vol. 39, pp. 399–439. 8 L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, New York, Pantheon, 1983. 9 See, for example, the recent collection, D. Hillman and C. Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, New York, Routledge, 1997. Essays examine various parts of the anatomy including joints, the eye, the tongue and the heart. There are essays on the female breast and the clitoris, yet there is no essay devoted to the penis or testicles. 10 M. Irvine, ‘Abelard and (Re)writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity and Remasculinization’, in J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, New York, Garland, 1997, pp. 87–106. 11 B. Wheeler, ‘Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession’, in J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, New York, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 107–28. 12 Y. Ferroul, ‘Abelard’s Blissful Castration’, in J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 129–49. 13 J. Murray, ‘Mystical Castration: Some Reflections on Peter Abelard, Hugh of Lincoln and Sexual Control’, in Murray (ed.), Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, New York, Garland Publishing, 1999, pp. 73–91, pp. 80–4. 14 D. Brakke, ‘The Problematization of Nocturnal Emissions in Early Christian Syria, Egypt, and Gaul’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 1995, vol. 3, pp. 419–60. 15 C. Leyser, ‘Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emission and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages’, in D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe, London, Longman, 1999, pp. 103–20. 16 D. Elliott, ‘Pollution, Illusion and Masculine Disarray. Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy’, in Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 14–34. 17 J. Murray, ‘Men’s Bodies, Men’s Minds: Seminal Emissions and Sexual Anxiety in the Middle Ages’, Annual Review of Sex Research, 1997, vol. 8, pp. 1–26. 18 See D. Elliott, ‘Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of a Medieval Anxiety’, in Elliott, Fallen Bodies, pp. 61–80.

20 Jacqueline Murray 19 The first half of the phrase refers to the conclusions of V. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity, p. 7 cited in J.B. Nelson, Body Theology, Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992, p. 79. It is Nelson who is quoted and the italics are Nelson’s. Both Nelson and Seidler argue that masculinity has hitherto been a ‘negative identity’, learned primarily by defining itself by what it is not, that is, against feminine qualities such as emotionality and connectedness. Men have tended to ignore or deny their bodies, concentrating on themselves as thinkers or social and political actors, rather than as beings who as individuals are defined in part by their embodied experience. They have traditionally thought of women and gay men as having bodies in a way that is different from their perception of self. Moreover, it can be argued that the roots of masculine body alienation can be traced in an unbroken discourse to the ancient philosophical identification of the male with the intellectual/spiritual and the female with the material/physical. See P. Allen, Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC–AD 1250, Montreal, Eden Press, 1985 and M.C. Horowitz, ‘Aristotle and Woman’, Journal of the History of Biology, 1976, vol. 9, pp. 183–213. 20 1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:19–20. 21 1 Corinthians 12:27; 1 Corinthians 6:16. 22 Romans 7:23. 23 Die Exempla aus den Sermones feriales et communes des Jakob von Vitry, ed. J. Greven, Heidelberg, Carl Winter’s, 1914, p. 20. 24 The exemplum does not allow us to conclude how widespread such a notion was, and whether it was believed by clergy alone or by clergy and laity alike. Nevertheless, the fact that Jacques included the anecdote in a sermon is an indication that he believed the matter sufficiently serious that it needed to be addressed in a public forum. Alternatively, he may have considered this a ludicrous story which nevertheless was rhetorically effective for making his point. Whatever the motivation, what is important is that Jacques considered the exemplum relevant to his audience. For a discussion of sermon exempla, miracle stories, and other clerical genres and how they reflect the medieval laity’s world view see A. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. J.M. Bak and P.A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 2–4. 25 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, ed. A. Hilka, 2 vols, Bonn, Peter Hanstein, 1937, vol. 1, p. 25; vol. 2, p. 49. 26 Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and C.C.S. Bland, London, Routledge, 1929, vol. 2, p. 12; vol. 1, p. 139. See also the discussion by Elliott, ‘Pollution, Illusion and Masculine Disarray’, pp. 30–3. 27 For example, Peter of Poitiers suggested that a man who had intercourse with a menstruating woman could contract leprosy. Petrus Pictaviensis: ‘Summa de confessione’: Compilatio praesens, ed. J. Longère, CCCM 51, Turnhout, Brepols, 1980, p. 12, p. 17. 28 This understanding was confirmed by Thomas Aquinas who rejected the idea that God’s grace would prevent demons from utilising the semen from nocturnal emissions for their own nefarious purposes. R.E.L. Masters, Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft, New York, Julian Press, 1962, pp. 37–8. See also Elliott, ‘Pollution, Illusion and Masculine Disarray’, pp. 14–34. 29 See Murray, ‘Men’s Bodies, Men’s Minds’. 30 Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica: Giraldi Cambrensis: Opera, ed. J.S. Brewer, Rolls Series 21, London, Longman, 1862, vol. 2, 2.14. This has been translated as The Jewel of the Church: A Translation of Gemma ecclesiastica by Giraldus Cambrensis, trans. J.J. Hagen, Leiden, Brill, 1979. 31 Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2.14. 32 Odo of Cluny, Vita s. Geraldi Comitis Aurillac, PL 133, 1.9, cols 648–9. The translations are my own. 33 Vern Bullough argues that this case shows the extent of the power that the nobility could exercise, including sexual access to their serfs. V.L. Bullough, ‘Sex in History: A

The problem of male embodiment 21

34

35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Redux’, in J. Murray and K. Eisenbichler (eds), Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996, pp. 3–22. While this story illustrates the control that a lord could exercise over the very bodies of his tenants, it should not be confused with the ‘right of first night’. See A. Boureau, The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the droit de cuissage, trans. L.G. Cochrane, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998. Useful discussions on humoral theory and sex differences are found in J. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; and D. Jacquart and C. Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Adamson, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988. J. Goering and F.A.C. Mantello, ‘The “Perambulauit Iudas . . .” (Speculum confessionis) Attributed to Robert Grosseteste’, Revue Bénédictine, 1986, vol. 96, pp. 125–68, pp. 149–50. For an overview of medieval attitudes see Murray, ‘Men’s Bodies, Men’s Minds’. Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2.10. The original vita to which Gerald refers is that by Galfrid in Acta Sanctorum, Maii 5, pp. 70–85. Walter Daniel, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, trans. F.M. Powicke, London, Thomas Nelson, 1950, p. 16, p. 25. This was based on the teaching attributed to Pope Gregory the Great in the famous letter he was reputed to have written to Augustine of Canterbury. Although this attribution is spurious, in the Middle Ages the letter circulated over the pope’s name and the ideas were imbued with his authority. The text of the letter was disseminated widely. See Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford, Clarendon, 1969, 1.27. P. Delany, ‘Constantinus Africanus’ De coitu: A Translation’, The Chaucer Review, 1970, vol. 4, pp. 55–65, p. 59. For a discussion of some of the implications of the intersection of medical and theological discourses see J. Murray, ‘Sexuality and Spirituality: The Intersection of Medieval Theology and Medicine’, Fides et historia, 1991, vol. 23, pp. 20–36. The story is recounted in E.J. Kealey, Medieval Medicus: A Social History of Anglo-Norman Medicine, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, p. 42. Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2.11. The Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, Oxford, Clarendon, 1986, p. 7, pp. 14–15. Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. M.H. King, Toronto, Peregrina Publishing, 1993, p. 75, p. 101. The Metrical Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, ed. and trans. C. Garton, Lincoln, Honywood Press, 1986, pp. 20–3. Adam of Eynsham, The Life of St Hugh of Lincoln (Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis), ed. and trans. D.L. Douie and H. Farmer, London, Thomas Nelson, 1961, vol. 1, book 2 ch. 2, p. 50. Metrical Life, p. 27. Metrical Life, pp. 28–9. The mystical castration of Hugh of Lincoln is discussed in Murray, ‘Mystical Castration’, pp. 80–4. The belief that castration would remove all sexual desire was, in fact, at odds with the physiological reality. Ferroul has argued that castration does not eradicate a man’s sexual desire, although medieval people believed that it did. Ferroul, ‘Abelard’s Blissful Castration’, pp. 129–49. This discrepancy may account for the seemingly contradictory belief that eunuchs were more libidinous than men who were genitally intact. S.F. Tougher, ‘Byzantine Eunuchs: An Overview, with Special Reference to their Creation and Origin’, in L. James (ed.), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium, London, Routledge, 1997, pp. 168–84, pp. 174–5.

22 Jacqueline Murray 51 Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G.A. Williamson, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965; rpt. 1981, book 6, pp. 247–8. For a discussion of Origen see P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 161–9. 52 Abelard’s reflections on his castration are discussed at length in Murray, ‘Mystical Castration’, pp. 76–80. 53 Pierre Abélard, Historia Calamitatum, ed. J. Monfrin, Paris, J. Vrin, 1959, p. 102. The translation is from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. B. Radice, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974, p. 98. 54 J.T. Muckle (ed.), ‘The Personal Letters between Abelard and Heloise’, Mediaeval Studies, 1953, vol. 15, pp. 47–93, p. 88; trans. Radice, p. 146. 55 Muckle, ‘Personal Letters’, p. 89; trans. Radice, p. 148. 56 Muckle, ‘Personal Letters’, p. 89; trans. Radice, p. 148. 57 Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2.9. This passage is as yet unidentified and may be apocryphal.

2

The role of patronage and audience in the cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch Wendy R. Larson

We are all familiar with studies of twins who were separated at birth: adopted by different families, siblings grow up unaware of each other, but often with startling similarities in tastes, occupations and lifestyles. By making observations of siblings who share the same genes but have been raised in different environments researchers have been able to gain some insight into the tangled question of ‘nature versus nurture’; the riddle of to what degree people are born with certain traits and to what extent they are shaped by their surroundings. The cults of Sts Marina and Margaret of Antioch offer an analogous opportunity. Marina and Margaret share the same genetic code, that is, they share the same vita. However, the development of their cults took place in different cultural environments: St Marina is venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church while Margaret is the saint recognised in the Latin West, and the iconographic traditions associated with each are very distinct. This chapter will consider the role of gender in both the development and maintenance of these two cults as a way of measuring the effect of patronage in shaping cultic practices and artefacts, including textual and visual narratives of the saint’s life and her iconography. Specifically, the very prominent role of women patrons in the cult of St Margaret offers a contrast with the cult of St Marina, which does not appear to have had a clearly marked gender affiliation. This chapter will take a long historical and broad geographical perspective, looking at the cult in both the Orthodox East and Latin West. Mapping the history of the cult of Sts Marina and Margaret also offers the opportunity to explore some important questions much like that of nature versus nurture. The very distinct emphases the Marina and Margaret cults developed in the two realms of Christianity demonstrate how cultural differences play a role in a saint’s reception and the consequent development of the cult. While this may seem obvious, a comparative approach helps to avoid the tendency to think of the Christian Church as a monolithic institution. In the case of Marina and Margaret, their respective communities influenced the shape of their cults, the types of devotees (men and women, lay and religious, scholars) and the kinds of patronage which devotion to the saints inspired. This in turn ultimately affected the cults’ viability in the two cultural contexts. As part of working out a cultic map for Marina and Margaret, this chapter also addresses the relationship between devotion and patronage. Typically, we tend to

24 Wendy R. Larson think of patrons as people with the economic resources to sponsor edifices such as churches, manuscripts and other objects. However, attention will also be paid to those devotees who are able to give only a penny for candle wax, or perhaps most humbly are able to show their devotion to the saint only by calling on her name or asking that her vita be read aloud to them, all forms of devotion that are promoted by the saint herself in her vita.1 This chapter will use a definition of patronage in its broadest sense as encompassing the full range of practices and productions which are associated in some way with promoting or drawing on the subject’s sanctity and efficacy as an intercessor. Labelling all practices and productions associated with a saint as types of patronage puts members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and other religious and secular patrons, ranging from nuns to parish priests to lay women of every social class, into a shared role. The levelling effect promoted by this definition will encourage analysis which refuses to marginalise female or lay concerns. The case of Sts Marina and Margaret is a valuable example of how a broad definition of patronage can help to provide a better understanding of the operation of saints’ cults and how they were meaningful to those who participated in them, a model of patronage which more accurately reflects the dynamics of agency and influence at work in a widespread and enduring cult. The earliest extant Greek life of Marina of Antioch dates from the end of the ninth century, although Marina is supposed to have lived during the reign of Diocletian, the notorious persecutor of Christians in the late third century.2 At the age of twelve, Marina, the daughter of a pagan priest in Antioch, is given to a nurse outside the city when her mother dies; the girl is then converted to Christianity under the older woman’s influence.3 Marina’s passio begins when she refuses to marry Olibrius, the local pagan magistrate. She is put in prison, where in answer to her prayer that she be allowed a vision of her enemy, a demon in the shape of a dragon appears and swallows her. Marina makes the sign of the cross while in its belly, causing the beast to burst open, and the saint to escape unharmed. Immediately, another demon appears in her cell in the form of a man. Marina grabs him by his beard and beats him with a hammer, breaking his bones – in some versions, even knocking out one of his eyes. She triumphantly plants her foot on his neck and demands he tell her about his origins and activities among people. Following these two victories, Marina is subjected to horrendous tortures: beatings with scourges and hooks, boiling and burning with torches. She is finally beheaded, and angels descend to carry her head to heaven.4 Just before her death, Marina prays that those who dedicate a church in her name or who own a copy of her passion will have their sins forgiven and receive protection from demons. A dove comes from heaven to announce that her prayer has been granted. This version of the vita is framed by the narrative of Theotimus, a figure who claims to be a witness to the events of the saint’s life and passion, and author of the original account from which all others are derived. Marina and Margaret share this vita, yet their cultic histories are not the same. Marina and Margaret appear side by side in some Western martyrologies of the ninth century, in which the two are given separate listings and feast days even though their lives are identical.5 After these early joint appearances, however, Marina and

The cults of St Margaret and St Marina 25 Margaret are segregated to the East and West respectively. One clear sign of the differentiation of the two cults is the iconography: Marina is often shown grasping a demon by his hair or beard and striking him with a hammer, while Margaret is typically portrayed emerging from the dragon. While the subject of Margaret striking the demon is not unknown in the West, it is most commonly associated with other scenes from the saint’s life; only rarely does this subject occur in combination with the dragon motif, although the two tropes are found as a single image in the Eastern tradition. Figure 2.1 is an example of a late thirteenth-century image which combines the dragon story with the demon motif, highly unusual in Western iconography. The more standard formats of visual treatments of Margaret and Marina may be seen as a reflection of the difference between the two cults’ emphases. The parallel development of the cults of Sts Marina and Margaret offers a glimpse into how a cult may be constructed by the interests and concerns of its members. The various versions of the saints’ legend are particularly valuable for the

Figure 2.1 ‘St Margaret emerging from the dragon and attacking the devil’, Latin Psalter, end of thirteenth century. Source: London, British Library, Huth Bequest, Add MS 38116 fol. 13. Reproduced by permission of The British Library

26 Wendy R. Larson transparent way they indicate the needs and concerns of their respective audiences. One such moment in the text is the unusual list of types of veneration that the saint itemises in her final prayer. The saint says that those who build a church in her name, dedicate a lamp, pay someone to write down her life or own a copy of the text, or even those who simply request that it be read aloud to them, will have their sins forgiven. Certainly these sorts of venerations would be associated with an established saint and cultic following, although the text presents them supposedly at the moment they are founded by God’s granting of the saint’s prayer. The wide range of types of cultic patronage also demonstrates the variety of economic statuses from which the cult drew: from those who could fund a church or have a text copied, to those who could request only the reading of the saint’s life. The petitions that the saint promises to grant those who venerate her are another important element in the final prayer. In the earliest extant Greek vita, Marina promises forgiveness of sins to those who commemorate her or invoke her name, as well as a variety of interventions, ranging from protection against lawsuits to the safety of livestock. The Western vitae have the added element of the saint’s promise of children being born without defect, including demonic possession, in the house where her name is remembered or her passio read. In the legend the pagan idols that the saint’s father and Olibrius worship are described several times as deaf, dumb, blind and demon-possessed;6 these are also the traits from which St Margaret promises to preserve children. In one of the ninth-century Old English lives, Margaret prays that ‘þær boc sy mines martyrhades, ne sy þær geboren blind cild ne healt, ne dumb, ne deaf, ne fram unclænum gaste geswenct, ac sy þær sib and lufu and soþfæstnesse gast’ (in the house where the book of my martyrdom is [kept] may there not be born a child who is blind or lame or dumb or deaf or afflicted by an unclean spirit, but may peace be there and love and the spirit of truth).7 In fact, blindness, lameness, deafness and muteness were commonly regarded as signs of demonic possession; as we see in the gospels, Jesus’s miraculous cures are often exorcisms.8 The Christo-mimetic feature of Marina’s power over demons is also part of a larger pattern that links her life to that of Christ; these similarities reinforce her sanctity and efficacy as an intercessor. For instance, a dove descends after her ‘baptism’ in boiling water, and announces that Marina is blessed. In many images of her torments she is shown on a cruciform structure with her arms out to either side, and like Christ, she is taken outside the town to be executed. In addition, Marina enacts a type of descensus by being swallowed by the dragon, which may be linked to Christ’s descent into hell (often portrayed as the mouth of Leviathan or a dragon).9 Images which focus on the saint’s mirroring of events in the life of Christ further demonstrate her power as a patron. St Margaret’s association in a rather indirect way with children, through her ability to protect against demons, seems to have become more explicit as the cult developed in the West. The promise of protection for children appears in the earliest Latin and Old English lives from the ninth century. The first text specifically to mention mothers in addition to children is Wace’s Anglo-Norman life of St Margaret (1135), and from this point on mothers are almost always mentioned.10

The cults of St Margaret and St Marina 27 In practical terms, if children were to be born unharmed it would make sense that their mothers might deliver them without harm as well. The appearance of the new petition suggests that the childbirth aspect of Margaret’s legend drew increasing interest, and the legend itself became shaped by this emphasis. Jocelyn WoganBrowne, following the development of Margaret’s legend in Anglo-Norman, suggests that the Latin legend began to reflect the contemporary practice of women during childbirth, so that the direction of influence moved from the lay women invoking St Margaret in a specific time of need to the textual accounts of the saint’s passio.11 It is at this same time that the image of Margaret emerging from the dragon became established as her emblem in the West rather than the image of the saint with the demon. Perhaps this development was also linked to the childbirth practices that were already part of the cult. Rather than viewing this development as a case of confused doubling or conflation of saints,12 the shift from Marina the demon-slayer to Margaret the childbirth patron might also be seen as an instance of cultic logic which operates to reflect shifts within the community of believers. The various ways that elements of the Marina and Margaret legend were interpreted and valued by different types of devotees of her cult, ranging from the authors of legends to those who might have requested that her life be read to them during labour, are reminders that a saint’s cult is not a univocal community. Examining textual accounts and visual representations of St Margaret’s encounters with the dragon and demon offers a picture of how a variety of interpretations helped to compose the images of Sts Marina and Margaret. The ways in which two important elements of the saint’s life – her encounters with the dragon and demon – were received will now be examined as a means of gauging the interests that influenced the shape of the cult in two different cultural contexts. The example of the Marina and Margaret cults reminds us that even within a single cultural context the communities are themselves not monolithic but encompass a range of needs and viewpoints. For instance, the saint’s triumph over the demon is of critical importance in her legend for some patrons of her cult because this incident functions as an important sign of her power over the demonic. The ninth-century Greek exegete Methodius saw Marina’s battle against both of her demonic enemies as a physical representation of every Christian’s spiritual battle against evil. He read the copper hammer that she used against the anthropomorphic demon as an allegory of divine grace.13 The appeal of seeing Marina and Margaret’s enemies as physical signs of a normally intangible struggle in the soul is supported by the vita itself when the saint prays to have a vision of the ‘one who wars against me’.14 However, the literal presence of the dragon and demon in the vita became a matter of concern for other early commentators. Symeon Metaphrastes, a tenthcentury Greek hagiographer, called the demon and dragon scenes ‘malicious interpolations’,15 while other Greek writers wondered how it was possible that a purely spiritual being like a demon could be seized and beaten by anyone. Some answered by saying that sin had ‘thickened’ the normally ethereal spirits of the demons, so one could be grabbed by Marina and wounded.16 While some texts dealt with the problem by trimming the most sensational aspects of these two encounters, others, like the Old English Martyrology, simply left them out.17

28 Wendy R. Larson The Eastern iconography of Marina striking the demon with her hammer presents a figure of particular efficacy against the demonic in general. The appearance of Marina’s image fighting the demon in some Byzantine churches near doorways, paired with a decorated apotropaic (devil-averting) cross or St Michael (another figure who may be shown with a dragon, demon or some combination of the two), also suggests a protective function.18 The defeat of demonic enemies receives a good deal of attention in Marina’s story as she easily overcomes demons in both reptilian and human forms. In addition, Olibrius is called the foster-son or son of the devil, and he is associated with the worship of idols, which is also linked to the power and control of demons. Marina not only physically overcomes the two demons, but also successfully withstands the temptations of idolatry, worldly power, wealth and sexuality that Olibrius represents.19 Marina’s power to quell demons both physically and spiritually may have caused the owner of a late twelfth-century Byzantine reliquary of her hand to have a prayer inscribed which asks that the saint ‘save me from the storm of the evil spirits of my mind and give me victory over them, and power, dispensing a gift comparable to your nature’.20 The reliquary commemorates the hand that physically defeated the demon while it requests that the saint’s power be applied to mental torments which may be demon possession or temptation. Although in the West the image of St Margaret conquering the anthropomorphic demon was not the primary visual representation of the saint, as it was in the East, it nevertheless continued to be a part of the legend in the Western tradition. In Western iconography Margaret is very rarely shown wielding a hammer. More commonly, she is simply grabbing the demon and throwing him to the ground. Humiliated by his defeat at the hands of a mere girl, the demon is forced to confess his tactics among humans. Most typically, the demon confesses to tempting people to sins such as greed, but the variations here indicate that the demon’s confession is another point at which the legend may reveal the interests of a particular audience. One version of the legend shows the demon taking on the specific aspect of sexual temptation that the saint had physically to overcome. In the thirteenth-century English Seinte Marherete, a text intended for an audience of religious women, the conquered demon explains how he sets about tempting people to sexual sin.21 The life of St Margaret is recommended reading in Ancrene Wisse, another text written for a comparable or possibly identical audience, in a passage that deals with the power of prayer in overcoming temptation. In suggesting that the anchoresses read ‘ower englishche boc of seinte margarete’ (your English book of St Margaret), the author of Ancrene Wisse points to the saint as a role model for perseverance in the face of temptation.22 In this legend the demon reveals that he causes men and women who had made vows of chastity to fall by simply allowing them to be alone together and to become complacent about their self-control. This text’s explicit concern with sexual temptation demonstrates why St Margaret might be popular among female religious. Another life of Margaret uses the demon to express the concerns of mothers rather than anchoresses.23 In this account, the demon confesses to harming mothers and their children during birth: ‘Thedyr wolde I come belyve [at once], in childyng

The cults of St Margaret and St Marina 29 to do her harme. / If it were unblessed, I brake it foote or arme, / Or the woman herselfe in some wyse I dydde harme.’24 Raising the issue of Margaret’s protection for mothers and children at this point in the narrative is highly unusual, if not unique: it is usually stated only as part of the final prayer. In this case the author’s treatment of the demon scene demonstrates how concerns of a particular audience might be very directly addressed through a particular retelling of St Margaret’s life. Margaret’s defeat of the demon takes on a political resonance in the fourteenthcentury Sienese painting The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine.25 In this work, Margaret appears on the predella in the classic Marina pose with a mallet raised to strike the demon she grasps in her opposite hand. The image is paired with a scene of the Archangel Michael fighting a dragon on the right and an angel presiding over a kiss of peace between two reconciled enemies in the centre. In her discussion of the work, Lois Drewer notes that ‘through their conquest of Beelzebub and the dragon, St Margaret and Archangel Michael defeat the forces of chaos’.26 In turn, the kiss of peace reflects restored harmony in the human realm. Certainly it is not surprising that an Italian painter would be aware of Byzantine iconography, but it is interesting to see how this artist made use of the Eastern tradition for an unusual Western purpose. While the demon episode is critiqued by some writers as being too fantastic, it affords other authors and artists and their audiences a valuable space to reflect their understanding of what sort of evil forces they wish St Margaret to help them overcome. Like St Margaret’s battle with the anthropomorphic demon, her encounter with the dragon was also treated to a great deal of scepticism and commentary as well as widespread interest in both textual and visual narratives. The image of Margaret emerging from the womb of the dragon had a strong resonance for much of her cult, as it came to be connected with childbirth, yet the notion that the saint actually emerged from the belly of the beast was resisted by others. Jacobus de Voragine, author of the Golden Legend, in his telling of the Life of St Margaret, suggests first that Margaret saw the dragon in her cell and when she made the sign of the cross it disappeared.27 Then, he offers the more popular version: that the saint was actually swallowed by the dragon, made the sign of the cross inside him, and then burst out unharmed. This account, Jacobus says, is ‘apocryphal’ and ‘frivolous’,28 but it is frequently depicted in medieval art, in the motif of Margaret emerging from the body of the dragon with the hem of her dress spilling from its mouth, indicating that she has been swallowed. The motif of Margaret’s gown protruding from the dragon’s mouth may be one sign of the particular interests of a patron concerned with Margaret’s emergence from within the dragon as evidence of the saint’s power and efficacy. For instance, the image appears on a parchment amulet specifically intended for use in childbed.29 St Margaret’s hem is also prominent in an image on a small hinged metal box with loops for hanging. This item does not carry an explicit indication of its use, although the combination of St Margaret with St Katherine, patroness of nurses, may link it to childbirth as well.30 In the thirteenth-century South English Legendary, the narrator also exhibits concern about the veracity of the actual swallowing of the saint. He nimbly skirts the issue

30 Wendy R. Larson by telling the story, and then commenting: ‘Ac þis netelle ich no
t to soþe for it nis no
t to soþe iwrite / Ac weþer it is soþ oþer it nis inot noman þat wite’ (But I cannot say if this is true for it is not written as truth; but whether it is true or not, no man knows).31 He goes on to explain that it is problematic to believe that a demon can be destroyed, even by a very powerful saint. At the end of the text the narrator recommends that women read the life of Margaret when they are going to give birth: ‘Wymmen þat wiþ oþer were wanne hi child bere / Hit were god þat hi radde hure lyf þe sikerore
e seoþ it were’ (When women bear a child, in the company of other women, it is good that they read her life, for certainly it is the truth).32 The text seems very concerned with ‘truth’, as it tries to negotiate what that really is. The technical demonological issue forces a questioning of the tale’s veracity, yet the story must also be true for the women who hear the story as part of the ritual of childbirth.33 The account of Margaret’s swallowing and the persistence of the image of her emergence from the dragon’s belly despite a lack of endorsement and even denunciation from patrons whom we might conventionally label as ‘dominant’, suggest that they did not have the absolute hegemonic control often claimed for them. The coexistence of truths for two different groups of patrons in one text underlines again the multivocal nature of the cult. An embossed leather casket from the late fourteenth century, probably French or German in origin, seems to confirm the complaints of some medieval critics that St Margaret’s legend bordered on the ‘frivolous’.34 Here she is presented along with figures from a chivalric romance. Margaret emerging from the dragon (with her dress hem clearly dangling from his mouth) appears on the upper left corner of the lid. The remaining panels include two scenes from the romance Chatelaine de Vergi, and others described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalogue as ‘scenes of gallantry and grotesque monsters’.35 It is an odd combination of images: human heads appear on beastly bodies in some panels, while embracing couples may be discerned on others. The casket’s decorative programme may have been considered appropriate for a woman, possibly as a wedding gift, as it portrays lovers and the presence of St Margaret implies the safe arrival of future children. The context of St Margaret’s appearance on the casket is very similar to her image in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage (1434), where she functions as one sign of a fruitful marriage.36 While St Margaret may occasionally consort with the fantastic, as one group of patrons, the scholars, complained, the association is not haphazard, but indicates the specific concerns of another group of patrons, which included laywomen. This situation is best underlined by a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript of Margaret’s vita. A series of illuminations includes her encounter with the dragon (she is quite clearly swallowed), the demon (whom she binds and beats) and a scene of pilgrims coming to her shrine for cures.37 At the end of the passio appears an image of a midwife bringing out an infant to a mother in bed functioning as an emblem of the safe childbirth for both mother and child that St Margaret has just promised in the text.38 Above the childbed scene is written a prayer invoking the Trinity as well as the miraculous mothers of the New Testament and Apocrypha: Elizabeth, Anna and Mary.39 Clearly this example reflects the needs of one group of patrons who were sponsoring text production, following the promise of St Margaret whose

The cults of St Margaret and St Marina 31 request to intercede on behalf of those who owned a copy of her life or had it read aloud to them was granted by God. It goes beyond mere reflection, however, by incorporating an image of the audience into the text itself. The image of the new mother being presented with her healthy infant acts as a useful reminder that ultimately, the less fantastic, but also less powerful, version of St Margaret’s legend did not oust the construction of the saint which served the needs of a larger and apparently more influential set of patrons: those who had an investment in Margaret’s emergence from the dragon because of its association with childbirth. The overwhelming number of extant artefacts produced for a wide range of patrons, including manuscripts, amulets, wall paintings, icons, reliquaries and embroideries, focus on the very scene that a smaller, although institutionally more powerful, group of patrons attempted to excise from the legend. This Italian manuscript is also useful because while it shows a clear interest in mothers, it also indicates others who might have turned to St Margaret for help, by including an illumination of people at St Margaret’s shrine in Montefiascone, Italy. Two men appear to be suffering from lameness, one is on crutches, the other on his knees, while on the right a small demon escapes from a woman’s mouth. Similarly, the Vanni altarpiece, which was originally at the shrine, also demonstrates the saint’s ability to effect cures.40 Ex voto images of arms and legs hang above the shrine, while various people approach for help. Some have obvious physical ailments, such as blindness, while one figure who approaches with the assistance of two others may be a pregnant woman (the figure wears a gown with no belt at the waist). These images depict both men and women at the saint’s shrine, making it clear that she was not invoked solely by women or for childbirth alone. Women must have turned to St Margaret as a role model and patron for feminine concerns other than childbirth, including sexual continence and faith. Katherine J. Lewis describes how Margaret’s legend promoted values that would have been appropriate for unmarried girls and wives as well as for women religious.41 Study of the formation of women’s parish guilds reveals another realm of women’s activity; the ‘maidens’ guild’ dedicated to St Margaret at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster, described by Katherine French, offers a model for public devotion to the saint other than the well-known invocations for safe birth.42 Examination of the extent of the cult of St Margaret must also note her appearances on ecclesiastical embroideries, particularly vestments. The Pienza Cope (1315–30) features scenes from the life of St Margaret as well as the lives of the Virgin Mary and St Catherine of Alexandria.43 Margaret and Catherine are also paired on a fourteenth-century burse. In addition, St Margaret appears on the Butler-Bowden (1320–5) and Steeple Aston Copes (early fourteenth century).44 Clergy wearing the image of St Margaret are presumably not doing so because of her efficacy in childbirth, but because of her power as an intercessor. In her final prayer she not only asks that expectant mothers may pray to her for succour, but also that anyone who calls on her name may have their sins forgiven.45 St Margaret’s image on liturgical accoutrements demonstrates another context in which she is acknowledged and invoked, perhaps in different ways by those who may be wearing or utilising the vestment, and those who would witness its liturgical appearance.46

32 Wendy R. Larson The outline of Sts Marina and Margaret’s cult developed here is clearly one that stresses its non-unitary, composite quality. Scholars of the medieval West have had a tendency to pigeon-hole saints, causing them to overlook the semiotic fluidity which more accurately characterises the history of cults. The connection of St Margaret with childbirth, while nearly ubiquitous in the late Middle Ages in the West, was not self-evident in earlier centuries, and did not arise at all with St Marina in the East. In the East, rather than being associated with childbirth or even women’s needs in particular, St Marina’s power over demons led to her role as a guardian against demonic influences generally. While she appears in churches among other female saints in spaces associated with women, St Marina is also sometimes associated with male saints who also fought dragons and demons, such as St Michael and St George.47 Her cult remains very active in contemporary Orthodoxy, with many churches, convents and towns dedicated to her. In the West, Margaret’s close association with childbirth caused the cult to be vulnerable on two fronts: Protestant disapproval of saints generally, and advances in medical science which lessened the reliance on saints for help even among Roman Catholic women. The cult was officially demoted by the Vatican in 1969, when Margaret was declared unhistorical. Margaret may still be venerated by individuals, but is no longer part of the official Church calendar. Perhaps the progressive weakening of St Margaret in the West appears inexorable at first, but comparison with the continued viability of the cult of St Marina in the East makes Margaret’s decline seem less inevitable. These contrasts suggest that the explicit association of St Margaret with women’s concerns, and therefore with primarily female patrons, may have affected the credibility and hence the ultimate fate of her cult.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Margaret’s final prayer in The South English Legendary, ed. C. d’Evelyn and A.J. Mill, 3 vols, EETS os 235, 236 and 244, London, Oxford University Press, 1956–9, pp. 291–302, p. 301, lines 274–82. 2 As with other early virgin martyrs, such as Katherine of Alexandria and Barbara, the long gap between her death and the first signs of a cult are considered evidence that the saint is probably not a historical figure. The earliest known extant text is known as the Passio a Theotimo (Paris, Bibliothèque National, Gr. 1470) edited by H. Usener, ‘Acta S. Marinae et S. Christophori’, in Festschrift zur fünften Säcularfeier der Carl-RuprechtsUniversität zu Heidelberg, Bonn, Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 1886, pp. 1–47. It does not offer a date for Marina, but contemporary Greek hagiographies say she died in 270. See O Megas Synaxaristis tis Orthodoxou Ekklisias, ed. V. Matthaiou, Athens, 1970, vol. 7, pp. 310–20, p. 310. 3 See Katherine J. Lewis’s discussion of the role of the Christian nurse in ‘The Life of St Margaret of Antioch in Late Medieval England: A Gendered Reading’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), Gender and Christian Religion, Woodbridge, Boydell, 1998, pp. 129–42. 4 For an image of this scene, see Hanover Library MS I 189. See Passio Kiliani; Ps. Theotimus, Passio Margaretae: orationes (Facsimile), commentary volume C.J. Hahn; intro., trans. and transcription H. Immel, Graz, Akademische Druck, 1988. Discussion of the scene is on p. 92, with the image fol. 32 in the facsimile and fig. 55 in the commentary text. The Tiberius MS Old English life also claims that only Margaret’s head was taken

The cults of St Margaret and St Marina 33

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19

20

by the angels while the rest of her body stayed below to cure people. See The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, ed. M. Clayton and H. Magennis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 42–3 for discussion, p. 136 for text. In the Latin and later lives, only her soul is taken up. See Rabani Mauri Martyrologium, ed. J. McCulloh, CCCM 44, Turnhout, Brepols, 1979; for the Margaret entry in the Old English Martyrology, see Old English Lives, pp. 51–3, and p. 74 for a copious list of other early martyrology entries. See M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989 for discussion and illustrations of this concept. Cotton Tiberius A.iii, in Old English Lives, original and translation, pp. 132–3. See, for example, Matthew 15:22–8, a girl possessed by a demon is cured; Mark 9:17–29, Jesus drives a deaf and dumb spirit from a boy; Luke 13:11–13, a crippled woman is cured, Jesus describes her as ‘bound by Satan’. Jean-Pierre Albert offers an excellent discussion of the Christo-mimetic features of Margaret’s legend, including the dragon/descensus motif, and makes a link with the Physiologus which refers to being swallowed by a hydra and crocodile, motifs which may stand for Christ’s entry into hell. ‘La Legende de Sainte Marguerite’, Razo, 1988, vol. 8, pp. 19–33, pp. 23–5. Wace, La Vie de sainte Marguérite; édition, avec introduction et glossaire par Hans-Erich Keller, commentaire des enluminures du ms. Troyes 1905, ed. H. Keller, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, vol. 229, Tübingen, 1990. Jocelyn Wogen-Browne ‘The Apple’s Message: Some Post-Conquest Hagiographic Accounts of Textual Transmission’, in A.J. Minnis (ed.), Late-Medieval Religious Texts and their Transmission, Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 1994, pp. 39–53, p. 51. H. Delahaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. D. Attwater, 3rd edn, New York, Fordham University Press, 1962, pp. 150–1, traces the various connections between Marina/ Margaret and Pelagia, Marina/Marinos, etc. ‘Scholi Methodi’, in Passio a Theotimo, ed. Usener, pp. 48–53, p. 50. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta, ed. T. Graesse, Lipsiae, Librariae Arnold, 1850, pp. 400–3, p. 401. Metaphrastes’ writing has been preserved only in an early modern translation by Lawrence Surius, Vitae Sanctorum ex probatis auctoribus et mss. codicibus primo quidem per R.P. Fr. Laurentium Surium Carthusianum editae, nunc vero multis sanctorum vitiis auctae, emendatae et notis marginalibus illustratae, Cologne, 1617–18, vol. 3, p. 248. O Megas Synaxaristis, p. 316. Das altenglische Martyrologium, ed. G. Kotzor, Munich, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, Abhandlungen ns 88, 1981, vol. 2, pp. 141–4. Text and translation in Old English Lives, pp. 52–3. For examples see L. Hadermann-Misguich, ‘Contribution à l’étude iconographique de Marina Assomant le Demon’, Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales et Slaves, 1968–72, vol. 20, pp. 267–71. ‘Le caractère prophylactique’ is specifically discussed on p. 270. See, for example, Olibrius’s speech in the thirteenth-century South English Legendary, in which he says, ‘For such hendi body as þou berst bicome bet in boure / In min armes ligge iclupt þanne a false god honure’ (It is more fitting for such a gracious body as yours to be in the bedroom, lying embraced in my arms, than to honour a false god); South English Legendary, p. 294, lines 81–2. Description and plates in H.C. Evans and W.D. Wixom (eds), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996, pp. 496–7. For complete photos see M.C. Ross and G. Downey, ‘A Reliquary of St. Marina’, Byzantinslavica, 1962, vol. 23, pp. 41–4. Note that this article gives the wrong dates for Marina/Margaret’s feasts and also seems unclear about the details of the passio.

34 Wendy R. Larson 21 Seinte Marherete, ed. F.M. Mack, EETS os 193, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1934 and corrected edn 1958, pp. 32–6. 22 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, Essays and Studies, 1929, vol. 14, pp. 104–26, p. 125. 23 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Add. MS 4122. The manuscript is from the fifteenth century although the anonymous text dates to about 1250, contemporary with the South English Legendary. 24 Middle English Women Saints’ Lives, ed. Sherry Reames, Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming, lines 220–2. 25 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Inv. 15.1145. Museum’s attribution: ‘“Barna da Siena” Italian (Sienese), active mid-14th century’. 26 L. Drewer, ‘Margaret of Antioch the Demon-Slayer, East and West: The Iconography of the Predella of the Boston Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine’, Gesta, 1993, vol. 32, pp. 11–20, p. 18. 27 The Fulda manuscript (c. 975) in Hanover, Germany, shows a sequence similar to the Golden Legend’s account: when confronted by the dragon, the saint holds up a small cross before him. Hanover, Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek MS I 189, fol. 23. See also Passio Kiliani, pp. 111–14. 28 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, p. 401. 29 Illustrated in Albert, ‘La Legende de Sainte Marguerite’, p. 33. The amulet was introduced in A. Aymar, ‘Le Sachet accoucher et ses mystères’, Annales du Midi, Jan.–Apr. 1926, vol. 38, pp. 273–347. 30 Box 46.1249 Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Catalogue of Medieval Objects: Metalwork, ed. N. Netzer, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1991, pp. 107–8. 31 South English Legendary, p. 297, lines 165–6. 32 South English Legendary, p. 301, lines 317–18. 33 For more on the debate over this issue in the thirteenth century, see J. Price, ‘The Virgin and the Dragon: The Demonology of Seinte Margarete’, in M. Collins, J. Price and A. Hamer (eds), Sources and Relations: Studies in Honour of J.E. Cross, Leeds Studies in English, 1985, vol. 16, pp. 337–57, pp. 340–4. 34 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 23.229.1. 35 Metropolitan Museum of Art Accession Catalogue. 36 St Margaret appears on the left finial of the bedhead. National Gallery, London. 37 British Library, Egerton 877, fol. 7, fol. 8, fol. 11v. 38 In a late thirteenth-century French wall painting, St Margaret herself appears at a woman’s bedside, although there is no clear sign that the woman is an expectant mother. Church of St Cerneuf de Billom (Puy-de-Dôme). See P. Deschamps and M. Thibout, La Peinture murale en France au début de l’époque gothique, Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963, pp. 144–5, plate LXXVI–1. 39 British Library, Egerton 877, fol. 12v. 40 It is now part of the Vatican Collection. 41 Lewis, ‘The Life of St Margaret of Antioch in Late Medieval England’, especially pp. 141–2. 42 K. French, ‘Maidens’ Lights and Wives’ Stores: Women’s Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 1998, vol. 29, pp. 399–425. 43 The Pienza Cope is in the Diocese Museum of Pienza, Italy. 44 The Victoria and Albert Museum houses the burse and the Butler-Bowden and Steeple Aston Copes. A burse is a bag in which the corporal, the cloth on which host and chalice are placed during Mass, is stored. 45 For instance, ‘ex illa hora non imputetur peccatum illius’, in Bonius Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae Sanctorum (1480), Hildesheim, Georg Olms, 1978, reprint of Paris, Albert Fontemoing, 1910, pp. 190–6, p. 195. 46 See my treatment of the Pienza Cope and potential readings of the three women’s lives

The cults of St Margaret and St Marina 35 on it in ‘Narrative Threads: The Pienza Cope’s Embroidered Vitae and their Ritual Context’, Studies in Iconography, forthcoming in 2003. 47 When she does appear with a series of female saints, Marina is not shown fighting the demon, but in the traditional Byzantine pose of a female saint: usually in a maphorion (a large veil) holding the cross of a martyr in her right hand. For examples of this type of portrayal in connection with women’s sacred space, see S. Gerstel, ‘Painted Sources for Female Piety in Medieval Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1998, vol. 52, pp. 89–103.

3

Virginal effects Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse Anke Bernau

Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses, seeks to outline the parameters within which an anchoress can successfully achieve her religious identity.1 Of central importance to this identity is the ideal of female virginity, which was seen to consist of both an ‘inner’ disposition and an ‘outer’ (in the sense of physical) state. While the text is concerned to subsume the state of holy virginity firmly within a male–female gender paradigm on the one hand, on the other it sets the virgin apart in its attempt to differentiate her from her sexually active counterparts, without, however, quite knowing where to place her.2 What ensues is the destabilisation of the trope of virginity. This is particularly evident in the text’s discussion of temptation and confession, in which the line between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ (both of the virginal body itself and of the anchoress in relation to society) becomes increasingly blurred and displaced. Yet the text – and therefore language – is ultimately, as this chapter will argue, the site where virginity is primarily constructed and located. Important here is Louise O. Fradenburg’s urgent reminder that it is necessary to question the very categories that are constructed by (medieval) texts as representative of the ‘truth’ or a ‘natural’ order, so that ‘the Middle Ages’ are not confused with ‘the ways in which the Middle Ages (mis)represented itself to itself’.3 Virginity literature does not mask its prescriptive nature.4 Its ongoing concern with the ‘right’ way of ‘doing’ virginity indicates, as recent criticism has noted,5 that virginity, like other gender identities – perhaps more so – is not a ‘natural’ state in the sense of existing outside or prior to its expression and form(ul)ation in the multiplicity of discourses (social, religious, medical, legal) which discuss, describe or prescribe it. This insistence perhaps also masks an underlying anxiety about the definition of virginity. While it was idealised throughout the Middle Ages as the most stable identity of all, as Kathleen Coyne Kelly has pointed out in her recent study on virginity, it was by no means a stable term; nor was there clear consensus among writers as to what exactly constituted virginity.6 The nature of virginity and its position within the male–female binary framework posed a problem for theologians from the time of the early patristic writers throughout the Middle Ages. Tertullian argues in his treatise On the Veiling of Virgins (c. 206) that, just as women are veiled, so too is it necessary for virgins to be veiled, in order to be recognised as women, because, he emphasises, both are women and

Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 37 to say that the virgin is not a woman would be to make her a ‘third generic class, some monstrosity with a head of its own’.7 If the virgin must be made to fit into one of the categories of male or female, because that is what is demanded in order for the individual to be acceptable to and recognised by society, then the whole notion of a stable and oppositional duality that is somehow ‘natural’ and prediscursive is called into question. Judith Butler’s questions about the relationship between sex and gender, though formulated in relation to a twentieth-century debate, are pertinent to medieval texts as well. Butler questions the distinctions made between the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ – terms which imply a ‘natural’ material surface (the body) upon which cultural meanings (gender) are later inscribed.8 ‘Sex’ cannot be approached or conceived except through the terms of gender, as ‘[s]exual difference . . . is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices.’9 Discussions of anatomical difference in medieval medical treatises and natural philosophy were often combined with discussions of behaviour. In other words, the gendered meanings of the medieval body, like those of the modern body, are inseparable from their social meanings. Joan Cadden refers to the fifteenth-century writings of Jacopo Forli, who saw three categories involved in deciding sexual difference: complexion, disposition and physique.10 Bernard Gordon, a ‘prominent professor of medicine at the university at Montpellier’ in the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century, includes instructions on the rearing of children in his medical works, advising that chastity, for example, ranks only tenth in the important things that a young man should be taught, whereas it must come first in the education of young women.11 This was a construction of identity in which physiological markers were read as demonstrating behavioural character traits and in which certain physical markers were always already read through the interpretative framework of gender. The body and its gender were inseparable since physical markers were interpreted as signs of ‘inner’ character traits and vice versa. From the twelfth century onward, sexuality became ever more categorised and sexual behaviour modified as different aspects of sexual behaviour such as prostitution or health were legislated by ‘different source[s] of authority’,12 as well as being regulated by an increasingly sophisticated canon law.13 Virginity came to be seen as the correct way of life for both male and female religious as well as being regarded as a ‘potentially crucial entry-qualification’ for marriage.14 Simultaneously, the repeated call for stricter claustration of female religious, as Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg points out, resulted in a ‘loss of autonomy’ and a ‘similar loss in public influence and general visibility’ for religious women.15 From the twelfth century onwards, women who opted for a religious vocation could choose only between a coenobitic and an anchoritic life.16 So at the same time as there was a great increase in lay spirituality (especially for women), there was a noted decline in the ‘opportunities for women in the religious life’.17 Anchoritism, the most ascetic of the forms of religious life, was chosen mainly by women in medieval England, either ex-nuns or laywomen who, in most though not all cases, were virgins.18 In medieval western Europe, religious identities were seen and constructed as very distinct from worldly identities.19 Religion was, as Sarah Beckwith points out,

38 Anke Bernau ‘a central practice which produced knowledge’, with monasticism as a ‘vital locus for the disciplinary practice that produced religious subjects’.20 Certainly in this framework the female body did not pre-exist its inscription through religious practices. Yet anchoresses did not necessarily follow one of the established monastic orders, which differentiated them from women living in religious communities who were united by a common rule. The lay anchoress in particular occupies a potentially uneasy position between the apparently rigidly separated spheres of ‘religious’ and ‘lay’. Not belonging to a religious body that shaped the nun’s identity through rules and communal supervision, the anchoress’s existence is defined mainly and fundamentally by her – at least rhetorical – solitude and enclosure.21 Ancrene Wisse clearly tells the anchoresses not to concern themselves with questions about which order they follow, stating that their order is defined primarily by their separation from the world: for herein ‘is religiun. nawt i þe wide hod ne i þe blake cape. ne i þe hwite rochet ne i þe greie cuuel’ (is religion, not in the wide hood, nor in the black cape, nor in the white mantle, nor in the grey cowl).22 Enclosure is the main – since only visible – indicator of the anchoress’s identity, and the way she can successfully achieve it is laid out for her in the guide, which, the author tells her, ‘schal beon ow
ef
e hit redeð ofte swiðe biheue’ (will be very profitable to you, if you read it often).23 As Karma Lochrie points out, the virgin is ‘being called to enclosure at many levels’.24 The cell parallels the virgin body’s symbolic potential as a space marked by clear boundaries and purity. Both are figured within Ancrene Wisse as sealed containers, inhabited by the anchoress’s soul. The virgin’s body is constructed as an echo – a duplication – of the function of the anchorhold, which is then metaphorically related back to the specifically female body when the text likens it to a womb.25 Both the virginal and the architectural containers symbolise the three vows Ancrene Wisse demands of the anchoress: ‘obedience. chastete. & stude steaðeluestnesse’ (obedience, chastity, and stability of abode).26 All three of these foundational attributes are presented as intrinsically and logically interconnected, forming a comprehensive framework within which the woman can successfully complete her transformation from laywoman to anchoress. Although virginity was seen as the most ‘natural’ identity in that it was the perfect state of humans before the Fall, it required much regulation in a post-lapsarian world.27 In Part III, ‘The Inner Feelings’, Ancrene Wisse gives the anchoress eight reasons why she must flee the world; the first being security and the second the protection of her maidenhood. Enclosure is presented here as the reasonable decision, the only guarantee that the maiden can retain her state. By likening the virgin to an ‘ibruchel gles’ (brittle glass)28 jostled by a crowd, the text also indicates that the loss of her maidenhood should she stay in the world would be beyond her control – no matter how diligently she guards herself, the movements of the crowd are unpredictable. The entrance ritual the anchoress performs translates and also re-creates her identity from the worldly sphere to the anchoritic, defining her as still ‘female’, but now part of a different way of performing and defining that ‘femininity’. In order to fulfil her anchoritic identity successfully, the anchoress must subject herself to the shaping of her self-understanding as laid out within the parameters and confines of the anchorhouse and the Ancrene Wisse. As Beckwith points out, she ‘must

Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 39 come to love her own subjection, to desire it more than life itself’.29 Yet the anchoritic life itself is insufficient guarantee of ideal behaviour, as Ancrene Wisse distinguishes between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ anchoress. In Part I, ‘Devotions’, the text states that the anchoress’s sealed body must be controlled and disciplined by an organised daily schedule, which encompasses advice on ‘bodily posture’ and ‘stance and gesture’.30 Despite her intact maidenhood, the anchoress is told that her flesh is still dangerously wilful, in need of constant supervision: her ‘hwit meidenhad’ (white maidenhood) is ‘muche pine wel forte halden’ (very hard to keep well).31 The implication is that the sealed body is not an absolute state; physical intactness and separation from the world are not enough to ensure the ‘correct’ virginal identity.32 The precariousness of this identity requires the constant repetition of correct or corrective actions. Yet the need for repetition shows the creation of identity to be a continuing process, signalling an instability that allows the possibility of ‘rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of . . . regulatory law’.33 In this light, the sealed, virginal/anchoritic body can be read as a negotiable, dynamic and potentially disruptive trope. If a ‘seal’ is that which confers authenticity or a guarantee of quality upon the thing to which it is attached, or even signals ownership, then where does the authenticity of the virgin lie?34 Ultimately, virginity is ‘mark’ and ‘seal’ both, as it confers its own authenticity, collapsing notions of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. The seal here authenticates nothing but itself. As such it is also both inside and outside, demonstrating how the trope of the sealed body is fundamentally unstable and that this instability is, paradoxically, its enabling condition. The sealed body is therefore both the foundation of the virginal identity and not a secure ground at all. The trope of the stable, sealed body depends on the creation of an ‘inner’, which is clearly separated from an ‘outside’ other. Ancrene Wisse is self-consciously structured along these lines, with two ‘outer’ parts – I: ‘Devotions’ and VIII: ‘The Outer Rule’ – framing the sections which deal with the anchoress’s inner disposition. The introduction of Ancrene Wisse describes the guide as encompassing two rules. The first is the inner rule, the ‘leafdi riwle’ (lady rule) which applies to all anchoresses equally and deals with ‘purte of heorte’ (purity of heart), a ‘cleane & schir inwit. consciencia’ (clean and shining moral sense).35 The second rule is ‘al wiðuten’ (entirely concerned with outward things), ruling ‘þe licome & licomliche deden’ (the body and bodily actions) and teaching ‘al hu me schal beoren him wiðuten’ (everything about how a person should behave outwardly). It is also the ‘þuften’ (handmaid) rule, existing ‘nawt bute forte serui þe oþer’ (only to serve the other).36 Ancrene Wisse locates the fundamental difference between the two rules in the question of authorship and authority. The inner rule, ‘eauer & an wiðute changunge’ (always the same without changing) is ‘of godes heaste’ (commandment of God), whereas the outer rule varies ‘efter euchanes manere & efter hire euene’ (according to each individual’s character and capacity) and is ‘monnes fundles’ (a human invention).37 If the anchoress follows the inner rule, then ‘þer is riht religiun. þer is soð ordre’ (there is right religion, there is true order). Should she follow only the outer, then there is nothing ‘bute trichunge ant a fals gile’ (but trickery and false guile).38 The text repeatedly expresses anxiety about dissimulation, about a purely outer performance, which does not reflect what

40 Anke Bernau is posited as the true, inner anchoritic disposition. Yet even while the text clearly privileges the ‘inner’ over the ‘outer’, the latter is not dismissed, but acknowledged as a ‘tole’ (tool) used to ‘timbrin . . . towart’ (build toward) the inner rule.39 That the concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ rely heavily on one another in their construction is strongly evident throughout Ancrene Wisse. While on the one hand the two are presented as entirely separate (the anchoress is told that all disturbance comes from the outside and that she, inside her double enclosure of anchorhold and virgin body, is safe and apart), the relationship is immediately problematised.40 Not only is the outer world shown constantly to encroach upon and threaten the inside of the permeable anchorhold, but the inner self is represented as simultaneously attempting to move outwards. Thus, the heart is likened to a ‘ful wilde beast’ (most wild beast) which ‘makeð moni liht lupe’ (makes many a light leap out).41 The transgression of the boundary is precisely what marks the boundary, creating the distinction between an inner and outer. As Beckwith notes, this transgression must be continual to facilitate ‘the ongoing mutual construction of, and changing relations between, inner and outer’.42 This permeability is precisely what allows the virgin body to be delineated. When the text states that ‘þe swuch fulðe spit ut . . . in eani ancre earen’ ([a]nyone who spits out such filth in any anchoress’s ears) should be beaten, it posits the anchoress as a being with an interior which can be entered.43 Similarly, when the text likens the anchoress’s words and thoughts to water, which must be dammed, and stopped up,44 it constructs an interior space which contains ‘inner’ thoughts. The impermeability of the body is visible in its breaches, which signify the boundary between the inner and outer. The virgin’s/anchoress’s impermeability, as initially figured by the text, is not absolute, nor can it be as she must be open to the ‘right’ kind of things, which she also apprehends with her senses. These conduits, which link the anchoress inextricably to the outside world, are used either to acquire desirable information (nourishment for the soul) or forbidden, abject knowledge. But the recognition of the difference between the two is beyond the anchoress, as Ancrene Wisse reminds her: ‘ofte þat tu wenest godd is uuel & sawle morðre’ (often what you think is good is evil and murderous to the soul).45 Again, she must rely on the guide to provide her with the appropriate knowledge and wisdom. The reciprocity of the senses and the instability of the inner/outer construct find their most explicit expression in the longest part of the Ancrene Wisse, that on temptation.46 Temptations, the anchoress is told, are twofold: ‘uttre & inre. ant ba beo feoleualde’ (outer and inner and both are of many different sorts). What follows is a proliferation of different types of temptations, with the category of ‘outer temptations’ being subdivided into ‘licunge oþer mislicunge wiðuten oðer wið innen’ (outer or inner pleasure or pain).47 These are then once again subdivided into another version of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. The second kind, known as ‘inner temptation’, is yet again twofold: ‘flesch lich & gastelich’ (bodily and spiritual).48 This part is so dense that it has led Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson to note in their translation that ‘[e]ven the Corpus scribe seems to have found parts of this passage confusing.’49 In its attempt to circumscribe all possible occasions and causes of temptations, the text generates confusion rather than achieving coherence and clarity, since the differences between outer and

Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 41 inner temptations and sins are not always clear. For instance, although vainglory is categorised as an ‘inner’ and a spiritual sin, its connection to ‘outer’ (social distinctions, power) and physical (beauty) aspects figures strongly.50 Similarly, the ‘inner’ physical vice of lechery, which includes fornication and loss of virginity, cannot be contained by the parameters of its designated category. Worryingly, the anchoress is also told that these sins have been dealt with only briefly, and that she must realise that each word in the text is weighed down with ‘tene oðer tweolue’ (ten or twelve) other words.51 By trying to categorise as many eventualities as possible, the text inadvertently demonstrates the impossibility of that task. The text proliferates the conditions and possibilities of transgression rather than delineating them. Although it could (and has) been argued that this shows the nature of the anchoress’s life as one of continuing and continuous penance,52 calling, as Beckwith puts it, for the anchoress’s ‘perpetual, remorseless, self-policing vigilance’,53 it also points out the instability of the anchoritic/virginal identity, calling into question the very concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ that are shown to ensure the integrity of the subject in the first place. The binary is always challenged, must always be challenged, as abjection is located not just ‘without’, but always already within the anchoress herself.54 She is not just a vessel containing precious balm, but also a ‘fulðe fette’ (vessel of filth), her mouth and nose ‘twa priue þurles’ (two privy-holes).55 The two are not just opposite poles, but are connected by an endless variety of other identificatory possibilities. ‘Inner’ and ‘outer’ are not opposites divided by a fixed boundary, but a complex series of positions. The virgin body becomes incongruous in its association with excremental passages, its openings distorted and displaced. The representation of a ‘pure’ virgin body is intricately bound up with the possibility of the grotesque and the abject, because it tries to keep the abject at bay. Although, as Lochrie argues, the sealed virgin body represents ‘a taboo against that abjection which threatens the boundaries of the soul’,56 its relationship with abjection is far more intimate and unmarked. One example of this is found in the text’s representation of desire. Since, as Lochrie points out, taboo ‘serves to exclude something’ (giving the example of sexuality),57 virginity in Ancrene Wisse demonstrates the proliferation of multiple sexual possibilities as it warns the anchoresses against desiring not only men, but also their sisters and even themselves.58 The guide acknowledges the existence of various types of sexual acts, including masturbation, by telling the anchoress to confess them.59 Although the text condemns such acts, by naming them it has implicitly acknowledged their possibility, showing that it is not just heterosexual desire – refigured in the sponsa Christi motif – which outlines the anchoress’s gendered identity.60 Even her desire for Christ could be read as autoerotic, since she is said to be the mirror of Christ. The enclosed situation gives rise to a variety of desiring positions, further blurring the anchoress’s place in any fixed binary structure, be it inner and outer or male and female. The outlines of her body are unfixed as it is not clear whether they are defined by her hymen, her skin, the anchorhold, or even the whole female anchoritic community in England, in which ‘alle teoð an. alle iturnt anesweis’ (all pull one way, and all are turned in the same direction).61 Virginity, particularly in conjunction with anchoritism, relies so heavily on the creation of an inner essence because there

42 Anke Bernau are no definite anatomical markers that can be said to signal its state unambiguously.62 In Ancrene Wisse, this ‘inner essence’ is constructed and made visible primarily through the act of confession. Language is shown to be the condition of possibility for the virgin, as the virginal/anchoritic identity is constructed most emphatically through that unstable, excessive medium in the practice of confession. The guide tells the anchoress that confession – which she should perform frequently – ‘haueð monie mihtes’ (has many powers).63 In stating confession’s power to ‘[m]akeð us godes children’ (make us God’s children),64 the text acknowledges the way in which confession creates subjects and a particular kind of subjectivity. Michel Foucault defines confession as ‘one of the main rituals’ that Western societies ‘rely on for the production of truth’ since its institutionalisation through the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.65 Confession was central to the production of Christian subjects, who had to speak their identity in order to establish themselves either as coherent, acceptable and orthodox subjects or, conversely, as heretical subjects, incoherent, excluded and worthy of death. Although Ancrene Wisse warns the anchoress extensively about the dangers of speech, she is told to ‘[c]ulche hit i schrift ut utterliche as ha hit dude’ (vomit it out completely in confession exactly as she did it).66 The mouth, figured earlier as the gate which lets in the devil’s army, is now the mouth that not only ‘i schrift do ut þe heaued sunne’ (exposes the mortal sin in confession), but also recounts ‘al þe biginnunge þrof. & te foreridles þe brohten in þe sunne’ (the whole way in which it started, and the circumstances which made the sin happen).67 The anchoress is told that her confession must be ‘willes. þat is willeliche unfreinet’ (willing, that is, voluntary and unforced);68 in Foucault’s terms, she must be ‘authenticated by the discourse of truth’ which she is ‘able or obliged to pronounce concerning [her]self’.69 While the anchoress must desire this speaking of herself, it soon becomes clear that the act itself must take a strictly regulated form as the text explains exactly how confession should be performed: ‘Schrift schal beo Wreiful. Bitter mid sorhe. Ihal. Naket. Ofte imaket. Hihful. Eadmod. Scheomeful. Hopeful. Wis. Soð. & Willes. Ahne. & Studeuest. Bipoht biuore longe’ (Confession must be accusing, bitter with sorrow, complete, naked, made often, in haste, humble, full of shame, [fearful], hopeful, wise, true and willing, about oneself, determined, long considered).70 These guidelines, seemingly set up to help the anchoress confess ‘properly’, demonstrate how the speaking of the self might be voluntary, while by no means individually determined. The content of the anchoress’s speech about herself, the contours of her identity, must submit to the parameters of sorrow, haste and shame: a pre-determined grid which filters and moulds her literal ‘self-delineation’. As shown above, this speaking involves not just the present, but every single act from earliest memory: ‘[G]edere þine sunnen of alle þine ealdes. of childhad of
uheðe had gedere al to gederes. þrefter gedere þe studen þat tu in wunedest. ant þench
eorne hwet tu dudest in euch stude sunderliche & in euch ealde’ (Gather all your ages together, from childhood and youth. Then gather the places that you lived in, and think hard what you did in each place and at each age in turn).71 The anchoress must practise thinking the link between place, action and thought, searching deeper

Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 43 and further into a ‘self’ that is then constructed in the speaking of it. As stated above, the creation of the self, constituted through language, is located within an inherently unstable medium. The author recognises this and seeks to outline the type of speech the anchoress must use in confession. He tells her that it must ‘nawt [beon] bisamplet feire’ (not be prettified with rhetoric) but should involve words which are ‘ischawet efter þe werkes’ (suited to the actions) they describe.72 The passage again expresses anxiety about the possibility of deception, which would make confession an act of hypocrisy, itself intimately linked to language: ‘Makieð ham [false ancres] oþre þen ha beoð ase uox þe is ypocrite’ (They [bad anchoresses] pretend to be other than they are, like the fox, who is a hypocrite).73 This recalls my earlier discussion of the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the ‘knowability’ of virginity, which, like the anchoritic identity, is notoriously difficult to fix or render visible. Since the act of confession involves the demonstration and delineation of an ‘inner’ being, this form of religious identity, which is not seen or continuously supervised within a community, becomes located primarily within the speech act, within language. Although the text attempts to structure and categorise the performance of confession, giving the anchoress lines to speak in scenarios involving place, time, number and cause, it acknowledges the dangers of unsupervised speech when it warns that ‘to fule me mei seggen’ (one may speak too foully).74 Confession itself can potentially be the cause of further sin as the anchoress is warned that she must carefully choose her confessor when speaking of fleshly temptation.75 She is also warned not to omit anything, for it will be read to her on Doomsday, when ‘a word ne schal þer wontin’ ([n]ot a word shall be missing there).76 Only in the far-off distance of the Day of Judgement is that plenitude and fullness of language possible, which is why confession must be made continuously, causing the boundaries of the self to fluctuate according to how much is remembered or spoken. Ancrene Wisse also explains that confession, as every sacrament, ‘haueð an ilicnesse utewið of þat hit wurcheð inwið’ (has an outward sign of what it performs inwardly),77 reading the ‘inner’ back into an ‘outer’, more concrete presence. The outward sign of true inner contrition, for instance, is here said to be blushing.78 The act of speaking confession is thus said to enable the soul to be mapped on the face, making the ‘pure inner’ into a visible, physical sign. Nothing else fixes her position and these acts, though they are repeated ‘within a highly rigid regulatory frame’ and ‘congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’, are constantly subject to slippage and deferral.79 At this point I want to return to Tertullian’s anxiety about the categorisation of virgins in relation to the position of virginity in a binary male–female framework. I would argue that Ancrene Wisse expresses similar anxieties to Tertullian’s, and makes similar attempts to circumscribe the virgin against – but simultaneously within – the category of ‘woman’. Numerous critics have remarked that the text uses images that specifically appeal to a female audience. It has been called ‘pervasivel[y] feminine’ in orientation,80 with a ‘specifically feminine interpretation of images of enclosure’ and the structure of the work itself has been interpreted as dictated by femininity.81 Yet the Ancrene Wisse also uses ‘feminine’ images or female desire as negatives, as roles from which the virgin/anchoress must turn. This explains its

44 Anke Bernau contradictory use of images which, on the one hand, warn the anchoress against any contact with or even thought of a man, while, on the other, advising her to reach for Christ ‘wið ase muche luue. as þu hauest sum mon sum chearre’ (with as much love as you sometimes have for some man).82 The act of confession, so central to the production of the virginal/anchoritic identity, also seeks to place the anchoress firmly within a binary framework as it instructs her: ‘Euch efter þat he is segge his totagges. Mon as limpeð to him wummon þat hire rineð’ (Let each declare the circumstances according to who they are, a man as is fitting for him, a woman as it touches her).83 This attempt, however, is undermined by the very dependence of the virginal/ anchoritic identity on language. Ancrene Wisse, while seeking to fix virginity and anchoritism as bounded and contained states, creates a sense of excess disproportionate to that which it attempts to outline. Virginity is ultimately shown to be a primarily linguistic – even textual – identity, ‘known’ through repeated speech acts that demonstrate and ‘make visible’ an ‘inner’ core. ‘Doing’ virginity is shown in this text to open up spaces through ‘hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation’, which have the potential to displace ‘the very constructs by which they are mobilised’.84 The necessity of repetition allows moments of resistance against the rigid regulatory framework surrounding the performance of this identity. Here, virginity proliferates and generates images and metaphors that blur the outlines the text seeks to fix. As a result, the identity of the virgin anchoress is diffused across these images – not contained in any of them – and is not elucidated but hidden from view by descriptions that constantly defer its meaning and fail to pinpoint its ‘essence’. This elusiveness can be read – traced – in the continuous anxiety and ever-intensifying calls for regulation accompanying discussions of female religious and female physiology. In a wider sense, then, virginity, which bases its definition on the separate categories of both the ‘natural’ body and its ‘cultural’ performances, repeatedly brings into question the epistemological and ontological grounds of gender identity. In this, virginity poses precisely the same questions that recent feminist theories of postmodern identity have addressed. Praised over hundreds of years as the most perfect state of being, held up as an ideal that both bridged and confirmed the gap between ‘male’ and ‘female’ and having as its main proponent the mother of God, virginity raises questions as to how gender identities are reiterated and disrupted from the centre, not just the margins.

Notes 1 References (unless otherwise stated) are to The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien, intro. N.R. Ker, EETS os 249, London, Oxford University Press, 1962; henceforth cited as Ancrene Wisse. All Modern English translations are taken from Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. N. Watson and A. Savage, preface by B. Ward, New York, Paulist Press, 1991; henceforth cited as Anchoritic Spirituality. 2 For instance, Ancrene Wisse repeatedly sets anchoresses against ‘lauedis iðe worlde’ (ladies in the world), telling them they must not wish to be ‘leafdiluker leoten of þen a leafdi of hames’ (more graciously regarded than the lady of the house), p. 58 (Anchoritic

Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 45

3 4 5

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8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

Spirituality, p. 88), reminding them sternly that the anchoress ‘nis nawt husewif’ (is not a housewife), p. 212 (Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 200). The first quotation here is taken from a section of the text that is missing in the MS Corpus Christi 402; however, it does appear in Cotton MS Cleopatra C. VI (c. 1225–30). I borrow here from Savage and Watson’s practice in their translation of Ancrene Wisse in Anchoritic Spirituality, and draw from the latter manuscript. The edition cited here is: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Edited from B[ritish] M[useum] Cotton MS. Cleopatra C. VI, ed. E.J. Dobson, EETS os 267, London, Oxford University Press, 1972, fol. 25v, line 18; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 70. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all other quotations are from MS Corpus Christi 402. L.O. Fradenburg, ‘Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and The Prioress’s Tale’, Exemplaria, 1989, vol. 1.1, pp. 69–115, p. 75. This term encompasses treatises, saints’ lives, decretals and, arguably, medical treatises on the successful maintenance of virginity. S. Salih, ‘Performing Virginity: Sex and Violence in the Katherine Group’, in C.L. Carlson and A.J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 95–112; K.C. Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, London, Routledge, 2000. Kelly has shown that the nature of the hymen, for instance, although frequently perceived as central to virginity, was, in fact, always a contested topic. Its existence as absolute ‘seal’ was never fully or unanimously accepted: see Performing Virginity, pp. 25–32. When I speak of the ‘sealed’ virgin body, I am referring to its representation as such in Ancrene Wisse. ‘Si caput mulieris vir est, utique et virginis, de qua sit mulier illa quæ nupsit: nisi si virgo tertium genus est monstruosum aliquod sui capitis’, Tertullianus, ‘De Virginibus Velandis’, Tertullianus II: Opera Montanistica, ed. A. Gerlo and others, CCSL 2, Turnhout, Brepols, 1954, p. 1216 ; translation from ‘On the Veiling of Virgins’, AnteNicene Fathers, ed. A. Menzies, 4th edn, 10 vols, Peabody, Hendrickson, 1994, vol. 4, p. 31. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York, Routledge, 1993, p. 5. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 1. I am not suggesting that this ‘constructedness’ of sex implies voluntarism. My aim is to examine the ways in which such categories are constituted, not to deny their power to shape social experiences. J. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 203. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, pp. 262–3. For more on Bernard Gordon as a ‘particularly significant representative of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century medicine’, see Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. H.R. Lemay, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 45–7, p. 46. M. Green, ‘Female Sexuality in the West’, Trends in History, 1990, vol. 4, pp. 127–58, p. 129. See J.A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. J. Wogan-Browne, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in R. Evans and L. Johnson (eds), Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All her Sect, London, Routledge, 1994, pp. 165–94, p. 165. J.T. Schulenburg, ‘Strict Active Enclosure and its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience (ca. 500–1100)’, in J.A. Nichols and L. Shank (eds), Medieval Religious Women I: Distant Echoes, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1984, pp. 51–86, p. 78. For more on the stricter enclosure of female religious, especially in relation to recluses, see also A. Barratt, ‘Anchoritic Aspects of Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Aevum, 1980, vol. 49, pp. 32–56; E. Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience, Knoxville, University

46 Anke Bernau

16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

of Tennessee Press, 1990, pp. 13–31 and G. Roy, ‘“Sharpen your Mind with the Whetstone of Books”: The Female Recluse as Reader in Goscelin’s Liber Confortatorius, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse’, in L. Smith and J.H.M. Taylor (eds), Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St. Hilda’s Conference, 1993, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1995, pp. 113–22. I am using Barratt’s definitions of ‘Western coenobitism’ as ‘religious life lived in community’ under the ‘rule of one elder’. Barratt explains that the female anchorite did not live in complete isolation for reasons of safety and propriety and ‘tended to become identified with “recluse” (Latin inclusa), that is, a woman subject to strict enclosure’; ‘Anchoritic Aspects’, p. 3. Roy, ‘Sharpen your Mind’, p. 122. For statistical information on the number of anchorhouses and anchorites in medieval England, see R.M. Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England, London, Methuen, 1914. Dyan Elliott points out that, for the clergy, ‘the boundaries between clergy and laity were real, sacrosanct, and essential to the well-being of Christendom’ and that therefore ‘the possibility of confusing the two ways of living or one’s appropriating the functions proper to the other was presented as a real danger’; Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 100. S. Beckwith, ‘Passionate Regulation: Enclosure, Ascesis, and the Feminist Imaginary’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 1994, vol. 93.4, pp. 803–24, p. 807. This solitude is not absolute, since the anchoress is permitted to have maidservants who interact with the world on her behalf. Ancrene Wisse, p. 10; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 50. Ancrene Wisse, p. 221; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 207. K. Lochrie, ‘The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse’, in A.J. Frantzen (ed.), Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 115–40, p. 126. Ancrene Wisse, p. 193; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 186. Ancrene Wisse, p. 8; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 49. See Wogan-Browne, ‘Virgin’s Tale’, p. 167. Ancrene Wisse, p. 85; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 109. Beckwith, ‘Passionate Regulation’, p. 808. J. Price [Wogan-Browne], ‘“Inner” and “Outer”: Conceptualizing the Body in Ancrene Wisse and Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum’, in G. Kratzmann and J. Simpson (eds), Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G.H. Russell, Cambridge, Brewer, 1986, pp. 192–208, p. 208. Ancrene Wisse, p. 30; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 66. Wogan-Browne notes that ‘[i]n a conceptually uncomfortable manner for an apparently unambiguous state, virginity is gradable and negotiable’; ‘Virgin’s Tale’, p. 167. Similarly, the ideal of complete enclosure and absence from the world was not actually possible for the medieval anchoress, who still faced financial and spiritual problems once in the anchorhold. Anchoresses frequently relied on male patrons or clergy to support them, relationships that were not always successful or unproblematic. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 2. OED, s.v. seal. Ancrene Wisse, p. 7; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 48. Ancrene Wisse, p. 6; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 48. Ancrene Wisse, p. 7; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 48. Ancrene Wisse, p. 11; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 51. Ancrene Wisse, p. 11; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 51. See Ancrene Wisse, p. 49; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 82. Ancrene Wisse, p. 29; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 66.

Text and identity in Ancrene Wisse 47 42 Beckwith, ‘Passionate Regulation’, pp. 808–9. Beckwith points out that ‘[i]nteriority . . . is not so much the opposite of exteriority as its complex coproduct’; ‘Passionate Regulation’, p. 808. 43 Ancrene Wisse, p. 44; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 78. 44 See Ancrene Wisse, p. 39; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 75. 45 Ancrene Wisse, p. 143; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 150. 46 Savage and Watson note that this part (Part IV) ‘is by far the longest of the parts of Ancrene Wisse, taking up a third of the whole work’; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 368, note 1. 47 Ancrene Wisse, p. 93; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 114. 48 Ancrene Wisse, p. 99; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 119. 49 Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 370, note 6. Michel Foucault describes the effect on the individual that results from such an ever-widening spectrum of sins as one of ‘eternal vigilance, a suspiciousness directed every moment against one’s every thought, an endless self-questioning to flush out any secret fornication lurking in the inmost recesses of the mind’; ‘The Battle for Chastity’, in P. Ariès and A. Béjin (eds), Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, trans. A. Forster, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, pp. 14–25, p. 24. 50 Ancrene Wisse, p. 101; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 120. 51 Ancrene Wisse, p. 103; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 121. 52 See, for example, Price [Wogan-Browne], ‘“Inner” and “Outer”’, p. 201. 53 Beckwith, ‘Passionate Regulation’, p. 815. 54 Julia Kristeva points out that one of the main differences between Judaism and Christianity is that, in Christianity, ‘abjection is no longer exterior’. Here, she argues, the threat of abjection to the body comes no longer from outside; now it is ‘permanent and comes from within’; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 90–132, p. 113. 55 Ancrene Wisse, pp. 142–3; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 149. 56 Lochrie, ‘Language of Transgression’, p. 129. 57 Lochrie, ‘Language of Transgression’, p. 128. 58 On desiring their sisters, see Ancrene Wisse, p. 34, p. 163; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 71, p. 165. On desiring themselves, see Ancrene Wisse, p. 62; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 91. For more on same-sex relationships between religious women, see E.A. Matter, ‘My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 1986, vol. 2.2, pp. 81–93. 59 See Ancrene Wisse, p. 163; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 165. 60 Anne Savage sees this trope as central to the depiction of the anchoritic experience which is, she argues, ‘defined in many ways as an essentializing of feminine experience: the woman is redefined by the process of translatio from the ordinary spheres of sexual identification in rape, seduction and marriage, pregnancy and childcare, into the anchoritic cell, where she becomes the betrothed, lover and bride of Christ’; ‘The Translation of the Feminine: Untranslatable Dimensions of the Anchoritic Works’, in R. Ellis and R. Evans (eds), The Medieval Translator 4, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1994, pp. 181–99, pp. 182–3. 61 Ancrene Wisse, p. 130; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 141. 62 As stated by Kelly, the hymen cannot be relied on as ultimate ‘proof’ of virginity: see note 6 above. Even if its existence and presence is assumed by the text, the problem with the idea of an intact hymen, as Wogan-Browne points out, is that ‘[s]ince the hymen is composed of inner folds of flesh, few women are born with an imperforate one.’ Thus the imperforate hymen is not – and was not in the Middle Ages – a biological ‘fact’, but a ‘cultural construction’, created and upheld ‘by the demand for blood as evidence of technical intactness’; ‘Virgin’s Tale’, p. 187, note 16. 63 Ancrene Wisse, p. 154; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 158. 64 Ancrene Wisse, p. 154; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 158.

48 Anke Bernau 65 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, London, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 58. 66 Ancrene Wisse, p. 107; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 124. 67 Ancrene Wisse, p. 154; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 158. 68 Ancrene Wisse, p. 173; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 172. 69 Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 58. 70 Ancrene Wisse, p. 156; Anchoritic Spirituality, pp. 159–60. 71 Ancrene Wisse, p. 174; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 173. 72 Ancrene Wisse, p. 162; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 164. 73 Ancrene Wisse, p. 68; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 96. 74 Ancrene Wisse, p. 163; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 164. 75 Ancrene Wisse, p. 171; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 171. 76 Ancrene Wisse, p. 175; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 174. 77 Ancrene Wisse, p. 169; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 169. 78 Ancrene Wisse, p. 169; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 169. 79 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 33. Butler’s account does not explicitly address confession, but the terms of analysis are transferable. 80 C. Frost, ‘The Attitude to Women and the Adaptation to a Feminine Audience in the Ancrene Wisse’, Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 1978, vol. 50, pp. 235–50, p. 241. 81 Savage, ‘Translation of the Feminine’, p. 189. 82 Ancrene Wisse, p. 208; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 197. 83 Ancrene Wisse, p. 164; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 166. 84 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 31.

4

Pain, torture and death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea Martha Easton

Modern viewers often find medieval images of bloody and horrific martyrdoms extremely unsettling. Laurence is roasted alive, Sebastian is shot full of arrows, Bartholomew’s skin is flayed, Agatha’s breasts are severed, Anastasia is burned at the stake and countless other martyrs are stabbed, boiled, stoned and beheaded. Such imagery is used throughout the Middle Ages; in fact, the use of violence and death as signifiers of sainthood is an established artistic tradition whose roots can be traced back to early Christian and Byzantine iconography. Such images leave little to the imagination; blood flows freely and severed body parts abound. With the creation of the Legenda aurea, or Golden Legend, in the second half of the thirteenth century, popular interest in and devotion to these martyrs and their tortures reached an unprecedented level, and the text itself swiftly became one of the most widely read and reproduced texts of the later Middle Ages. The Legenda aurea was a compendium of hagiographic and other liturgical material, compiled by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine and organised according to the Church calendar.1 The work seems to have been written with a clerical audience in mind; preachers often used it as a sourcebook for sermons and readings on important feast days.2 In fact, very few of the over one thousand surviving manuscripts of the Latin text are illustrated beyond one opening miniature or historiated initial; many have absolutely no decoration of any kind. In contrast, manuscripts of the text in translation were more often illuminated. In particular, manuscripts of the Légende dorée, the French translation by Jean de Vignay made in 1333 at the instigation of the French queen Jeanne de Bourgogne, were often lavishly decorated.3 Most of these manuscripts had royal or aristocratic patrons or owners, and thus were not compendia for the clergy but rather showpieces for the elite. The earliest surviving extensively illuminated manuscript of Jacobus’s text is not one of the many translations, but rather one in the original Latin.4 A Parisian production of between 1270 and 1280, it is illustrated with 135 column miniatures surviving from the original 178. Because the scale of illumination is so unusual for a manuscript of this kind, it is possible that it was produced for someone affiliated with the court of Philip III, perhaps even Frère Laurent, Philip’s Dominican confessor. A marginal note on folio 11v indicates that the manuscript was in England by the third or last quarter of the fourteenth century.5 It was owned by several generations of the Ingilby family at Ripley Castle before being purchased by the Huntington Library.

50 Martha Easton One of the most remarkable features of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea is the concentration on graphic, bloody tortures and violent martyrdom scenes. This fragmentation of the narrative and isolation of the martyrdom scene is not unique to Legenda aurea manuscripts, and Jacobus himself emphasises the gruesome nature of the martyrdom stories. His text is filled with detailed descriptions of various tortures; altogether he describes eighty-one different types. The images of violence, torture and death so ubiquitous in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea are part of a tradition of honouring the violent end of a martyr’s life as the supreme example of their holiness; in this way the martyr is most like Christ, witness to the paradox of divinity revealed through the crucible of human suffering. However, the accounts of torture and execution in the Legenda aurea are generally part of a much broader narrative concerning the steadfast faith, good works, miracles and other worthy pursuits of these saints, and the emphasis on violence in the imagery of the manuscript usually does not reflect the focus of the written accounts of the lives of the martyrs. In fact, individual miniatures may diverge from the text so that the visual image is horrifically enhanced in comparison to its textual counterpart. For example, on folio 64v the martyr Felicula is shown naked from the waist up (with her pendulous breasts fully evident), suspended from an apparatus and raked with combs, her orange-red blood covering her body (Fig. 4.1). The textual legend of Felicula (in the chapter devoted to Petronilla, daughter of Peter the Apostle) recounts that after rejecting the sexual overtures of count Flaccus she was simply ‘tortured on the rack’; there is no mention of either her nudity or the bloody raking. The miniature diverges not only from the text, but also from the accompanying instructions to the illuminator still extant in the margin. These state that Felicula is dead, but her eyes are open and

Figure 4.1 ‘The torture of St Felicula’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. Source: Huntington Library HM 3027 fol. 64v. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 51 she stares with anxiety at the torturer on her right. The image, as the first thing the reader/viewer sees upon examining the chapter, is by its very nature more arresting and memorable than either the surviving instructions to the illuminator, though prominent, or the text itself. The resulting miniature is more violent than the text requires. Felicula’s graphically flowing blood, her facial signifiers of discomfort and her nudity are all visual clues that would have been contextually meaningful to a late thirteenth-century viewer. Tradition-bound as some of this martyrdom iconography and imagery may be, certain cultural assumptions are on display along with the decapitated and dismembered bodies of the saints. The martyrdom imagery in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea stands at the crossroads of a change in the medieval perception of pain and its religious and social implications. Pain is not a pre-discursive sensory experience but rather a culturally constructed phenomenon,6 and the late medieval perception of pain differs dramatically from our own. Although it may seem that pain is the human experience we most want to avoid, Esther Cohen has used the word ‘philopassianism’ – the deliberate attempt to feel as much pain as possible – to describe one aspect of the experience of pain in the later Middle Ages.7 The idea of the usefulness of pain permeated late medieval society; pain and its judicious application was thought of as a means to salvation, purgation and truth. In general, the violent imagery of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea is part of a late medieval rhetoric in which violence is normalised as reflective of social realities and cultural assumptions, privileged as a harbinger of truth and sanctity and utilised as a means to spark religious devotion and reinforce memory. Felicula is but one of the many virgin martyrs whose codified legends are included in the Legenda aurea. These young, beautiful women are tortured and killed not because of their Christianity per se, but rather because their beliefs keep them from succumbing to sexual temptation. In spite of this leitmotif present in so many virgin martyr legends, through martyrdom women could leave behind their culturally constructed gender roles. The concept of masculinity and femininity as categories which are fluid, blurred and capable of being transgressed seems to have been a commonplace in the Middle Ages, with pertinent examples to be found in both secular and sacred realms. There are a number of so-called ‘transvestite romances’, such as Le roman de silence (written in the thirteenth century, contemporary with the Legenda aurea), that feature cross-dressing women and challenge the essentiality of gender, suggesting that it is socially performative rather than biologically fixed.8 Legends of martyrs such as Perpetua sometimes described the physical transformation of women into men as a signifier of their uncommon holiness.9 Despite the particular social roles prescribed for medieval men and women (at least in part determined by an Aristotelian understanding of male and female biology), there were opportunities, and even encouragements, for slippage between the categories, particularly for women. From the earliest days of Christianity, ‘becoming male’ was a metaphor applied to women who were uncommonly devoted to their Christian beliefs, particularly if they renounced their sexuality. The notion of ‘becoming male’ became a signifier for female spirituality; women martyrs and ascetics who had cast off the constructed characteristics of their gender ‘progressed’

52 Martha Easton towards an advanced spiritual state that was described as masculine.10 This conception of the spiritual woman recast as a man is a prominent theme in patristic writings. Augustine, Tertullian, Jerome and Ambrose are a few of the Church Fathers who proclaimed that certain women, through their spiritual fortitude and the denial of their femininity, have attained, as Tertullian puts it, ‘an allegorical manhood’.11 According to Jerome, ‘as long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from men as body is from the soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.’12 Martyrdom accounts often described women who rejected feminine roles and even miraculously changed their physical appearance. Many of the female saints included in the Legenda aurea become ‘masculinised’ through either physical or social metamorphosis. The motif of the forced mastectomy, for example, associated most closely with Agatha (fol. 33) but experienced by a number of virgin martyrs, removes the most visible physical sign of femininity, and implies a process of masculinisation that ultimately connotes a state of spiritual grace, attainable by women only if they suppress physical and social indicators that are understood to be manifestations of the female.13 Even if their feminine bodies are not transformed/deformed into masculine ones through vision or through torture, most of the women martyrs included in the Legenda aurea abandon some quality that is gendered female in medieval discourse. The renunciation of sexuality through virginity is one of the leitmotifs of female martyrdom accounts, of course, but even those who are not virgins often give up something feminine or maternal to further their spiritual goals. Thais, Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalen, once sexually active, renounce their sinful pasts and embrace a life of asceticism and chastity. Paula abandons four of her five children; she sails away to the Holy Land as her children cry with outstretched arms on the shore. Several virgin martyrs (Ursula, Daria and Cecilia) are engaged or even married but do not consummate the relationship. These feminine-gendered traits are all explicitly tied to the body, to sexuality and its results. If women martyrs become more masculine in their move towards spiritual grace, perhaps male martyrs become more feminine in their intimate connection to their bodies. At a time when Christ was increasingly written and depicted undergoing bodily suffering – which can be understood as a feminising experience – it would be appropriate for his male witnesses also to become more feminised through their submission to physical violence. Although the gospels describe the humiliation, torture and death of Christ, they make no mention of any physical pain during these ordeals;14 some early Christological controversies focused on the question of a divine Christ’s ability even to experience bodily suffering.15 Similarly, the passio of many early Christian martyrs stress either their superhuman ability to withstand pain, or often their complete imperviousness to any physical distress.16 Early martyrdom accounts stated that the physical markers of torture were miraculously absent from the bodies of saints.17 Before the thirteenth century, most medieval depictions of the Passion of Christ and the tortures of the martyrs are aligned with this view of the extraordinary ability of Christ and his witnesses to overcome pain either physically or spiritually, depicting them with placid faces and intact bodies. Images of suffering were reserved for sinners, especially the damned tortured in hell.

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 53 Yet by the thirteenth century Christ was increasingly portrayed, in text and image, as a flagellated, bleeding, suffering man, privileging his humanity rather than his divinity.18 Liturgical and theological developments during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries helped to further this emphasis on Christ’s suffering and the idea of pain as a signifier of heavenly grace. In the late eleventh or early twelfth century, Anselm wrote the influential treatise Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became a Man) in which he detailed the connection between the suffering Christ and human redemption.19 The writings of Bonaventure (d. 1274) on the Passion of Christ and the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Meditationes vitae Christi are typical of an increasing focus on the suffering undergone by Christ before and during the Crucifixion. In his De perfectione vitae ad sorores Bonaventure writes: You will see even more clearly how cruel was the death of Christ if you consider that whatever is more sensitive suffers more. In general, the body of a woman is more sensitive than that of a man; but never was there a body that felt pain as keenly as that of the Saviour, since his flesh was entirely virginal, conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin.20 Here Bonaventure not only emphasises the humanity of Christ through his capacity for feeling pain, but he even indirectly hints at the idea that the experience of pain is feminising for men. As Christ’s witnesses, martyrs – both male and female – began to be depicted fully experiencing physical torture, both in word and image. The depiction of martyrs’ naked bodies in the images in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea may represent an elision of gender. When nudity is portrayed in the illustrations of this manuscript, a fine line between the legs functions as a generic stand-in for the genitalia of both sexes. Just as medieval Christian ideas about sex and gender are built on older traditions, the stripping of the martyrs and the display of their ambiguously gendered bodies are a link to the earliest practices of Christianity, specifically the ritual of baptism. A naked martyr, particularly one who is depicted with ambiguous, androgynous physical gender, suggests a rebirth into a state of grace in which gender is transcended. Both textual and artistic traditions suggest that as a part of baptism early Christians were disrobed, immersed in water and redressed to reflect their entrance into the community of Christianity.21 Nudity as part of baptism signified a stripping away of the cares of the material world, and a return to innocence as exemplified in the pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve.22 So too martyrs were stripped (albeit forcibly), baptised in blood and clothed in the glory of heaven, entering the company of the elect. For the martyrs, nudity could connote purity and sinlessness, relieving the soul of its earthly trappings before its entrance into heaven. The ritual of baptism was also perceived to erase distinctions and unify opposites, as in Paul’s reminder to the Galatians that in Christ ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female.’23 Texts such as the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles also employ the motif of ‘making the two one’, the union of male and female. Ultimately such a metaphor could

54 Martha Easton connote the renunciation of sexuality by eliminating gender difference, and a rejection of ties binding one to the everyday world, as if through baptism and an ascetic lifestyle the Christian can attain a pure state of unfettered spirituality. However, much of the martyrdom imagery in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea seems to reinforce binary gender through particular forms of torture and execution. Although there are a few instances of male nudity, for the most part the male martyrs are shown clothed and decapitated, while female martyrs are stripped and penetrated, with knives, swords and arrows. In the text of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, decapitation is the most common method of martyrdom. The beheading of Blaise (fol. 32v) is a typical visualisation of these standardised textual scenes – the seated king directs the action while a white-capped executioner with a hitched-up tunic grabs the head and raises his sword to deliver the final blow to the kneeling martyr (Fig. 4.2). With very few exceptions, death by decapitation in the illustrations seems to be male-gendered, and by extension a superior method of execution. Beheading practices underscore beliefs about the power of the head.24 Although beliefs about the supreme power of the head and the use of bodily metaphors in

Figure 4.2 ‘The execution of St Blaise’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. Source: Huntington Library HM 3027 fol. 32v. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 55 general were in use in antiquity, in Christian discourse ideas about the privileging of the head and its connection to dominant masculinity were established by Paul.25 He described Christ as the head of the body of the Church, and pushed the analogy further to locate men as the heads of their women.26 The division of the body into higher parts ruling over the lower ones became a commonplace of medieval medical and theological discourse; the head was often described as the organ containing the soul and thus the ruling body part.27 By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the head as dominant body part was appropriated as a metaphor for the prince, or king, as the ruler of his realm, with one of the most famous examples of this type of analogy appearing in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus of 1159.28 The depiction of the severing of the head and other body parts in martyrdom imagery is reflected in actual practice, both religious and secular; the bodies of the saintly and the aristocratic were divided and housed or buried in different meaningful locations in order to distribute their power and influence.29 Having a relic of the head of a saint was thought to be as valuable as having the entire body,30 and in instances where the corpse was partitioned, it was believed that the true body rested wherever the location of the head might be.31 The emphasis on decapitation was also paralleled by the late medieval system of criminal justice. The beheading of a medieval criminal suggested that the condemned was no common offender. There was an iconography of public execution during the Middle Ages, and the victim’s social position was indicated through signs such as the type of clothing he wore, the type of transportation used to convey him from jail to the place of execution and the method of execution itself.32 Prior to their execution criminals of an exalted social status might be divested of certain items, such as their insignia of office, but only lower-class criminals, male and female, were completely stripped; they were often displayed or even paraded about in public. Decapitation tended to be a practice reserved for the nobility;33 it sometimes happened that a criminal sentenced to a less glorious death would petition to have his mode of execution changed to decapitation.34 It was also a practice generally reserved for men; female criminals were more likely to be burned or buried alive in an attempt to obliterate completely the more problematic bodies of criminal women.35 In general, the criminal justice practices of the later Middle Ages offer striking evidence that the martyrdom scenes, both textual and visual, in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea would have had particular resonance for a contemporary viewer. The bodily sufferings of the saints captured in word and image in the manuscript were reminiscent of those endured by accused criminals. In a revival of ancient Roman law, by the thirteenth century torture began to be used as a means of extracting confession in court.36 Pain in this context became a means of discovering truth, with the body as its locus. After confession was extracted, the criminal might be punished in a way that included judicial pain and even public execution. Public ceremonies of torture and execution were conceived as lavish spectacles of power, confirming an authoritative right to mete out punishment in public on a grand scale. Such events were theatrical pageants of propaganda; in fact, words describing these spectacles were derived from the theatre.37 The voyeuristic

56 Martha Easton attraction/repulsion of execution itself and the ritual of events leading up to the ultimate act ensured that executions became a type of spectator sport. From the point of view of the punishing authority, the spectacle of public punishment served as a means of moral instruction as well as a deterrent to those watching. The power of viewing is seen in the ubiquitous figure of the seated king who is a feature of most of the martyrdom scenes in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea and elsewhere. He functions simultaneously as sovereign, judge and witness, although in the context of the martyrdom scenes he is a symbol of anti-Christian forces, of heresy, of sadistic voyeurism, of government gone bad. In the later Middle Ages the spectacle of punishment and death was intended to secure not only social order but also spiritual forgiveness. Since bodily pain on earth in the form of illness or punishment was believed to subtract from pain in purgatory, witnesses could watch with the idea that the infliction of earthly suffering was in some sense compassionate.38 In most areas of Europe, criminals sentenced to death by beheading knelt on the ground with their backs to the executioner, so that their heads might be severed with a broad sweep of the sword.39 This kneeling position was one of both prayer and penitence, and must have seemed both poignant and appropriate to the viewing populace. It is also the position commonly used in decapitation scenes featuring martyrs, including those in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea. The parallels between the martyrdoms of early Christians and the executions of contemporary criminals were clear to late medieval people, and execution ceremonies even mimicked (and inspired) martyrdom accounts.40 The reader/viewer of the violence inherent in the text and imagery of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea is in part prepared for it by his social and cultural milieu, and in turn the pain and torture evident in the Legenda aurea can be seen to legitimise and make inevitable contemporary social norms. For martyrs, like criminals, decapitation had connotations of privilege, both political and spiritual. Decapitation was reserved for citizens of ancient Rome; thus Paul was beheaded while Peter was crucified. And while martyrs were able to survive a multitude of horrific tortures that would fell the normal person, beheading usually (although not always) completed the task, and thus it was the means by which the martyr achieved his or her reward. In fact, beheading had such hagiographic and cultural overtones of privilege that the artist of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea has even diverged from the canonical text; Matthew, Maurice and Simon are not beheaded in their legends but are in the accompanying miniatures (fols 129, 130 and 148); in the text Matthew is specifically stabbed in the back, Maurice is trampled by horses and Simon is crucified. Although executions of medieval criminals took class- and gender-specific forms, in the text of the Legenda aurea both male and female martyrs are ultimately decapitated. This literary similarity has led some scholars to assert that gender plays only a minor role in martyrdom accounts. Although men and women are treated differently in details of martyrdom stories, such as the emphasis on female beauty and virginity, the victimisation of female martyrs has been overemphasised in recent feminist literature.41 Even if female martyrs are tortured in exclusively feminine ways (such as having their breasts cut off), both male and female martyrs are most

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 57 commonly despatched by decapitation and all are victorious over death, receiving their ultimate reward in heaven. In certain instances, the women martyrs actively encourage their torturers, seeking the martyr’s palm. It has been suggested that this active participation in their fate gives the martyrs a measure of control, and thus leads to empowerment, dulling the sadistic nature of these legends;42 others have suggested that violence done to the female body is a corporeal vehicle for spiritual meaning.43 Yet something happens in the translation of text into image. Even if textual accounts of female martyrdom mention the abilities of the women to engage in intellectual debate, and even if they end with a beheading and an entry into heaven, images of female martyrs often undo the idea of privilege and create meanings and viewer responses fraught with ambivalence. An ongoing textual narrative leads the reader from bodily torture to spiritual release, but hagiographic imagery often focuses on the torture itself, presenting the martyrs in frozen moments of passivity and bodily display. Even if in the text women die by other methods, including beheading, they are usually depicted with their often-sexualised tortures in progress; only rarely are women beheaded in the imagery of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea. Just as images of male martyrdoms occasionally diverge from the text to privilege decapitation, images of female martyrdoms in the manuscript sometimes modify the torture of the text, creating a visually prurient image out of a more mundane literary account. The virgin martyr Lucy survives numerous tortures while trading barbs with the evil consul Paschasius until he is ‘at the end of his wits’. Taking pity on him, his friends thrust a dagger into her throat, but still she continues to speak. In the image of Lucy’s martyrdom (fol. 4v), the dagger is plunged into her stomach instead, becoming in effect a pseudo-rape, and completely erasing the significance of Lucy’s miraculous ability to continue speaking even with a knife through her throat (Fig. 4.3). The penetration of the stomach, common in scenes of female martyrdom, can be read as a sexual metaphor, as the belly (like the mouth) was associated with the sexual organs.44 In general, the images of the tortures of the virgin martyrs are often conceived in such a way that their punishments become forms of sexual molestation. They are stripped and displayed, their breasts are grabbed and mutilated, their bellies are penetrated with phallic swords. The women stand naked, their white bodies glowing in contrast to the fully clothed figures of the king and his accomplices. In many legends of female martyrs, especially virgin martyrs, involuntary nakedness is a humiliating part of the torture endured. Texts often describe their public stripping, whereas there is little mention of the nakedness of male martyrs.45 This distinction between the treatment of female and male martyrs in texts and images suggests an ambivalence concerning the nakedness of Christian women, a preoccupation with women’s bodies that is both religious and prurient. When an avowed virgin is naked, the connotations are even more complex: nakedness connotes both virginity and fallen virginity, both purity and shame. These strippings are complicated; the women sometimes state that they are unashamed, and yet they may conveniently grow hair or readjust their clothing to cover their nudity. Yet even if texts describe the sprouting of hair or other miraculous means of concealing female nakedness,

58 Martha Easton

Figure 4.3 ‘The torture of St Lucy’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. Source: Huntington Library HM 3027 fol. 4v. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

images more often present the women without recourse to modesty. In the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, some female martyrs are in fact not stripped in the text, but are naked in the miniature; Anastasia is one such example (fol. 8; Fig. 4.4). Of the surviving miniatures, there are no examples of ‘miraculous modesty’ for the female martyrs. The naked female body can be seen as a site of multivalent meanings; the stripped and tortured female martyr could represent spiritual heroism and yet still be a spectacle for the male gaze, personified in the figures of the voyeuristic kings. The inclusion of the king is particularly appropriate for a female martyr, as often this generic figure is symbolic of a man in the story who has been sexually rejected by her. The stripped woman is sadistically titillating to him; she has refused his advances, and therefore he tortures her both mentally and physically, through the humiliation of being stripped and the pain of being mutilated. The legends of

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 59

Figure 4.4 ‘The torture of St Anastasia’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. Source: Huntington Library HM 3027 fol. 8. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

the virgin martyrs are both stories of Christian faith and tales of sexual denial and frustration, with an emphasis on sexuality and physicality that is less common in the lives of male martyrs. On rare occasions, some male martyrs are in fact represented partially or fully nude. However, there seems to be an awareness of the impropriety of male nudity in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, in both text and image. In the legend of Hippolytus, the Roman general Decius orders that he be stripped; the saint says to him, ‘You haven’t stripped me, rather you’ve clothed me!’ Infuriated, Decius responds, ‘How can you be so stupid, not even blushing at your nakedness?’ For Hippolytus, the removal of earthly garments is a preparation for the cloak of martyrdom, but for the Roman general, the martyr’s nudity is clearly intended to be embarrassing and humiliating; faced with the prospect of losing this contest of significations, Decius orders that Hippolytus be clothed once again. Significantly,

60 Martha Easton in the few cases where there is total male nudity, the king is absent. Although he is a stock figure in the scenes of male decapitation, as well as in the scenes of female torture and execution, whether they are clothed or nude, no voyeuristic king appears with the few male martyrs who are depicted naked. Some images suggest an implied self-consciousness on the part of the male martyrs; Laurence is stripped in the text and shown naked in the miniature illustrating his legend in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, but he covers his genitals as he lies roasting on an iron grill (fol. 97v; Fig. 4.5). Even if the text calls for male nudity, it is often not followed in the imagery of the manuscript: Andrew, Cyriacus and Dionysius are all stripped as part of their torture but they are pictured fully clothed in the manuscript (fols 1, 97 and 142v). Even though male and female martyrs may in some instances renegotiate the body and transcend the binary system of gender, ultimately it is through their bodies that they attain salvation and holiness. In the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, gender is a factor in the differentiation of the ways the martyrs are tortured and displayed. So martyrs escape the confines of gender only to have them reinscribed in the images of their bodies. With this in mind, we might consider yet again how often hagiographic texts and imagery record the stripping of female martyrs, and

Figure 4.5 ‘The torture of St Laurence’, Legenda aurea, 1270–80. Source: Huntington Library HM 3027 fol. 97v. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 61 how infrequently male martyrs are represented in this way. Although the transcendence of gender for martyrs who are women is constructed as a transformation from female to male, from body to soul, from material to spiritual, the images of the virgin martyrs in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea freeze them explicitly at the moment that they are most identified with the body. The stripped and displayed virgin martyrs are forever caught unclothed and their sex (at least their breasts) revealed, even if they are ‘masculine’ in their uncommon spirituality, their rejection of culturally ordered feminine roles and their embrace of martyrdom. The paradox is that although beheading is a privileged method of execution, male-gendered both in this manuscript and in medieval judicial practice, the codification and standardisation of the beheading scenes renders the male martyrs nearly visually anonymous. In contrast, although women usually suffer the additional humiliation of public stripping, a loaded signifier of both sexuality and criminality in the later Middle Ages, the combination of nudity with their individualised tortures makes them easily identifiable and ultimately more memorable. The connection of violence and memory provides a tool to understand how a viewer might have reacted to the numbing repetition of martyrdom scenes in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea. The thirteenth century brought an increasing concern about the art of memory through a revival of interest in Aristotelian teachings about memory and sense perception.46 The power of the images in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea makes them more than just a visualisation of the written narrative; the pictures had devotional, didactic and mnemonic functions. The author of the Roman treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium, widely circulated in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, has a telling prescription for fixing memories in the mind; this is most easily accomplished if ‘we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking’.47 When text is turned into image, how much more fearful and memorable for the spectator. Thomas Aquinas’s prescriptions for good mnemonic tools fit the violent imagery of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea; he stated that ‘Man cannot understand without images. . . . We remember less easily those things which are of subtle and spiritual import; and we remember more easily those things which are gross and sensible.’48 Mitchell B. Merback has explored the pedagogical potential of violent visual imagery in his analysis of a set of woodcuts by Lucas Cranach the Elder illustrating the martyrdoms of the Twelve Apostles; in this case, the scenes were intended for the teaching of children. He draws parallels between art and life as children were often brought to executions and expected to derive moral lessons from witnessing such events; these lessons were impressed upon the memory by subsequent slappings or whippings inflicted on the child.49 Here pain, both vicariously viewed and personally experienced, becomes a mnemonic tool of instruction and reinforcement. Since the Huntington Library Legenda aurea was probably a manuscript that was used for personal devotion rather than public display, the images functioned as a type of memory device to recall the text and its significance. A focused, private contemplation of the martyrdom scenes would only intensify the depth of the experience; a viewer might find them both stimulating and disturbing, both attractive and repulsive.

62 Martha Easton In a social and religious context where pain was an indicator of judicial truth through torture and redemption through physical suffering, the late medieval audience for the Huntington Library Legenda aurea would have understood the tortured and beheaded body, male or female, as a locus for spiritual salvation. But the same people who could view images of martyrdom with outrage and devotion perhaps could also appreciate the potential for prurience inherent in such scenes. By the time the Huntington Library Legenda aurea was produced, the public stripping, punishment and execution of criminals served as an example of how scenes of martyrdom could be viewed and analysed, and conversely such spectacles themselves were often modelled upon martyrdom accounts. This was especially true if the accused was a popular or sympathetic figure, yet even if the punishment was deemed appropriate and deserved, public punishments of criminals evoked a variety of responses. Such spectacles of public punishment could frighten, horrify, reassure, tantalise and even arouse empathy in the viewer. In the end, both criminals and martyrs stood outside the normal community, their bodies functioning as sites for meaning mapped onto them by late medieval society. The martyr, often a social outcast in perception or practice, glides between the apparent polar opposites of body and spirit, suffering and impassibility, passivity and assertiveness; he or she may even transcend the biological and cultural constrictions of sex and gender. The difficulty of fitting the martyr into set parameters produces a myriad of interpretative strategies through which to understand the meaning and power that this type of sainthood offered to the faithful of the Middle Ages.

Notes 1 Recent scholarship on the Legenda aurea includes A. Boureau, La Légende dorée: Le Système narratif de Jacques de Voragine (†1298), Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 1984; S.L. Reames, The Legenda aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985; B. Dunn-Lardeau (ed.), Legenda aurea: Sept siècles de diffusion, Montreal, Éditions Bellarmin, 1986; B. Dunn-Lardeau (ed.), Legenda aurea – la Légende dorée (XIIIe–XVe s.), Montreal, Éditions Ceres, 1993; B. Fleith, Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Lateinischen Legenda aurea, Subsidia Hagiographica 72, Brussels, Société des Bollandistes, 1991; and G.P. Maggioni, Ricerche sulla composizione e sulla trasmissione della Legenda aurea, Biblioteca di Medioevo latino 8, Spoleto, Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1995. The best translation of the Legenda aurea in English is The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W.G. Ryan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, based on the second edition of the Latin transcription published by T. Graesse in 1850. The edition was reprinted in 1890 and a photo-offset reproduction produced in 1969: Jacobi a Voragine Legenda Aurea Vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta, ed. T. Graesse, Osnabrück, Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969. 2 Boureau, La Légende dorée, pp. 21–5; Reames, Reexamination, pp. 85–100. 3 H. Maddocks, ‘Pictures for Aristocrats: The Manuscripts of the Légende dorée’, in M. Manion and B.J. Muir (eds), Medieval Texts and Images: Studies of Manuscripts from the Middle Ages, Chur, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991, pp. 1–23. 4 Huntington Library, San Marino, California (HM 3027). See M. Easton, ‘The Making of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea and the Meanings of Martyrdom’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2001; and C.W. Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, San Marino, The Huntington Library, 1989, vol. 2, pp. 590–4, fig. 62.

The Huntington Library Legenda aurea 63 5 Dutschke, Guide to Medieval, vol. 2, p. 593. 6 D. Morris, The Culture of Pain, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991. 7 E. Cohen, ‘Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages’, Science in Context, 1995, vol. 8.2, pp. 47–74, p. 51. 8 P. McCracken, ‘“The Boy who was a Girl”: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence’, The Romanic Review, 1995, vol. 85.4, pp. 517–36. 9 J.E. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman, New York, Routledge, 1997. 10 M.R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, Tunbridge Wells, Burns and Oates, 1992, pp. 53–77; E. Castelli, ‘“I Will Make Mary Male”: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity’, in J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, New York, Routledge, 1991, pp. 24–49. 11 Quoted in J.A. McNamara, A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries, New York, Institute for Research in History, 1983, pp. 110–11. 12 Jerome, ‘Commentarius in Epistolam ad Ephasios’, PL 16, col. 56. 13 M. Easton, ‘Saint Agatha and the Sanctification of Sexual Violence’, Studies in Iconography, 1994, vol. 16, pp. 83–118. 14 J. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative, Kortrijk, Van Ghemmert Publishing Company, 1979, p. 46. 15 Cohen, ‘Towards a History’, p. 54. 16 The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. H. Musurillo, Oxford, Clarendon, 1972, p. 67, pp. 79–91; Cohen, ‘Towards a History’, p. 54. 17 The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Musurillo, p. 69. 18 For the changing imagery of the Passion of Christ, see H. Belting, The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. M. Bartusis and R. Meyer, New Rochelle, Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990; see also Marrow, Passion Iconography and M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 302–16. It should be noted that this type of representation of Christ’s humanity was not the only one in late medieval culture. See D. Aers and L. Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp. 15–42. 19 Cohen, ‘Towards a History’, p. 60. See also S. Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings, London, Routledge, 1993; and T. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 20 Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure: I Mystical Opuscula, trans. J. de Vinck, vol. 1, Paterson, St Anthony Guild Press, 1960, p. 242; Bestul, Texts of the Passion, p. 202, note 25. 21 W.A. Meeks, ‘The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity’, History of Religions, 1974, vol. 13.3, pp. 165–208, pp. 182–3. 22 Meeks, ‘Image of the Androgyne’, p. 194. 23 Galatians 3:28. See Meeks, ‘Image of the Androgyne’, p. 166. 24 P.-H. Stahl, Histoire de la Décapitation, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1986. 25 J. Le Goff, ‘Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages’, in M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, New York, Zone, 1989, pp. 13–26, pp. 13–14. 26 Ephesians 5:3–24; Le Goff, ‘Head or Heart?’, p. 14, pp. 23–4, note 3. 27 Le Goff, ‘Head or Heart?’, p. 13; M. Camille, ‘The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies’, in S. Kay and M. Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 62–99, pp. 68–70. 28 Le Goff, ‘Head or Heart?’, pp. 17–18.

64 Martha Easton 29 E.A.R. Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, Viator, 1981, vol. 12, pp. 221–70. 30 Stahl, Histoire de la Décapitation, p. 140. 31 Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body’, p. 240. 32 E. Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France, Leiden, Brill, 1992, pp. 181–208. 33 Cohen, Crossroads of Justice, p. 187. 34 M.B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 141–2. 35 Cohen, Crossroads of Justice, p. 191. 36 See E. Peters, Torture (Expanded Edition), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; also T. Asad, ‘Notes on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual’, Economy and Society, 1983, vol. 12.3, pp. 287–327; Cohen, Crossroads of Justice; Cohen, ‘Towards a History’; and Bestul, Texts of the Passion, pp. 145–64. 37 L. Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence and Martyrdom, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1991, p. 15. 38 S.Y. Edgerton Jr, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 131. 39 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 132. 40 Cohen, Crossroads of Justice, p. 152. 41 For example, B. Cazelles (ed.), The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; and in a secular context, K. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 42 S. Salih, ‘Performing Virginity: Sex and Violence in the Katherine Group’, in C. Carlson and A.J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 95–112; C. Innes-Parker, ‘Sexual Violence and the Female Reader: Symbolic “Rape” in the Saints’ Lives of the Katherine Group’, Women’s Studies, 1995, vol. 24.3, pp. 205–17; and C. Innes-Parker, ‘Fragmentation and Reconstruction: Images of the Female Body in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group’, Comitatus, 1995, vol. 26, pp. 27–52. 43 K.C. Kelly, ‘Useful Virgins in Medieval Hagiography’, in C. Carlson and A.J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 135–64; and S. Horner, ‘The Violence of Exegesis: Reading the Bodies of Ælfric’s Female Saints’, in A. Roberts (ed.), Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1998, pp. 22–43. 44 Innes-Parker, ‘Sexual Violence’, p. 216, note 12. 45 Cazelles, The Lady as Saint, p. 52; Miles, Carnal Knowing, pp. 56–7. 46 See M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 47 Quoted in J. Enders, ‘Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence’, Theatre Survey, vol. 38.1, 1997, pp. 139–60, p. 144. See also P. Parshall, ‘The Art of Memory and the Passion’, Art Bulletin, 1999, vol. 81.3, pp. 456–72, p. 457. 48 Quoted in S. Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 242–3. 49 M.B. Merback, ‘Torture and Teaching: The Reception of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles in the Protestant Era’, Art Journal, 1998, vol. 57.1, pp. 14–23.

5

St George as a male virgin martyr Samantha J.E. Riches

As the disciplines of hagiography and hagiology have developed, researchers have formulated a range of conceptual tools to facilitate their work. The sheer volume of recorded saints, whether officially canonised or less formally recognised, and the wealth of evidence for their cults indicate that such strategies are necessary in order for the researcher to assess effectively a saint cult and investigate the meanings it contains. However, such approaches, though commonplace, are not without their problems. One frequently used tool is the assignment of saints into convenient categories, such as royalty, clerics, hermits, mystics, penitents, military figures or martyrs, in order to facilitate a reader’s recognition of the subject at hand. For example, the index of Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints defines each entry with a coding system (V for virgin, B for bishop, C for confessor, and so forth),1 allowing an individual saint to be rapidly envisioned. However, the extent to which these classifications are helpful is debatable. Take the category of ‘cleric’, for example. St Yves (or Ivo) of Brittany and Sir John Schorne were both fourteenth-century priests, but the ideas associated with them are quite different. The former was renowned as an honest canon and civil lawyer who took a vow of chastity and served the poor; his cult was primarily centred on his native Brittany. The latter’s fame, which rested primarily on his achievements of trapping the Devil in a boot and discovering a holy well, spread far beyond his immediate locale.2 His cult enjoyed royal patronage which ultimately led to the translation of his bones from North Marston, his parish in Buckinghamshire, to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, in 1480, despite the fact that he was never officially canonised. Other than their shared status as clerics, these two men seem to have little in common. Another potentially misleading category is the royal saint. St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31), widow of Ludwig IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, and a princess in her own right, is strongly associated with ideas of charity. St Margaret of Scotland (c. 1045–93) and St Elizabeth of Portugal (1271–1336), both canonised queens, are also figures of charity, which may tend to imply that royal status and charitableness are necessary concomitants in the hagiographical schema, but the topos of generosity also arises in the life of the servant-saint Zita (c. 1218–78), a distinctly nonroyal character.3 Charity could perhaps be a function of the gender of these saints: are the Elizabeths of Hungary and Portugal, Margaret of Scotland and Zita all

66 Samantha J.E. Riches subject to similar presentation because of their femaleness? It is certainly possible that such tropes are linked to gender in the minds of hagiographers, but we should note that there is always an exception: St Walstan, a male servant-saint (d. 1016) is also strongly associated with charity.4 In effect, it seems that there may be no hard and fast rules about the significance of category: Butler’s codes, and the nearequivalents adopted by many other hagiographers, may tell us rather less than we would like to think. The effects of socio-economic status, geography and chronology (of both the saints themselves and their hagiographers) are often downplayed in such superficial categorisations of saints’ lives. Tellingly, the personal interests of patrons and artists who created the profile of the saint in the evidence we now have (literary retellings of the legend, records of festivals, visual imagery), which are likely to have been among the most important factors in the shaping of a specific presentation of a saint, are often entirely overlooked.5 When these factors are added into the equation it becomes clear that simplistic groupings often obscure rather than clarify our understanding of the meanings associated with different saints: as Wendy Larson demonstrates in Chapter 2 of this volume, the perception of individual saints changed over time and varied enormously from place to place, but they were also subject to the vagaries of their devotees’ personal beliefs and needs. It seems vital that we should question the nature of these categories and break down the barriers between them in order to produce fuzzy, rather than defined, models of sanctity. The deployment of such fuzzy models allows individual saints to be understood in the light of changing modes of presentation and interpretation, with the clear acknowledgement that a specific saint need not necessarily have operated within the same web of associations in the mind of each of their devotees, even when a group of devotees demonstrably had much in common (for example, were the same gender, were living in the same geographical location, at the same time, were of similar social class, and so forth). There are many instances of the use of categorisation in hagiology; one example which immediately presents itself is the apparently self-evident category of ‘virgin martyrs’, such as Sts Katherine, Margaret and Barbara, who are often discussed together as a convenient group.6 However, it may be argued that the signifying tropes which the virgin martyrs all appear to share are also found in the legends of other saints who do not conform to all the specifications of the ‘standard’ virgin martyr. The term ‘virgin martyr’ invariably carries the tacit implication of femininity: female virginity is, after all, well known as a concern of the medieval mind. But is this necessarily the full definition of the category?7 As the title of this chapter betrays, it is my contention that the conceptual category of virgin martyrs can be extended across the boundary of gender. If there could be a male virgin martyr, how would we recognise him? Furthermore, what might such an identification demonstrate? Initially, perhaps, we need to define the characteristics of a virgin martyr.8 The written legends of those individuals routinely described as virgin martyrs tend to indicate that several factors are relatively constant. First, there is an explicit definition of the woman as a beautiful, virginal creature, a trope which seems

St George as a male virgin martyr 67 to encode ideas of nobility – moral, as well as social – and innocence. She is also defined as a Christian, in opposition to a non-Christian environment. This dramatic encounter encodes opposition to the martyr’s religious beliefs in a human antagonist, who sometimes appears in the guise of an explicitly heathen father (as in the case of St Barbara), and/or as a heathen ruler who threatens the saint’s virginity, often through an offer of marriage. The saint invariably refuses to co-operate, a decision which clearly brings together ideas of sexual purity and Christianity, in opposition to heathen belief and a lack of chastity. This opposition is encoded in the trial before the heathen ruler, a process which often includes the threat of a sexual assault. The trial culminates in a litany of physical tortures, often graphically described, which may include overtly sexualised torments focusing, for example, on the breasts, and a pronounced use of sexualised language, such as description of the martyr’s ‘swete tendre body’.9 The virgin martyr patiently endures her suffering, and is ultimately executed by being beheaded. The martyr’s soul is then often described being received into heaven.10 This literary approach is echoed in visual treatments of these legends, where the tortures inflicted on the hapless martyrs are often presented in particularly graphic terms. The near-nakedness of the martyr in these images forms a strong visual contrast to the clothed tormentors (whose exotic clothing is often used to present them as foreign, non-Christian and ‘other’); and is strongly symbolic of the innocence of the saint. The routine depiction of the crucified, suffering Christ in a state of near-nudity is an iconographic convention which is also played upon in these images: one of the functions of a martyr’s legend is the depiction of an imitatio Christi, and the unclothed, tormented body of a martyr saint echoes the Passion of Christ. Nakedness has other meanings too: it is also a concomitant of the new life of the hereafter which saints approach through their suffering (the soul is routinely depicted as a naked body, often a naked child, in late medieval art). However, it is also possible to read a sexualised subtext into these images. It is argued by Martha Easton in Chapter 4 of this volume that a sublimated sexual charge can be discerned within the physical attack, with the penetration of the martyr’s body by the spear, a weapon with arguably phallic overtones. Figure 4.3, and others which play on the same topos, would surely be read by most spectators in the knowledge that the saint retains her virgin status throughout the assault: a paradox is established of the violated body and the inviolate virginity.11 The conceptual format of the virgin martyr seems to require the process of torture and the corporeality it denotes. Karen A. Winstead has claimed, in a discussion of ‘the generic virgin martyr’, that an emphasis on gender and sexuality is a distinguishing feature of the legends of female martyrs, when compared to their male counterparts.12 This seems to indicate that no equivalence exists between male and female martyrs, but the apparent insistence on corporeality in the presentations of some male martyrs gives the lie to this stark use of categorisation. Gail Ashton has written that: The saint is a sacrificial victim opposing yet diluting the male threat of violence, surrendering her body to Christ yet also making her own identity. It is a process

68 Samantha J.E. Riches exemplified through violence, in the significant morphology of blood and bodily emissions.13 Can this conception not equally be applied to at least some male martyrs? My thesis rests to some extent on the conceit that virginity can be read into depictions, both written and pictorial, even when the sexual status of the saint is not overtly stated. This may seem a convenient belief, for it extends the potential number of virgin martyrs most helpfully, but we should recall that virginity occupied a demonstrably complex position in medieval thinking. Although virginity is, as we have seen, invariably associated with women in the minds of modern commentators, examination of a range of medieval evidence indicates that the concept of virginity encompassed a range of meanings well beyond the simple inviolate female body, the sealed vessel. For example, it could act as a marker of elevated status: thanks to the (self-)presentation of Elizabeth I the idea of the virgin queen is familiar, but kings too could be constructed as virgins.14 Just as the virgin martyr’s beauty acted as a marker of nobility, the very description ‘virgin’ could carry the same overtones. There are several examples of explicit descriptions of men as virgins, such as St John the Evangelist and Christ himself,15 but chastity can also be implicit rather than explicit.16 Furthermore, virginity is something which at least some medieval people thought could be earned or achieved or restored, rather than simply retained: Margery Kempe is perhaps the most obvious example of a sexually active person (the mother of fourteen children) who arguably decided to adopt the performance of virginity.17 This fuzzy conception of virginity may derive from the influence of the Early Church: the legend of Sts Perpetua and Felicitas (d. 203), who were both wives and mothers, is strikingly similar to the generic formula of the female virgin martyr.18 If the standard virgin martyr legend was influenced by an account of the suffering of non-virginal women, and a clearly non-virginal woman can be presented in the persona of a virginal saint, cannot a man be treated likewise? If the conceptual category of virgin martyrs can be extended to incorporate male saints, it seems that St George is likely to be a prime candidate for inclusion; the fact that he is one of the most widely recognised figures in the pantheon of Christian tradition makes this reading particularly interesting. The myriad retellings – in prose, poetry and visual images – of the legend of his encounter with a dragon are ample testament to his popularity through the centuries, but they also tend to give the impression that he has been universally understood as a figure of the knight errant. True, he is often presented as a splendid vision of nobility, chivalry and masculinity, but this depiction is considerably less than the whole story. The dragon episode, far from being the beginning and end of St George, was actually a late addition to a well-established legend; it should perhaps be viewed as a popular optional extra rather than as an integral part of the saint’s life. Whilst a mid-fifteenthcentury Christian in most parts of the known world would undoubtedly have had little hesitation in including St George in the canon of military saints, and would have been familiar with the image of the saint as a mounted knight fighting the dragon, he or she would almost certainly have had an understanding of the saint’s legend that was rather wider than this one episode. Late medieval hagiography and

St George as a male virgin martyr 69 visual imagery that is concerned with the legend of St George as a whole, as opposed to the dragon story in isolation, offers us a considerable amount of information about the ways in which this saint was presented to the contemporary audience, and there are clear indications of the invocation of the tropes of the virgin martyr. St George’s cult dates to the first years of the fourth century, the time of the last wave of persecution of Christians under Emperor Diocletian, and although no Urtext is known, it is evident from the earliest sources that St George is consistently identified as a martyr. The oldest extant account of St George’s martyrdom is a fragmentary manuscript dated to c. 350–500, found under a fallen pillar in the cathedral of Q’as Ibrim during the construction of the Aswan Dam in 1964.19 St George is identified as a Cappadocian Christian who entered the imperial service and was martyred when he challenged the pagan beliefs of the king at Diospolis. A second, and considerably more influential, source is found in a fragmentary fifthcentury palimpsest in Vienna that is presented as based on an earlier document written by, or at least with the assistance of, a servant of the saint called Pasicrates. He claims to have witnessed St George’s passion, which he says endured for seven years and led to the conversion of 30,900 people, including the Empress Alexandra, wife of the villainous Emperor Datianus, or Dadianus, a name that transmogrifies into the Dacian of later medieval tradition. This detailed version had an enormous impact on the hagiography of St George: it is the source of traditions that St George was killed four times, only to be resurrected on the first three occasions, that he was given poison by a magician named Athanasius who subsequently converted to Christianity and was himself martyred, and that the saint was suspended over a fire, sawn in two and so forth. The problem with this apparent eyewitness account, aside from the somewhat fantastical nature of the saint’s experience, is that ‘Pasicrates’ was almost certainly an invention of hagiographers. A Vatican manuscript, almost certainly of a somewhat later date, and possibly as late as the eighth century, names Diocletian as the heathen emperor, and incorporates three miraculous cures rather than actual resurrections. Gelasius, a late fifth-century pope, recognised the extent of the problems associated with the saint, and decreed that the hagiographical legends should be treated with extreme circumspection. His Church Council of 494, which formulated the first Index of forbidden books, trimmed the number of George’s tortures and removed all references to resurrection.20 As we can see from the evidence of later images and literature concerned with the lengthy martyrdom, their efforts were not well rewarded. One of the most striking aspects of the cult of St George in the late medieval period is his sheer popularity. Originally a saint of the Eastern Church, where he is designated as a megalomartyr, St George’s cult spread to the West from as early as the sixth century, and by the eighth century his veneration was general throughout Christendom. Around one hundred visual cycles of St George survive from the medieval period across Europe,21 as well as innumerable individual images, and there is also considerable evidence of his cult in other forms, such as the dedications of churches, altars, lights and holy wells, fairs and festivals held in his honour, and songs and charms that invoked his memory or called upon his aid. Examination of this vast array of evidence demonstrates not only that St George was hugely popular

70 Samantha J.E. Riches across a wide geographical area, but also that his popularity continued for a remarkably long time, well into the modern age. This was a considerable feat for a non-canonical character of obscure origin, and it is my contention that his appeal lay not only in the nature of the dragon story, with its clear overtones of the battle between good and evil, but also in the extent to which his legend could be manipulated to suit various specific needs. Examination of the visual imagery in particular demonstrates that the legend was extremely malleable: episodes could be added or omitted according to taste, and there is strong evidence of localised traditions being used to enhance the basic story.22 It is notable that, in the visual imagery in particular, the motif of torture is not used consistently: the number and type of tortures depicted vary enormously,23 and this factor alone seems to indicate that we are not looking at a simple repetition of a well-recognised hagiographic tradition, but, rather, at conscious decision-making on the part of patrons and designers. Hence, St George can be shown inside a barrel in a fourteenth-century fresco; long nails are heated in a brazier and then plunged through the sides of the barrel and into the martyr within.24 This particularly ingenious torture does not appear amongst the eight torments on a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Russian icon, where St George runs the gamut of the wheel, rakes assaulting his skin, burial in lime, boiling in a cauldron, sawing in half, scourging, burning with torches and baking in a metal cauldron shaped like a bull within the narrative it establishes.25 Meanwhile, the St George cycle in the La Selle retable, an English alabaster altarpiece dated to c. 1485, manages to present a structurally coherent account of the legend of the saint with no reference to torture at all, underlining the extent to which the inclusion or exclusion of specific tortures was a matter of choice rather than tradition.26 This emphasis on torture in visual treatments of the life of St George is paralleled by extant literary versions, although, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, 27 there is remarkably little consistency in the presentation of tortures. Given that, as the La Selle retable demonstrates, it was perfectly possible to construct a life of the saint that omitted any reference to torture, we need to question the function of such an emphasis and ask why it became so marked. One explanation is undoubtedly an invocation of an imitatio Christi. By showing that St George suffered patiently for his faith the hagiographer was enabled to exhort other Christians to do the same. However, this aspect of martyrdom is equally applicable for any other tormented saint: it does not explain the particular focus on torture found in most late medieval versions of the story of St George. I feel that another explanation is indicated here, for it is notable that St George’s legend is reminiscent of the narratives associated with female virgin martyrs, such as Sts Katherine, Barbara, Lucy, Agnes and Margaret. In these legends there tends to be a strong emphasis on torture and physical suffering.28 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne draws a distinction between female virgin martyrs and male martyrs: she notes that in the Passiones of women there tends to be an emphasis on the suffering of the entire body, whilst tortures applied to men tend to be more specific, such as feet shod with red-hot shoes or nails driven into the head.29 Wogan-Browne makes a strong argument in her paper, but I would argue that this construction is not a feature of later medieval narratives of St George,

St George as a male virgin martyr 71 and certainly does not appear in visual material where motifs such as being boiled, being sawn in half and being dragged by a horse clearly suggest a whole-body experience.30 However, one factor which tends to separate male martyrs from female martyrs is that the narratives of male martyrs generally concentrate on one specific torture, such as St Erasmus with his windlass and St Sebastian with his arrows. Meanwhile, female virgin martyrs tend to suffer a number of different torments in their narratives, even when an individual may be visually associated with one torture in particular (for example, St Agatha was put into a fire and placed in a brothel as well as having her breasts cut off, St Margaret was beaten and burned with torches as well as being visited by a dragon, St Apollonia was burnt in a fire as well as having her teeth broken). It is notable that St George, with his litany of tortures, seems to fit into the archetype of the female virgin martyr far more easily than that of the stereotypical male martyr. Does this mean that St George was understood as some kind of crypto-female? This is a possibility, but I would argue that it is far more likely that his presentation is actually an attempt to ‘borrow’ another aspect of these female martyrs, specifically their virginity. In pursuing this train of thought I am using ideas taken from medieval literary studies, where virginity has been shown to be a performative state.31 In effect, it is a spiritual as well as a bodily condition, an asexuality which can be aspired to, or adopted or achieved, rather than a mere physical status which derived from a negativity, that is, the state of not having experienced sexual congress. We can, perhaps, think of virginity as a third gender, one that is marked out as separate from maleness and femaleness by an insistence on spiritual purity as well as physical chastity. Although St George is never specifically said to be a virgin in the British or Latin texts on his life, it is my contention that chastity is often implied, and that the gender of virginity is a factor which sometimes underlies his presentation in literature and art. When considering this idea of ‘borrowing’ the nature of other saints, we should remember that St George is a borrower par excellence: it seems that all the tortures which appear in his legends, whether literary or visual, also appear in the legends of other martyrs. Hence he is boiled in oil and survives poison like John the Evangelist, beaten and burnt with torches like St Margaret, and tormented on the wheel like St Katherine (he is actually less fortunate than Katherine, for in her narratives the wheel falls apart before she can be tortured on it). One particularly rich late medieval cycle of St George offers intriguing evidence on the meanings associated with torture within this kind of iconography. A version of the life of St George, created c. 1450, was formerly situated in the upper level of a two-tier design in the glazing of the chancel of St George’s Church in Stamford (Lincolnshire). The lower row contained figures who purported to be the founder knights of the Order of the Garter, of William Bruges, who was first Garter King of Arms and the patron of the cycle, and of his wife and daughters. Sadly, the glazing of the chancel was destroyed during the mid-seventeenth century, but most of the lights were fortuitously recorded in the Book of Monuments,32 compiled in the period 1642–3 by the herald Sir William Dugdale and the limner William Sedgwick. The Book of Monuments records 21 of the original 29 pairs of images, and not all the drawings are complete, but despite the omissions and losses, it is evident that there

72 Samantha J.E. Riches was a remarkable emphasis on torture in this cycle with virtually half of the surviving images depicting various scenes of physical torment. It is likely that several of the lost subjects also focused on the story of the saint’s passion, most probably other forms of torture.33 The recorded tortures in the Stamford cycle are stretching on the rack, scourging by torturers who each wield a morningstar (a spiked metal ball attached to a stick with a short length of chain), a scene which is either burning with flaming torches or raking of the flesh with iron combs, boiling in a cauldron set over a fire, stretching with millstones, poisoning, sawing in half vertically, the wheel and scourging with a seven-headed whip, before the ultimate execution by beheading. The most interesting for our purposes is perhaps the image of stretching with millstones (Fig. 5.1). This version of the torture of the millstones is quite unusual. Rather than being suspended by his hands with a millstone tied to his feet to stretch him,34 or crushed under a millstone,35 the saint has been seated on a large blade with a small millstone tied to each ankle. The torturer on the right appears to be operating a mechanism to raise the blade and cut the saint in half. Drops of blood are indicated, running down the saint’s legs, but they have not been coloured by the limner; this has the doubtless unintended effect of lessening the horror of what would have been a particularly graphic image in the original version. What interests me here is the area of the saint’s body that is being tortured. It would doubtless be very painful to have millstones tied to the ankles, but the true focus here is on the pudendum. The saint’s loincloth protects his modesty in an entirely conventional manner, but the fact that he is being sawn in half from the bottom up strongly implies injury to the genitalia. The blade is shown actually cutting through his fundament; this is highly suggestive of a sexualised discourse which is notably absent in the conventional image of being cut in half, which shows the saw progressing from the top of the body (head or shoulders) downwards. This latter format is undoubtedly graphic, with spilling intestines and cascading blood,36 but it is hard to argue that it is sexualised in such a direct way as the Stamford subject.37 The format of Figure 5.1 seems to fit into the model of the sexualised tortures of female virgin martyrs, where the breasts are often a particular focus of attention. Penetration of the body, particularly the abdomen, by phallic weaponry is another mainstay of the iconography of the female virgin martyr; Robert Mills has argued persuasively that a similar discourse is brought into play in eroticised imagery of St Sebastian penetrated by arrows,38 and I would maintain that it is possible that a sexualised agenda also underlies the Stamford version of the torture of the millstones. A second image from the Stamford cycle potentially contains further indications of the use of iconography in the construction of gender identity. This subject shows St George, in armour, baptising a convert, who is probably to be identified as the magician Athanasius. Viewed in isolation this image is not terribly remarkable, but its interest lies in its placement within the entire cycle, for (according to the evidence of the Book of Monuments) it occurs amidst a run of images of torture where the saint is always clothed only in a loincloth. Michael Evans, amongst others, has worked on the gendering potential of armour, for example in the iconography of Joan of Arc and other female warriors.39 He has observed that arms were understood as

St George as a male virgin martyr 73

Figure 5.1 ‘St George tortured with millstones’, mid-seventeenth-century illustration of mid-fifteenth-century glass, formerly at Stamford, Lincolnshire. Source: William Dugdale’s Book of Monuments, London, British Library, Add MS 71474 fol. 158. Reproduced by permission of The British Library

‘male’, a gendering which led to profound implications for the perceived genderroles of women taking on such archetypal masculine attributes, and also discusses the topos of the warrior who is only revealed to be female when her armour is removed. However, we should note that this trope can work equally well in reverse: just as the possession of a gendering attribute mediates the gender of the holder, the loss of such an attribute can also signify gender. In late medieval iconography St George is shown wearing armour in his role as a heroic knight, but is always stripped during the scenes of torture. The stripping may seem to be a simple narrative

74 Samantha J.E. Riches necessity, as it would be well-nigh impossible to torture satisfactorily someone encased in metal,40 but at Stamford we see that the tortured St George is returned to his suit of armour as he performs the task of baptism. The next scene is a subject of St George being sawn in half; once more we see the saint in his loincloth. The readoption of armour for the rite of baptism makes no sense from a narrative point of view (surely the Emperor Dacian would not have been careless enough to allow the saint’s belongings to be left lying around his prison cell), and it does not appear to be paralleled in other known accounts of the legend of St George, written or visual. The rationale behind the image may well relate to what the saint is actually doing: baptism is an activity that we can perhaps relate to masculine authority, and St George is shown in masculinising armour as he baptises his converts, but reverts to his loincloth as he resubmits to torture. A second example of this topos appears in the iconography of another late medieval English cycle of St George. This occurs in the carved desk-ends of the south side of the quire at St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle, a scheme which is dated to 1477–84. There is no discernible narrative pattern in this cycle,41 but two of the images are of particular interest. The first (Fig. 5.2) shows St George wearing armour, standing before a board, being threatened by a group of men. It is possible that the viewer is meant to infer that he is in the process of being stripped: a figure in the background

Figure 5.2 ‘St George threatened’. Desk-end of south side of quire, 1477–84, St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Canons of Windsor

St George as a male virgin martyr 75 holds a robe which he could perhaps have worn over his armour. In the second scene (Fig. 5.3) we see St George lying on a board which is very similar to that seen in the previous subject. He has been stripped to his loincloth and is now tortured by being dismembered and his body parts are cooked in a small cauldron over a fire.42 The loss of armour demonstrates that he has relinquished his masculine, heroic role and adopted the demasculinised status of the tortured martyr. Note that the operative word is demasculinised, not feminised: the argument here is that the removal of the armour moves the saint out of the masculine gender and into a third, indeterminate, perhaps virginal, gender, not that he is made into a pseudo-female. The presence or absence of armour is not the only means by which male saints can be redefined. Another example of this discourse is perhaps even more telling, a trope which can usefully be termed ‘body substitution’. This is clearly evident in a miniature illustrating another life of St George, this time a fifteenth-century German narrative (Fig. 5.4). The central figure is female, and is almost certainly to be identified as the Empress Alexandra, the wife of St George’s heathen emperor. She is naked except for a loincloth and her crown, and is being tortured by two men who are cutting off her breasts. If this subject is viewed in isolation, separate from the cycle of St George images, it could easily be mistaken for an image of the torture of St Agatha, a virgin martyr who is said to have had her breasts cut off

Figure 5.3 ‘St George dismembered and boiled’. Desk-end of south side of quire, 1477–84, St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Canons of Windsor

Figure 5.4 ‘The torture of Empress Alexandra’, mid-fifteenth-century German life of St George. Source: London, British Library, Add MS 19462 fol. 54. Reproduced by permission of The British Library

St George as a male virgin martyr 77 during her torture. There seem to be no references to this torture, nor other tortures undergone by Alexandra, who converted to Christianity in consequence of witnessing the saint’s forbearance, in other literary or visual versions of St George’s legend, so it may well be a conscious borrowing from a female virgin martyr legend, albeit a borrowing which was applied to the empress, one of St George’s converts, rather than to St George himself. Here the body of the suffering male saint has literally been exchanged for a female body, undergoing a highly sexualised torment.43 A similar topos is invoked in the Golden Legend version of the life of St Blaise. This male saint is martyred by means of a simple beheading, but during the narrative a group of unnamed women are tortured by being hung up and slashed with iron rakes: ‘their flesh was seen to be white as driven snow’.44 The women are also threatened with molten lead, iron combs and, significantly, red-hot breast-plates; they are eventually thrown into a furnace, from which they emerge unscathed, and are finally beheaded. In effect, a sexualised series of torments are imported into a male martyrdom story; female bodies are substituted, quite literally it seems, for the male body. It is clear that this ‘borrowing’ of tropes from one saint’s life to another was quite common in late medieval hagiography, but it is also apparent that such borrowings need not have been general to all versions of a saint’s life. It seems that different treatments of a saint’s life reflect the range of interests and concerns of the specific audience or patrons for whom they were prepared: hence, the ‘virgin martyr’ tropes may appear in some versions of the life of a ‘male virgin martyr’ but not in others. Where it does occur, the rationale behind this is almost certainly based on a wish to call to the mind of the spectator the attributes of the female virgin martyr: the particularly graphic sufferings associated with them are a way of signalling just how pious their Christianity was, and how much they were prepared to suffer to bear witness to their truth. By presenting St George in a similar way he is also accorded the status of one who shows supreme courage in the face of extreme suffering, and hence his usefulness as a didactic model is enhanced. However, the construction of St George as a virgin martyr also places emphasis on the topos of male chastity, a topic which, as discussed elsewhere in this collection, was of concern to at least some medieval people. St George can thus act as an exemplar of both forbearance and chastity, and it is instructive to consider his chastity in relation to his more famous role as a heroic knight. There are several aspects of the literary and visual presentation of the saint which may also call to mind ideas of chastity and virginity. St George’s standard emblem, the red cross on a white field, asserts him as a miles Christi, a knight of Christ, which would seem to imply a chaste state, but of potentially far greater significance is his other role, as the champion of the Virgin Mary, for the virginal Queen of Heaven would surely require a virginal champion. The precise origins of this motif are unclear, but the link is certainly evident in the late thirteenth-century Golden Legend version of the narrative, for it is stated that the king of Silene, the city in Libya where the story is set, built a magnificent church in honour of St George and the Virgin following the saint’s victory over the dragon and conversion of the city.45 Altars with a compound dedication to St George and the Virgin are known, for example in the mid-sixteenth century at the parish church in Towcester

78 Samantha J.E. Riches (Northamptonshire),46 and the link is also evidenced in pairings of St George and the Virgin in artefacts such as the Great Seal used by Edward III towards the end of his reign,47 a lost fifteenth-century latten candelabra recorded at the Temple Church in Bristol,48 which combined a figure of St George and the dragon with a statuette of the Virgin and Child, and the pairing of St George and the Virgin and Child on the decoration of a tomb niche at Ratcliffe-on-Soar (Nottinghamshire).49 The connection also appears in various medieval carols, 50 and the relationship between the Virgin and St George is stated explicitly in some literary versions of his legend: ‘men callis hym oure lady knycht’ appears in the Scottish Legendary;51 whilst Lydgate described St George as ‘oure ladyes owen knyght’.52 Furthermore, there is a specifically English tradition surrounding the relationship between St George and the Virgin.53 This occurs in the Stamford imagery as well as in the cycle in glass at St Neot (Cornwall) and the alabaster altarpieces of the life of St George at Borbjerg (Denmark) and La Selle, as well as various individual images.54 The narrative is not related in any extant written legend, but seems to concern the saint fighting a heathen army, being captured and beheaded by them before an altar bearing an image of the Virgin, and then being resurrected and armed by the Virgin as her champion. This story seems to have come to western Europe through a collection of miracles of the Virgin and originally involved the Greek soldier-saint Mercurius, but in visual treatments at least St George seems to have been gradually substituted for this little-known figure.55 Other subjects which appear to take their inspiration from this story are also known, such as the obeisance of St George before the Virgin, found at Windsor (Fig. 5.5). There is also an instance of the Virgin knighting St George with a sword whilst a pair of angels hold his shield and horse, in a late fifteenth-century wall painting at Astbury church (Cheshire), where it is combined with an image of St George on foot, encountering the kneeling princess.56 St George’s status as the Virgin’s champion can be considered with other narrative motifs which combine to give an impression of chastity. One notable factor is that in Alexander Barclay’s version of the legend, dated 1515, St George is said to be offered the princess’s hand in marriage as a thank-offering following the defeat of the dragon.57 This casts him in the heroic mould of Perseus, a hero who rescues a young woman from a monster and is one of many pre-Christian archetypes who appear to inform the iconography of St George. Perseus does indeed marry Andromeda, but St George’s refusal to accept the offer clearly marks him out as chaste.58 A related indication of St George’s sexual status seems to occur in some late medieval images of the combat with the dragon. Figure 5.6 is an example of a group of images where the monster is placed in an attitude which clearly displays its pudenda, complete with a well-defined orifice.59 It seems that the orifice indicated in all these images is often intended to be read as female genitalia, a conclusion which is indicated by the shape of the orifice (invariably an open almond or slit shape, rather than the tightly clenched rounded shape which one might expect of an anus). The stance of the dragon is of equal potential significance, for its position on its back shows that it is ready for humanised, face-to-face intercourse, rather than the standard position that one might expect of an animal. Furthermore, other Georgian dragons

St George as a male virgin martyr 79

Figure 5.5 ‘The obeisance of St George before the Virgin Mary’. Desk-end of south side of quire, 1477–84, St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Canons of Windsor

are presented with breasts or dugs, an unmistakable gendering of the dragon as female. My reading of these ‘feminised’ images from a narrative point of view is that the dragon is offering herself to St George in an effort to avoid death. However, the iconographic significance seems to be that St George is refusing her offer. The gendered dragons are specifically depicted with humanised genitalia, rather than the reptilian cloaca that dragons should have, strictly speaking, so St George is effectively rejecting human sex. Indeed, he can be said to be sublimating his sexual desire through the use of phallic weaponry, such as the sword and the lance, and it is notable that this weaponry is often used to point to the orifice, especially the device of the broken lance. The bestial female forms a very effective antithesis to the noble human male, and her sexuality tends to indicate his chastity. Through conquering the dragon St George is also able to subjugate the sins of the flesh, and this vanquishing of carnal desire strongly resonates with the legends of female virgin martyrs. If the contention that St George is constructed as a virgin martyr in some late medieval treatments of his legend has real merit, it is likely that similar gendering motifs will be found in the presentations of other saints – male and female – who are not explicitly defined as virgin martyrs in surviving literary texts. Whilst these other saints will not be linked to ideas of chastity in quite the same way (through an

80 Samantha J.E. Riches

Figure 5.6 ‘St George and the dragon’, from the fifteenth-century roodscreen at Somerleyton, Suffolk. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

explicit connection to the Virgin Mary and an iconography of sexualised monsters, for example), it seems likely that they too will be polysemic figures. St George’s varied presentation and reception – he has been understood as a figure of national identity, of the urban elite, and of healing, to name but a few of his roles – tend to imply that a skein of associations and responses were woven around this one saint; this strongly supports the contention that medieval saints’ cults were far more complex than is often assumed. The apparent invocation of the legends of virgin martyrs in some versions of the life of St George should remind us not only of the extent to which medieval saint cults were polysemic, but also of the paucity of our own knowledge and understanding. We cannot be sure that William Bruges, the patron of the Stamford cycle, thought of St George as an archetype of male chastity and suffering, rather than as a more overtly masculine hero, or as both at the same time. This is unanswerable, but there remains the possibility that the litany of

St George as a male virgin martyr 81 torments presented in written and visual versions of the legend of St George, with their apparent overtones of the virgin martyr, would have held a special appeal for some of their audience, and helped to cement the idea of the suffering chaste saint as the noblest form of Christian witness.

Notes 1 A. Butler, The People’s Edition of the Lives of the Saints, London, Burns and Oates, n.d. It is notable that an almost identical form of categorisation is used in even the most modern hagiographic resources. See, for example, the ‘For All the Saints’ website: http://users.erols.com/saintpat/ss/ss-index.htm. 2 On Sir John Schorne, see W.H. Kelke, ‘Master John Schorne, The Marston Saint’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 1869, vol. 2, pp. 60–74; E.C. Rouse, ‘John Schorne’s Well at North Marston’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 1970, vol. 18.5, pp. 431–6. 3 The shared interest in charity may appear to be a simple function of sainthood: it would seem reasonable to expect that saints as a class would all be inevitably linked with the Christian virtue of generosity to the poor. However, again, the true situation is far more complex, with relatively few saints being expressly linked with charitableness in their vitae. 4 St Walstan, whose cult is primarily based in Norfolk, was alleged to have been a king’s son who renounced his royal status and became a farm labourer. See M. Gill, ‘The Saint with a Scythe: A Previously Unidentified Wall Painting in the Church of St Andrew, Cavenham’, Journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 1995, vol. 38.3, pp. 245–54. See also P.H. Cullum in this volume (Chap. 9) for further discussion of gender and charity. 5 K.J. Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2000, is an honourable exception to this trend. 6 See, for example, K.A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997; G. Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint, New York, Routledge, 2000. 7 This multi-gendered interpretation of virgin martyrs does not seem to have been considered by other writers on this topic. For example, the title of Winstead’s work Virgin Martyrs makes no reference to gender, yet all the saints she considers are women. 8 For a full discussion of this formulation, see J. Wogan-Browne, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in R. Evans and L. Johnson (eds), Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All her Sect, London, Routledge, 1994, pp. 165–94. 9 ‘St Margaret’, in The South English Legendary, ed. C. d’Evelyn and A.J. Mill, EETS os 235, London, Oxford University Press, 1956, rpt. 1967, pp. 291–302, line 123. Other phrases are used of St Margaret in this version which underline the allusion: she is ‘a hende [gentle] maid’ (line 74) who says to her opponent ‘thou hast poer [power] of mi body’ (line 144). I am grateful to Katherine Lewis for her advice on these references. 10 St Cecilia is a good example of a virgin martyr who does not conform in all respects to the standard pattern. Most notably, she marries during the course of her legend; she persuades her new husband Valerian to live in chastity with her and become a Christian. Valerian’s brother Tibertius is also converted, and is put to death alongside him. Intriguingly, the brothers’ souls are described in the Golden Legend as ‘going forth like virgins from the bridal chamber’ as angels carry them to heaven; Cecilia herself is denied this signifying death scene. Equally, she does not suffer a litany of tortures, merely an attempt to suffocate her in her bath, followed by a decollation (even this is unusual, as it occurs at her home rather than in a public space, and the executioner takes three strikes at her neck, ultimately leaving her to linger for three days). The ways in which this legend varies from the standard tropes of the virgin martyr underline the

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11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18

19 20 21

22

23

extent to which the category of virgin martyr is a fuzzy concept, and can incorporate male figures as well as females. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W.G. Ryan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, vol. 2, pp. 318–23. Figure 4.3 is discussed further by Martha Easton on p. 57 of this collection. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, p. 56. Ashton, Generation of Identity, p. 145; my emphasis. See Katherine Lewis’s contribution to this collection (Chap. 6) for an analysis of the construction of Richard II and Edward the Confessor as virgins; other candidates for this status include St Kenelm, who is discussed in P. Hayward, ‘The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth-Century and Early Eleventh-Century English Hagiology’, in D. Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, Studies in Church History 30, Oxford, Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1993, pp. 81–92. St John the Evangelist is explicitly described as a virgin in The Ancrene Riwle: The Corpus MS Ancrene Wisse, trans. M.B. Salu, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1990, p. 73; Christ’s status as a virgin is discussed by Martha Easton in this volume, p. 53. Thomas Laqueur has persuasively argued that until the eighteenth century a one-sex model of the body predominated in which sexual difference was a matter of degree, as opposed to a recognition of two distinct sexes; T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1990. Sts Valerian and Tibertius, respectively the husband and brother-in-law of St Cecilia (see note 10, above), seem to be examples of this formulation. In the Golden Legend version of the legend their souls are said to be like virgins but their bodies are not described in this way. S. Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2001, pp. 166–241. For a full discussion of the Passio Sanctorum Perpetuae et Felicitatis see T. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 185–230. Heffernan has noted that the passio of St Perpetua and her servant Felicitas presented medieval hagiographers with ‘exquisite models for the portrayal of female heroism’; Heffernan, Sacred Biography, p. 230. W.C.H. Frend, ‘Martyrdom in East and West: The Saga of St George in Nobatia and England’, in D. Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, Studies in Church History 30, Oxford, Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1993, pp. 47–56, pp. 51–2. C.S. Hulst, St George of Cappadocia in Legend and History, London, David Nutt, 1909, p. 46. K.J. Dorsch, Georgszyklen des Mittelalters, Europäische Hochschulschriften 28, Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1983, a Ph.D. dissertation presented at the University of ErlangenNürnberg, describes 102 cycles of St George, but it is not an exhaustive list. At least four cycles in England and France are omitted, including the woodwork at St George’s Chapel, Windsor (Figs 5.2, 5.3 and 5.5 in this volume); a description of the cycle from Stamford (Lincolnshire) is included, but it is incomplete, with the first four subjects omitted. For example, the Valencia altarpiece (c. 1410–20, Victoria and Albert Museum, London) includes a subject of St George nailed and tied with chains to a table. This torture also occurs in two near-contemporary Catalan versions of the legend of St George but is unknown elsewhere: a localised tradition is indicated. C.M. Kauffmann, ‘The altar-piece of St George from Valencia’, Victoria and Albert Museum Yearbook, 1970, vol. 2, pp. 65–100, p. 84. During the research for my Ph.D. thesis I noted twelve different tortures in English, Scottish and Latin lives of St George; all but one appeared in the sample of visual cycles of St George I examined, along with a further five torments. It is significant that not one of these tortures appeared in all treatments. S.J.E. Riches, ‘The La Selle Retable: An English Alabaster Altarpiece in Normandy’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leicester, 1999, tables 2 and 5.

St George as a male virgin martyr 83 24 This most imaginative torture is enhanced by the addition of a rotary mechanism which spins the barrel (and hence St George) round. It is illustrated in S. Braunfels-Esche, Sankt Georg: Legende, Verehrung, Symbol, Munich, Georg D.W. Callwey, 1976, fig. 9. 25 Braunfels-Esche, Sankt Georg, fig. 10. 26 The La Selle retable combines subjects from the life of the Virgin Mary with scenes from the life of St George. The absence of any images of torture almost certainly relates to the apparent desire of the designer to draw parallels between aspects of the experience of the two figures: as the Virgin Mary did not experience any physical (as opposed to emotional) suffering during her early life and Christ’s childhood (the chronological period covered by this narrative) it seems that the designer chose to omit this aspect of St George’s legend too. The altarpiece is fully discussed in Riches, ‘La Selle Retable’. 27 S. Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth, Stroud, Sutton, 2000, pp. 49–50. 28 See K. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; S. Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. 29 Wogan-Browne, ‘Virgin’s Tale’, p. 177, p. 191, note 44. 30 It may be possible to extend this argument to other male saints too, such as St Laurence, who suffered on the grid-iron; this is an area of my research which is currently being developed further. 31 K.C. Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, New York, Routledge, 2000. 32 London, British Library Add. MS 71474, fols 152–62. This cycle is described and discussed in S.J.E. Riches, ‘The Lost St George Cycle of St George’s Church, Stamford: An Examination of Iconography and Context’, in C. Richmond and E. Scarff (eds), St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the Later Middle Ages, Leeds, W.S. Maney for the Dean and Chapter of Windsor, 2001, pp. 135–50. 33 There is certainly no shortage of possible subject-matter: as observed above (note 23) at least seventeen varieties of torture were associated with St George in late medieval written and visual imagery, and it seems that many more torments appeared in earlier versions of the legend. This emphasis on torture in the Stamford cycle is particularly interesting in the light of the rather cursory treatment given to the story of St George and the dragon, which is accorded only two subjects, the combat itself and the baptism of the rescued princess and her parents. Several additional subjects drawn from the dragon story suggest themselves, such as the princess taking leave of her parents, St George meeting the princess, and St George and the princess leading the dragon back to the city (all these appear in St George imagery in the carved desk-ends on the south side of the quire in St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle, dating from the period 1477–84 alongside various scenes of torture, some of which are discussed in this current chapter). We must, of course, acknowledge that eight of the Stamford cycle’s subjects are missing, and that some of the lost images could be drawn from the dragon story. However, evidence on the positioning of the missing subjects suggests that it is unlikely that more than one or two subjects could possibly be added to this section. Indeed it is quite possible there were more than nine subjects of torture in the cycle, which would make the disparity even more pronounced. On the Windsor St George cycle see: S.J.E. Riches, ‘The Imagery of St George and the Virgin Mary in the Woodwork of the Quire at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle’, in L. Keen and E. Scarff (eds), Windsor and Reading, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 25, W.S. Maney, forthcoming. 34 This format occurs in the early sixteenth-century window of St George at St Neot (Cornwall). G.McN. Rushforth, ‘The Windows of the Church of St Neot, Cornwall’, Transactions of the Exeter Diocesan Architectural and Archaeological Society, 1937, 3rd series, vol. 4.3, pp. 150–90, p. 176. 35 This is described in the life of St George which appears in the early-to-mid-fifteenth-

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36 37

38 39

40

41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48 49

century Mirk’s Festial: ‘De Festo Sancti Georgii, Martyris’, in Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by John Mirk, ed. T. Erbe, EETS es 96, London, Kegan Paul, 1905, pp. 132–5, p. 134, lines 14–15. See, for example, the version of this subject in the Valencia altarpiece (see note 22, above), illustrated in Riches, St George, p. 42, fig. 2.4. Robert Mills has argued that the Valencia altarpiece subject contains an explicit allusion to the idea of castration, as the saw is shown passing through the saint’s flesh in the genital region. However, I feel that the starting point of the sawing is deeply significant; indeed, Mills notes that the prophet Isaiah is often depicted being sawn in half whilst upside down, with the saw shown at the genital region. However, it is certainly possible that a sexualised discourse does inform the Valencia imagery, especially when it is seen in comparison with images of St George sawn in half where the saw is shown at his head (for example, in the Stamford cycle). See: R. Mills, ‘“Whatever You Do is a Delight to Me!”: Masculinity, Masochism and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom’, Exemplaria, 2001, vol. 13.1, pp. 1–37, p. 18. Mills, ‘“Whatever You Do is a Delight to Me!”’, pp. 25–33. M.R. Evans, ‘“Unfit to Bear Arms”: The Gendering of Arms and Armour in Accounts of Women on Crusade’, in S. Edgington and S. Lambert (eds), Gendering the Crusades, University of Wales Press, forthcoming. I am grateful to Michael Evans for sharing his unpublished research with me. The gendering potential of armour and clothing more generally is discussed in J.A. Schultz, ‘Bodies that Don’t Matter: Heterosexuality before Heterosexuality in Gottfried’s Tristan’, in K. Lochrie, P. McCracken and Schultz (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 91–110. The saint could, of course, be roasted in his armour most satisfactorily, but the fact that subjects of the roasting of St George show him stripped and placed inside a metal bull indicates the generic need to see – or envision, in relation to written accounts – flesh which can be torn. See, for example, Jan Borman’s altarpiece of the martyrdom of St George, 1493, Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels, illustrated in Riches, St George, pp. 44–5, fig. 2.5. Riches, ‘The Imagery of St George’. This particular torture is a variation on the theme of St George being boiled entire, as seen in the Stamford cycle, for example. Katherine Lewis has observed to me that a similar iconography is sometimes found in treatments of the life of St Katherine, with the heathen empress undergoing a similar process of conversion, torture and execution. It is notable that St Katherine largely avoids the graphic tortures which the ‘generic virgin martyr’ is invariably subject to: perhaps St Katherine’s empress is another example of body substitution, with the iconography of the sexualised torture being introduced into the saint’s legend through a secondary figure to confirm her status as a virgin martyr. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 152–3. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 240. The altar is mentioned in the will of James Glastebery, 1534, who leaves 2 shillings to the light: R.M. Serjeantson and H.I. Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, Archaeological Journal, 1913, vol. 70, pp. 217–452, p. 418. The seal is illustrated in J.J.G. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, London, Royal Academy of Arts in association with Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, catalogue number 672. The candelabra, which was destroyed during the Second World War, is noted in G.H. Cook, The English Medieval Parish Church, 3rd edn, London, Phoenix, 1961, p. 204. The tomb in the niche is that of Ralph Sacheverall (d. 1539) and his wife, but the niche decoration is clearly part of a different scheme as the tomb effigies obscure the figures of St George and the Virgin and Child.

St George as a male virgin martyr 85 50 For occurrences in carols see The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F.J. Child, New York, Folklore Press, 1956, vol. 3, p. 294; vol. 4, p. 499. 51 ‘George’, in Legends of the Saints in the Scottish Dialect of the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Metcalfe, Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1891, vol. 2, pp. 176–203, line 14. 52 ‘The Legend of St George’, in J. Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H.N. MacCracken, EETS es 107, London, Oxford University Press, 1910, rpt. 1962, pp. 145–54, line 85. 53 Whilst the subject of the resurrection of St George by the Virgin seems to be exclusively English, the arming of St George by the Virgin does occur in a non-English work, the Valencia altarpiece, which implies that the motif was known outside England. A connection between the Virgin and St George was evidently made elsewhere too: a late fifteenth-century alabaster statuette, now in Krakow, Poland, which does not appear to be English work, shows the Virgin and Child alongside a crucifix draped with a dead serpent. The predella of the composition bears a relief carving of St George fighting the dragon. This image is illustrated and discussed in Riches, St George, pp. 94–5, fig. 3.22. 54 Riches, St George, pp. 68–100. 55 Rushforth, ‘St Neot’, p. 174. 56 M.C. Gill, ‘“Now help saynt George, our ladye knyght . . . to strengthe our kyng and England ryght”: Rare Scenes of St George in a Wall Painting in Astbury, Cheshire’, Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 1995, vol. 91, pp. 91–102. 57 The Life of St George by Alexander Barclay, ed. W.M. Nelson, EETS os 230, London, Oxford University Press, 1955, lines 1187–8. 58 It is notable that in post-medieval versions, such as Richard Johnson’s Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendome, which dates from the late sixteenth century, St George does marry the princess, a reversion to the ‘original’ narrative device which seems to underline changes in contemporary attitudes to chastity and the importance of family. See Riches, St George, pp. 180–1. 59 Whilst relatively uncommon in the iconography of St George and the dragon, this motif is paralleled in at least forty images, originating largely from Germany, England and the Low Countries, and dating mainly to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. See Riches, St George, pp. 158–78.

6

Becoming a virgin king Richard II and Edward the Confessor Katherine J. Lewis

Richard II’s devotion to Edward the Confessor has been examined by several scholars over the last few years. It has been interpreted within the context of Richard’s pious practices and wider religious interests, and his investment in Edward as a model of the peace-loving king.1 This chapter offers an additional dimension by speculating that Richard’s interest in Edward may also have been a matter of political expediency and that it can tell us something about the anxieties surrounding his status as both king and man. This is to be understood not in general terms, but within the specific context of the mid-1390s, the period which witnessed the death of Richard’s first wife Anne of Bohemia in 1394 and his remarriage to the 6-yearold Isabella of France, in the midst of growing concerns about the succession. Edward the Confessor enjoyed a substantial cult in later medieval England, and many aspects of Richard’s devotion to him were unexceptional. Edward’s popularity grew in part from his reputation as an intercessor who could effect impressive healing miracles from his shrine in Westminster Abbey.2 As a native saint, he provided a tangible link to the Old English past that was becoming a central element of the developing nationalist discourse which sought to identify England as a place of special sanctity and heroism.3 Moreover, several of Richard’s kingly predecessors, in particular Henry III, had displayed conspicuous devotion to Edward as patron of the royal family, an expression of its power and authority.4 The aspect of Edward’s life and cult which I want to identify as being of more particular interest to Richard is his status as a virginal, childless king. The ensuing discussion suggests the ways in which Richard’s devotion to Edward in the mid-1390s involves the appropriation of an ideology and identity of kingly, saintly virginity. This builds upon previous interpretations of Richard’s conception and construction of kingship, and relates in particular to the exalted semi-divine role which he is often argued to have been creating for himself in the later 1390s.5 This examination takes as its starting point the most famous representation of Richard, Edward the Confessor and other favourite saints: the Wilton Diptych.6 Most scholars agree that this piece was commissioned by Richard himself, no earlier than about 1395, around the time he was negotiating his marriage to Isabella of France.7 This chapter aligns itself with those commentators who posit that it was created for his own personal use, and that it was something to which his inner circle of closest friends and supporters may also have had access.8 The diptych can

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 87 therefore tell us something about the ways in which Richard perceived himself and, arguably, wanted to be perceived by others. Richard II is presented to the Virgin and Child by three of his favourite saints: Edmund, the martyr king of East Anglia, Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist. Why this combination of saints? As always with the adoption of a favourite saint we could adduce a variety of motives and explanations: personal, political, spiritual, dynastic, nationalistic. Precise instances of Richard’s devotion to these saints have been catalogued in detail elsewhere.9 It seems far from coincidental, and perhaps of central importance to an understanding of this representation of Richard, that the three saints who join in presenting him to the Virgin were, by this period, explicitly understood and described as virgins.10 The Golden Legend, compiled in the later thirteenth century, tells us that John the Baptist ‘was a virgin and because of his virginity he was called an angel’.11 This is a theme that is continued in later Middle English workings of his life.12 We know next to nothing about the life of St Edmund of East Anglia outside of hagiographic sources.13 Certainly by the time Abbo of Fleury wrote his seminal version of the life in the 980s the king was understood to have lived and died a virgin.14 Ælfric’s translation of this made in the 990s explains that when the saint’s body was first exhumed his decapitated head was found to have miraculously reattached itself to his body, which was incorrupt and bore no marks of his martyrdom.15 As a result Ælfric observes: ‘His body, which lies undecayed, tells us that he lived here in the world chastely and went to Christ with a stainless life.’16 This was elaborated upon in the later Middle Ages. John Lydgate’s life of the saint, written in the 1430s for another king, Henry VI, represents the height of this tradition, describing Edmund as ‘emeraud trewe of chastite most cleene’.17 By the later Middle Ages Edward the Confessor’s unconsummated marriage with Edith had become a standard part of his legend.18 The fact that he lived and died a virgin was fundamental to his construction as a saint in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries.19 Arguably this is because it was the only thing that lent any kind of heroic quality to his life, for as we shall see the claims for Edward’s virginity have little to do with the lived reality of his marital life. But by Richard’s time Edward’s status as a virgin was unequivocal. The metrical French version of his life written for Henry III’s wife Eleanor of Provence – possibly presented to the queen in 1245, the date of Westminster Abbey’s restoration – gives much space to a discussion of Edward’s unwillingness to lose his virginity in the face of demands that he, as a king, must marry.20 Edward prays to God: ‘In this dismay and doubt / Grant me the assurance / That there shall not come on me the injury / Of losing my virginity.’21 Edward and Edith marry and take a secret vow to live chaste and ‘They preserve the flower of chastity / So of it there was much marvel / The white lily, red rose / The heat of their youth / Makes not wither, injures not.’22 In order to establish Edward’s sanctity it was extremely important for this writer, and others who wrote Edward’s life, such as Osbert of Clare and Aelred of Rievaulx, to emphasise that the couple’s self-control enabled them to refrain from sexual activity. The audience is to understand this selfdenial, this ability to curb fleshly urges, as something astonishing, and, more than that, as analogous to martyrdom. The French life makes this absolutely explicit:

88 Katherine J. Lewis By the conquest over fleshly lust Well ought he [Edward] to be called a martyr; Nor do I know of any history which describes A king, who had so great a victory, Conquered his flesh, the devil and the world, Who are three powerful enemies.23 In order to provide a context for this key element of Edward’s life and sanctity we need to explore contemporary constructions of virginity. By the later Middle Ages virginity was perceived not so much as a spiritual state which could apply equally to men and women, as it had been by the early Church Fathers, but largely, although not exclusively, as a physical state which applied primarily to women. This is a feminisation of virginity which has been noted by several scholars.24 All of this links in with the construction, through the medium of the hymen, of woman as a sealed but breachable vessel.25 However, within a discourse of secular male heterosexuality a man has nothing tangible to lose and therefore cannot bear any marks of loss. This is not to say that there are never anxieties about male virginity and its loss, especially within a religious or hagiographical setting, but this is the dominant ideology.26 In spite of this, virginity was not necessarily perceived as an absolute status, but was a discursive and malleable entity. Ideas about the importance of the will consenting to bodily acts and the emphasis on the necessity of possessing internal purity, in order to render physical intactness meaningful and special, introduce us to the concept of levels or degrees of virginity. Virginity is something which can be experienced or assumed, and regained regardless of one’s actual physical status. The most famous example here is provided by Margery Kempe, who was married and gave birth to fourteen children, and yet whom Christ still addressed as ‘a mayden in thi sowle’.27 This provides an example of ways in which virginity and its social and cultural embodiment can be understood as a gender, something that, as Sarah Salih has argued, ‘cannot be self-evident, but must be constituted performatively and read onto the body’.28 Indeed, this performance of virginity seems to have been an intrinsic part of the enactment of royalty in later medieval England. In a recent article Joanna Chamberlayne has explored the ways in which the language and trappings of virginity could be used to represent a queen even after she had married, become sexually active and borne children.29 For example, the royal virginity of Elizabeth Woodville, who was a widow and mother when she married Edward IV, was ceremonially constituted at her coronation by the employment of Marian parallels and Elizabeth’s long blonde hair, worn loose beneath a crown.30 Virginity here provides a means of emphasising the gulf between a queen and all other women.31 Along the same lines, Chamberlayne also explores the ways in which the performance if not the actuality of virginity also impinged upon the ideology of kingship, in particular its claims to power and singularity. A poem written to celebrate the accession of Edward IV praised him as ‘Thoue vergyne knight of whome we synge / Vn-Deffiled sithe thy begynnyng’; thus virginity could be an appropriate kingly quality for even the most unlikely of candidates.32

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 89 Clearly in the case of kings and queens the symbolism of virginity was more important than the actuality – they were expected to provide heirs, after all. Indeed, it is generally in the event of a failure to perform that duty that the phenomenon of the royal, virginal king-saint is located. Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell point out that most male saints who are said to have insisted on chaste marriage (as opposed to falling in with the insistence of a wife) were of high status.33 In this way the virgin king becomes a convenient explanation for subsequent dynastic disruption and dislocation.34 Self-evidently virgin kings may be all very well in retrospect, but in their own time caused serious problems, threatening the welfare of their country by not providing an unequivocal heir to the throne. Edward the Confessor’s lack of an heir led to the Norman Conquest and the establishment of a foreign royal dynasty. Similarly, when the last Saxon emperor Henry II died in 1024 having not produced an heir with his queen Kunigund, his successor Conrad II became the first emperor of the Salin dynasty. Subsequently Henry and Kunigund’s union was explicitly described as virginal and both were canonised in the twelfth century.35 So, whilst in many respects royal, male virginity is deeply problematic, it can at the same time serve as a source and symbol of sacred dignity. In the case of Edward the Confessor, virginity clearly functions as the prime signifier of his singularity. I want to argue that all of these issues may have played a part in Richard’s interest in the figures of male, and predominantly kingly, male virginity, as articulated in the Wilton Diptych, considering virginity as a set of signs that can be performed by a man who is not a virgin in order to lend him certain kinds of specialness and authority. This interest of Richard’s was ultimately determined by political and personal issues which take us back to the wider circumstances within which the diptych was created, and within which Richard’s devotion to the Confessor became especially marked. This will also require an account of the hagiographic rewriting of Edward himself. Arguably Richard was using the performance of kingly virginity to deal with anxieties surrounding his status as both king and man. He was married to Anne of Bohemia for twelve years, and was apparently devoted to her. And yet there were no children, which led to speculation and ultimately intrigue revolving around the succession, implicitly, if not overtly. With no heir of his own body Richard seems at times to have regarded Roger Mortimer as his heir, and there is a later medieval account of John of Gaunt having unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament in 1394 to have Henry Bolingbroke acknowledged as heir to the throne.36 Taking this state of affairs into account Richard’s devotion to Edward the Confessor in the mid-1390s takes on an enhanced significance. Some scholars have even suggested that Richard and Anne may have taken a vow of chastity, in direct imitation of Edward and Edith.37 But there is no direct evidence to suggest that they did and it seems rather unlikely under the circumstances. As we have already seen, actually virginal kings and queens were extremely impractical.38 Richard’s devotion to Edward the Confessor became particularly marked only after Anne’s death in 1394, and I want to suggest that this may have been something of a rearguard action. At this point it is instructive to consider the representation of Richard and Anne on their tomb. Richard made detailed provision for the form and appearance of this

90 Katherine J. Lewis tomb in the contract for its construction drawn up in 1395, and thus gives us an idea of the way in which he wanted to be represented to and remembered by posterity, within the context of the royal dynastic vault.39 Anne had already been buried there, Richard intended his body to end up there. This was the first double royal tomb ever commissioned in England.40 So whatever were to happen to Richard subsequently, in terms of future marriage or possible children, the tomb would serve quite literally to enshrine him as one half of a childless couple. The design for the tomb was based on Edward III’s, in which that king’s many children figure prominently.41 It would have been possible for Richard to leave this feature out of the composition altogether, rather than draw attention to his obvious failings by comparison, but Richard opted to include saints in the place of children.42 Perhaps the implication here is that, like Edward and Edith, Richard and Anne would engender spiritual, rather than physical, progeny.43 The life of Edward the Confessor written soon after his death includes a poem which celebrates the virginal Edith as the mother not of babies, but of angels, conceived through the implanting of heavenly seed in her womb.44 The inscription describing Anne on the tomb states that she fulfilled all the roles expected of a queen, being charitable, and a peacemaker, in line with the duties enjoined on her at her coronation.45 But, of course, she could not fulfil perhaps the most significant of all – the undertaking to be fruitful. Instead, we are told, rather poignantly, that she ‘helped pregnant women’.46 After Anne’s death, while Richard was in the midst of negotiating with Charles VI to marry his daughter Isabella, Philippe de Mezières wrote to Richard to promote peace between the two countries and exhort Richard to go on Crusade. At one point he asked Richard to consider: How many valiant men in this world had no heirs of their body to succeed them! . . . How many valiant men have there been of the New Covenant, emperors, kings and princes, confessors and martyrs, who have passed from this world without leaving direct issue, and yet whose memory is more renowned than that of a thousand others who have left successors.47 This is within the context of a discussion of ‘kings and princes of Christendom who have lived in chastity, of whom the memory in Heaven and on earth is more glorious than of a thousand who married’, de Mezières stating ‘What a number of kings there have been in England, in France and in other kingdoms, who have lived chastely.’48 Thus at this moment Richard was being perceived as and appealed to within the paradigm of the virginal (or at least chaste) childless ruler. Indeed, what this chapter seeks to identify in Richard’s interest in Edward the Confessor is a deliberate strategy to rewrite his first marriage (if not any subsequent ones) as being childless as a result of deliberate choice, not personal failing. In cases of childless marriages women were frequently blamed, and particularly so in the case of royal marriages with national implications.49 It may be that Richard had no more idea than we do why his marriage remained childless. It was most likely a result of bad luck, barrenness on Anne’s part or sterility on his, in which case

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 91 there would not necessarily be any way of knowing for sure, then or now. Perhaps significantly, in 1394 Richard made reference to a white label that should have been the crest of the king’s eldest son ‘si quem procreassemus’ (if we had had children).50 This was a good five months before Anne’s death and might suggest that the couple had resigned or accustomed themselves to their childless state. Some might argue at this point that we could place Richard’s childlessness within the context of what has been identified as his rather equivocal masculinity. It is often argued that Richard was perceived by his contemporaries to be ‘effeminate’ due to his failure to engage in warrior-like activities and the lavish lifestyle he followed at court.51 Indeed, there are suggestions of contemporary suspicion that the close relationship between Richard and Robert de Vere was of a sexual nature.52 In a recent study Chris Fletcher has pointed out the ways in which much of this sort of approach has been presented without a consideration of the culturally specific nature of gender as a social construct.53 Commentators seem to have relied on their own personal perceptions of masculinity rather than examining what we know of late fourteenth-century understandings of the issue.54 Fletcher argues that many of the representations of Richard which are used to bolster the effeminacy argument (most famously those presented by Thomas Walsingham and the Monk of Evesham) must be understood in relation to the purpose for which they were written: largely to explain and/or justify Richard’s deposition and replacement with Henry IV.55 The authors are moral propagandists whose works do not simply attack Richard, but are more widely castigating lay notions of what it meant to be a man and trying to enforce a certain interpretation upon Richard’s conduct and appearance.56 Fletcher explores resistant readings of these texts in which these aspects of Richard’s public persona are instead seen to tie in with contemporary concepts of noble masculinity.57 Moreover, the inspiration for descriptions of Richard’s masculinity as defective stems not from ideas about gender per se, but from their political content. It may be, for example, that, at the time, Richard’s failure to engage the French in full-scale war was significant more in terms of politics than for what it revealed about Richard’s manliness.58 The same could also be said of Richard’s childlessness, that the political ramifications in terms of the succession were of more importance than the implied slur on his virility. But I believe that this is an area that can be explored more fruitfully in terms of Richard’s masculinity and contemporary perceptions that he might be less than manly. After all, becoming a father is one of the signifiers of the transition from boyhood to manhood – a transition that had already been problematic for Richard as a young king struggling to emerge from the control of the Appellant lords.59 When he took government into his own hands in 1389 he complained to the Appellants that he was the only 20-year-old in the kingdom who was not allowed to conduct his own affairs.60 By not providing an heir Richard was failing in his most fundamental duty as not just king, but man as well. There is, of course, always the possibility that Richard suffered from impotence. There is no direct evidence to suggest that he did, or of public conjecture on the subject, but it is likely to have been something that those around him, and in the country at large, at least considered. The recent work of several scholars on

92 Katherine J. Lewis concepts of medieval masculinity has explored the definitive link that was felt to exist between male sexuality and fertility and masculine gender. As Vern Bullough has noted, ‘Ultimately . . . the male was defined in terms of sexual performance, measured, rather simply, as his ability to get an erection . . . masculinity is equated with potency, and any lack of virility is a threat to one’s definition as a man.’61 Similarly, Jacqueline Murray has noted that ‘impotence threatened how a man perceived himself and was perceived by others’.62 She cites as evidence an early fifteenth-century annulment case from York in which one John Skathelok was examined by several women, implicitly prostitutes, in order to ascertain whether he was genuinely impotent and unable to get an erection, in which case his marriage to Alice Russell could be dissolved. In the course of their attempts, the women not only fondle John’s genitals while in various states of undress, but also attempt to incite him to action verbally, one Margaret Bell telling him ‘that he should for shame show these women his manhood if he were a man’.63 Richard II did not have to suffer this sort of public humiliation, and his status as king presumably safeguarded him from all but private speculation on this issue. But, given a contemporary link between sexual dysfunction and doubtful masculinity it seems reasonable to suggest that his lack of children may have been seen as extremely significant – and all the more so in the absence of any other evidence to the contrary. Richard II apparently had no mistresses, for example. On the other hand, at the time the Wilton Diptych was made Richard was probably only in his early thirties, and there was potentially plenty of time to produce an heir, especially if the problem had been with Anne.64 But the longer he remained without an heir the longer he was positively issuing an invitation to the other grandsons of Edward III to get their hopes up at the very least. So perhaps it was with such concerns in mind that Richard began a second foray into the Continental marriage market in 1395, resulting in his marriage in the following year to Princess Isabella, who was six years old. John Palmer has convincingly dealt with the stereotype which sees Richard as having deliberately chosen a child-bride as a result of some personal neuroses, demonstrating that his marriage to a 6-year-old was a product of dynastic and diplomatic factors.65 The fact is that Isabella simply happened to be the eldest daughter of Charles VI. However, arguably, given the nature of his first marriage and conjecture about the succession at the English court, this was rather an unfortunate accident. We have seen that there was plenty of time for Richard to father an heir. Indeed, the marriage contract made quite complicated provision for the territories that were to be given to a whole succession of future English princes/princesses born of the match.66 However, there would be another six years to wait until Isabella reached the canonical age of consent and he could even start thinking about making an attempt. So if there were concerns surrounding Richard’s childlessness, they would not be resolved in the short term. Thus it may be that in the mid-1390s Richard realised that an interim measure was called for, one which would safeguard his status as king, even without the security of an heir. He needed a measure that would explain his current childlessness without compromising his masculinity. This suggestion in turn renders more explicable and meaningful the intriguing development which Richard’s devotion to Edward the Confessor underwent at just

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 93 the same time. It seems that Richard considered himself to be spiritually joined to the Confessor and this was made manifest in his practice of impaling his own arms with the mythical arms of the Confessor, in the manner of husband and wife. 67 Although representations of Edward’s arms are found in association with Richard before this they are first found impaled with Richard’s in 1395, after Anne’s death and before his marriage to Isabella.68 Richard publicly adopted them as his arms in 1397.69 The arms featured on several silver vessels which were made between 1395 and 1396, on his banner, and on at least one of his signet seals.70 How are we to interpret this establishment of a partnership between the two kings? I would suggest in terms of a manifestly practical expedient to shore up his status and authority as king and man.71 If Richard were to become a sacred, virginal king, then that at once would explain away all of the anxieties (and possible slanders) surrounding his childlessness. If we think about the ways in which virginity was mapped onto male and female bodies, we can see how the situation could even be turned to his advantage. A man, unlike a woman, was not generally understood to have anything tangible that could be ruptured, breached or spilt, in the language used of female virginity. Nor did he suffer any specific distinguishing or irreparable wound as a result of loss of virginity. His loss was therefore largely located in the will, in having consented to sex.72 If fathering a child was the only certain way that a man could be identified as a nonvirgin, then Richard’s childlessness would be reified and become a signifier of his virginity. In thinking of himself as a virgin he could rewrite all the attacks on his manliness and kingliness. As we have seen, Edward’s virginity was understood as the result of an epic struggle against the flesh: male continence was not an easy option, for it required great strength of will to overcome the inherently unruly and sexual body.73 We have seen that contemporary notions of masculinity and the male body viewed virginity as rather suspect – if one did not demonstrate active, even aggressive, heterosexuality one was not a real man. Nonetheless, multiple models of both masculinity and kingship coexisted, even if some of these did achieve hegemony over others.74 Contemporary understanding also connected effeminacy with heterosexual excess. For example, in the Confessio Amantis, John Gower stressed the importance of chastity as the fifth element of statecraft, writing that kings (as secular, but nonetheless anointed and consecrated figureheads) owe it to their station and their people to think very carefully before descending into debauchery, because this lapse would ‘change for the wommanhede / The worthinesse of his manhede’.75 So by representing himself as heroically chaste Richard could demonstrate that he was a ‘real’ man, even without fathering children or having sex with wife or mistresses. Regardless of whether Richard and Isabella would eventually have children, in this way he could hedge his bets. The Wilton Diptych displays a model of kingship that rests specifically on the alternative register of power offered by virginity. Building on this potential and taking Edward the Confessor as his partner and mentor, Richard sought to be seen as sacred both by virtue of his coronation, and also through the quasi-saintly properties and strengths afforded to him as a virgin (and a male, royal one at that).

94 Katherine J. Lewis Richard’s arms were impaled with those of Edward the Confessor both in the diptych and on the canopy over his tomb – lending weight to the argument made above that the tomb was designed to represent Richard and Anne as a deliberately chaste couple. By its very nature this reading of Richard’s devotion to Edward the Confessor is not something that can be quantifiably, categorically proven. But to conclude, let us examine a comparative instance which seems to demonstrate fairly unequivocally that for the surviving partner of a childless, royal marriage, reconstructing that marriage as one of deliberate sexual abstinence could be a means of self-validation, not to say self-preservation. For it is likely that the very image of Edward’s kingly virginity – in which, this chapter has argued, Richard was so interested – was nothing more than a product of the circumstances and concomitant needs of his widow, Edith. While there may have been rumours surrounding the possibility that Edward had taken a vow of chastity during his final years, the first real evidence we have relating to this issue is provided by the Vita Aedwardi Regis written for Edith in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest. Pauline Stafford has demonstrated at length the ways in which this text is informed and unified by Edith’s concerns.76 Edith began 1066 as the wife of the king of England. She was also the sister of his successor, Harold, but by the end of the year the events of the Norman Conquest had deprived her of four brothers and left her in an extremely vulnerable position.77 All of the benchmarks by which her identity as a royal woman can be assessed had been destroyed and replaced, or rendered extremely dangerous. In an atmosphere of defeat and recrimination she needed to explain events from her own perspective, both with an eye to establishing some sort of status for herself under the new regime, and in order to exculpate herself from any blame in relation to the Conquest.78 Most importantly she had to account satisfactorily for her failure to produce an heir for Edward, thus arguably leaving the way open for William. There is every reason to think that the union between Edward and Edith solemnised in 1045 was intended to produce heirs.79 Indeed, the context and comparative circumstances of the rather confused events of 1051 which saw Edith’s father, Godwin, banished and Edith herself sent to a nunnery suggest that the succession and more specifically the failure of the marriage to provide an heir was at the root.80 It is likely that Edward was persuaded by his Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, to repudiate Edith with an eye to finding a new wife who could fulfil her role properly. It was also a convenient way of hitting out at the most mighty and potentially most threatening of Edward’s subjects: Godwin. Indeed, it was presumably only that power that saved Edith at this stage, Godwin and his entire family returning in triumph to the court the following year. The period 1051–2 is entirely rewritten in the Vita Aedwardi, Edith presenting her separation from Edward as temporary in intention as well as actuality, suggesting that it was an event that people looked back to as indicative and significant, and which needed to be explained in terms that had nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of offspring.81 Moreover, there is a strong suggestion that Edith also had to contend with accusations of having been unfaithful to Edward, perhaps as a result

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 95 of the age gap of at least fifteen years which existed between the two.82 William of Malmesbury, writing in the early years of the twelfth century, forty years before Edward’s canonisation, tells us that Edith had been suspected of adultery both during Edward’s life and after his death, and that on her death-bed, presumably to counter these rumours, she took a vow to confirm that her virginity remained intact.83 He also indicates another problematic area for Edith, the suggestion that Edward did not consummate the marriage because his hatred for Godwin, whom he believed had killed his brother Alfred, extended to a hatred of his daughter, whom he had been forced to marry. Edward therefore did not wish to father an heir who would be king of England and Godwin’s grandson.84 Taking these circumstances into account we can see that for Edith there was an extremely high premium in rewriting her marriage within the discourse of royal, marital virginity. Indeed, Stafford argues that Edith constructed Edward’s claim to sanctity and thus her own claim to survival on his chastity.85 It is in the Vita Aedwardi written at her behest that we have the first account of the elements which, by Richard’s period, had become an elaborate articulation of Edward’s lifelong virginity. Most notably it recounts the vision of Brihtwald, Bishop of Wiltshire (d. 1045). We are told that during the 1030s, when Edward was in exile in Normandy: he saw the blessed Peter, first of the apostles, consecrating the image of a seemly man as king, assign him the life of a bachelor, and set the years of his reign by a fixed reckoning of his life. And when the king even at this juncture asked him who of the generations to come would reign in the kingdom, Peter answered, ‘The kingdom of England belongs to God; and after you He has already provided a king according to His own will.’86 This king is understood to be Edward – marked out as a virginal ruler years before his marriage. Through the medium of the Vita Aedwardi childlessness is appropriated by Edith and represented as unequivocally the result of divine ordination – not personal failing. Unlike Kunigund Edith was not canonised with Edward the Confessor, but she still succeeded in establishing herself as an extremely laudable queen and woman, rather than as a barren adulteress. She thus shored up her position in post-Conquest England, living a reclusive but secure and wealthy life at Wilton. This is not to suggest that any of the above would be directly apparent to Richard II, nor that his and Edith’s concerns would be in any specific sense congruent. But on a basic level Edith’s need to account for a childless marriage can be related to Richard’s position in the mid-1390s. It would suit his purposes very well to rewrite his marriage to Anne as having been a jointly heroic exercise in chastity. Is this perhaps the context in which we should understand the frequent descriptions of Richard and Anne as having been so entirely devoted to each other?87 Is this also part of the rewriting? As we have seen, the life of Edward the Confessor established that marital celibacy was a form of martyrdom: surely an unconsummated marriage with a much loved partner would make an even more compelling claim to sanctity? This reading of Richard’s devotion to Edward the Confessor is intended to be only one part of a wider whole, seeking to demonstrate why the sort of virginity

96 Katherine J. Lewis which Edward represented could have been an extremely appropriate vehicle for Richard’s articulation of his kingship. As a final point its appropriateness lies in the fact that it was so entirely removed from the concerns of most of his male subjects. It thus becomes an excellent means of expressing his worthiness, sacredness and otherness. It also becomes a way of turning a potentially divisive personal, intimate failing into a magnificent public triumph.

Notes I would like to thank Mark Ormrod, Craig Taylor, Chris Fletcher, Joanna Huntington, Patricia Cullum and Victoria Thompson for their advice and encouragement with this chapter. 1 See, for example, N. Saul, Richard II, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 311–16; S. Mitchell, ‘Richard II: Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, London, Harvey Miller, 1997, pp. 115–24. It is dedicated to Helen Dorward. 2 For the development of the cult of Edward the Confessor at Westminster with particular reference to the royal family see P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 199–206 for discussion of Richard II within this context. 3 N. Saul, ‘Richard II’s Ideas of Kingship’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, London, Harvey Miller, 1997, pp. 27–32, esp. p. 27 for the legitimising link which Anglo-Saxon king saints’ cults provided with the Old English past. 4 Binski, Westminster Abbey, pp. 52–89. 5 For discussion of this point see Saul, Richard II, pp. 366–404; N. Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, English Historical Review, 1995, vol. 110, pp. 854–77; Saul, ‘Richard II’s Ideas of Kingship’. 6 The unique nature of the diptych has led to a number of theories about its meaning and function. D. Gordon, ‘The Wilton Diptych: An Introduction’, in Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, London, Harvey Miller, 1997, pp. 19–26 provides a useful summary of many of these. The collection as a whole provides the most comprehensive study of its content and context. See also D. Gordon, The Wilton Diptych: Making and Meaning, London, National Gallery Publications, 1993; Saul, Richard II, pp. 304–7. 7 Gordon, ‘Wilton Diptych: An Introduction’, p. 20 for the majority opinion that the diptych was commissioned by Richard, and on 1395 as the terminus post quem for its creation. The broom-cod collar worn by the white hart on the reverse is a reference to part of the arms of Charles VI of France, and Richard did not incorporate broom-cod into his own livery until the marriage negotiations of 1395. 8 For example, John Harvey suggested that the diptych functioned as an icon for members of Richard’s innermost circle; J. Harvey, ‘The Wilton Diptych – A Re-examination’, Archaeologia, 1961, vol. 98, pp. 1–28. Maurice Keen has also discussed the possibility of some sort of secret brotherhood with the diptych at its centre, although with a different emphasis from Harvey; M. Keen, ‘The Wilton Diptych: The Case for a Crusading Context’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, London, Harvey Miller, 1997, pp. 189–96. 9 See Saul, Richard II, pp. 309–16 and Mitchell, ‘Kingship and the Cult of Saints’ for instances of Richard’s gifts to the shrines of Edward the Confessor at Westminster and Edmund at Bury. John the Baptist’s intercession is explicitly requested in Richard’s epitaph on his tomb.

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 97 10 This is not something that has been remarked upon by any other commentator on the diptych, as far as I know. 11 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W.G. Ryan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, vol. 1, p. 334. 12 For example, Speculum Sacerdotale, ed. E.H. Weatherby, EETS os 200, London, Oxford University Press, 1936, p. 165. 13 The brief reference to his death in 870 (actually 869) in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle constitutes the only documentary reference; see The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, trans. and ed. M. Swanton, London, Phoenix Press, 2000, p. 71. 14 For an edition of Abbo’s life see Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, ed. T. Arnold, Rolls Series 96, London, Longman, 1890, part 1, pp. 3–25. 15 See The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, trans. and ed. K. Crossley-Holland, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 228–33 for a translation of Ælfric’s ‘Passion of St Edmund’. 16 Anglo-Saxon World, p. 231. 17 Altenglische Legenden: Neue Folge, ed. C. Horstmann, Heilbronn, Henniger, 1881, pp. 376–445, p. 381, line 215. 18 E. John, ‘Edward the Confessor and the Celibate Life’, Analecta Bollandiana, 1979, vol. 97, pp. 171–8; D. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 94–131 discusses Edward’s chaste marriage alongside other royal examples. 19 The official canonisation happened in 1161. I am indebted to Joanna Huntington for her thoughts on the construction and development of Edward’s sanctity. 20 For an edition of the text and translation, see Lives of Edward the Confessor, ed. and trans. H.R. Luard, Rolls Series 3, London, Longman, 1858. It may have been written by Matthew Paris; see P. Binski, ‘Reflections on the Estoire de Seint Aedward: Hagiography and Kingship in Thirteenth-Century England’, Journal of Medieval History, 1990, vol. 16, pp. 333–50. 21 Lives of Edward the Confessor, p. 210, lines 1107–10; the original French is on p. 56. 22 Lives of Edward the Confessor, p. 214, lines 1242–6; the original French is on p. 60. 23 Lives of Edward the Confessor, pp. 214–15, lines 1255–60; the original French is on pp. 60–1. 24 For the most detailed discussion see K.M. Phillips, ‘The Medieval Maiden: Young Womanhood in Late Medieval England’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of York, 1997; also her article ‘Maidenhood as the Perfect Age of Woman’s Life’, in K.J. Lewis, N.J. Menuge and K.M. Phillips (eds), Young Medieval Women, Stroud, Sutton, 1999, pp. 1–24. Phillips has a book on the subject forthcoming. See also J. Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. 25 For further discussion of this point see J. Wogan-Browne, ‘Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences’, in S. Kay and M. Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 24–42. See also Wogan-Browne, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in R. Evans and L. Johnson (eds), Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All her Sect, London, Routledge, 1994, pp. 165–94. See also C. Atkinson, ‘“Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass”: The Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Family History, 1983, vol. 8, pp. 131–43 and relevant essays in C.L. Carlson and A.J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999. 26 For example, within a monastic/clerical setting nocturnal emissions and their ramifications for male chastity was a frequently discussed topic, and an obvious site of unease. For further discussion of this point see C. Leyser, ‘Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emissions and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages’, in D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe, London, Longman, 1999, pp. 103–20. 27 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. L. Staley, Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications, 1996, p. 62.

98 Katherine J. Lewis 28 S. Salih, ‘Performing Virginity: Sex and Violence in the Katherine Group’, in C.L. Carlson and A.J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 95–112, p. 100. See also K.C. Kelly, ‘Useful Virgins in Medieval Hagiography’, in the same, pp. 135–64. 29 J. Chamberlayne, ‘Crowns and Virgins: Queenmaking During the Wars of the Roses’, in K.J. Lewis, N.J. Menuge and K.M. Phillips (eds), Young Medieval Women, Stroud, Sutton, 1999, pp. 47–68. 30 Chamberlayne, ‘Crowns and Virgins’, pp. 60–2. 31 Chamberlayne, ‘Crowns and Virgins’, p. 61. 32 Quoted in Chamberlayne, ‘Crowns and Virgins’, p. 55. 33 D. Weinstein and R.M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 76. 34 For further discussion of this point see Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, pp. 119–23. 35 Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, pp. 119–20. 36 Saul, Richard II, pp. 396–7; C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 196–7 for a translation of John Hardyng’s account of Gaunt’s petition, written in the early 1460s. It is by no means certain that this event ever took place. 37 See, for example, Caroline Barron, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, in D. Gordon, The Wilton Diptych: Making and Meaning, London, National Gallery Publications, 1993, pp. 13–19, p. 15 for the suggestion of a vow; P. Tudor-Craig, ‘The Wilton Diptych in the Context of Contemporary English Panel and Wall Painting’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, London, Harvey Miller, 1997, pp. 207–22, p. 219 for a more strongly stated case in favour of a vow. 38 As Elliott points out, there is little evidence for chaste royal marriages being discussed as such at the time, only in retrospect; Spiritual Marriage, p. 120. A vow of chastity thus functions as an explanation for the lack of children, rather than the cause. Discussion of this point in relation to Richard II can only ever be speculative of course. It may be that Richard and Anne came to the conclusion that they could not have children (see below for more on this point) and perhaps decided to stop having sex and take a vow of chastity as a result, but it seems unlikely that such a vow was the reason why they did not produce an heir. Similarly, Binski has suggested that Richard’s devotion to the Confessor may have served to legitimise rather than inspire his own childlessness; Binski, Westminster Abbey, p. 200, note 176. 39 P. Lindley, ‘Absolutism and Regal Image in Ricardian Sculpture’, in D. Gordon, L. Monnas and C. Elam (eds), The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, London, Harvey Miller, 1997, pp. 61–83, discusses the form and construction of the tomb; see p. 63 for the contract and its terms. See also Binski, Westminster Abbey, pp. 200–2. 40 Lindley, ‘Absolutism and Regal Image’, p. 62. The form of the tomb is often taken as one of the indications of Richard’s great love for his queen. 41 Lindley, ‘Absolutism and Regal Image’, p. 64; see Binski, Westminster Abbey, pp. 199–206 for Edward III’s tomb more generally and the emphasis it places on that king’s generative prowess. 42 If the figures of saints were ever attached, they are now lost. It is tempting to wonder whether Richard had particular saints in mind, and whether they would have been the same as those who feature on the diptych. 43 Tudor-Craig has also made this point about Richard and Anne, in relation to the life of Edward the Confessor; ‘The Wilton Diptych’, p. 219. 44 The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, trans. and ed. F. Barlow, 2nd edn, Oxford, Clarendon, 1992, pp. 72–5 for the original and translation of the poem. It is actually addressed to the new abbey church at Wilton, Edith’s own foundation, but as Monika Otter has pointed out, ‘it takes no special interpretive skill to see that it is also addressed metonymically to the church’s founder, Edith herself, consoling her for her

Richard II and Edward the Confessor 99

45 46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66

childlessness by suggesting that the surrogate motherhood she has chosen by building a nunnery is much preferable to biological motherhood’. M. Otter, ‘Closed Doors: An Epithalamium for Queen Edith, Widow and Virgin’, in C.L. Carlson and A.J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 63–92, p. 70. For the full inscription, see Lindley, ‘Absolutism and Regal Image’, p. 72. Lindley, ‘Absolutism and Regal Image’, p. 72. Similarly, one of the best-known miracles of Edward the Confessor is his curing of a barren young woman who suffered from scrofula, after which she was able to conceive and give birth to a beautiful child; see Life of King Edward, pp. 61–2. Philippe de Mezières, Letter to King Richard II, ed. and trans. G.W. Coopland, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1976, p. 37. De Mezières, Letter to King Richard II, p. 36. For a general discussion of theories explaining reproductive failure, see J. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 228–58. M. Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown’, English Historical Review, 1998, vol. 113, pp. 580–609, p. 597, note 1. For a detailed discussion of this approach to Richard, see C. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999, esp. pp. 6–13. I am very grateful to Chris Fletcher for providing me with a copy of his research. Saul, Richard II, p. 121. Beyond allegation, there is no real indication of homosexuality in Richard’s relationship with any of his close male friends. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, pp. 9–10. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, pp. 10–11. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, pp. 25–33. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, p. 34. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, pp. 34–41. Fletcher, ‘Perceptions of the Masculinity of Richard II’, pp. 42–53. See Saul, Richard II, pp. 176–204 for an account. For Thomas Walsingham’s account of this incident see Historia Anglicana, ed. H.T. Riley, Rolls Series 28, London, Longman, 1864, vol. 7, p. 358. Richard was actually twentyone at the time. V.L. Bullough, ‘On Being a Male in the Middle Ages’, in C.A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 31–45, p. 43. J. Murray, ‘Hiding behind the Universal Man: Male Sexuality in the Middle Ages’, in V.L. Bullough and J.A. Brundage (eds), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, New York, Garland, 2000, pp. 123–52, p. 139. Some of the depositions made in this case have been edited and translated in P.J.P. Goldberg, Women in England, c. 1275–1525, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995, pp. 219–22, quoted deposition on p. 219; my emphasis. Several of the other women use a similar formula in relation to John’s failure to achieve an erection. In Hardyng’s account of Gaunt’s attempts to have Bolingbroke recognised as Richard’s heir the lords ask, ‘Who is it who dares to suggest that the king will have no issue? For he is young and able to have children’; Given-Wilson, Chronicles of the Revolution, p. 196. J.J.N. Palmer, ‘The Background to Richard II’s Marriage to Isabel of France (1396)’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 1971, vol. 44, pp. 1–17; Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377–99, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 166–74. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, pp. 169–74. It could be argued that some of the territorial claims made by Richard in the contract are so extraordinary (asking for the Angevin Empire back, for example) that they are not to be taken as anything more

100 Katherine J. Lewis

67 68 69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

than an attempt to push the dowry up, but the possibility that Richard seriously believed that he could and would father children by Isabella should not, nonetheless, be discounted. Barron, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, p. 18; Saul, Richard II, p. 311, p. 457, note 100. Barron, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, p. 22; Saul, Richard II, p. 457, note 100; Mitchell, ‘Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, p. 117. Mitchell, ‘Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, p. 117. In the same year Richard allowed the five new dukes he had just created to impale their arms with those of the Confessor too, leading Keen to suggest that the impaled arms of the Confessor had some specific meaning among Richard’s intimate circle, which he relates to crusading; Keen, ‘Crusading Context’, pp. 194–6. Mitchell, ‘Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, p. 117; Keen, ‘Crusading Context’, p. 195. In this respect my interpretation of the partnership differs from that of Barron and Saul who see Richard looking backwards to Anne and using Edward as some sort of substitute partner; see references in note 67 above. Instead, I see Richard looking forwards to Isabella. Binski has suggested that Edward functioned as a father-figure for Richard; Westminster Abbey, p. 87, p. 200. As was noted above, this is not an absolute rule, but certainly the dominant perception within a secular discourse. See J. Murray, ‘“The Law of Sin that Is in my Members”: The Problem of Male Embodiment’, Chapter 1 in this volume. For a discussion of multiple medieval masculinities see D.M. Hadley, ‘Introduction’, in Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe, London, Longman, 1999, pp. 1–18. The English Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, EETS es 81, part 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1900, p. 354, lines 4256–7. P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh Century England, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997, esp. pp. 41–7; see also Otter, ‘Closed Doors’. For Edith’s biography, see Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, pp. 255–79. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, p. 45. F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 2nd edn, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 81, for the Archbishop’s prayer at Edward’s coronation that God will send many children to the king. See also Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, p. 254. Both Barlow and Stafford point out that Edward’s virginity is largely the result of post-mortem extrapolation based on his childlessness and encouraged by his widow. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, pp. 264–5. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, p. 32, p. 264. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, p. 210. De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series 90, London, Longman, 1887, p. 239. De Gestis Regum Anglorum, p. 239. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, pp. 260–1. Barlow, Life of King Edward, pp. 9–10. I am grateful to Victoria Thompson for her thoughts on this passage. Saul, Richard II, p. 455, for a representative assertion that Richard and Anne were deeply in love. It was suggested to me by Mark Ormrod that this image should perhaps be questioned, as most of the evidence for it comes from after Anne’s death, but space does not permit further discussion of this point here.

7

Female piety and impiety Selected images of women in wall paintings in England after 1300 Miriam Gill

The mid-fourteenth-century nurture poem ‘How the Good Wijf tau
te Hir Dou
tir’ begins with exhortations to church attendance and charity.1 The adoption of the literary device of maternal instruction and the primacy accorded to prayer and benevolence, over prudential advice about marriage and domestic management, suggests that the anonymous but probably clerical author considered these activities essential expressions of female piety. The Book of the Knight of the Tour Landry (1371, translated into Middle English in the mid-fifteenth century) also emphasises these feminine virtues and illustrates them with reference to a range of narrative sources: virgin saints such as St Katherine affirm female education, the exemplum of Tutivillus warns against gossip in church, and scriptural and hagiographical extracts promote the Works of Mercy.2 Such stories are commonplace in conduct literature for elite young women, but also appear in public forms such as preaching, drama and church art, where they are necessarily directed to a wider audience. This chapter examines the extent to which parochial representations of selected didactic and devotional subjects featuring women can be related to gendered ideals of piety, focusing on three mural subjects which have prominent female figures and can be closely identified with the expressions of female piety outlined above: St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, the Warning to Gossips and the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy. All three subjects are found in medieval English wall painting after 1300 and the majority of the surviving representations date from the fourteenth century. The study of each of these images reveals particular factors which need to be considered when monumental representations are discussed in relation to gender. This chapter discusses the ways in which these subjects with prominent female figures were intended to speak to both men and women, while retaining an awareness of those instances where gender is likely to have been a relevant factor in their reception. St Anne teaching the Virgin is first found in murals in the early fourteenth century and twenty-two possible examples of the subject are known, of which fourteen are still visible or partially visible.3 The Warning to Gossips shows a demon, often identified as Tutivillus, encouraging women to chatter during the mass. This subject is found in a total of sixteen murals from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, thirteen of which are now visible.4 In English wall paintings the gossips are always female, although this is not true of representations in wood carving and

102 Miriam Gill stained glass.5 There are over forty paintings of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, a list derived from Matthew 25:35–6 of the good deeds which would be rewarded at the Last Judgement. As the title suggests, these were practical acts of benevolence, such as feeding the hungry. Along with the Seven Deadly Sins this subject from the catechism is found in wall painting from the early fourteenth century.6 Surviving murals depict both men and women performing the Works, but the prominence and numerical preponderance of female protagonists has long been noted.7 Murals and conduct literature both draw their subjects from a range of literary genres: hagiography, exempla and catechisms. There is one instance where two of the three chosen subjects survive in the same church, at Slapton in Northamptonshire, but they are not displayed together. No extant or recorded mural scheme combines these images in the sort of assemblages of female vice and virtue found in nurture texts. The different treatment of these motifs in literary and visual modes suggests that they may have spoken differently to their different audiences. This raises the question of the extent to which parochial representations of these subjects were motivated by or interpreted in relation to ideas about gender. The interpretation of the mural evidence presents specific problems and possibilities. Wall paintings in parish churches are an important survival of medieval visual culture. The subjects they contain would have been familiar to a range of viewers that transcended traditional distinctions of status, education and gender.8 Wall paintings survive in situ, but represent only one element of a once complex and diverse visual culture. Most surviving schemes are fragmentary, so we know little of the other murals to which they originally related, and often even less of the other representations in the church. Although this chapter focuses on wall paintings, this is not intended to suggest that a single medium is a sufficient guide to the deployment and meaning of these subjects. Indeed, their representations in other media may have invited different readings. Even more elusive is much of the oral culture that interpreted such parochial images. The probable diversity of the viewers and patrons of mural images raises the probability of a multiplicity of interpretations and readings. Unfortunately, little is known of patterns of English mural patronage even in the later Middle Ages. Of the approximately eighty sites considered here, evidence for patronage survives in only four cases. The paintings of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read in tomb recesses at Northmoor in Oxfordshire (Fig. 7.1) and Hereford Cathedral were presumably commissioned by those commemorated, Thomas de la Mare and his wife at Northmoor, Dean Swinefield at Hereford, or their executors.9 The painting of St Anne teaching the Virgin at Corby Glen in Lincolnshire (Fig. 7.2) is on the north wall of the north aisle, which had been erected as a Lady Chapel by Margery de Crioll, whose will is dated 1319.10 The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy at Trotton in Sussex belong to an extensive didactic scheme apparently financed by the Lord of the Manor, Sir Thomas de Camoys (d. 1421).11 Unfortunately, this evidence is too limited to sustain any general assessment of the gender profile of those who patronised this material. The majority of undocumented schemes may have been the result of manorial beneficence, clerical initiative or combined parochial effort. The selections made by individual donors may have been guided by the wishes of the parish or

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 103

Figure 7.1 ‘St Anne teaching the Virgin to read’ (c. 1340), painting in tomb recess above effigy of Sir Thomas de la Mare, Northmoor, Oxfordshire, now severely abraded. Source: Watercolour by E.T. Long: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top Oxon a. 75. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library. Drawing by the author

the local clergy. Moreover, the exact form in which a subject was portrayed depended on the models available to the artist. The paintings of the gossips at Little Melton and Colton, and the Seven Works of Mercy at Moulton St Mary and Wickhampton (all in Norfolk), are sufficiently similar to conclude that the same visual model and probably the same painters were employed.12 However, very little is otherwise known of the typical work practices of English mural workshops. Equally mysterious is the reception of such public religious art. The scanty literary evidence does not relate to the subjects covered in this chapter. Individual reactions were probably dependent on experience and knowledge of other related texts and images. Moreover, changes in context may have altered interpretations over time. Although a study of literature, preaching and drama can suggest some of the expectations and interpretative mechanisms which viewers brought to these representations,13 one of the most interesting aspects of these three subjects is the frequent discrepancy between the textual and visual traditions. While these images clearly relate to a range of ideas preserved and disseminated through medieval texts, this chapter will demonstrate that they do not merely illustrate them. Such a divergence between textual and visual traditions is perhaps most evident in the motif of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read. This image appears to contradict the main textual source for the childhood of the Virgin, the second-century Protoevangelium, which stated that she was presented to the Temple in Jerusalem at the age of three and lived there until her marriage.14 There were medieval variants of

104 Miriam Gill

Figure 7.2 ‘St Anne teaching the Virgin to read’, north wall of north aisle, Corby Glen, Lincolnshire; probably financed by Margery de Crioll (d. 1319). Source: Photograph and drawing by the author

this account, such as the Evangelium de Nativitate which stated that the Virgin returned home to prepare for marriage, or the work of Epiphanus which described St Anne as caring for her daughter until the age of seven and then accompanying her for the first two years of her stay in the Temple.15 Only one wall painting, possibly the earliest surviving English mural representation of this subject, on the south wall at Croughton in Northamptonshire (c. 1310), integrates the Education of the Virgin into a narrative cycle.16 It locates the incident between the Presentation of the Virgin and her espousals and shows Joachim leading his reluctant daughter away from the tutelage of her mother. In this context the reading motif may be intended to suggest the pious domesticity which Mary is loath to abandon, rather than her first lessons. By contrast, all of the other known murals of this subject depict it as an independent scene, although it is occasionally accompanied by another Marian image, such as the Annunciation. Even once the Education of the Virgin was established as an artistic motif it does not seem to have been integrated into subsequent literary accounts of Mary’s childhood.17 The discrepancy between text and image and the frequent portrayal of this subject as an independent scene suggest that it was a deliberate formulation rather

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 105 than an incidental elaboration of Marian iconography. However, the reasons for its creation are hard to trace. It is generally accepted that the earliest instances of this subject are English.18 A possible representation has been identified in a damaged panel of stained glass at Thurlby in Lincolnshire (c. 1225–50), while the subject is clearly found in the Alphonso Psalter, dated to c. 1302–16.19 Representations on the Musée de Cluny panel (1330s) (which probably adorned the High Altar of the Dominican House at Thetford) and in the Alphonso Psalter have connections with the Order of Preachers, suggesting that they may have promoted, even created, the image. Dominican interest in education and their participation in the religious education of laywomen may confirm that this image was devised to affirm female literacy.20 Alternatively, the origins of the image may have been typological, expressing the Virgin’s unique destiny. This seems to have been its function on the Musée de Cluny panel, where it may have balanced a scene of the Annunciation (now lost). The unusual text derived from Psalm 118:50, ‘Harken, O daughter and see, and incline thine ear, for a king shall desire thy beauty’, alludes to the Virgin’s status as Mother of God and Bride of Christ elect.21 The Dominican Order famously rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which stressed the Virgin’s inherited sinlessness. Perhaps they found this image which combined Christ’s election with St Anne preparing her daughter for her high vocation a more acceptable expression of the Virgin’s unique status. Whatever its precise origins, or the theological ends to which it was occasionally employed, it seems very likely that its frequent deployment in the illumination of devotional books represents an affirmation and encouragement of religious literacy and the use of texts in private devotion, particularly for the laity.22 There is some evidence that this enthusiasm may relate to contemporary practice. This was a period in which high-ranking laity, often women, were using such devotional books to introduce into their domestic circles traditionally monastic patterns of devotion.23 It seems that laywomen were responsible for the primary education of their children, particularly their daughters.24 The connection between this image and a period of increasing literacy is also particularly suggestive.25 Many depictions of this subject anachronistically showed the Virgin reading the opening of the Little Office composed in her honour: ‘Domine labia mea aperies’. Since the Book of Hours was the text from which many laypeople learned to read, this detail may represent a happy combination of realism and ideology.26 However, these are the words of a prayer and their display suggests that it is devotional, Latinate literacy, perhaps with its attendant benefits of broader career choice and benefit of clergy, which is being commended.27 A more universal statement of the value of literacy is perhaps found in the alternative text of the ‘ABC’ displayed in a Sarum Book of Hours of c. 1325–30,28 and in a lost fourteenth-century wall painting from Mentmore in Buckinghamshire.29 These complementary readings make perfect sense in the private context of illuminated devotional books, whose users, whether elite women or male clerics, might identify with either St Anne the teacher or her daughter learning to read and pray. However, St Anne teaching the Virgin to read could encompass a range of meanings. For example, the unusual inclusion

106 Miriam Gill of St Joachim in an image of the Education of the Virgin with the book owner, Amice de Haddon, in the Fitzwarin Psalter (later 1340s), may represent an invocation of the Virgin’s parents for help in conceiving a child.30 Moreover, we may need to explore other interpretations if we are to understand what this apparently popular and novel image meant to parochial congregations, the majority of whom were illiterate. The example of Margery de Crioll at Corby Glen suggests that the choice of this image may sometimes relate more closely to the interests of the patron than the parishioners (Fig. 7.2), but the paucity of patronal evidence prevents us from assessing how typical this pattern was. The will of Margery de Crioll reveals her not only as a woman who owned religious books, ‘Matyns de Notre Dame’ and a ‘Little Book of Matyns and Common of the Saints’, but also as a member of a circle where such aids to piety were owned and exchanged among female friends and relations. Her ‘Matyns de Notre Dame’ had belonged to her sister and was bequeathed to Lady Margery le Valence, and her best paternoster beads, a gift from the Countess of Pembroke, were left to one Elizabeth de Pavenham, a nun at Shaftesbury.31 St Anne teaching the Virgin seems a natural choice for a lady with such interests and experience. Perhaps for illiterate parochial viewers the Virgin’s literacy was an accomplishment which signified her exalted status. Alternatively such images may have been understood either as expressions of the affective bond between Mary and her mother, suggested by compositions such as that at Corby Glen in which Anne enfolds her daughter in her cloak (Fig. 7.2), or as expressing the general value of maternal education which might include but was not confined to literacy, as in the ideal of oral, maternal instruction recalled in the poem ‘How the Good Wijf tau
te Hir Dou
tir’. Sadly, many paintings such as that at Corby Glen are too badly damaged to assess whether the text displayed was from the Book of Hours, suggesting the association of reading and prayer, or a simple ‘ABC’. Appropriately, the most legible instance is in the mural in the Refectory of Coventry Charterhouse (c. 1411–17).32 In contrast to the parochial corpus this mural was created for an enclosed community of male religious whose patron was St Anne. In this context the image may have resonated with the practice of devotional reading during communal meals, raising again the possibility that images of learned women may function as models for learned men.33 When a similarly contextual approach is applied to the corpus of parochial murals, two early patterns of deployment emerge which have received insufficient recognition. While these do not necessarily reveal the extent to which wall paintings of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read were associated with the promotion of female literacy, they do extend our understanding of the range of meanings invested in this image and the range of contexts in which it was deployed. The first pattern of deployment is the use of this subject as a devotional image of the Virgin. While the image may have had personal resonances for Margery de Crioll, St Anne teaching the Virgin was one of two major figurative subjects painted in her Lady Chapel, the other being St Christopher. In addition to the narrative scene already described, the north wall of the church at Croughton in Northamptonshire

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 107 contains a mural of the Virgin taught by St Anne paired with the Annunciation.34 The remainder of the wall is covered with a cycle of the Life of Christ, suggesting that these two scenes, at the east end, were selected to accompany a side altar, presumably dedicated to the Virgin. Similarly, in the mid-fourteenth-century south chancel chapel at Wotton Wawen in Warwickshire, a Marian dedication is suggested by the now badly damaged scheme on the east wall which combines an image of St Anne and the Virgin (lower part of figures only) with a scene of the Coronation of the Virgin.35 In both these paintings the Education of the Virgin is related to her destiny as mother and bride of Christ. Images of the Education of the Virgin alone also accompany the positions of probable Lady Altars at Slapton in Northamptonshire (c. 1350) and possibly Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire (c. 1330–40).36 This pattern may represent an earlier strand in the interpretation of this image, which pre-dates its adoption as the prime devotional representation of St Anne.37 This devotional rather than didactic reading may help to explain a very puzzling aspect of the chronology of the mural corpus. Fourteen of the datable parochial murals come from the middle of the fourteenth century or before, but only a further six murals have been identified for the period between the later fourteenth century and the Reformation. Moreover, only one of this latter group, of doubtful identification, is an isolated representation in a parish church.38 In addition to the patronal image in the Charterhouse at Coventry, there is one representation in the scheme of devotional and thaumaturgic subjects in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century scheme at St Wulfstan’s Hospital in Worcester and a domestic wall painting from the early sixteenth century in the Rochford Tower at Spirbeck near Boston in Lincolnshire.39 The scene also appears in the schemes of the Holy Kindred in the church at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire (1420s) and in the chantry of Catherine and Peter Arderne (d. 1467) at Latton in Essex.40 The continued popularity of St Anne in stained glass and as the dedicatee of parochial gilds demonstrate that there was no late medieval decline in interest in this saint, indeed rather the reverse.41 This ‘disappearance’ appears too early to be an effect of any anti-Lollard reaction or doubts about the religious value of literacy. It certainly does not fit with the apparent popularity of didactic subjects in mural painting during the second half of the fourteenth century evident in the other two subjects discussed in this chapter. However, it is reminiscent of the pattern observed by Tristram in relation to the representation of the Virgin and Child.42 This subject, frequently found in the early fourteenth century, is rare after 1350, probably as a consequence of the increased recourse to more prestigious media, particularly threedimensional sculpture, for this central devotional image. If this is the case with St Anne and the Virgin it strengthens the impression that in murals at least it functioned primarily as a devotional image. This does not negate its personal or didactic potential, but does suggest that this was not always the primary significance of its display. A second aspect of this devotional use of the image may be evident in its display in paintings (now badly damaged) above the tomb of Dean Swinefield in the Lady Chapel in Hereford Cathedral (c. 1310–20) and in one of the recesses in the north wall of the north transept of Northmoor in Oxfordshire which now contains the

108 Miriam Gill effigy of Sir Thomas de la Mare (c. 1340) (Fig. 7.1).43 Paintings in tomb recesses are often badly preserved, but the surviving corpus includes a wide range of imagery among which Marian subjects are prominent. For example, the Coronation of the Virgin is shown in the second recess at Northmoor.44 As the most powerful intercessor, the popularity of the Virgin requires no explanation, so her Education may simply have joined the corpus of devotional Marian subjects displayed in this context. It may also be that Dean Swinefield and Sir Thomas de la Mare were personally attracted to this image of holy literacy. However, a Marian miracle recorded in the earlier fifteenth century may suggest a possible association between honouring St Anne and her daughter and aid in sickness and perhaps beyond the grave. It described how a sick monk at Lichfield, who augmented the Ave with an invocation to St Anne, was comforted by a vision of the holy mother and daughter.45 Perhaps images of St Anne and the Virgin express a multi-layered strategy of intercession; as the fifteenth-century poet John Audelay suggests, the prudent suitor ingratiates himself with his sweetheart’s mother.46 This additional association reminds us of the range of meanings with which a single image, perhaps particularly one which was not reliant on an important text, could be associated.47 Recognition of the nature of the parochial context initially problematises the predominantly didactic interpretation of this subject as a legitimisation of lay and often female literacy, derived from the study of manuscript illumination. However, examination of the mural corpus does present clear evidence of how this subject was deployed in Marian devotion. Physical context is equally important in the assessment of the second mural subject, the Warning to Gossips, which, like the Education of the Virgin, can be shown to have multiple meanings. In contrast to the absence of textual background for the image of St Anne teaching the Virgin, this subject comes from a traditional exemplum, preserved in a wide range of variants and disseminated throughout Europe.48 The story derives from Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240). He describes how a demon transcribing the idle chatter of a large congregation was discovered when he attempted to stretch his parchment (he had run out of room). When the preacher confronted the congregation, their penitential tears washed the scroll clean – the supernatural equivalent of erasing the policeman’s notebook. This version of the story makes no comment on the gender of the congregation. However, by the mid-thirteenth century the protagonists were identified as female.49 Thus the motif of the full parchment became a satire on female loquacity. This ‘feminisation’ of the exemplum was highly influential on most subsequent authors and all the surviving English wall paintings show female protagonists. Sermons and nurture literature often equated female virtue with silence or modest and gentle speech.50 For example, the ‘Good Wijf’ admonishes her daughter to speak meekly to her husband.51 There is also evidence of fear that family privacy would be compromised by female gossip.52 However, the deployment of this scene in wall painting suggests a more specific concern. Of the hundreds of exempla produced in the Middle Ages, this is one of only two subjects which appear more than once in the surviving corpus of English murals, the other being the Warning to Swearers.53 Both these images relate to transgressive speech and follow exempla tradition by showing

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 109 protagonists of a single gender: male swearers and female gossips. Swearing was a vice which fell outside the common schema of the Seven Deadly Sins and this may be the reason for its visual treatment. However, the selection of the Warning to Gossips for frequent public parochial representation must surely relate to the fact that it confronts misbehaviour in church. While it used the topos of gossiping women, common in other genres, its specific target was loquacious inattention by parishioners of both sexes. In contrast to the literary sources and some later Continental images, English murals do not include many explicit visual pointers to the ecclesiastical setting of the exemplum. The women, often a pair, are shown together, standing in thirteenthcentury paintings at Brook in Kent and Wiston in Suffolk, kneeling in paintings such as the early fourteenth-century mural at Melbourne and sitting on simple benches (hardly pews) in many of the mid- and later fourteenth-century East Anglian images.54 This chronology may provide important evidence of the development of church seating, but it is not a conclusive visual indication that the women are attending a mass. A further signal which may have been more obvious to medieval viewers than to us is the prominence of prayer beads. The illiterate were expected to occupy the time before the consecration and elevation with Aves and Paternosters, presumably recited aloud. In the version of the exemplum in Mirk’s Festial (c. 1382–90) the gossiping women are questioned about their behaviour during mass and lie that they have ‘sayde hor “Pater Noster”’.55 Like the prayer beads in the paintings, this dishonest response points to the gap between expectation and reality. It is worth remembering that this distinction was very hard for medieval clergy to make. How could the priest at the altar tell if the hum of voices from people bent over their beads in the nave was devotion or defamation? Given the paucity of evidence for patronage we do not know whether any of these paintings were commissioned by anxious clergy, but their positioning within parish churches may tell us something of their specific didactic purpose. Of a total of fifteen paintings whose position is known, nine are shown on the north wall, visible to parishioners as soon as they enter the church.56 This placement may reflect a desire to remind church-goers what they were there for and how they should behave.57 Six paintings are above or adjacent to a door.58 The majority of paintings are close to the west end of the church;59 it would not be surprising if those – male or female – wishing to gossip tended to sit at the back of the church. However, this convention may also represent an attempt to target women in particular. Patterns of seating or standing in medieval parish churches clearly varied greatly. However, there is some documentary evidence that many congregations were segregated with the women conventionally, although by no means invariably, on the north side of the church.60 Whether or not this convention was followed, it is also possible that the north side of the church was symbolically connected with women as a consequence of the constellation of Marian imagery found there, in particular the representations of the Virgin on the rood beam and as an intercessor in the Doom.61 Moreover, at Slapton in Northamptonshire, the survival of a painting of the gossips on the south side of the church may preserve a local seating pattern. The position of the painting of St Anne teaching the Virgin described above suggests

110 Miriam Gill that the Lady Altar stood in the south aisle. Evidence from St Lawrence’s, Reading, suggests that women sat on the south side there, adjacent to the Lady Altar.62 If such an association of Lady Altar and female seating was followed at Slapton, then the position of the Warning to Gossips at the west end of the south arcade is less puzzling. English mural representations of the Warning to Gossips are typified by their focus on the demonic inspiration of gossip. In this respect they differ from many of the more elaborate narrative compositions found in Continental art, such as the sixteenth-century painting at Chanteussée in France, in which the demonic scribe sits at some distance from the women.63 This detail derives from versions of the exemplum such as that by Vincent of Beauvais.64 The physical association between the gossips and demons in English murals recalls misogynistic statements about the susceptibility of women to diabolic suggestion.65 However, particularly given the possibility that these images were aimed at female worshippers, this intimacy may represent a more subtle rhetorical strategy based on revulsion and aversion. Several paintings include apparently scatological details. The most explicit is the recently rediscovered representation at Eaton near Norwich (mid-fourteenth century) where the demons are farting or defecating (Fig. 7.3).66 However, such unpleasant associations may also be present in the prominent display of the devil’s tail between the heads of the gossips in paintings such as that at Colton in Norfolk (mid-fourteenth century), since contemporary anti-mendicant satire draws on the association between the devil’s tail and his filthy bottom.67 Female parishioners looking at the Warning to Gossips saw a mirror of themselves, with an apparently trivial failing exposed as disgusting and dangerous. It is worth remarking that in nearly all cases the heads of women in these paintings are covered, a detail which conventionally denotes married women. In the poem ‘How the Good Wijf tau
te Hir Dou
tir’ daily church attendance emerges as almost the only legitimate reason for a wife to leave the house.68 The implicit message of these paintings of the Warning to Gossips is that those attending mass, perhaps particularly the women who may well form the majority, should pray. Significantly, one mural (now lost) from Stokesby in Norfolk (c. 1340–60) makes this explicit (Fig. 7.4).69 The gossips sit next to each other, a demon pressing their heads tightly together. A third female figure sits alone, praying her beads. This commendation of pious seclusion was surely implicit in the more common representation of a huddle of gossips. These murals are the visual counterparts of the exempla tradition from which they come, a rare example of the monumentalisation of an illustrative story. By contrast, the common depiction of this subject on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century misericords served a different audience and a different function. In this context the Warning to Gossips became one of a number of motifs which reminded a male clerical audience of the subversive, even infernal power of women, humorously affirming their chosen celibacy. In contrast to the subjects discussed above, not all murals of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy have female protagonists. Of a corpus of twenty-two schemes where the gender of at least one protagonist can be identified, eleven show female figures,

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 111

Figure 7.3 ‘The Warning to Gossips’ with demons farting or defecating, mid-fourteenth century, north wall of nave, above north door, Eaton, Norfolk. Source: Photograph by Dr S.J.E. Riches and drawing by the author

eight male, while a further three include both.70 Since documentary studies suggest that only a small proportion of bequests to churches came from women, it is improbable that this preponderance of female figures results from patronage alone.71 It has been suggested that the feminine gender of abstract qualities such as ‘Misericordia’ and the subsequent tradition of personifying concepts, particularly the virtues, as female might be expected to influence such images.72 However, there is only a single surviving mural where a clear case for such a personification can be made. This is the intriguing painting at Potter Heigham, Norfolk, from the mid-fourteenth century which shows scenes of the individual works arranged around a large, nimbed female figure (Fig. 7.5).73 She holds a small building, in the door of which stands a porter. Such a figure suggests an allegorical or perhaps hagiographic setting, and recalls allegorical descriptions of Mercy or Charity.74 The iconography also bears a resemblance to a mural in the Bigallo in Florence in which the Seven Corporal Works of

112 Miriam Gill

Figure 7.4 Watercolour of ‘The Warning to Gossips’ with additional figure of solitary ‘good woman’ (c. 1340–60), north wall of nave, west of north door, Stokesby, Norfolk, painting no longer visible. Source: Watercolour by C.J.W. Winter: Norwich Museums Service, 1951.235.B147. Reproduced by permission of Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery

Mercy are arranged around a large central figure of the Virgin in the form of the Mother of Mercy.75 In the painting at Potter Heigham all the female figures performing the works are dressed in the same veil and open supertunic worn by the central figure (Fig. 7.5). If she is a personification or a specific personality, then these scenes represent her action. However, mid-fourteenth-century paintings at Moulton St Mary and Wickhampton in the same county show a range of female figures performing the works (at Wickhampton no women are shown in the scene of the burial of the dead).76 These figures are differentiated by their headdresses, which suggest different marital states or at least different ages. For example, at Moulton St Mary a youthful figure, with the long, uncovered hair associated with virginity, reaches out her hand to a figure now lost, while a woman in a fashionable ruffled veil gives drink to the thirsty, and a woman in a hood and pleated wimple, of the type often associated with widowhood or at least with a mature matron, clothes the naked. These three types of figure correspond to the ‘Three Ages of Woman’ identified by medieval authors: maidenhood, marriage and widowhood. This variation seems to suggest that in these images at least there was a deliberate attempt to promote charitable behaviour by women, not through the presentation of a female personification, but in schemes which demonstrated the appropriateness of charity to every stage of a woman’s life.

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 113

Figure 7.5 Detail of visiting the prisoner from ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’ (midfourteenth century), south wall of south nave aisle, Potter Heigham, Norfolk. Source: Photograph by R. Gill

This promotion of charity as a form of pious behaviour particularly appropriate and desirable for women can be found in many contexts and traced back to the biblical picture of a good wife in Proverbs 31:10–31. Charity was emphasised in the lives of female saints such as St Katherine.77 This emphasis can also be found in contemporary sermons, such as that preached by Bishop Brinton (d. 1398) to commemorate a woman from Wrotham, possibly called Margarita, which draws attention to her charitable acts.78 There is a strong body of evidence which suggests that social expectations are preserved in these images. Female charity often represented an extension of household activity and charitable disposal of surplus was regarded as an aspect of good domestic management, as in the Book of Proverbs.79 Like her prayers, a wife’s charity could bring blessing on her household and theologians defended the right of a wife to spend her husband’s wealth for the good of his soul, even without his permission.80 Exempla, such as those recorded by John of Bromyard, also warned about the spiritual dangers of female failure to fulfil such pious provisions.81 Hagiography defended even the right of servants such as St Walstan to disperse their employers’ goods in prodigal charity.82 Generosity might be expected to bring material benefits: as the poem ‘How the Good Wijf tau
te Hir Dou
tir’ states, ‘seelden is þat hous poore þere god is steward’.83 At Ruabon in Clwyd, the young man feeding the hungry gives a coin, while his female counterpart dispenses drink from a covered tankard (Fig. 7.6). This

114 Miriam Gill

Figure 7.6 Engraving of ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’ (c. 1390–1410), south wall of south nave aisle, Ruabon, Clwyd. Source: Engraving from D.R. Thomas, The History of the Diocese of St Asaph, Oswestry, Caston Press, 1913, vol. 3, p. 277

small detail may acknowledge the economic reality of a society where men had more ready cash, while women had easier access to household goods. This gendered pattern of giving is clearly evident in medieval wills where many female bequests consist of the gift of personal items rather than money.84 The image of the charitable woman generously dispensing the household surplus for the spiritual and temporal well-being of her family finds its antithesis in the hostile contemporary characterisation of economically active women who used such surplus for profit. Most prominent of these was the figure of the fraudulent ale wife, found in English art from the fourteenth century.85 It seems that such economic activity could be regarded as an expression of greed, as in Margery Kempe’s retrospective account of her failed brewing venture.86 It may be that we should see the promotion of female charity as an implicit criticism of more economically assertive ways of utilising spare time and produce. If the predominance of female figures in murals of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy relates to an association of women with charity, particularly its practical expression, the presentation of the needy as exclusively male requires some explanation. Later medieval female poverty is well documented and testamentary evidence reveals interest in schemes, such as dowries, specifically intended to help poor women.87 Hagiographic images such as the stained glass window from St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, which probably shows the charity of St Elizabeth of Hungary, portrays both male and female figures in receipt of charity.88 As Christine Peters has suggested, it seems likely that the almost exclusively male representation of the poor in depictions of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy has an ideological

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 115 justification.89 In St Matthew’s Gospel the righteous are commended by Christ with the words: ‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’90 Blessing figures of Christ accompany the Works at Moulton St Mary and Wickhampton.91 Mirk associates the Works with women who ministered to Christ.92 This christological reading of the gender of the recipients is supported by the iconography of fifteenth-century representations of this subject, such as the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (c. 1440) where a recognisable figure of Christ stands among the indigent figures.93 Performance of the Works of Mercy not only offered women the opportunity to secure the spiritual and perhaps practical well-being of themselves and their household, but was also implicitly presented as the more intangible reward of quasi-sacramental contact with Christ himself. These three mural subjects represent the prominent display of independent female figures performing acts of piety or impiety which can be clearly related to some contemporary ideas about desirable female behaviour. The first two have no obvious male equivalent in wall painting, but the third is found in a number of different forms, and with both male and female protagonists. However, as this chapter has shown, to see these images simply as illustrations, without considering their specific context, is to distort their meaning and to misinterpret the ways and the extent to which they reveal expectations about piety which truly relate to gender. This is why such emphasis has been accorded to comparisons with nurture literature, a specific context in which motifs such as this are used to convey messages about gendered behaviour. This comparison recognises the importance of context in the gendered interpretation of such images. In parochial context, these images were not always primarily about gender, although they might retain such associations. The results of these three case studies argue that material, social, literary and visual context must be taken into account in gendered readings of public art. In particular, the study of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read suggests the importance of iconographic detail, social and physical context, patronage and the chronology of a corpus of images. The examination of the Warning to Gossips confirms the importance of physical context, while warning that a pattern of positioning may be open to varied interpretations. The differences between text and image perhaps reveal the specific focus of its monumental display. Moreover, the suggestion that it may have been intended for a predominantly female audience reinterprets details which may have been dismissed as mere misogyny as a calculated strategy of aversion instead. Either of these subjects may be directed at men, women or both, with its significance subtly varying according to its intended audience. Finally, the study of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy suggests the importance of analysing the incidence of gender within a corpus of paintings and of paying attention to details such as costume which imply age and status. It also reveals that gender can function both didactically (even realistically) and symbolically within a single image – female protagonists suggest that charity is a desirable activity for women, male recipients recall Christ. While it is not always possible to employ all these interpretative strategies, their number and variety suggest something of the subtlety and complexity of medieval visual culture and its ability to convey messages about

116 Miriam Gill gender or social expectations in subjects which were primarily hagiographic or didactic.

Notes This chapter is based on a paper given at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 1998, in a session convened by Dr Sam Riches. I am very grateful to all who have helped me, particularly Dr Katherine French, Jennie Ednes-Pierotti and Dr Graham Jones. Much of the work presented here was undertaken as part of my doctoral studies under the guidance of David Park. I am indebted to him for having first encouraged me to examine the depiction of women in wall painting and for access to the National Survey of Wall Painting. Further work on the Seven Deadly Sins was undertaken as a Seed Corn project at the University of Leicester under the supervision of Dr Phillip Lindley: http://www.le.ac.uk/arthistory/seedcorn/contents.html. 1 The Babees Book, ed. F.J. Furnivall, EETS os 32, London, N. Trübner and Co., 1868, pp. 36–7. For a modernised version and comments on authorship, see P.J.P. Goldberg (trans. and ed.), Women in England c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995, pp. 99–103; The Good Wife Taught her Daughter: The Good Wife Wold a Pylgremage: The Thewis of Gud Women, ed. T.F. Mustanoja, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae 61.2, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1948. 2 The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, ed. T. Wright, EETS os 33, London, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1906, p. 29, pp. 40–1, p. 112, pp. 117–18. For recent work on conduct literature, see F. Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text’, Speculum, 1996, vol. 71, pp. 66–86; C. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 50–74; B.A. Hanawalt, ‘At the Margins of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe’, in Hanawalt, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 70–87; K.M. Phillips, ‘Bodily Walls, Windows and Doors: The Politics of Gesture in Late Fifteenth-Century English Books for Women’, in J. Wogan-Browne and others (eds), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, Turnhout, Brepols, 2000, pp. 185–98. 3 For the most comprehensive published list of the fourteenth-century examples, see D. Park, ‘Form and Content’, in P. Binski, D. Park and C. Norton (eds), Dominican Painting in East Anglia: The Thornham Parva Retable and Musée de Cluny Frontal, Woodbridge, Boydell, 1987, pp. 33–56, pp. 51–2. Further examples have been recently identified at Wotton Wawen, Warwickshire (fragmentary) (with thanks to Dr Phillip Lindley) and Northmoor, Oxfordshire (previously misidentified as the Virgin and Child). A lost painting at Compton Martin in Somerset is identified in C.E. Keyser, A List of Buildings in Great Britain and Ireland Having Mural and Other Painted Decorations, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883, p. 74. Fifteenth-century examples are listed in the text of this chapter. 4 For the most comprehensive published list, see D. Park, ‘Warning against Idle Gossip’, in J.J.G. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, London, Royal Academy of Arts in association with Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, p. 444. I am indebted to David Park for drawing further recent identifications to my attention: Bishopsbourne, Kent; Great Conrad, Suffolk; Nedging by Naughton, Suffolk. For Eaton (Fig. 7.3), see A. Hulbert, ‘Conference Review’, Conservation News, 1992, vol. 49, pp. 34–5, p. 34. A further example at Crostwight, Norfolk, has been identified by the author (previously identified as a scene of witchcraft). 5 G.L. Remnant, A Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain, with an Essay on their Iconography by M.D. Anderson, Oxford, Clarendon, 1969, p. xxxix, p. 19, p. 58, pp. 93–4, p. 114,

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 117

6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

p. 132, p. 141, plates 15c, 16b; R. Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages, London, Routledge, 1993, pp. 80–1. E.W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, London, Oxford University Press on behalf of the Pilgrim Trust, 1955, pp. 99–107. M.R. James, ‘The Mural Paintings in Wickhampton Church’, in C. Hussey (ed.), A Supplement to Blomefield’s Norfolk, London, Clement and Ingleby, 1929, pp. 129–42, p. 132. P. Binski, ‘The English Parish Church and its Art in the Later Middle Ages: A Review of the Problem’, Studies in Iconography, 1999, vol. 22, pp. 1–25, p. 10. E.T. Long, ‘Medieval Wall Paintings in Oxfordshire Churches’, Oxoniensia, 1972, vol. 37, pp. 86–108, p. 101; L. Gee, ‘Fourteenth-Century Tombs for Women in Herefordshire’, in D. Whitehead (ed.), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Hereford, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 15, Leeds, W.S. Maney, 1995, pp. 132–7, pp. 133–4. E.C. Rouse, ‘Wall Paintings in the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Corby, Lincolnshire’, Archaeological Journal, 1943, vol. 100, pp. 150–76, p. 151; Early Lincoln Wills: An Abstract of all the Wills and Administrations Recorded in the Episcopal Registers of the Old Diocese of Lincoln, etc, 1280–1547, ed. A. Gibbons, Lincoln Record Series 1, Lincoln, J. Williamson, 1888, pp. 4–5. P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Painting in Medieval England: The Wall to Wall Message’, in N. Saul (ed.), Age of Chivalry: Art and Society in Late Medieval England, London, Collins and Brown, 1992, pp. 106–19, pp. 110–11. D. Park, ‘In Glorious Colour’, Past Masters, Present Delights: The Churches Conservation Trust Review and Report, London, The Churches Conservation Trust, 2000, pp. 20–5, p. 23. M. Gill, ‘Preaching and Image: Sermon and Wall Paintings in Later Medieval England’, in C. Muessig (ed.), The Sermon in the Middle Ages, Leiden, Brill, forthcoming. W. Scase, ‘St Anne and the Education of the Virgin: Literary and Artistic Traditions and their Implications’, in N. Rogers (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, Stamford, Paul Watkins, 1993, pp. 84–90, pp. 84–6. Scase, ‘St Anne’, pp. 87–9. E.W. Tristram and M.R. James, ‘Wall Paintings in Croughton Church, Northamptonshire’, Archaeologia, 1927, vol. 76, pp. 179–204, pp. 188, plate xxxvii, no. 6. Scase, ‘St Anne’, p. 84. Park, ‘Form and Content’, p. 51. P. Hebgin-Barnes, The Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Lincolnshire, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. xliv, pp. 336–7; D. Park, ‘Form and Content’, p. 51. V. Sekules, ‘Women’s Piety and Patronage’, in N. Saul (ed.), Age of Chivalry: Art and Society in Late Medieval England, London, Collins and Brown, 1992, pp. 120–31, p. 130; Park, ‘Form and Content’, pp. 50–3. Park, ‘Form and Content’, p. 53; Scase, ‘St Anne’, pp. 91–2. P.M. Sheingorn, ‘The Wise Mother: The Image of St Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary’, Gesta, 1993, vol. 32, pp. 69–80, pp. 75–8; Scase, ‘St Anne’, p. 96. M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, p. 111, p. 253. Sheingorn, ‘Wise Mother’, pp. 76–7. Scase, ‘St Anne’, p. 96. Scase, ‘St Anne’, p. 93. Sheingorn, ‘Wise Mother’, p. 76. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 231 fol. 3. Sheingorn, ‘Wise Mother’, p. 76. N. Rogers, ‘The Original Owner of the Fitzwarin Psalter’, Antiquaries Journal, 1989, vol. 69, pp. 257–60. Early Lincoln Wills, pp. 4–5.

118 Miriam Gill 32 M. Gill, ‘The Role of Wall Paintings in Monastic Education: The Evidence from Wall Painting in Late Medieval England’, in C. Muessig and G. Ferzoco (eds), Medieval Monastic Education, London, Leicester University Press, 2000, pp. 117–35, pp. 127–9. 33 For hagiographical instances of male clerical self-identification with female saints, see K.A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 101. 34 Tristram and James, ‘Wall Paintings in Croughton’, p. 196, plate lxxvi. 35 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, p. 268. 36 Park, ‘Form and Content’, p. 51. 37 Sheingorn, ‘Wise Mother’, p. 70. 38 E.T. Long, ‘The Wall Paintings in Shorthampton Church’, Oxford Archaeological Society Report, 1937, 83, pp. 8–11, p. 9 (previously identified as St Frideswide). 39 E.M. Moore, ‘Wall-Paintings Recently Discovered in Worcestershire’, Archaeologia, 1940, vol. 88, pp. 281–8, p. 283, plate lxxxviia; N. Pevsner and J. Harris, Lincolnshire, Buildings of England, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964, p. 633. 40 Keyser, A List of Buildings in Great Britain, p. 119; R. Gough, Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, London, J. Nichols, 1796, vol. 2.3, pp. 216–17. 41 Park, ‘Form and Content’, pp. 51–2; E. Duffy, ‘Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’, in D. Wood and W.J. Sheils (eds), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 175–96, p. 193. 42 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, p. 21. 43 The effigies of Sir Thomas and his wife were returned to these positions only in the early twentieth century: Long, ‘Medieval Wall Paintings’, p. 101. 44 Long, ‘Medieval Wall Paintings’, p. 101. 45 T.D. Cooke with P. Whiteford and N.M. McKinley, ‘Tales, 3: Pious Tales. Miracles of the Virgin’, in A.E. Hartung (ed.), A Manual of Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, New Haven, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 9, pp. 3177–258, p. 3205. 46 The Poems of John Audelay, ed. E.K. Whiting, EETS os 184, London, Oxford University Press, 1931, p. 130. 47 Sheingorn, ‘Wise Mother’, p. 71. 48 Gill, ‘Preaching and Image’; M. Camille, ‘The Devil’s Writing: Diabolic Literacy in Medieval Art’, in I. Lavin (ed.), World Art Themes of Unity in Diversity: Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania State University, 1989, vol. 2, pp. 355–60; P. Halm, ‘Der schreibende Teufel’, in Cristianesimo e Ragion di Stato: L’Umanesimo e il Demoniaco nell’Arte. Atti del II Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici a cura di Enrico Castelli, Rome, Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, 1953, pp. 235–49; M. Jennings, ‘Tutivillus: the Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology, 1977, vol. 74, pp. 1–87; A. Långfors, ‘Le Sous-diacre, les deux femmes bavardes et le diable: Conte pieux traduit du Latin du Vincent de Beauvais par un frère prêcheur du Soissonnais’, Mémoires de la Société Néo-Philologique de Helsingfors, 1929, vol. 8, pp. 389–408; H. Rasmussen, ‘Der schreibende Teufel in Nordeuropa’, in E. Ennen and G. Wiegelmann (eds), Festschrift Matthias Zender: Studien zu Volkskultur, Sprache und Landesgeschichte, Bonn, Ludwig Röhrich Verlag, 1972, vol. 1, pp. 455–64. 49 E.F. Wilson, The ‘Stella Maris’ of John of Garland Edited Together with a Study of Certain Recollections of Mary Legends Made in Northern France in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Cambridge, MA, Medieval Academy of America 45, 1946, pp. 129–30, pp. 193–4. 50 M. Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct, Contributions in Women’s Studies 130, Westport, Greenwood, 1993, pp. 60–2. 51 Babees Book, p. 38. 52 Hallissy, Clean Maids, pp. 80–1.

Women in wall paintings in England after 1300 119 53 Gill, ‘Preaching and Image’. 54 For Brook and Wiston, see E.W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Thirteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press on behalf of the Pilgrim Trust, 1950, p. 514, p. 626; for Melbourne, see Park, ‘Warning against Idle Gossip’, p. 444. 55 Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, ed. T. Erbe, EETS es 96, London, Kegan Paul, 1905, p. 280. 56 This association was suggested by David Park. See M. Gill, ‘Late Medieval Wall Painting in England: Content and Context (c. 1330–1530)’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2001, Appendix. The subject is shown on the north side of the church at Peakirk, Cambridgeshire; Melbourne, Derbyshire; Brook, Kent; Crostwight, Little Melton and Stokesby (lost) (Fig. 7.4), all Norfolk; Grundisburgh (moved to chancel), Nedging by Naughton and Wiston, all Suffolk. 57 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, p. 115. 58 The subject is shown near the door at Crostwight, Eaton (Fig. 7.3), Nedging by Naughton, Peakirk, and possibly occupied this position at Stokesby (Fig. 7.4) and Wiston. 59 Park, ‘Warning against Idle Gossip’, p. 444. 60 M. Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, in D. Wood and W.J. Sheils (eds), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 237–94, pp. 241–2. 61 R. Gilchrist, ‘“Blessed Art Thou among Women”: The Archaeology of Female Piety’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c. 1200–1500, Stroud, Sutton, 1992, pp. 212–26. 62 Aston, ‘Segregation’, p. 280. 63 Halm, ‘Der schreibende Teufel’, p. 239. 64 Långfors, ‘Le Sous-diacre’, p. 405; Jennings, ‘Tutivillus’, p. 29. 65 C. Grössinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 96. 66 Hulbert, ‘Conference Review’, p. 34. 67 A.J. Fletcher, Preaching and Politics in Late-Medieval England, Dublin, Four Courts, 1998, p. 287. 68 Babees Book, pp. 36–7. 69 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, p. 235. 70 Gill, ‘Late Medieval Wall Painting in England’, Appendix. 71 The association between gender and patronage was suggested by James, ‘The Mural Paintings in Wickhampton Church’, p. 132. For a study of female patronage, see J.A. Ford, ‘Art and Identity in the Parish Communities of Late Medieval Kent’, in D. Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts, Studies in Church History 28, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992, pp. 225–39, p. 236. 72 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, pp. 99–101; M. Evans, ‘Allegorical Women and Practical Men: The Iconography of the Artes Reconsidered’, in D. Baker (ed.), Medieval Women, Studies in Church History Subsidia 1, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978, pp. 305–30, p. 236. 73 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, pp. 236–8. 74 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, p. 100. 75 W. and E. Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz: Ein kunstgeschichtliches Handbuch, Frankfurt, Vittoria Klostermann, 1955, vol. 1, p. 384, p. 390. 76 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, pp. 223–4, pp. 263–4; D. Park, ‘In Glorious Colour’, pp. 22–3. I am indebted to Dr Katherine French for the observation about Wickhampton. 77 K.J. Lewis, ‘Model Girls? Virgin Martyrs and the Training of Young Women in Late Medieval England’, in Lewis, N.J. Menuge and K.M. Phillips (eds), Young Medieval Women, Stroud, Sutton, 1999, pp. 25–46, pp. 28–9. 78 The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1372–1389), ed. M.A. Devlin, Camden Society 3rd series 85–6, London, Royal Historical Society, 1954, vol. 86, p. 267.

120 Miriam Gill 79 P.H. Cullum, ‘“And Hir Name was Charite”: Charitable Giving by and for Women in Late Medieval Yorkshire’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c. 1200–1500, Stroud, Sutton, 1992, pp. 182–211, p. 184, p. 191. 80 Cullum, ‘And Hir Name was Charite’, p. 203. 81 R.M. Karras, ‘Gendered Sin and Misogyny in John of Bromyard’s Summa Predicantium’, Traditio, 1992, vol. 47, pp. 233–58, p. 251. 82 M. Gill, ‘The Saint with a Scythe: A Previously Unidentified Wall Painting in the Church of St Andrew, Cavenham’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 1995, vol. 37, pp. 245–54. 83 Babees Book, p. 37. 84 Cullum, ‘And Hir Name was Charite’, p. 185; Katherine French’s current research on women’s piety in late medieval England also supports this finding (personal communication). 85 J.E. Ashby, ‘English Medieval Murals of the Doom’, unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, University of York, 1980, p. 177, pp. 180–1. 86 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S.B. Meech and H.E. Allen, EETS os 212, London, Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 9. 87 Cullum, ‘And Hir Name was Charite’, pp. 197–202. 88 C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass Painting in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1950, plate vii. 89 C. Peters, ‘Women and the Reformation: Social Relations and Attitudes in Rural England’, unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1992, p. 152. 90 Matthew 25:40. 91 Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century, pp. 100–1. 92 Mirk’s Festial, pp. 231–2. 93 H.L.M. Defoer (ed.), The Golden Age of Dutch Manuscript Painting, New York, George Braziller, 1990, pp. 152–7.

8

Staging conversion The Digby saint plays and The Book of Margery Kempe Sarah Salih

It has been persuasively argued that the processes of conversion in later medieval hagiographic texts are marked by gender. Conversions which take the form of sudden, intense, once in a lifetime revelations that prompt the saint to disavow his old life are typical of the lives of men. The legends of holy women are more likely to tell a unified story. Testifying to the wide acceptance of this general distinction, Caroline Walker Bynum cites Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell: Male saints were more likely to undergo abrupt adolescent conversions, including renunciation of wealth, power, marriage and sexuality. Crisis and decisive change were more significant motifs in male than in female vitae throughout the later Middle Ages, in part because medieval men had more power than women to determine the shape of their lives.1 When women change the form of their lives, by, for example, entering convents in widowhood, they do so when they are finally freed to follow their own longstanding inclinations towards virginity.2 In such a case, the woman remains internally consistent, although the forms of her outer life may change according to her circumstances. The lives of female saints and holy women are thus more likely to be narrated as stories of a single, legible subject, one whose present is continuous with her past. It is also claimed that holy women are continuous with secular women; that female saints translate the common concerns of their gender into religious meaning. Citing Bynum, Gail Ashton argues that ‘women writing of themselves construct texts marked by continuity which enhance, or continue, ordinary experience and ordinary lives’.3 The female is thus marked as self-identical, a gender category which overrides religious status. Nevertheless, one of the best-known holy women of late medieval England offers a partial exception to this pattern. The departure of The Book of Margery Kempe from the usual model has been noticed before, by Bynum and by Dyan Elliott, so I am not announcing a new discovery here, but exploring further just what this exception to a rule might prove.4 It is only a partial exception. It is true that Margery’s conversion is a gradual process: it fits the female model described above in, for example, the many years of persistence which are necessary before Margery can persuade her husband to agree to a vow of chastity. Chastity, however, is not what

122 Sarah Salih she always wanted: there is no suggestion that she had desired chastity from childhood, and clear indications that she had previously enjoyed the ‘inordynat lofe & þe gret delectacyon’ of the early years of her married life.5 The vow thus marks a radical change to her way of life, even if the desire for chastity is not realised immediately. The Book, moreover, is deeply attached to scenes of unexpected, overwhelming, conversion experience. Jesus rescues Margery from madness by appearing at her bedside, dressed in purple silk (MK 8). Margery leaps from her marriage bed at the sound of heavenly music (MK 11). She is ravished in spirit as she is assured of salvation (MK 16). The multiplicity of the conversion scenes inevitably casts some doubt on their efficacy, but each one, nevertheless, is written as a classically life-changing moment. The Book thus offers a combination of typically masculine and typically feminine features in its narrative of conversion. It could be argued that the male scribe is responsible for the ‘masculine’ and Margery for the ‘feminine’ topoi of the text, but such an analysis would merely reproduce gender binarism. It may even be that the reverse is more likely: that the less conventionally feminine elements of the text come from Margery herself, while her scribe attempts to contain her within the accepted model of holy women. Catherine M. Mooney argues that in some cases, the emphasis on the holy woman’s physicality and asceticism which is often identified as a marker of female piety can be shown to be the preoccupation of the male hagiographer, not the holy woman herself.6 I have argued elsewhere that Margery’s Book shows a number of significant, if partial, departures from typically female pieties, and think it worth exploring the possibility that her conversion may be another such variation.7 Richard Kieckhefer names The Book of Margery Kempe as an ‘autohagiography’: much criticism has traced its indebtedness to various kinds of hagiographical text.8 The conversion scenes, however, are not derived from the Lives of Margery’s favourite groups of saints, virgin martyrs and near-contemporary holy women. Contemporary holy women tend to conform to the female model of consistency outlined at the beginning of this chapter. This pattern is used in the Lives of two of Margery’s female models, Mary of Oignies and Bridget of Sweden, for both of whom celibate marriage is a substitute for the perpetual virginity they had originally desired.9 The common scenario in virgin martyr legends of the rebellion of a Christian daughter against her pagan parents implies a conversion scene in the prehistory of the narrative, but this scene is rarely narrated.10 John Capgrave’s version of Katherine’s legend offers a partial exception, but even here conversion only confirms the saint’s unarticulated but pre-existing commitment to Christ and virginity: ‘ffor though he sente the ermyte as his massanger / Er the ermyte cam, cryst hym-self was there.’11 For both categories of saint, continuity is more characteristic than rupture. The Book itself identifies conversion by rupture as characteristic of other kinds of saint. Christ encourages Margery to take the apostles as models for her hagiographic self-remaking: Sche seyd a-geyn, ‘I am þe most vnworþi creatur þat euyr þow schewedyst grace vn-to in erth.’ ‘A, dowtyr’, seyd owyr Lord, ‘fere þe nowt, I take non hede what a man hath ben, but I take hede what he wyl ben. Dowtyr, þow hast despysed

Digby saint plays and Book of Margery Kempe 123 þi-self, þerfor þow xalt neuyr be despysed of God. Haue mend, dowtyr, what Mary Mawdelyn was, Mary Eypcyan, Seynt Powyl, & many oþer seyntys þat

arn now in Hevyn, for of vnworthy I make worthy, & of synful I make rytful.’ (MK 49)12 Thus two categories of saints are identified as models for total conversion, when ‘what a man hath ben’ differs from ‘what he wyl ben’: penitent prostitutes such as Mary of Egypt and apostles such as Paul, with Mary Magdalen, of course, occupying both categories.13 Margery’s use of the model of the Magdalen has been thoroughly established in the critical literature. Carolyn Coulson demonstrates that Margery adopts Mary’s role as handmaiden to the Virgin and companion in her mourning.14 Suzanne L. Craymer focuses in particular on the Digby play of Mary Magdalen, listing a number of parallels to demonstrate the likelihood that The Book of Margery Kempe represents an imitatio Magdalenae.15 Susan Eberly outlines Margery’s imitation of Mary Magdalen as preacher and lover of Christ, and notices that Margery’s Passion visions put her into the place of the Magdalen.16 The legend’s influence on the Book is undeniable: to mention only two of the many citations, the writing of the Book begins on ‘þe day next aftyr Mary Maudelyn’ (MK 6), as if to suggest that Margery too is ‘aftyr Mary Maudelyn’ and Margery takes Mary as a model when she wishes ‘I wolde I wer as worthy to ben sekyr of thy lofe as Mary Mawdelyn was’ (MK 176). The extent to which the legend of St Paul may have been an influence on the Book has, along with the apostolic aspects of Margery’s mature spirituality, received far less critical attention, perhaps because it demonstrates a cross-gendered identification.17 In this chapter I intend to concentrate on the scenes of conversion in the Book and in the Digby plays of Sts Paul and Mary Magdalen.18 Several moments in the Book show Margery to be aware of contemporary religious drama: Carol M. Meale demonstrates that the Passion visions are influenced by the York Crucifixion play, and suggests also that Margery and her scribe may have been reluctant to acknowledge explicitly her debt to drama.19 The Digby plays share late medieval East Anglian origins with The Book of Margery Kempe, and it has even been argued that Mary Magdalen comes from Margery’s native town of Bishop’s Lynn.20 Meale is understandably doubtful of the validity of the comparison between Book and plays, finding it ‘ahistorical’.21 It is certainly true that the plays cannot be claimed as a direct source for Margery, for their editors estimate Mary Magdalen to have been written in the late fifteenth century and The Conversion of Saint Paul in the early sixteenth.22 Nevertheless, it is highly likely that Margery Kempe had seen saint plays. The great majority of saint plays have been lost, but there may have been a play of Mary Magdalen in fifteenth-century Norwich, and one was certainly performed in Thetford in 1503.23 The Book of Margery Kempe shows clear traces of religious drama, and it is entirely possible, even likely, that Margery could have seen saint plays which themselves influenced, or were the precursors of, the surviving Digby plays.24 At the least, the Digby plays and Margery Kempe can be treated as parallel, near-contemporary East Anglian reinventions of hagiographic material, and as possible testimony to a continuing interest in conversion scenes.

124 Sarah Salih Conversion scenes are central to both Digby plays and to The Book of Margery Kempe. Here comyth a feruent [lightning], wyth gret tempest, and Saule faulyth [falls] down of hys horse; þat done, Godhed spekyth in heuyn: Saule, Saule! Why dost þou me pursue? Yt ys hard to pryke agayns þe spore [resist the spur]! I am þi Savyour þat ys so trwe, Whych made heuyn and erth, and eche creature. Offende nott my goodnes; I wyll þe recure [heal]! SAULUS. O Lord, I am aferd, I trymble for fere! What woldest I ded? Tell me here!25 DEUUS.

Ihesu . . . lokyng vp-on hir wyth so blyssyd a chere [countenance] þat sche was strengthyd in alle hir spyritys, seyd to hir þes wordys: ‘Dowtyr, why hast þow forsakyn me, and I forsoke neuyr þe?’ And a-noon, as he had seyd þes wordys, sche saw veryly how þe eyr openyd as brygth as ony levyn [lightning] . . . And a-noon þe creature was stabelyd in hir wyttys & in hir reson as wel as euyr sche was be-forn. (MK 8) Woman, woman, why art þou so onstabyll? Ful bytterly thys blysse it wol be bowth! Why art þou a
ens God so veryabyll? .... MARY. A, how þe speryt of goodnesse hat promtyt me þis tyde, And temtyd me wyth tytyll of trew perfythnesse! Alas, how betternesse in my hert doth abyde! I am wonddyd wyth werkys of gret dystresse. A, how pynsynesse potyt me to oppresse [anxiety oppresses me], That I haue synnyd on euery syde!26 GOOD ANGYLL.

If these episodes seem familiar to the modern reader, it is because conversion scenes occupy a privileged place in postmodern understandings of subjectivity. The medieval texts present versions of the scene of interpellation, in Louis Althusser’s classic analysis: Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects amongst the individuals . . . by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognised that the hail was ‘really’

Digby saint plays and Book of Margery Kempe 125 addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).27 This fictive scene follows the structure of the conversion scenes of the medieval texts very closely: the one who is not yet a subject is addressed, identified and brought into being. The neatness of the fit confirms Judith Butler’s argument that Althusser’s scene of interpellation takes place in a landscape derived from Christian materials: it was already a conversion scene.28 It quite literally represents a con-version, a turning-around, in response to a vocation or calling. As an origin story, the scene of hailing is a fiction, ‘exemplary and allegorical’ in Butler’s words, which leaves open the question of what kind of not-yet-subjected entity responds to the hailing, but it is a fiction particularly suited to tell a tale of rupture.29 The two plays and The Book of Margery Kempe address the problem of what responds by consistently identifying the agency that precedes selfhood as illusory. Margery’s pre-conversion self simply and unreflectively occupies the positions of daughter and wife, ‘as kynde wolde’, and then disintegrates under pressure from devils (MK 6). Mary Magdalen and Paul had also acted at the prompting of devils, present as characters on the stage in Mary’s case, but concealed in Paul’s. It is Paul who produces the most convincing imitation of agency in the pre-conversion period, as the devils who are actually guiding his actions do not appear until later in the play. While he is persecuting Christians he is perceived and perceives himself as an agent in a vaunting speech which, as is usual in these plays, is an ironic commentary on the limitations of his perception and power: ‘Saule ys my name – I wyll þat ye notyfy – / Whych conspyreth the dyscyplys wyth thretys and menacys’ (CP 21–2).30 What happens in the scene of conversion is that the three claim responsibility for the period before they became subjects, and (mis-)recognise themselves as having been agents all along. Identity is dependent upon the acceptance of guilt, because guilt guarantees agency: all three are accused of having already deliberately turned away from God. Crucially, the attribution of agency is retrospective. The converts are presented with narratives of their lives: they are able to emerge into agency by accepting them because the narratives are presented as questions. In all three texts conversion demands self-examination and self-questioning. God and his representatives do not instruct their new converts: instead they ask them questions, questions which demand that they become actively involved in the construction of coherent narratives of their personal histories. Margery, addressed as ‘daughter’, becomes that daughter, who has not been forsaken: from the chaotic multiplicity of her madness a clear, single story is produced. In thus scrutinising their past actions, the three converts become other than what they were: they acknowledge that they have persecuted, forsaken, been unstable, as a necessary step towards no longer doing and being so. This acceptance also implies a denial of previous narratives: of that of the devils who assure Margery that ‘sche schuld be dampnyd’ (MK 7), of those of the devils who value Paul and Mary as their own. Their conversion is both a recognition of and a rupture with their previous lives. In the words of an onlooker in the play of St Paul, ‘He ys another man than he was, verely’ (CP 591). In this conversion resembles the process of confession,

126 Sarah Salih in which individuals at once acknowledge and reject their sins. Jerry Root argues that in the later Middle Ages the language of selfhood and penitence escapes from the scene of confession to appear in literary texts, testifying to a widespread interest in the process of telling of the self: it may be that conversion scenes project and dramatise the experience of confession.31 Conversion is paradoxical as well as dramatic. The Book of Margery Kempe announces itself as the narrative of a life of inconsistency, unified only by the rupture that comes with conversion: And euyr sche was turned a-
en a-bak in tym of temptacyon, lech vn-to þe tyme þat ower mercyfulle Lord Cryst Ihesu hauyng pety & compassyon of hys handwerke & hys creatur turnyd helth in-to sekenesse, prosperyte in-to aduersyte, worshep in-to repref, & loue in-to hatered. (MK 1) Margery’s original, profane instability is cured only by the holy instability imposed upon her by Christ. She attains stability at the cost of non-self-identity, as her instability is transformed from the synchronic to the temporal. Mary Magdalen too is a figure continually and with some justice marked as ‘onstabyll’. The devils treat her conversion as a betrayal, and her as ‘þat ipocryte’ (MM 734); similarly Paul’s former employer Cayphas sees his conversion as ‘rebellyous treytory’ (CP 400). These perspectives highlight the paradox of conversion; that the saints must prove themselves stable by becoming other than what they were. The inherent problem of using conversion scenes to demonstrate personal integrity and self-identity is further emphasised in The Conversion of Saint Paul, when the poet in person has to come on stage to insist that Paul was ‘constant and trwe / Aftyr hys conuersyon neuer mutable’ (CP 350), raising the question of whether conversion really is, as it claims, irreversible and perfect, or whether it might produce unpredictable excess. Criticism of Mary Magdalen has often focused on the play’s length and diversity. The play, as Theresa Coletti writes, makes use of ‘nearly every theatrical device known to the late medieval playwright’.32 Its action moves from Palestine to France and back again, twice; it has around forty-five characters, many of whom appear in only one scene. Its modes of representation are at various times allegorical, parodic, spectacular and naturalistic. Scott Boehner identifies a typical movement of criticism on the play: to proclaim its multiplicity and then discover a key theme that unifies its apparent sprawl.33 Coletti points to theological and dramatic unities, and Boehner himself finds the play to be ‘a complex meditation on the practice of pilgrimage’.34 Both analyses are well supported, but it is also true, as Peter Womack argues, that Mary herself is the main unifying principle of the play, the only character present throughout, whose wanderings the audience follows.35 If the play is perceived as problematically disunified, and the figure of Mary its main claim to unity, then that unity is further complicated by the fact that she too is problematically disunified, and her disunity exemplified in the scenes of conversion. The play takes her through five distinct stages. She begins the play as a dutiful, respectable daughter; is converted to a life of sin; from sin to personal devotion to Christ; after

Digby saint plays and Book of Margery Kempe 127 his death, she becomes an apostle and preacher; when her work is done, she becomes a contemplative and penitent.36 Her final conversion takes her from this life to the next. A series of interpellations is staged, in which Mary obediently responds to and adopts the terms in which her father, the personified sins and Christ address her. Here we have, perhaps, a stylised version of the gradualism noted above as typical of women’s lives. The multiplicity of her holy career, which is not specific to the play, provides a close parallel to Margery Kempe’s mixture of modes of sanctity. In her settled form of life, Margery is both active and contemplative, teacher and pilgrim, simultaneously the Bride of Christ and the wife of John Kempe. To return to the original terms of the question: does Margery Kempe’s use of a predominantly masculine conversion topos affect her gender identity? It is possible that the rupture of conversion might also produce a rupture with her previous gender, and that to emerge into subjectivity is to emerge into masculinity. Both Mary and Margery are initially established as markedly feminine, Margery by marriage and childbirth and Mary by her father’s description of her as ‘ful fayur and ful of femynyte’ (MM 71). The pre-conversion sins of both women – sexual transgression, materialism and vanity – are those identified as particularly feminine. Furthermore, despite their formal similarities, the three conversion scenes are strongly marked by binary gender. Margery is addressed as she lies in a quintessentially feminine space, the marriageand child-bed; her immediate response to her conversion is to take up again her duties as housewife, concretised in ‘þe keys of þe botery’ (MK 8). Mary lies sleeping in another feminine space, the enclosed garden in which, in a profane parody of the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs, she receives her lovers (MM 564–71). Like Margery, she takes on feminine roles after her conversion, as an affective devotee of Christ and as sister to Martha and Lazarus. Paul’s conversion, by contrast, takes place in a public space, the open road, where Paul, upright and active, accompanied by soldiers, is undertaking a public mission to persecute Christians. The multiplicity of the women’s incarnations, however, takes them away from conventionally feminine roles. They pass through the feminine on their way to something else, their public apostolate. Apostolicism is not a normally feminine position. The mendicant orders which claimed the modern apostolate did not extend it to their female members.37 Preaching is a prominent component of both Margery and Mary’s missions, and one that sits uneasily with the Pauline ban on women’s preaching. Margery identifies with male apostles, adopting whatever is useful from Mary and Paul without ever explicitly noticing the gender gap. Although she has a female role model for her apostolate in the Magdalen, this is still, in a sense, a cross-gendered imitation, demanding a rupture from the normal behaviour of women. Their apostolic careers post-conversion are noticeably unusual for women: the rare word, ‘apostylesse’ seems only ever to have been used to refer to the Magdalen.38 Do Mary and Margery feminise the apostolic vocation, or do they themselves become other than feminine in their pursuit of this vocation? Susannah Milner argues that the Digby play marks Mary’s apostolate as feminine, citing the miracle in which Mary’s prayers allow the previously barren queen of Marseilles to conceive.39 However, miracles concerning childbirth are not the exclusive property of women saints. John Capgrave includes amongst the miracles

128 Sarah Salih of St Gilbert of Sempringham one in which the saint relieved a woman ‘whech trauayled in byrth of a child too dayes’ and the healing of another from postnatal sickness.40 Mary’s mission also has a public aspect: she converts the king and queen in order to convert the nation. To a spectator, her most impressive miracle would surely be the destruction of the idols of the temple of Marseilles: ‘Here xall comme a clowd from heven, and sett þe tempyl on afyer, and þe prest and þe clerk xall synke’ (MM 1561 s.d.), a public, political miracle which must have demanded a spectacular stage-effect. This kind of miracle is not gender-specific, being also performed by, for example, St George: ‘fire came down from heaven and consumed the temple, the idols and the priests, and the earth opened and swallowed up anything that was left.’41 Margery’s apostolate does include incidents that suggest a feminisation of her mission. Her healing miracles are directed at women: a virgin is cured of temptations (MK 177), a married woman cured of a madness following childbirth (MK 178). Margery’s confessor insists she confine her leper-kissing activities to leper women (MK 177). Women are often a receptive audience: the nuns of Denny (MK 202), Lady Greystoke (MK 133) and the crowd of women outside her prison window in Beverley are all supportive (MK 130). But she does not move in a strictly female sphere. Lynn Staley points to the public implications of Margery’s mission: her performance of holiness comprises a critique of the worldliness of the clergy.42 Men are included amongst Margery’s confidantes, supporters and converts. She refuses to withdraw from the social world; as Sarah Beckwith writes: ‘Margery was a religious woman who refused the space traditionally allotted to religious women – the sanctuary (or imprisonment) provided by the anchoress’s cell or the nunnery.’43 She thus cannot be confined to a feminine sphere, or a feminised apostolate. As Victor I. Scherb argues, her habit of rebuking bishops and their households is equivalent to Mary Magdalen’s destruction of the idols and conversion of the king and queen: both holy women authorise themselves by identifying others as blasphemers.44 These public activities are the necessary complement to and fulfilment of Mary and Margery’s conversions. Conversion is an interior experience: the individual feels, hears, sees the presence of God, which is usually inaccessible to others. The plays and the Book bring God and his ministers visibly onto the scene. Claire Sponsler argues that late medieval drama is a genre privileged to explore the tensions and difficulties of performative self-formation.45 It can also be argued that drama is, surprisingly, the proper mode for demonstrating conversion. After conversion, the convert’s own actions must bear witness, dramatically, to the effects of their conversion: an interior experience must be translated into exterior behaviour. Interpellation demands of all three of our converts that they bear witness to it; their own personal ruptures become the texts that they preach. The uniquely authoritative interpellations that bring the three into saintly subjectivity do not produce clearly legible social identities: all need to find a surface effect that speaks of the interior. Davidson comments that Mary Magdalen ‘dramatises scenes which show a saint engaged in the mystical experience – an experience that would not be available to all’.46 Implicit in this comment is that the play takes on the difficult, but imperative, task of finding and staging an exterior sign of the interior experience of contemplation.

Digby saint plays and Book of Margery Kempe 129 The Book of Margery Kempe is not obliged to perform the same task: insofar as it is a mystical treatise it could confine itself to recounting the interior experiences of Margery. However, the Book accepts that sanctity, even private and mystical sanctity, has a social profile, and goes to some lengths to describe the exterior manifestations of Margery’s contemplative experience. Joel Fredell’s analysis of the Book points out that Margery’s visions are signified to onlookers in the writhings of her body, which themselves establish her as a contemplative martyr.47 This double perspective means that the text must adopt a double focus, aware simultaneously of internal and external views of Margery: whan sche knew þat sche xulde cryen, sche kept it in as long as sche mygth & dede al þat sche cowde to withstond it er ellys to put it a-wey til sche wex as blo as any leed [went leaden-coloured], & euyr it xuld labowryn [labour] in her mende mor and mor in-to þe tyme þat it broke owte. (MK 69) In this passage, the perspective of the writer is double: she is both Margery herself and an onlooker, knowing both that Margery kept the cry in as long as she could, and that she turned blue with the effort. The dramatic and the narrative texts are both in the business of staging the self, using the dramatic methods of script, action and costume. The Book writes not only Margery’s performance, but also her audience, which audience may be sceptical, like those neighbours of Margery who responded to her hearing of heavenly music – itself a favourite stage-effect – with ‘Why speke
e so of þe myrth þat is in Heuyn;
e know it not &
e haue not be þer no mor þan we’ (MK 11). The Book thus highlights the difficulty of producing an external effect that is an accurate counterpart to Margery’s inner certainty: she can be read, but also misread. The same problem is dramatised in the plays in the doubts of figures who represent the average Christian: Simeon cannot accept that Mary Magdalen is not self-identical, and Ananias is reluctant to meet Paul because ‘I here so myche of hys furyous cruelte’ (CP 225). Once converted, the saints need to find exterior signs of their difference from their previous selves. They change the exterior, social self to mirror the internal change produced by Jesus’s intervention, and for the women, but not for Paul, this change has implications for gender. In all the texts, a change of heart is marked by the theatrical device of a change of costume.48 After his conversion, Paul appears ‘in hys dyscyplys wede’ to preach of the seven deadly sins, a single and uncomplicated change (CP 501 s.d.). The women, however, undergo at least two changes of clothes. Mary’s costume in her days of sin is unspecified, but Davidson is surely right to speculate that ‘she must have been dressed in garb indicative of her new occupation as a courtesan who caters to rich clients’, which may have been different from her original costume as a nobleman’s daughter.49 Mary’s apostolate begins when she appears with the other Maries ‘arayyd as chast women’ (MM 992 s.d.), probably plain dark outfits, and she is later dressed by angels in yet another costume, ‘a mentyll of whyte’, which must therefore be different from her chaste woman’s dress (MM 1604). The white clothing is not a standard element of Mary’s legend. It does not appear in the play’s

130 Sarah Salih main sources, the Golden Legend and South English Legendary, nor in Osbern Bokenham’s near-contemporary East Anglian version.50 In the visual arts, Mary is dressed richly – Thomas Aquinas assumes that she usually appears in red and blue – or appears naked and long-haired as a penitent in the desert.51 She wears, for example, green in Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century panel, The Magdalen Reading, in the National Gallery, London; and red and blue in the Très Riches Heures du Duc du Berry.52 A very close visual parallel to the Digby play’s representation of her personal discontinuity is Lucas Moser’s Magdalen Altarpiece of 1432.53 In the first panel Mary is shown in the moment of repentance as she embraces Christ’s feet, still wearing the costume of her life of sin, a red dress and loose hair. For her apostolate in Marseilles she has changed into what can probably be identified as a chaste woman’s costume: the red dress is covered with a dark cloak and her elaborate white head-dress covers her chin. In the desert scene she appears naked and covered with hair: the altarpiece thus shares the play’s interest in the significant changes in her appearance, but omits white clothing. I am unaware of any visual representation of the Magdalen dressed in white: this is not to say that none were ever created, but they must have been rare. In the play, Mary understands her white dress as ‘tokenyng of mekenesse’ (MM 1607), an unusual interpretation, for it is usually black which signifies ‘abjection, contempt for the world, penance, adversity, self-abasement, consciousness of sin, humility, sadness, and death’.54 Mary dresses in white as a prelude to completing the conversion of the king and queen and ruling as their regent. White is evidently meant to signify in the social world, and can be the dress of power as well as humility. Before her conversion, Margery uses elaborate clothing to convey her social ambitions: ‘Hir clokys also wer daggyd [slashed] & leyd [lined] wyth dyuers colowrs be-twen þe daggys þat it schuld be þe mor staryng [noticeable] to mennys sygth and hir-self þe mor ben worshepd’ (MK 9). It is implied that this manner of dress is abandoned following the failure of her business ventures (MK 32). The Book does not specify her second outfit, but her German confessor’s later instruction, ‘I charge
ow þan þat
e leue
owr white clothys, & weryth a-geyn
owr blak clothys’ (MK 84), indicates that after her initial conversion she adopted a sober black outfit, of the kind worn by vowesses, and probably identifiable with Mary’s costume as a chaste woman.55 The scene in which Margery is ordered to wear white makes it clear that such an outfit is not the normal dress of chaste women (MK 32). White dress performs the same function for both Margery and Mary: it sets them apart, not only from secular women but from chaste women too. Their adoption of white shows them to have renounced renunciation, and to have arrived at a stage beyond penitence. White clothes mark a further movement away from sexuality: both Mary and Margery first change their dress to mark that they are chaste; that they are no longer to be defined as sexual women. The white clothes mark a further movement away from ordinary womanhood, in which the two saints are no longer even identified with reference to sexuality. Chastity remains the ground of their authority, but ceases to be proclaimed: their white clothing removes them from familiar social and sexual categories altogether. Both women attain a state of holiness whereby the usual, sexually defined categories of womanhood are rendered irrelevant. An angel assures Mary, and the

Digby saint plays and Book of Margery Kempe 131 audience, that she will be ‘Inhansyd [raised] in heven above wergynnys [virgins]’ (MM 2022). Christ promises Margery ‘for-as-mech as þu art a mayden in þi sowle, I xal take þe be þe on hand in Hevyn & my Modyr be þe oþer hand, & so xalt þu dawnsyn in Hevyn wyth oþer holy maydens & virgynes’ (MK 52). They achieve chastity only to go beyond it, in the process becoming discontinuous both with other women and with their former selves. They do not escape womanhood altogether, but perform it differently. Butler outlines the possibility that interpellation might produce an excess of discourse and signification: Mary and Margery’s reinterpretation of the role of holy woman is just such an excess.56 Paul’s conversion does not involve a comparable change of gender identity: he is masculine, active and vocal before and after, with only a brief liminal period of blindness and passivity. In a muted recollection of the ‘virility’ ascribed to early Christian holy women, to become more perfect, Mary and Margery have to become, if not masculine, at least differently feminine.57 The emergence into subjectivity takes differently gendered forms, complicating the gender identities of Mary and Margery but confirming that of Paul. The women’s careers conform to a stylised version of the gradualism outlined above, but not to the continuous self-identity that this model implies. In becoming other than what they were, Mary and Margery also become discontinuous with other women. Margery leaves no traces in the contemporary sources, such as bishops’ registers, where a researcher might hope to find her, and it has been argued that this absence suggests that the Book should be read as fiction.58 It is also possible that the lack of any reference to Margery by her East Anglian contemporaries shows her to be less singular than the Book claims: Roberta Gilchrist and Marilyn Oliva show that fifteenth-century East Anglia housed a number of freelance holy women.59 Perhaps, however, Margery does leave a trace. I earlier resisted claiming the Digby play of Mary Magdalen as an influence on the Book of Margery Kempe. It is not inconceivable, however, that the influence was the other way around: that the Digby playwright perceived his traditional sources on the life of the Magdalen informed by the memory or the writing of another apostolic, white-clad, discontinuous holy woman, Margery Kempe. If so, then the relations between life and Life, piety and sanctity, are multiple. Margery, imitating the saints in her life and text, would then herself become a textual exemplar that feeds back into the hagiographic tradition.

Notes 1 C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, p. 25; D. Weinstein and R.M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom 1000–1700, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 24. Rosalynn Voaden’s current research into hagiography confirms that radical conversion experiences are far more prevalent in men’s Vitae; Voaden, ‘Visions of my Youth: Representations of the Childhood of Medieval Visionaries’, paper read at Medieval Women: Work, Spirituality, Literacy and Patronage Ten Years On, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, July 2000 and personal communication. See also R. Kieckhefer, ‘Convention and Conversion: Patterns of Late Medieval Piety’, Church History, 1998, vol. 67, pp. 32–51 for a useful complication of the meanings of conversion.

132 Sarah Salih 2 D. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 241. 3 G. Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 73. See M.S. Dixon, ‘“Thys Body of Mary”: “Femynyte” and “Inward Mythe” in the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Mediaevalia, 1995, vol. 18, pp. 221–44 for an application of this argument to the Digby play. 4 Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 280; Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, p. 211. 5 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S.B. Meech and H.E. Allen, EETS os 212, London, Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 12. Further page references will appear as ‘MK’ in parentheses in the text. 6 C.M. Mooney, ‘Voice, Gender and the Portrayal of Sanctity’, in Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 1–15, p. 13. 7 In particular, that Margery’s performance of virginity produces a partial departure from femininity; S. Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2001, pp. 166–241. The current chapter further develops some observations made in the book. 8 R. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and their Religious Milieu, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 6. 9 For Mary, see ‘Prosalegenden: Die legenden des ms. Douce 114’, ed. C. Horstmann, Anglia, 1885, vol. 8, pp. 103–96, pp. 134–96; for Bridget, lyfe of seynt Birgette in The Myroure of oure Ladye, ed. J.H. Blunt, EETS es 19, London, Trübner, 1873, pp. xlvii–lix. 10 See, for example, the legends of Sts Margaret and Christine, in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W.G. Ryan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, vol. 1, pp. 368–70, pp. 385–7. 11 John Capgrave, The Life of St Katherine of Alexandria, ed. C. Horstmann, EETS os 100, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1893, book III, lines 468–9. 12 See also S. Beckwith, ‘Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency and Authority in the Book of Margery Kempe’, Exemplaria, 1992, vol. 4, pp. 171–99, p. 175 for discussion of this passage. 13 The Book’s alignment with the model of penitent prostitutes is discussed in T.K. Szell, ‘From Woe to Weal and Weal to Woe: Notes on the Structure of the Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. McEntire (ed.), Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, New York, Garland, 1992, pp. 73–91, p. 84 and in L.H. McAvoy, ‘Spiritual Virgin to Virgin Mother: The Confessions of Margery Kempe’, Parergon, 1999, ns vol. 17, pp. 9–44. 14 C. Coulson, ‘Mysticism, Meditation and Identification in the Book of Margery Kempe’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 1995, vol. 12, pp. 69–79. 15 S.L. Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation of Mary Magdalene and the “Digby Plays”’, Mystics Quarterly, 1993, vol. 19, pp. 173–81. 16 S. Eberly, ‘Margery Kempe, St Mary Magdalene, and Patterns of Contemplation’, Downside Review, 1989, vol. 107, pp. 209–23. See also S. Fanous, ‘Measuring the Pilgrim’s Progress: Internal Emphases in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in D. Renevey and C. Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000, pp. 157–76 and N.K. Yoshikawa, ‘Veneration of Virgin Martyrs in Margery Kempe’s Meditation: Influence of the Sarum Liturgy and Hagiography’, in the same, pp. 177–96. 17 I am grateful to David Lawton for pointing this out and for encouraging me to work on the subject. 18 The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. D.C. Baker, J.L. Murphy and L.B. Hall Jr., EETS os 283, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982. 19 C.M. Meale, ‘“This is a deed bok, the tother a quick”: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kemp’, in J. Wogan-Browne and others (eds), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, Turnhout, Brepols, 2000, pp. 49–68, pp. 52–7, p. 65.

Digby saint plays and Book of Margery Kempe 133 20 Late Medieval Religious Plays, p. xix, p. xxxvi; J. Bennett, ‘The Mary Magdalene of Bishop’s Lynn’, Studies in Philology, 1978, vol. 75, pp. 1–10. 21 Meale, ‘“This is a deed bok”’, p. 59, note 32. 22 Late Medieval Religious Plays, p. xx, p. xxii, p. xl. 23 C. Davidson, ‘The Middle English Saint Play and its Iconography’, in Davidson (ed.), The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications, 1986, pp. 31–122, p. 74; D. Grantley, ‘Saints’ Plays’, in R. Beadle (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 265–89, p. 266. 24 Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation of Mary Magdalene’, p. 173. 25 Conversion of St Paul, in Late Medieval Religious Plays, pp. 1–23, lines 183–9. Further line references will be given as ‘CP’ in parentheses in the text. 26 Mary Magdalen, in Late Medieval Religious Plays, pp. 24–95, lines 588–90, lines 602–7. Further line references will be given as ‘MM’ in parentheses in the text. 27 L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Althusser, Essays in Ideology, London, Verso, 1984, pp. 1–60, p. 48. 28 J. Butler, ‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’, Yale French Studies, 1995, vol. 88, pp. 6–26, p. 9. 29 Butler, ‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’, p. 6. 30 See T. Coletti, ‘The Design of the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene’, Studies in Philology, 1979, vol. 76, pp. 313–33, p. 316 for a discussion of the ironies of vaunting. 31 J. Root, ‘Space to Speke’: The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature, New York, Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 78–9. 32 Coletti, ‘Design of the Digby Play’, p. 313. 33 S. Boehner, ‘The Aesthetics of “Sprawling” Drama: The Digby Mary Magdalene as Pilgrims’ Play’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1999, vol. 98, pp. 325–52, p. 327. 34 Coletti, ‘Design of the Digby Play’, p. 314; Boehner, ‘Aesthetics of “Sprawling” Drama’, p. 352. 35 P. Womack, ‘Shakespeare and The Sea of Stories’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1999, vol. 29, pp. 169–87, p. 175. 36 This Mary is thus the ‘composite Magdalen’: see M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, London, Picador, 1985, pp. 225–8. 37 A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 348. 38 Mary Magdalen, line 1381; MED, ‘apostlesse’. See K.L. Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola’, in B.M. Kienzle and P.J. Walker (eds), Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 57–96, for further discussion of the Magdalen as preacher. 39 S. Milner, ‘Flesh and Food: The Function of Female Asceticism in the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Philological Quarterly, 1994, vol. 73, pp. 385–401. 40 John Capgrave, Lives of St Augustine and St Gilbert of Sempringham, ed. J.J. Munro, EETS os 140, London, Oxford University Press, 1910, p. 125, p. 126. 41 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 241. Thanks to Sam Riches for pointing out this parallel. 42 L. Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, p. 74. 43 S. Beckwith, ‘A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe’, in D. Aers (ed.), Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, Brighton, Harvester, 1986, pp. 34–57, p. 37. 44 V.I. Scherb, ‘Blasphemy and the Grotesque in the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Studies in Philology, 1999, vol. 96, pp. 225–40, p. 231. 45 C. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. xvi. 46 Davidson, ‘Middle English Saint Play’, p. 94.

134 Sarah Salih 47 J. Fredell, ‘Margery Kempe: Spectacle and Spiritual Governance’, Philological Quarterly, 1996, vol. 75, pp. 137–66, p. 156. 48 Clothing symbolism in Mary Magdalen is discussed in Coletti, ‘Design of the Digby Play’, pp. 325–31. 49 Davidson, ‘Middle English Saint Play’, p. 85. 50 D. Grantley, ‘The Source of the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Notes and Queries, 1984, vol. 229, pp. 457–9; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 374–83; South English Legendary, Vol. I, ed. C. d’Evelyn and A.J. Mill, EETS os 235, London, Oxford University Press, 1956, pp. 302–15; Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. M.S. Serjeantson, EETS os 206, London, Oxford University Press, 1938, pp. 144–72. 51 S. Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, London, HarperCollins, 1993, p. 147. 52 The Très Riches Heures image dates from the 1480s and can be found in E. Pognon, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, trans. D. Macrae, Geneva, Productions Liber, 1983, pp. 106–7. 53 Reproductions of the altarpiece are in H. May, Lucas Moser, Stuttgart, Emil Fink Verlag, 1961. Medieval East Anglia had ‘close economic and cultural links with northern Europe’, where Margery Kempe travelled extensively in 1433; G.M. Gibson, Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 22. 54 G. Constable, ‘The Ceremonies and Symbolism of Entering Religious Life and Taking the Monastic Habit, from the Fourth to the Twelfth Century’, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano de Studi Sall’Alto Medioeva, 1987, vol. 33, pp. 771–834, p. 829. 55 See also M.C. Erler, ‘Margery Kempe’s White Clothes’, Medium Ævum, 1993, vol. 62, pp. 78–83, p. 79. 56 J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York and London, Routledge, 1993, p. 122. The Book of Margery Kempe maintains a consistent interest in the problematics of interpellation, staged most clearly in the trial scenes, when Margery, addressed as heretic, proves herself (ambiguously) orthodox. 57 J. McNamara, ‘Sexual Equality and the Cult of Virginity in Early Christian Thought’, Feminist Studies, 1976, vol. 3, pp. 145–58. 58 Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, p. 60, note 50. 59 R. Gilchrist and M. Oliva, Religious Women in Medieval East Anglia, Norwich, Centre of East Anglian Studies, 1993, pp. 74–80.

9

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography P.H.Cullum

By the later Middle Ages the pious were taught that there were two forms of the religious life, the active and the contemplative. While those living by a rule were generally directed towards the contemplative life, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had seen a great emphasis placed on the active life, both for religious, such as the new Augustinian and mendicant orders, and also for laypeople. In practice of course the two were not mutually exclusive and each can be found both in the lives of those recognised by the Church for their sanctity, and those who merely aspired to holiness. Nevertheless, spiritual advisers often recommended the active life as particularly suited to those who were not enclosed. Within the active life it was often the expression of charity through almsgiving that was the most prominent exemplary practice. Charity also played a part in the investigation of putative cases of sanctity by the papacy, and in the representation of sanctity in collections of the lives of saints, such as Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend.1 By the early fifteenth century when Christine de Pisan, a well-read recipient of this tradition, was writing her book of advice to women, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, she explained the two forms of the religious life but couched the expression of the active life solely in terms of almsgiving and charity.2 Charitable activity was something that was enjoined upon all the faithful, but access to it was not equally available. Although medieval property law varied considerably, both geographically and chronologically, in general terms men owned property whereas women had the use of property. Heiresses might technically own property outright, but did not often have personal control of it, and when married their rights in it largely passed to their husband. Married women might have an income from specified resources, and peasant and artisan wives often contributed to the household economy, though usually from the product of their labour rather than their own property. Even as widows women often had only a life interest in their dower, which would be entailed to children on their deaths, though as mothers they might have responsibility for the administration of the inheritance of under-age children. Often it was only the childless widow who had real control of property. Therefore the positions of men and women in relation to the practice of charity were different and the range of activities available to women was more limited than that available to men. The fact that women spent much, often all, of their lives under the authority of men – father, husband and sometimes son – affected their

136 P.H. Cullum ability to practise the kind of charity that they might have chosen. It also clearly affected perceptions about the extent to which women had the right or duty to practise almsgiving. The main problem was that women might have the use of food or money resources, but those resources often legally belonged to someone else, usually a father or husband. This issue of who had authority to give alms was clearly an important one during the thirteenth century for it is addressed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. Wives, children and servants were all under the authority of the paterfamilias, and Aquinas set up a proposition based on Augustine that none of these could give alms: ‘alms should come out of what a man has honestly earned by his own toil, not out of other people’s property, which would be the case if those who are subject to others engaged in almsgiving. Therefore such persons may not do so.’3 His answer, however, was to suggest that although almsgiving should be subject to the permission of the superior, there were circumstances in which the inferior could give alms. A servant could give alms if it was to the benefit of the master: ‘they may do anything that advances his interest, and there is no more effective way of doing this than by giving alms in his name’. A wife too, though under her husband’s authority ‘is also his partner, and so can still engage in almsgiving’. The wife or servant could give alms out of their own resources, and did not need permission to do so, but the wife ‘should exercise moderation in the matter so as not to reduce her husband to penury’. Similarly children and servants could only give small alms from household resources, except with the explicit permission of the father. Aquinas’s discussion suggests a real ambivalence about how far anyone other than the master of the household had a right to alienate property, and left much to individual judgement. Who decided whether a servant’s (or wife’s) alms would ‘advance his [the master’s] interests’, or what constituted ‘small alms’? Nor did Aquinas’s view settle the matter. In the fifteenth century St Bernardino of Siena continued to doubt whether those who were themselves dependent or who owed obedience – such as wives, children and servants – could give charitably, as what they gave was not wholly theirs.4 Moreover, the issue was made more problematic by the fact that it was usually part of the wife’s role as household manager to distribute alms.5 In a sense Aquinas’s and Bernardino’s problem arose only because it was the responsibility of the wife, or occasionally the servant, to decide what could and should be given to the poor from the household’s surplus of food, clothes and sometimes money. If almsgiving were primarily the husband’s responsibility the issue would not arise. However, men did have a responsibility to give alms, particularly where it might involve the alienation of money or real property, but their choices may not always have coincided with those of their female dependants. Although charity was enjoined upon all Christians, in practice it had different meanings and expression for men and women. A male householder had to balance his responsibilities towards the poor with other considerations: he was expected to ensure the status of family and lineage, and pass down an intact patrimony to his heirs. For men the practice of charity more often confirmed both their own status and that of recipients than it challenged them, and was rarely so profligate that it threatened their own economic security or that of their dependants. For women,

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 137 however, the practice of charity could be excessive and threatening to the status of both individual and family.6 Furthermore, the question was not just a matter of disposition of the leftovers of a meal, but a careful balancing act of the duty of charity to the poor, the requirements of thrift for the preservation of the household and the maintenance of social status through both. Felicity Heal’s work on the idea of hospitality in late medieval and early modern England has shown that although the amount, timing and range of hospitality were voluntary, the practice of hospitality itself was not.7 To refuse to aid one’s neighbours or inferiors was to label oneself a miser, an outsider without ties of obligation or dependency, one who had no reputation to create or maintain, and also to risk one’s soul in the life to come. Weinstein and Bell, in Saints and Society, have emphasised the distinctive place of almsgiving in the piety of holy women of the later Middle Ages. For Weinstein and Bell ‘women were more rigidly confined to a particular type of holiness than were men’.8 The vitae of women saints show a higher proportion of supernatural experiences than do those of men, but women also appear disproportionately as healer and helper saints. By their calculations, helping the sick, the poor, pilgrims and widows and children was a much more prominent motif in the lives of female saints than in those of male saints.9 They also found that the penitential and ascetic life was also particularly correlated with female sanctity.10 However, they also suggest that a group of characteristics – ‘penitential asceticism, private prayer, mystical communion with the Godhead, and charity’ – were found in the lives of some of the most popular saints, male and female, who they claim are more accurately termed androgynous.11 Caroline Walker Bynum explored the place of female almsgiving, particularly the distribution of food, in her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast a few years later. She argued that ‘each gender renounced and distributed what it most effectively controlled: men gave up money, property, and progeny; women gave up food’.12 The binary oppositions which Bynum, and to a lesser extent Weinstein and Bell, set up are interesting but mainly focus on the female side of the equation. They also do not always take into account the economic and legal circumstances which shaped how men and women acted. As the discussion above of women’s position in relation to property and of theological debate about the issue indicates, there was considerable ambivalence about women’s almsgiving. In some respects this makes the observations of both even more surprising. The rest of this chapter will seek to explore the extent to which models of gender and sanctity interacted, often abrasively, in ways which meant that the binary patterns observed by previous writers did not always work. This means that models of sanctity might have affected the gendered expression of charity, and also that models of gender affected the way in which sanctity might be expressed, or indeed whether it was recognised at all. One important area for exploration below is the extent to which breach of gendered role affected perceptions of sanctity. In some cases it may have enhanced a reputation for sanctity, but more usually it seems to have hindered it. In theory the routes to sanctity were equally open to all, but in practice once the age of martyrs was past, it was easier for some to achieve sanctity than others.

138 P.H. Cullum Churchmen were those most likely to be canonised up until the twelfth century, but increasingly from this period laypeople, and from the thirteenth century more women – and even married women – were being canonised.13 Laymen, especially if not of high status, were perhaps least well-represented. Nevertheless it is clear that at the level of papal canonisation, women candidates were less likely to succeed than men.14 Saintly women remained a problematic category for the higher levels of the Church, and we should therefore expect to find that women had to demonstrate excessive levels of religiosity compared to men before their cults would be recognised. Yet if they did behave ‘excessively’, whether charitably or in other respects, they risked aligning themselves with representations of women as unbalanced or unreasoning, which might themselves bring their sanctity into question.15 Similarly, while men – particularly of high status, whether clerical or lay – could be canonised for the proper exercise of their office, especially in the promotion of justice for the poor (for example, St Louis), others who transgressed these roles were much more problematic, such as Charles of Blois or even Francis of Assisi, as will be seen below.16 Models of male and female sanctity as they related to almsgiving are considered below, with reference to the writing of a close contemporary of Thomas Aquinas, Jacobus de Voragine. These templates will allow us to explore how the interaction of sanctity and gender affected both practice and reputation in the later Middle Ages. In Jacobus’s Golden Legend, composed about 1260, we have both a compilation of the most popular and widely revered traditional saints and a smattering of the more recently canonised saints. The Golden Legend was the most popular book in the Middle Ages after the Bible; it survives in around a thousand manuscript copies and was widely printed in a variety of languages from the later fifteenth century.17 It can thus claim to represent a popular understanding of the nature and variety of sanctity in the later Middle Ages. Jacobus gives us the lives of three traditional male saints: St Julian the Hospitaller, St John the Almsgiver and St Nicholas, all of whom were proverbial for their generosity.18 Julian was a young man of noble family who while hunting received a prophecy that he would kill his parents. Desperate to avoid such a crime he fled to another country where by a cruel twist of fate the prophecy came true. As a penance he and his wife established a hospice on the banks of a river where they kept the ferry and provided for travellers and the poor. Eventually an angelic visitor told Julian that his penance had been accepted, and soon thereafter both husband and wife died.19 The story undoubtedly contains romance elements. In this account charitable activity was penitential, and was also something that both Julian and his wife were engaged in together. It is an agreed product of the household, though presumably one that Julian directed. The economic basis of the story is nowhere addressed: Julian was nobly born but left everything behind when he fled; however, service to a prince brought him a noble widow as a wife. Implicitly this wealth too was left behind when they sought a place to perform their penance, but they were nevertheless able to establish a hospice and provide for the poor. The economic basis of their charity is a non-issue as a result of the romantic nature of the story and also because there were no constraints on Julian: he and his wife shared their penitential

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 139 life and holy death, so Julian did not need to provide for a widow, and they had no children (implicitly if not explicitly), so there was no need to provide for heirs. While Julian was a lay figure, John the Almsgiver was a bishop, the patriarch of Alexandria. Charity towards the poor was an important part of the role of a bishop, particularly in early Christianity, and it is no accident that almsgiving represents a very significant element in the sanctity of two of Jacobus’s bishops, John and Nicholas. The account of John the Almsgiver is a complex one, largely consisting of stories which John himself told in order to encourage charity to the poor. It includes the legend of the tax-gatherer whose soul was saved by an unwilling act of charity, throwing a loaf of bread at a beggar. This story was more widely known and referred to in the Middle Ages, for example by John Mirk in his Festial.20 John himself appears to have performed many of his charitable works by persuading wealthy citizens to make rather larger donations to his work than they had intended. One such was the tale that a rich man, seeing that John’s own bed was poorly furnished because he gave away all his better bedclothes to the poor, gave him a costly quilt. John was unable to sleep and in the morning sold the quilt. The donor bought it back and re-presented it to John who promptly sold it again, and the story repeated. ‘In this way the saint gently plucked the rich man.’21 Nevertheless it is clear too that John also used up his own resources. The time came when he was stricken with a high fever and realised that his end was near, and he said: ‘I thank you, O God, because you have listened to my indigence begging your bounty that when I die I should be found to possess no more than a single penny: and now I order that that penny be given to the poor.’22 The emphasis on heroic charity in the account of John the Almsgiver in part reflects early Christian attitudes to charitable activity, but was also acceptable in the later Middle Ages as appropriate to a bishop. John was heroic and demonstrably saintly in his disbursal of resources. A bishop was a different kind of man, and therefore also a different kind of saint, from a layman. Chastity, defence of the poor and personal piety were all essential to the episcopal saint: ‘the great bishop who preached the gospel, visited the sick, practised celibacy, and insisted that his priests do likewise was promoted for veneration’.23 The account of St Nicholas opens with the famous story of his gift of three bags of gold to provide dowries for the daughters of an impoverished nobleman who would otherwise have put them into prostitution. This act, performed while Nicholas was a young and wealthy man, leads directly into the account of how he became bishop of Myra.24 Similarly the food multiplication miracle, in which he commandeered grain from the imperial grainships which nevertheless delivered a full cargo, involved no economic loss to any party, but merely reinforced the saint’s reputation.25 The act of charity does not necessarily destabilise, but rather may reinforce, masculine power and authority. For Nicholas, the narrative structure implies that the act of charity towards the girls is what causes him to be made bishop, although

140 P.H. Cullum he insists on it being kept secret. When a convocation met to choose the next bishop of Myra a voice told the leading bishop to elect the first man who came to the church who will be called Nicholas, and so it fell out.26 Despite Nicholas’s secrecy, his holiness was revealed and rewarded. Similarly it was John the Almsgiver’s own charity and humility which sets an example to the wealthier of his flock and gave him the authority to persuade them to give more to the poor than they might have chosen. Nor does this moral pressure appear to cause conflict or opposition. Julian’s case is somewhat different for his charity was penitential, not a product of his office. He was justified by it, but it appears also to protect him from civil justice and sustains his marriage. One of the few ‘older’ female saints in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legend, and even rarer because not a virgin saint, is St Paula. Paula is a curious choice for inclusion in his collection, because although she was an exemplary Christian Mother, she appears to have had very little cult by the later medieval period. Jacobus de Voragine’s account of her is also unusual in that he had simply extracted elements of Jerome’s epistle on her; he did not even introduce her with his customary symbolic etymology of the saint’s name.27 This suggests that Jacobus was not quite sure what to do with the story; it was not one he was so familiar with that he could comfortably rework Jerome’s account. She may appear in part by association of name, being preceded by the Conversion of St Paul, and in part by thematic association, as Paul and Paula are sandwiched between St John the Almsgiver and St Julian. Paula was an exemplar of heroic charity: a noble Roman widow of wealth and status, who bore five children, and yet abandoned Rome and her youngest children in order to dedicate herself to a religious life in the Holy Land. There, accompanied by her daughter, the dedicated virgin Eustochium, she established monastic houses for both men and women, and practised an ascetic piety.28 Jerome uses an account of her generosity to criticise his own moderation: ‘I admit the error I committed when I rebuked her for her prodigal almsgiving.’29 He advised that she did not give away too much, lest she end up with nothing, but she ‘wisely’ declared (like John the Almsgiver) that ‘her one wish and vow was that she might die a beggar, unable to leave as much as a penny to her daughter’.30 Jerome also records a critic telling Paula that some thought her carried away by the ardour of her virtues, and to be out of her mind, and that she should take better care of her brain. To this she replied: ‘We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men: we are fools for Christ’s sake, but the foolishness of God is wiser than men.’31 Paula was demonstrating a late Roman contemptus mundi, exemplified by her willingness to give up status, children and home, for the hope of a heavenly reward.32 Jerome’s emphasis on Paula’s maternal feelings is presumably designed to argue that she did not abandon her children selfishly, but to a higher end, but in doing so he emphasises the abandoning of her familial responsibilities.33 For Jerome, perhaps this reinforces the strength of her piety, but he may also have felt that she had fulfilled

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 141 her duties: she had borne her children, and they were old enough to manage without her. Her contemporary critics could, however, suggest that she was unbalanced, implicitly not being reasonable or moderate. By the mid-thirteenth century she must have looked more like a precursor of St Elizabeth of Hungary, and this may explain her inclusion in the collection; she could have provided justification for more recent saintly females who did not fit into the traditional virgin saint model. Paula was particularly useful because she was married and had had children. Women such as Elizabeth of Hungary and Margaret of Cortona also had to negotiate the problem of having children when traditional models of saintly females were virginal and childless. Both coped by rejecting their children in part or whole in order to concentrate on the more important business of devotion.34 However, in doing so they risked breaching secular and indeed Marian images of the good woman as devoted mother. Paula’s actions might provide a legitimation of their choices, but while Elizabeth, a married woman of high status, did receive papal approval, Margaret, of lower status and whose child was illegitimate, did not, though she did have a strong local cult.35 Jacobus de Voragine includes St Elizabeth of Hungary among his most recent saints, but a number of the most popular female saints of the later Middle Ages all took the demands of charity extremely seriously. Indeed their willingness to give away the resources of their households was, depending upon your viewpoint, either excessive or heroic. Their readiness to listen to the call to give to the poor was saintly in its literal-mindedness. St Elizabeth of Hungary once gathered all the crops in her husband’s barns and distributed them to the poor when famine threatened, and later as a widow spent her entire dower, partly in building a hospital and the rest by distributing it to the poor.36 St Zita of Lucca, the servant-saint, gave food from her master’s stores in time of famine, spent her own limited wages on charity, and allowed the homeless poor to use her own bed.37 Less well-known figures, such as the fifteenth-century Frances of Rome, gave grain and wine from her family’s cellars during a great famine. Miraculously, no matter how much she gave, it was never exhausted.38 While these activities might be thought no more than the proper fulfilment of the contract between rich and poor, other aspects of these women’s actions show that they created as much conflict as charity. Elizabeth’s scrupulosity about the source of the food that she and her maids ate led her husband to assign her specific revenues, and to say that he refrained from imitating her diet only because he was ‘afraid of upsetting the whole household’.39 Her expulsion from her rights and property on her husband’s death was allegedly because his vassals thought her a ‘wasteful, prodigal woman’.40 ‘Like a woman’ Elizabeth was irresponsible, by noble standards, in failing to preserve her husband’s patrimony, and a bad mother in failing to ensure that her children inherited as much as possible of their parents’ property. Of both Elizabeth and Zita the same apocryphal miracle story was told: that having been forbidden to give food to the poor because of their excessive generosity, each was caught, by husband or master, carrying bread to the poor in her apron, and when challenged revealed nothing more than a lapful of roses, a miraculous transformation.41 This story, which was also told of other female saints – and the

142 P.H. Cullum better-attested story of Columba of Rieti, that her mother complained to her that she had given away all the family’s food, told because it was the occasion of a foodmultiplication miracle – indicate that such excessive charity could be the cause of conflict within the household.42 To the master, the husband or the mother, giving away too much risked diminishing permanently the resources of the household and its position within the social hierarchy. Too close an identification with the needs of the poor risked the possibility of stepping from an imagined to a genuine life of poverty, with the concomitant destruction of social hierarchy and indeed of the possibility of fulfilment of the social contract. Frances and Elizabeth, both women of elite status, though in differing degree, nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, also strove in other ways to destroy hierarchy within their own households, and in their relations with people from outside that household. Elizabeth, though a princess, insisted that her ladies address her in the familiar, rather than the formal, mode.43 As a Franciscan tertiary she tended to the sick poor in her hospital with her own hands.44 Frances, from a noble Roman family, also treated her servants as equals, herself carried wood like a servant, but also went begging in the streets and at church doors.45 A Bakhtinian reading would suggest that these activities, by inverting the conventional roles of noble women, in fact reinforced the hierarchy of status which they were attempting to escape. Only a person of higher status engaged in these activities could receive (with whatever reservations) commendation for them. For someone of lower status such occupations were simply their employment and attracted no surprise. A servant who addressed her mistress as an equal unprompted would not have thereby demonstrated her sanctity. This is a valid reading but there is another one: Frances and Elizabeth were not reinforcing the conventional hierarchy but replacing it with a more important privileging of the spiritual over the material. Within the realm of the spiritual, relations were conceived on a horizontal rather than vertical frame: Elizabeth wished to be addressed as an equal; Frances demonstrated her identification with the poor. Both these women sought to obliterate the conventional hierarchies in which they were embedded and to collapse the dependencies of rich and poor into a single identity.46 The families and friends of all these women experienced their activities as socially disruptive, both of the household itself, but also of the household’s place in the wider society. Indeed, Boanas and Roper argue that Frances’s piety was a sustained critique of her marital family’s concern with consolidating their status in Roman society.47 To be too charitable, to take the issue of mutual dependence too seriously, could itself break the ties of the social hierarchy that charity was supposed to reinforce. Why did these women tend to adopt this literal-minded approach to charity? The conventional explanation has been in their devotion to Christ in the poor. This view is clearly important, but does not entirely explain their desire to reverse or collapse social hierarchies. I would like to suggest the relevance of one particular aspect of the liturgy that has had relatively little attention paid to it. The Magnificat was a hymn spoken by Mary on the occasion of the Visitation to Elizabeth, who was particularly a saint of women, especially of married women. The Magnificat may

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 143 therefore also have appealed to these women. It was recited daily at the office of Vespers or Evensong and includes the following passages: My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid: for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. . . . He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.48 The Magnificat would have been familiar to most Christians as part of the daily liturgy and so too would its upsetting, destabilising message that also spoke of the importance of the charitable act. It was one part of the liturgy that was often translated in the vernacular devotional literature of the period such as the Lay-Folks’ Prayer Book, the Stanzaic Life of Christ and Nicholas Love’s Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. It was also regularly explicated to a non-literate audience through the religious drama of the day. The regular translation and explication of this part of the liturgy demonstrate not only the centrality of the Magnificat but also that these models of sanctity were not confined to Italy; by the early fifteenth century at least they had moved into northern Europe. The place in which this was most thoroughly carried out was in the Marian section of the N-Town play. This late fifteenth-century East Anglian drama contains an enactment of the Visitation closely based on the liturgy.49 This was not the only play in which the Magnificat was enacted; the Chester Nativity and the Towneley Salutation of Elizabeth both contain versions of the Magnificat in English, and the York Visitation concludes with a rendition of it in Latin. The Mary Play, however, had a very clearly didactic purpose, and the Visitation section consisted of a simultaneous translation by Elizabeth of the words spoken in Latin by Mary. Of all the versions this one most showed the two women acting in concert. It concluded with Mary’s explanation that: This psalme of prophesye seyd betwen vs tweyn, In hefne it is wretyn with aungellys hond; Evyr to be songe and also to be seyn, Euery day amonge us at oure evesong.50 While this statement might be no more than a reference to the place of the Magnificat in the Vespers liturgy, it probably indicates that Evensong was regularly attended by at least the devout and better-off, who may also have recited it at home. Margery Kempe was going to Evensong when one of her neighbours, also on his way to attend the service, made a pass at her, suggesting that even the less devout attended.51 Representations of the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth were primarily used as explications or foci for the Ave prayer, and have mainly been interpreted by historians

144 P.H. Cullum as concretising the concept of the Incarnation, but they also served as reminders of the Magnificat.52 Was the liturgy alone, or even in conjunction with ideas about the service of Christ in the poor, enough to explain the actions of women like Frances of Rome, Columba of Rieti or Zita of Lucca? There was, I would suggest, something more. These women were themselves dependent within this culture; they were wives, daughters, servants. All were dependent upon some man for status, household and security. Yet they were all household managers and controllers of food and the other products of the household. They were the ones who decided how those household resources were disposed. When the Magnificat said, ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away’, it was they who stood at the kitchen door and decided who was filled with good things, and who sent empty away. Yet even this was a limited authority, at least in the Italian culture of Frances, Columba and Zita, of Aquinas and Bernardino. All these excessive enactments of charity reinforced conceptions of women as unreasonable, irresponsible, disobedient, but their reprising of negative motifs of femininity could be forgiven, indeed lauded, because it was in the service of a higher calling, by which they demonstrated their victory over their inherent weaknesses as women. Themselves dependent upon their masculine head of household, as the story of the rose-filled apron only too clearly demonstrated, these women were also able to identify with the dependency of the poor. This brings us back to the issue of the potentially, and sometimes actually, disruptive effects on the household of charity taken seriously. These women, though themselves dependent, had in their hands a source of power. As managers of the domestic goods they chose how those goods were distributed. To give alms was to claim the right to a voice in how household goods were distributed. If they chose to give ‘excessively’, ‘heroically’, of those resources to the poor, they arrogated to themselves choice about the economics of the household. They could disburse resources which a husband, a master, a father might have chosen to use in other ways. They could always defend themselves with the appeal to the higher demands of religion and the poor. In so doing they disrupted hierarchies of power within the household.53 For holy men adopting the active life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were choices to be made about how this was to be achieved. They might, especially if clerics, adopt the episcopal models of St Nicholas or St John the Almsgiver. Laymen might imitate St Julian, but the twelfth-century emphasis on not just almsgiving but actual identity with the poor suggested that these models might not be enough. Negotiating these problems, and finding an apposite idiom in which to work out these new modes of piety in a gender-appropriate fashion, was difficult and not all those who sought to do this found approval for their solutions. Elizabeth of Hungary, with Dominic and Francis, was among a relatively small number of recent saints associated with the mendicant orders whose lives Jacobus de Voragine chose to record. Here we have more of a sense of Jacobus’s own priorities. Dominic, like Nicholas, indicated his piety in his youth, in his case by selling his books and furniture while a student to help the poor during a famine. As a result he was made a canon regular by the bishop.54 In this respect Dominic very

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 145 much falls into the traditional pattern. However, twice Dominic intended to sell himself into slavery to assist men who had fallen either into heresy or the hands of the Saracens, but in both cases God ensured that it was not necessary, ‘foreseeing that the saint would be needed for the spiritual redemption of many captives’.55 This is part of a longer narrative in which Dominic demonstrates his steadfast devotion to duty and willingness to be martyred if necessary. It follows a story in which Cathar heretics threatened him with death, and precedes another in which he demonstrated the true religion by keeping a strict fast and watch through Lent, and thus brought some Toulousan ladies back to the faith. This section is followed by one that discusses Dominic’s founding of his new order.56 Thus Dominic is shown to have identified with the poor in the proper fashion, but not to have gone beyond this into acting irresponsibly. God preserved him for a greater need. Dominic is shown as having a manly courage, but also acting reasonably. He did not attempt to provoke the heretics into martyring him, and the austerities to which he subsequently subjected himself were also reasonable. He observed the strict letter of the Lenten law but did not go beyond it to excessive privation. This is a man of mesure, and that judgement is what leads him to found his order. By contrast Francis of Assisi, the other great mendicant saint, developed a very different strategy. Francis, in comparison with Dominic, had a more feminised pattern of charity, and as with women, it often engendered conflict. Like Elizabeth and Frances, Francis sought to obliterate the conventional hierarchies in which he was embedded and to collapse the dependencies of rich and poor into a single identity. As a young man he seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps, but Jacobus’s account of his youth as ‘vain and frivolous’ and his subsequent conversion suggest a man unwilling to take on the burdens of the secular patriarch.57 His rejection of his family is well known. In throwing to the ground the money he had made from selling his goods, and stripping off even the clothes he was wearing, and adopting as a new father a ‘plain, simple man’ whom he asked to bless him even as his own father cursed him, he showed a dismissal of all the claims and privileges of his family.58 He rejected his father’s authority, his position in the community and as a blood relative, his source of income and also the claims that the family might have on him as a continuation of the lineage. The rage which this engendered in his father was presumably not just the result of thwarted authority but also embarrassment at the choice his son had made. This is supported by the story of the jibe aimed by Francis’s brother at the freezing mendicant. His blood brother, seeing Francis at prayer clothed in rags and shivering with the wintry cold, said to a companion: ‘Tell Francis to give you a penny’s worth of his sweat!’ Francis heard this and quickly retorted: ‘In fact I sell it to my Lord!’59 This tale suggests that a dispute about the appropriateness both of Francis’s activity and of mendicancy in opposition to commerce was at the heart of the argument. Even before his final conversion Francis had not avoided this kind of activity. On a devotional visit to Rome he had dressed like a beggar and sat with them at a church

146 P.H. Cullum door, seeking food. ‘He would have done this more often but was dissuaded because it embarrassed those who knew him.’60 Later he would also imitate a beggar in order to shock his friars into a proper appreciation of the poor.61 His refusal to become a priest, remaining a deacon, and his decision towards the end of his life to resign his authority within the order and to subject himself to a guardian are usually rendered by both contemporaries and modern critics as a devotion to humility, and I do not doubt this explanation.62 But it is arguably also a refusal of the markers of masculine authority. Francis refused to be a proper man, and that also explains the more feminised form of his practice of charity. Given that I have argued above that saints had to conform to gender stereotypes in order to be recognised for their sanctity, it might be thought surprising that Francis was so recognised. There are I think at least two reasons why this was the case. One of these is that Francis also took on an important female virtue, obedience. He was thus significantly transgendered, and if he did not exactly fit a masculine model of sanctity he did fit a model of sanctity. He also embodied more than any other saint of the period the ideal of identity with the poor. It was also in the interests both of his followers and of the papacy that his poverty, charity, austerity and obedience be emphasised. There were other men, like Francis, who also attempted excessive forms of charity, but attitudes to them were at best ambivalent. Homobonus was a representative of the twelfth-century upsurge in lay piety.63 He was a merchant of Cremona who died while hearing Mass in 1197 and was canonised within two years by Innocent III. Homobonus was noted for his almsgiving, including sheltering the needy in his own home, being known as ‘father of the poor’ and ‘comforter of the afflicted’.64 Contemporary records are fairly limited and although some accounts suggest that his wife shared his interests,65 others suggest that his charity caused domestic disharmony.66 The latter version, while closely contemporary, may reflect folkloric or misogynistic embellishments of the story, but does suggest something of the conflict of interest between the continuance and preservation of household and lineage – Homobonus had at least two sons – and individual charity, which makes Homobonus a rather unusual case. Men, although expected to be charitable, were also expected to balance the demands of family against the desirability of charity, and not to endanger the one in the pursuit of the other. Despite some local and papal interest in the cult Jacobus de Voragine did not regard it as sufficiently important to include in the Golden Legend. Jacobus was in many ways a traditionalist; few of his saints were recent ones, and those mostly associated with the mendicant orders. A married layman was perhaps too unconventional a figure as a saint for Jacobus to contemplate. Indeed, this seems to have been a widespread view. Even in Cremona the cult of Homobonus did not really take off until the later fourteenth century, and then mainly as a patronal saint.67 An irresponsible figure who antagonised his family and threatened their patrimony was a difficult figure for the Cremonese popolo to identify with, even though he was one of them himself. Even more radical than Homobonus was his close contemporary Peter Valdes, the founder of the Waldensians. Valdes was not an Italian, but from Lyons, another

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 147 great urban centre. Valdes was a merchant and moneylender who began his career after hearing the story of St Alexis.68 This saint, who was the son of a wealthy but devout Roman noble, was also to figure as one of Jacobus de Voragine’s subjects in the later Golden Legend. On his wedding night he persuaded his bride to live in chastity and then fled to Syria where he gave away all his money and lived by begging in the church porch. After many years his holiness was recognised but he fled again, his ship being driven back to Rome. He begged alms from his father in the street, who did not recognise him, but remembering his son, gave him a small room in his house. He remained there, unrecognised, living a poor and holy life, for many years, until his death when his identity was revealed.69 Inspired by this story Valdes consulted a cleric and decided to give up his property. In 1176 he ran a food-relief programme during a famine. Like Francis a generation later, he publicly threw his money away; unlike Francis he was a married man with children. He provided for his wife and made arrangements for his daughters to enter Fontevrault;70 in this he was very conventional. He became influenced by gospel texts both to practise apostolic poverty and to preach, and in pursuit of the latter vocation he sought vernacular translations of the scriptures.71 Like Francis and Dominic, but unlike any other lay saint, he sought followers. The preaching, trespassing on clerical privilege, brought local opposition, and Valdes and his followers sought papal approval at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. They received approval of the vow of poverty, but the constraints on preaching, which put it under the control of local clergy, were not acceptable.72 By the mid-1180s the Waldensians were pushed into the category of heretics by the Bull Ad abolendam, although for some years they were not considered to be as great a threat as the Cathars.73 Charity and the desire to follow literally Christ’s injunction to sell all he had and give it to the poor were Valdes’s initial inspiration, and did not obviously inspire objections, though these may have been lost to us in the welter of complaints about more serious issues. In many ways Valdes can be represented as retaining a masculine subject position: he provided for his family in appropriate ways before disposing of his property; he sought to claim preaching privileges which were not just masculine but clerical; he made himself the leader of a group of preachers. His arguably feminine behaviours were excessive dispersal of the household’s goods and disobedience. The latter even included giving permission to certain women followers to preach on the same terms as men, which would have been seen as also indicating feminine weakness of judgement.74 Thus he fulfils the worst kind of feminine stereotypes, without any moderating influences. At a slightly later date Charles of Blois, duke of Brittany (d. 1364) lived an austere, devout life, with a strong emphasis on charity to the poor, both in personal distributions to the needy and in the provision of hospitals and medical care. He refused to increase taxation to fund the civil war and ended up with large debts. He was also extremely generous to the religious orders. His piety was not entirely shared by his wife (who slept on a feather bed while he slept on straw, except on the rare occasions when he joined her). His nobles complained about his generosity, and some even mocked him. Despite popular support, the process for his canonisation failed.75 Excessive charity and humility before the church was not sufficient (or perhaps the

148 P.H. Cullum wrong kind of excess) in a man who should have been able and willing to balance the needs of his dukedom and his heirs against the demands of the Church and the poor. While Charles’s cause did not fail because of the form which his almsgiving took, in the case of a number of female saints the attitude to the poor may well have been a significant factor. Vauchez argues that Margaret of Cortona, Angela of Foligno, Clare of Montefalco and Delphine of Sabran all failed to be canonised because of their supposed connections with the Spiritual Franciscans and their uncompromising line on poverty, despite being otherwise obedient daughters of the Church.76 The early fourteenth-century Spirituals’ desire for an uncompromised version of St Francis’s determination to own no property – either personally, or more importantly institutionally – brought them into conflict with the Papacy and the older religious orders. Their insistence on total poverty was implicitly, and increasingly explicitly, a critique of those parts of the institutional Church which owned property. Those men of holy life among the Spirituals did not even get as far as having their qualifications for canonisation considered, but the women who were associated with them did. This adherence to a radical understanding of poverty was perhaps also easier for women, who had much less access to and control of property than men, and for whom issues such as dowry may often have been as problematic as positive. The continuing discussion of who had rights to give charity shows that the right use of property remained a contentious issue throughout the Middle Ages. The understanding of the practice of charity was a gendered one in the Middle Ages. Both men and women were expected to be charitable, but often in different ways. Men were expected to be responsible figures, balancing the demands of charity against the needs of household and lineage, although not all of them accepted this golden mean. Men who did achieve this balance, such as Dominic, achieved canonisation (though not necessarily for their charity) and might acquire a widespread cult. Women were expected to dispense alms under the direction of father or husband, and at least partly for his benefit, but in fact could and sometimes did dispense them excessively, partly in an attempt to collapse notions of dependency, partly as a means of claiming power within the household. In so doing they might upset the ‘proper’ balance of power within the household and display ‘innately feminine’ characteristics of irresponsibility. In some cases, as with St Elizabeth, the contradictions between secular definitions of irresponsibility and religious ideas of heroic sanctity allowed the subject to emerge as a papally approved saint. In other cases a local cult did not translate into a formal canonisation. Yet on the whole the women fared better than the men who attempted a more heroically charitable sanctity. Homobonus managed papal approval but seems to have remained a predominantly local figure, Charles of Blois acquired a local cult, but no more, but others such as Peter Valdes fell far beyond the pale of the acceptable. Irresponsibility was disruptive, but also to be expected from a woman and thus forgivable. In a man it was derogation from that perfection expected of a saint. It can thus be seen that conceptions of gendered behaviour strongly affected perceptions of sanctity, but also that conceptions of sanctity in turn affected perceptions of gender. Francis’s feminised form of piety and charity was acceptable partly because he made it self-consistent and moved thoroughly into a feminine mode,

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 149 partly because his identification with the poor so encapsulated contemporary ideas of sanctity and partly because contemporaries recognised that his transgendered behaviour was an appropriate part of his mission to shock his audience into a state of higher awareness and thus bring them to repentance. The work of Caroline Walker Bynum in seeking to delineate a distinctive feminine form of piety opened up the possibilities of exploring gendered piety. Weinstein and Bell have provided some definitions of gendered sanctity which not only gender men, but also allow for variables such as class and change over time. What is needed now is an exploration of the extent to which holy men and women could play with these ideas of gender. Saints are by their nature disruptive figures. In a period where gender was perhaps less closely tied to the body than it is now, some holy figures deliberately performed in a transgendered fashion, or adopted elements of transgendered behaviour in order consciously to destabilise normative expectations and thus to highlight the call of God. Where performance and message were coherent then even quite transgressive gender behaviour could be sanctified, but where either performance was inconsistent, or the relationship between performance and message was incoherent, then rejection was more likely than acceptance.

Notes 1 A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 303; D. Weinstein and R.M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1100–1700, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 157–8. 2 Christine de Pisan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. S. Lawson, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, pp. 43–6. 3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. R.J. Batten, intro. T. Gilby, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1975, vol. 34, II–IIa, 32, 8, pp. 262–6. ‘quod eleemosynae non sunt faciendae de alieno, sed de justis laboribus propriis uniusquisque eleemosynam facere debet, ut Augustinus dicit. Sed si subjecti aliis eleemosynam facerent, hoc esset de alieno. Ergo illi qui sunt sub potestate aliorum non possunt eleemosynam facere.’ ‘Licet autem eis aliquid in utilitatem domini facere, quod maxime fit si pro eis eleemosynas largiantur.’ ‘Sed uxor potest eleemosynam facere, cum assumatur in viri sociebat.’ ‘[M]oderatas tamen, ne ex earum superfluitate vir depauperetur’. 4 M. Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 61. 5 P.H. Cullum, ‘“And Hir Name was Charite”: Charitable Giving by and for Women in Late Medieval Yorkshire’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, 1200–1500, Stroud, Sutton, pp. 182–211. Also published as Women in Medieval English Society, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg, Stroud, Sutton, 1997. 6 C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 222–6. 7 Heal argues for the development of a distinction between hospitality and charity, at least as practised by the nobility, by the fifteenth century, but acknowledges that charity, however distanced, remained a necessary practice well into the sixteenth century, and points to the numbers of the nobility who supported almspeople within their own households. F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 33–6, pp. 69–70. 8 Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, p. 220. 9 Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, pp. 228–33.

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39 40 41

42

Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, pp. 233–5. Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, p. 237. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 193. A. Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. and intro. D.E. Bornstein, trans. M.J. Schneider, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1993, p. 51; Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, pp. 220–1. Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 256–69. For example, Catherine of Siena’s claims were challenged by suggestions that she was possessed; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 85–7. Vauchez, Sainthood, p. 359. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W.G. Ryan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, vol. 1, p. xiii. Chaucer uses the analogy ‘Seint Julian he was in his contree’ to underline the Franklin’s openhandedness in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales; The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 29, line 340. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 127–8. Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by John Mirk, ed. T. Erbe, EETS es 96, London, Kegan Paul, 1905, p. 104. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 117. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 118. Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, pp. 221–2; see also Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 285–305. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 21–2. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 22–3. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 22. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 121. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 122, p. 124. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 123. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 123. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 124. For another view of Paula, as using her wealth to establish her freedom, particularly intellectual freedom, and authority within a religious context, see P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, London, Faber, 1990, pp. 367–71. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 121–2, p. 125. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 309; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 221. Vauchez, Sainthood, p. 266. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 306, p. 311. M. Goodich, ‘Ancilla Dei: The Servant as Saint in the Late Middle Ages’, in J. Kirshner and S.F. Wemple (eds), Women of the Medieval World, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, pp. 119–36, p. 128. G. Boanas and L. Roper, ‘Feminine Piety in Fifteenth-Century Rome: Santa Francesca Romana’, in J. Obelkevich, L. Roper and R. Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 177–93, p. 182. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 306. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 307–8. This episode is a later accretion to the Lives. By contrast, the Golden Legend presents Elizabeth’s husband in a sympathetic light, as understanding her piety and wishing to emulate it. He eventually died on crusade in the Holy Land having gone at her bidding; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 306–7. This rewriting of her story to fit hagiographic convention adds to and reflects the perception that charity by women was opposed by, because perceived to be at the expense of, the male householder. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 146.

Gendering charity in medieval hagiography 151 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 309–10. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 311. Boanas and Roper, ‘Feminine Piety’, p. 181. Whether this is a case of ‘when in Rome’, or an indication of the adoption of this style of feminine piety in northern Europe by the fifteenth century, Margery Kempe, wife and daughter of two aldermen of Lynn, on pilgrimage in Rome, spent part of her time in service to a poor old woman, gave away all her money and that of her companion, and ended up dependent on the charity of a number of wealthy people; The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. W. Butler-Bowdon, London, Jonathan Cape, 1936, pp. 132–8. Boanas and Roper, ‘Feminine Piety’, pp. 180–5. Luke 1:46–53. The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript, ed. P. Meredith, London, Longman, 1987, pp. 6–7. Mary Play, lines 1538–41. Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Butler-Bowdon, p. 35. Mary Play, ed. Meredith, pp. 7–9. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 220–7. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 45. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 46. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 46–7. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 220. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 221. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 221. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 220. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 222. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 225–6; Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, p. 8. It is not clear whether Homobonus – ‘good man’ – or Omobono was a given name, or some kind of nickname. Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 356–7. D.H. Farmer (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 3rd edn, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 234. His Vita, written within a generation of his death, presents his wife as a critic and a scold, who did not understand his spirituality and who forced him to conceal his charity; Vauchez, Laity in the Middle Ages, pp. 64–5. If the rose-filled apron motif could have been applied to a man, he would have been an appropriate subject. Vauchez, Laity in the Middle Ages, pp. 68–9. M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, p. 63. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 371–4. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, p. 63. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, p. 63. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, pp. 63–4. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, pp. 66–8. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, p. 69. Vauchez, Sainthood, p. 264, pp. 363–9. Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 76–7.

10 Ecce Homo Robert Mills

I saw, standing in front of the altar . . . an image of the Lord Saviour. As I was in deep contemplation, I recognised the crucified Lord himself crucified in that very place and I beheld him, living, in my mind’s eye . . . I took hold of him whom my soul loves, I held him, I embraced him, I kissed him lingeringly. I sensed how gratefully he accepted this gesture of love when, between kissing, he himself opened his mouth, in order that I kiss more deeply.1 O my god, o my lufe! in-to me scrith with þi charite þirlyd [enter into me, pierced with thy charity], with þi bewte wounded; sclyde doune & comforth me heuy [descend and comfort me heavily]; medecyn, to me wrech, to þi lufer schew þiself; behald, in þe is all my desyre, & all my hert sekis. To þe my hert desyres; to þe my flesch is þirsty. . . . Hayle þerfore, o lufly lufe euerlastynge, þat vs rayses fro þies lawe þinges, & with so oft rauyschynge to þe sight of godis maiestee vs representys. Cum in to me, my leman [lover]!2 it often comes to pass that, in their very spiritual exercises, when they are powerless to prevent it, there arise and assert themselves in the sensual part of the soul impure acts and motions, and sometimes this happens even when the spirit is deep in prayer, or engaged in the Sacrament of Penance or in the Eucharist. . . . For when the spirit and the sense are pleased, every part of a man is moved by that pleasure to delight according to its proportion and nature.3

‘Ecce Homo!’ Behold the man! Behold the . . . homo? What did it mean for a twelfth-century Germanic monk to envision himself embracing the crucifix and indulging in a bout of passionate ‘French kissing’, for a fourteenth-century English hermit to imagine lusting after his beloved Saviour’s ‘bewte’, or for a sixteenth-century Spanish visionary, situated squarely in the medieval mystical tradition, to recount scenes of young monks at prayer with erections? To many of today’s readers the passages quoted above are striking, some might say shocking. They are remarkable first because of their supreme eroticism – which, for all the frequency of its occurrence in certain strands of medieval devotional literature, still retains the unrivalled capacity to offend the sensibilities of the pious in sacred contexts4 – and second because all three are alluringly

Ecce Homo 153 homoerotic – written by men, about men, for men, evoking desires amorously directed towards images of a barely clothed male deity. How are we to account for the unabashed frankness with which the spectre of male–male love rears its potentially subversive head within the confines of Christian orthodoxy, a location more usually thought of as offering pale shelter to the transgressive, the perverse and the queer? It is worth bearing in mind, of course, that the vision of Rupert of Deutz in the opening epigraph – suggestive though it is – repeats a familiar trope in monastic literature.5 Pinocchio-like tales of crucifixes shuddering to life in order to address or even embrace their beholders frequently formed the basis for a quasi-conversion narrative in which the young initiate discovered that he had been called to a deeper understanding of Christ’s mysteries, giving vent, even in the most traditional contexts, to images of men kissing and hugging fast. Whereas St Francis was simply said to have seen Christ speak ‘from the wood of the crucifix’,6 Herbert of Torres, recounting the miracles of St Bernard, describes a ‘certain monk’ known to him who once found the blessed abbot Bernard in church alone in prayer. While he was prostrate before the altar, a certain cross was visible there depicting the crucifixion, placed on the floor in his presence. The most blessed man was worshipping it devoutly and kissing it warmly. Furthermore the Lord himself, with arms separated from the ends of the cross, seemed to embrace the same servant of God and to draw tight to him.7 Indeed, a manuscript illumination illustrating an edition of the Manuel des Péchés (Fig. 10.1) figures the convention quite literally as two men locked together in an intimate embrace, suggesting the extent to which such imagery was deemed perfectly acceptable in sacred contexts.8 But for all the conventionality of their immediate context, is it possible that such metaphors might also have been read, in the Middle Ages as today, in queer, counter-hegemonic ways? Should we dare to pose the hermeneutical question ‘what if?’ and in its answering raise the spectres of queerness and perversity in relation to sacred symbolism? Our chief problem is that a culture of hesitancy – even chastisement – militates against making queer readings of Christian imagery plain and explicit, particularly in the context of fantasies of the ‘medieval’ and more so again when those fantasies are articulated under the auspices of the academy.9 (Though they are, of course, sporadically sanctioned in the realms of the individual psyche, the popular and the profane – a fleeting recognition of the correlation between Christian denial and masochistic narratives of suspension in psychoanalytic theory,10 a muttered whisper in a gallery or tastefully framed comment in a survey of ‘erotic art’ when confronted with the image of a seductively dressed saint,11 or even the outrageous presentation of a gay Christ-like figure in a controversy-laden, fatwa-prompting drama.12) A case in point would be the pronouncements of Caroline Walker Bynum, whose work commands a central position in projects of rehabilitating the body as a subject for intellectual scrutiny in medieval cultural studies. Richard Rambuss and Karma Lochrie have already rehearsed the main elements of criticism in this respect,13 and

154 Robert Mills

Figure 10.1 ‘The crucifix embraces a layman’, Manuel des Péchés, fourteenth century, France. Source: Robert H. Taylor Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, fol. 44r

the point of what follows is not simply to engage in another bout of ‘Bynum-bashing’ (though her work’s centrality and near-canonical status does lay it open to close interrogation).14 Nevertheless, I think it is worth, at the outset, reciting once more the phobic underbelly to such strands of historical writing as an example of the ways in which queer possibilities continue to be checked, censured and circumscribed in even the most purportedly ‘liberal’ contexts.

Bynum and the ‘problem’ of homosexuality Bynum, like many medievalists, owes a major methodological debt to the ideology of context. ‘We can only’, she counsels, ‘read the texts in context (i.e., with other texts among which they belong both chronologically and by self-ascription)’ – though, as she simultaneously admits, ‘no one of us will ever read more than

Ecce Homo 155 partially, from more than a particular perspective’.15 Consider those texts ‘written and preserved and read together’,16 she argues, and the past becomes not knowable as such but at the very least recountable. Indeed, for Bynum, contextual analysis constitutes what she terms ‘a new voice or a new mode in history writing: the partial or provisional voice, the comic mode’.17 So far so good – there is, after all, a degree of promise in the proposition that we ‘find comic relief in the human determination to assert wholeness in the face of inevitable decay and fragmentation’,18 akin to Eve Sedgwick’s formulation of ‘reparative’ reading practices in the processes of constructing queer subjectivity,19 Carolyn Dinshaw’s narratives of connectivity and community formation,20 or even Scott Bravmann’s call to engage in the dynamic rhetorical performances that he labels ‘queer fictions of the past’.21 In one of the essays that follows these pronouncements – which comprise the introduction to her well-received Fragmentation and Redemption collection – the mutinous promise that we will discover ‘compromises and partialities and improbabilities’22 is, however, undergirded by the recommendation that certain partialities and improbabilities are unlikely in medieval contexts. The essay in question is Bynum’s celebrated response to Leo Steinberg’s controversial The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, a piece of writing that, as Steinberg himself laments, has been ‘widely assigned as required reading to neutralise mine’. 23 (Though, as I will demonstrate in due course, the gap between both critics is not necessarily, as the latter believes, ‘unbridgeable’,24 given that each promotes in their own way a decidedly unperverse Christianity – they can, at least, hold a conversation with each other on that score.) Reflecting on Steinberg’s thesis that we look at the spaces in Renaissance religious painting where we are not supposed to look – to the Christ-child’s groin, to his deliberate acts of self-exposure (the ostentatio genitalium), his penis and its fondling by ageing relatives, the homage paid to it by the Magi, the folds of the mature Christ’s loincloth insinuating phallic tumescence – Bynum submits: Did medieval people immediately think of erections and sexual activity when they saw penises (as modern people apparently do)? . . . It is impossible to prove that medieval people did not assume what we assume when we look at pictures. And we clearly see breasts and penises as erotic. But let me at least suggest that we would do well to be cautious about projecting our ways of seeing onto the artists or the views of the past.25 Bynum’s basic point is a good one: that modern commentators reflect on their own stake in probing ‘the sexual’ in medieval art and culture. But the statement poses problems too, stemming first and foremost from the collectivisation of ‘medieval people’ as psychically and libidinally distinct from the ‘sex-obsessed’ inclinations of ‘we moderns’. This reproduces a familiar disjunction between past and present that, as Zˇizˇ ek suggests, paradoxically preserves the fetishistic narrative of alterity by which ‘we avoid calling into question our own position, the place from which we ourselves speak’.26 In other words, by subscribing to the much wider tradition of urging historicist ‘caution’ – the methodological imperative always to historicise

156 Robert Mills that protects medieval studies from the encroachments of non-specialists and dissenting ‘presentists’ – Bynum happily reproaches critics like Steinberg for not considering their own interpretative stance while remaining immune to such accusations herself. What I find problematic in Bynum’s account is not that she questions the ‘genitality’ of modern sexual inquiries as such, but that she chooses to seize upon contemporary concepts of homosexuality – that ‘modern disease’, traditional figure for all things different, diverse and perverse – as the main example in support of her vision of radical medieval alterity. ‘Despite recent writing about “gay people” in the Middle Ages’, she pronounces, referring to the work of John Boswell,27 it is questionable whether anyone had such a concept. To medieval theologians, lawyers and devotional writers, there were different kinds of sexual acts – between people of different sexes, between people of the same sex, between people and animals – and all had some kind of taint attached. But there was no clear notion of being one or the other kind of sexual being.28 Evoking, as such, the bare bones of the long-standing ‘social constructionist controversy’,29 Bynum neatly underscores the epistemological gap between past and present (without, it should be added, interrogating the foundational categories, such as the ‘maternal’, implicit in her own analysis of medieval gender relations).30 Rather, she goes on to offer an example that would not look out of place among the epigraphs with which I opened, using it to stage a complaint about modern projections onto the sexually-innocent past: When, for example, the medieval nuns Lukardis of Oberweimar and Margaret of Faenza breathed deeply into their sisters’ mouths and felt sweet delight flooding their members, they did not blush to describe this as receiving God’s grace or even as receiving the eucharist. Twentieth-century readers think immediately of lesbianism.31 And why shouldn’t they? Because to think in such ways is symptomatic, to Bynum’s mind, of ‘a modern tendency to find sex more interesting than feeding, suffering or salvation’.32 It is important to bear in mind that Bynum’s real argument is with sex – contemporary notions of gay and lesbian identity are merely the springboard from which she mounts her attack. The ultimate agenda is the promotion of what she categorises as a very medieval way of relating to the world, a nostalgic deference to notions of ‘dignity’, ‘fertility’ and ‘unavoidable suffering’ over and above the pleasures of the sexual: [i]f we want to express the significance of Jesus in both male and female images, if we want to turn from seeing body as sexual to seeing body as generative, if we want to find symbols that give dignity and meaning to the suffering we cannot eliminate and yet fear so acutely, we can find support for doing so in the art and theology of the later Middle Ages.33

Ecce Homo 157 But statements of this sort also suggest that, aside from homosexuality, Bynum’s argument regarding modern concerns with the body sexual is also established on the basis of a number of questionable assumptions concerning gender. For all the insistence elsewhere on interrogating medieval concepts of fleshliness and the body in all their protean permutations,34 the ‘Reply to Leo Steinberg’ simultaneously engages in a somewhat reductive policing of the flesh, attempting to rein in the libidinal, the illicit and even the homoerotic with reference to what Rambuss astutely characterises as ‘a normalizing semiotics of marriage, impregnation, lactation, or food preparation: a set of terms that keeps the female body, even in its most ecstatic states, quite properly domesticated’.35 In other words, there is more to Bynum’s claims than a simple inclination to historicise the medieval body (with a correlative disinclination for seeing it as a sexualised – and, it follows, inherently anachronistic – body). Constructions of gender are crucially at stake. This is especially apparent in relation to an earlier essay of Bynum’s, where she probes the motif of ‘Jesus as Mother’ and asks why maternal imagery was the favoured medium of expression for religious males in the twelfth century. Given the period’s predilections for metaphors drawn from human relationships, Cistercian monks, she says, ‘had a problem’: For if the God with whom they wished to unite was spoken of in male language, it was hard to use the metaphor of sexual union unless they saw themselves as female. We do have occasional examples of monks describing what appears to us to be a sexual union with a male God. (Rupert of Deutz’s vision of embracing the crucifix is a case in point.) We also have many examples of monks describing themselves or their souls as brides of Christ – that is, as female. But another solution . . . was of course to see God as female parent, with whom union could be quite physical (in the womb or at the breast).36 Bynum’s unacknowledged ‘problem’ is, of course, what Chaucer’s Parson characteristically dubs ‘thilke abhomynable synne, of which that no man unnethe [hardly] oghte speke ne write’ – that is to say, same-sex desire.37 In order to avert the homosexual peril, Bynum implies, writers subscribed to a manifestly heterosexual model, since ‘to some extent, males seem to have been attracted to female images and women to male images’; the queer crisis to which she obscurely alludes is thus neatly resolved in relation to male mystics by regendering Christ’s body female and assuming that its femaleness equates to a maternal, reproductive and implicitly asexual concern with ‘dependence/independence, incorporation/withdrawal’.38 Lochrie has already looked beyond the lens of ‘presumptive heterosexuality’ and ‘interventionist gender correction’ in such scholarship in order to address the question: ‘What does it signify when a female mystic desires and adores the feminized body of Christ?’39 But without wishing to detract attention from this important avenue of research, could we not also risk posing the related question, ‘What does it signify when a male mystic desires and adores the (un)feminised body of Christ?’ What does it mean when religious men lust after Christ’s tortured body and desire that it hold them, kiss them, even penetrate them in return? And why is it required

158 Robert Mills that Christ’s liquescent, wounded body be understood, in accounts like Bynum’s, as ‘feminine’, ‘feminised’ or ‘becoming female’ (which seems to imply, in relation to male beholders, that religious devotion to Christ necessarily entails heterosexual object choice)?40

The homoerotics of Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris The latter question is, of course, rhetorical, since an answer has, I think, already been rehearsed. The point is not that we should resist exploring the gender-troubling implications of medieval Christological imagery, but that we should recognise how (1) penetration does not necessarily entail feminisation, and (2) figurations of a ‘female’ Jesus preclude both the ambiguous promise of his tortured body and the fact that its moments of maleness may have afforded potential spaces for homoerotic modes of religious expression. To understand why this is so, let us leave Bynum aside for the moment and pursue the issue through the words of one of the religious figures cited at the outset. The text in question is Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris, a work of ‘affective evangelism’,41 composed c. 1343 and distributed widely in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (both in the original Latin and in vernacular translations). In this book, Rolle advocates the relation between Lover and Beloved as the crucial framework for devotions attendant upon Christ’s punished body. The hermit’s point, first and foremost, is that to take imitatio Christi to its literal extreme is to enter into a state akin to erotic union, so that he remarks (in Richard Misyn’s ‘Englishing’ of the text, dated 1435): ‘Qwhat is lufe bott transfourmynge of desire in to þe þinge lufyd? . . . All lufand to þer lufe treuly ar likkynd [All loving is truly comparable to their love], & lufe makis hym like þat lufys to þat þat is lufyd’ (I.18, p. 40). He then goes on to adopt as his main paradigm the union of the soul with Christ as it is figured in the Song of Songs 1:1, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’: [L]ufe makes me hardy [bold] hym to call þat I best lufe, þat . . . he me comforthand & filland [comforting and filling] my
t kys me with kyssynge of hys mouth . . . I beseke he kys me with swetnes of his lufe refreschynge, with kissynge of his mouth me straytly halsyng [embracing me tightly], þat I fayl not, & gras in puttyng [grace in allowing] þat I may besily in lufe grow.42 (I.27, p. 58) We could first, of course, ‘desexualise’ Rolle’s fantasy, by understanding it as a metaphor (or allegory) of spiritual union and thereby downplaying its significance as eroticism. We could also easily ‘heterosexualise’ the scene by reminding ourselves that the soul in medieval representation was often gendered female (stemming from the grammatical gender of anima, its Latin correlate).43 This, though, would be to subscribe to a narrative that perceives images of queerness as ‘problems’ to be solved, rather than possibilities to be embraced. The fact that gendering the soul female

Ecce Homo 159 provides too easy a solution is indicated by the fact that in the original Latin version of Incendium Amoris, as well as the subsequent English redaction quoted here, there is a considerable degree of confusion as to whether the soul should be understood as male or female. At one point, Rolle talks of ‘wymmen’ qwhos lufe distractis þe wytt, peruertis & overturnes resone, wysdome of mynd to foly it channgys, þe hart fro god it withdrawes, and to fendys þe sawl makis bonde [the soul attaches itself to devils]. . . . Bot and þow cristis lufe withoute cessyng wold cal a-gayn, and hym in all place haue in þi sight with dreyd, I trow be fals chiryssyng of a woman þou suld neuer be begillyd. (I.30, pp. 65–6) The passage is obviously striking for its virulent misogyny. Nonetheless, in this context, what is significant is that the passage is directed towards a group deemed unequivocally antithetical to women, an audience admonished to spurn the love of women in order to focus their attentions on the love of Christ. In denouncing women, Rolle implies that the endangered soul belongs to a man. Indeed, pages later, the soul’s gender is made linguistically explicit: ‘A chosyn þerfor & lufe alway desirand, hym-self turnys in-to hys lufe, for nouder wardly substance he has nor desyres to haue [he neither has nor desires wordly goods], bot be wilful pouert criste filoand [following]’ (II.2, pp. 70–1; my emphasis); moreover, the lover is ‘also byrnand into vnbodily halsynge [incorporeal embracing], his wykkydnes clensyd & all þoghtis vanyschyd þat to þis ende goys not, with his gostely ee his lemman desyrand to see [desiring to see his lover with his spiritual eye]’ (II.4, pp. 76–7; my emphasis). By gendering the lover as grammatically masculine, in the context of a grammatically male Christ, the fifteenth-century redactor has merely translated the Latin nouns ‘Electus’ and ‘Amator’ literally,44 and as such we can hardly impute Misyn himself with queer intentions. Yet what we are left with are lines in which a male lover is overtly represented as the wooer of a linguistically male Christ.45 I am not the first to call to account the representational queerness of Rolle’s imaginings: Brad Peters, similarly citing the Incendium Amoris (in modern English translation) in an essay on Rolle’s ‘eroticised language’, submits: ‘Christ’s love finds expression and functions divinely in the gap between the homoerotic metaphor and the human reality it represents. The male reader remains behind, in the place where more conventional passions and temptations reside.’46 Yet although, according to Peters, we would do well not to ignore the rhetorical impact of such passages upon male bodily identity, we are subsequently advised that it is to the implications of Rolle’s erotic metaphors on his pastoral approach to women in his English writings that we should ultimately direct our attention (despite the fact that the Latin Incendium Amoris, as internal evidence indicates, seems to have been written for a primarily male audience). Peters consequently writes of the ‘unexpectedly feminized psychodynamic of spiritual identity’ that attends to Rolle’s visions, conveniently heterosexualising – like Bynum – the homoerotic excess with reference to the rhetorical breakdown of male identity as a way of placing men and women on ‘common redemptive ground’.47

160 Robert Mills To speak of ‘feminisation’ in such terms is potentially, however, to engage in a process of simple reversal that effectively reinforces the gender binaries that it supposedly calls into question. The gendered assumptions behind Peters’s analysis are clear: describing a passage in which Rolle recounts his experiences with a group of women, he remarks that feminisation is the result of ‘rebukes from the women who are his objects’, ‘impotence’ and ‘the inert nothingness of a man whose attributes are merely beautiful and lovely’.48 But rather than repeating the equation of femininity with impotence, inertia and sexual objectification, perhaps we should instead take heed of Rambuss’s insistence that ‘we avoid peremptorily re-encoding every representation of the penetrable male body as feminized because penetrated’, and also ask what the masculine stake is in positions of fleshliness, passivity and penetration. Perhaps we should also recall, as Rambuss does, that male bodies, too, have orifices.49 Rolle, after all, keeps positions of penetration fundamentally in play in the Incendium Amoris, presenting the soul’s relationship to Christ as simultaneously ‘penetrated’ and ‘penetrating’. At one point, we are told: behald in hym &
e sall se his godly hede with þornes crownyd, his face bespittyd, hys full fayr eyn be payns wan [his beautiful eyes dulled by pain], hys bak scourgyd, his breste hurtt, hys worþi handis þirlyd [pierced], hys swetyst syde with a spere woundyd, hys feytt þorow naylyd [his feet nailed through], & woundis sett þorow al hys soft flesch (I.28, p. 61) recalling a passage in one of the Middle English passion meditations customarily ascribed to Rolle, where Christ’s tormented body is likened to a dovecote ‘ful of holys [full of holes]’.50 Yet in another description, it is Christ himself who wounds: Truly þou seis þat whikly [to the quick] I am woundyd with fayr bewte, and longynge releissys not bot grows more & more, & paynlynes [spiritual anguish] here present me down castis & prikkis to go to þe of qwhome onely I trow solas & remedy I sal see.51 (II.5, p. 78) The centrality of Christ’s tortured body as a site of voyeuristic exploration in such images, and the perceived homology between wound (vulnus) and vagina (vulva) in comparable works like James of Milan’s Stimulus Amoris, are facts frequently remarked upon in medieval scholarship,52 a line of reasoning that accords well with contemporary feminist theories of the heteronormative ‘male gaze’ where the objectified, fetishised female body becomes the snare for male scopic attention.53 Michael Camille, adopting this paradigm in order to interpret an image in the Rothschild Canticles depicting a nun pointing a lance towards the wound in Christ’s side (Fig. 10.2), remarks, rather prescriptively: ‘Only by becoming a female body was it possible for God to become the focus of an eroticised gaze. . . . The gaze still only goes in one direction, towards the female Christ from the male–female’s phallic

Ecce Homo 161

Figure 10.2 ‘The sponsa penetrates Christ’s side’, Rothschild Canticles (c.1320), Flanders or Rhineland. Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 404, fols 18v–19r

sphere.’54 This does not, however, detract from the ways in which Christ’s tormented body in verbal and visual representations remains at the same time perplexingly male – if, at least, we are permitted to understand the use of the gender-specific pronoun ‘hym’ as harbouring some of its originally intended significatory value and visual images of anatomically male bodies as retaining some kernel of maleness (which is certainly not to undermine Bynum’s perception that certain depictions might also ‘suggest another sex for Christ’s body’).55 Looking at the folios in the Rothschild Canticles again, could we pose an alternative interpretation? The image illustrates the Song of Songs 4:9, ‘Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse’, and, as Jeffrey Hamburger perceptively notes in his survey of the manuscript, in representing the moment after Christ’s side has been pierced, the illuminator actually makes the preceding event more immediate – so that the focus is the act of wounding rather than the wound itself.56 That is to say, it is not an unambiguously ‘female’ body of Christ on fol. 19 that is the focus of the gaze, so much as the penetrating transaction that occurs across the folios between Christ and sponsa. Importantly, moreover, Christ appears in the image as the ‘agent’ in his own passion, holding in one hand the whip of flagellation and in the other hand the nails with which he was fastened to the cross. As such, agency is distributed across both halves of the image, an ambiguous and indeterminately gendered performance that renders attempts to conceive it in terms of binaries and ‘role reversals’ highly problematic. Camille

162 Robert Mills argues that ‘the woman’s masculine role as bearer of the phallus is what makes her vision possible’57 – a turning of the tables that does, indeed, have potentially subversive implications. But that does not mean to say that Christ himself becomes completely ‘feminised’ in the process or that holding a spear remains inherently ‘masculine’: we should resist reproducing normative gender paradigms in our efforts to describe the image. The probable owner of the manuscript was, as Hamburger insists, a woman, most likely a nun or canoness. As he himself admits, however, the case for female ownership is ‘hardly conclusive’; nor should we forget that the ‘audience’ of medieval manuscripts not only extended to their eventual owners but also to the compiler, the scribes and the artists.58 Thus, as Flora Lewis suggests, such imagery is not necessarily alien to male circuits of devotion and indeed if we again consider the similarity of the bodies of the naked virgin [in an image later in the manuscript] and Christ, and the sponsa holding her spear, it is clear that the image enables a male viewer to imagine himself as a penetrating sponsa, piercing the naked and sexually indeterminate body of Christ.59 Given that essential indeterminacy, could such images also have provided a space in which male devotees were able to explore metaphors of sexual union with a God imaginatively gendered male? Rather than simply subscribing to heteronormative models of voyeuristic response and gender binaries – where the body of Christ signifies at any one time only as this or that gender, depending on the current gender dispositions of the mystical devotee – we should instead recognise the degree to which positions of power and powerless in Christian discourse are in a state of perpetual circulation, the very mobility of which creates spaces for the excessive, transgressive and perversely erotic.60 Thus, the passage cited earlier, in which Rolle describes Christ’s perforation of the lover, no doubt recalls the familiar trope in courtly love literature of the lover who, gazing upon the object of his desire, casts himself as victim of the (female) beloved’s beauty,61 and we might well want to follow the traditional line of reasoning that casts Rolle’s words in an unproblematically heteroerotic mould. Then again, we might not.

The sexuality of Christ in Renaissance art: Steinberg with Bynum The point of the above analysis is not to force Rolle to ‘come out’ gaily from his homodevotional ‘prayer closet’;62 nor do I wish the writings of medieval mystics simply to stand in for my own queer tendencies and desires (the attendant risk in any attempt at historical queering). What I would like to advocate is a gesture in the direction of a hermeneutical exploration of medieval representation that resists the ‘flattening, overly normalizing metaphorics of unvariegated heterosexuality’.63 Perhaps art historians could themselves learn from such a manoeuvre. As my analysis of the Rothschild Canticles folios showed, visual images of the tortured body of Christ and the saints are not devoid of the capacity to signify erotically, or even homoerotically. Certainly the medieval ideal was to rise above the corporeal contemplation

Ecce Homo 163 of images and, according to writers like St Bernard, images were not the ultimate goal of spiritual meditation.64 But that does not mean that viewers always, then or now, perceived representations in terms of those ideals. In 1402, Jean Gerson, bishop of Paris, wrote a treatise on the ‘corruption of the youth’ in which he implored secular and religious authorities to institute laws against the sale of dirty pictures. At one point he laments ‘the filthy corruption of boys and adolescents by shameful and nude pictures offered for sale at the very temples and sacred places’,65 demonstrating the perceived complicity of the sacred and the erotic in Christian representation in the later Middle Ages. Similar anxieties are expressed by Bernardino of Siena, the notorious fifteenthcentury Italian preacher, in his treatise De inspirationibus. Warning of the dangers of viewing human flesh in sacred art, even the flesh of Christ himself, the preacher complains: ‘I know a person who, while contemplating the humanity of Christ suspended on the cross (I am ashamed to say and it is terrible even to imagine) sensually and repulsively polluted and defiled themselves.’66 By the sixteenth century comments of this sort had become commonplace in the context of Lutheran religious upheaval. Erotic responses to images of female saints are well documented in the writings of German iconoclasts;67 reformers like Zwingli likewise reproved the sexual arousal elicited by images of male religious.68 The sixteenth-century Council of Trent, indeed, decreed with respect to the veneration of relics and the sacred use of images, that ‘all superstition shall be removed, all filthy quest for gain eliminated, and all lasciviousness avoided, so that images shall not be painted and adorned with a seductive charm’.69 Sexuality is not, as Bynum imagines, something we moderns simply ‘read into’ the texts and images of times past – regulations like these bear witness to the zeal with which authorities attempted to read it out.70 Tridentine ordinations did not, on the other hand, problematise the kissing of visual images of Christ’s body,71 despite the fact that manuscript illuminations of the crucifixion literally worn away by years of repeated oral adoration attest to the widespread popularity of the practice.72 This is not to suggest that the kissing of the crucifixion image by the officiating priest as part of the daily service was in itself especially transgressive or even perceived as such by most participants. Rather, I am proposing that in some contexts – certain visualisations of the sponsalia Christi, for example – we reverse the terms of the question and ask not, ‘To what extent does Christian representation self-consciously depend on a homoerotic subtext?’ (though that may well be a valid question to ask in certain cases, especially where sources become available)73 but, ‘How might queer subjects have deployed potentially homoerotic Christian imagery to their own perversely libidinal ends?’ In order to begin to debate this question it would be worth looking once again at the images reproduced in Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ. One of the objections to Steinberg’s book (coming from Bynum, among others)74 is that its title is misleading since it concerns Christ’s ‘genitality’ rather than his ‘sexuality’. I have no argument with Steinberg on that score, since it is evident that the book’s subject is ‘not the penis but the enigma of its ostension’,75 and that the ostentatio genitalium is being read as ‘the projection upon Christ of a sexuality which in him – in him as in the First Adam anterior to sin – exists without guilt’.76 But it is worth pointing out that Steinberg’s characterisation of Renaissance art as orthodox and accepting of Christian tradition

164 Robert Mills nonetheless closes down the act of looking by rehabilitating it wholly within the sphere of religious orthodoxy. According to Steinberg’s interpretation, the presentation of Christ’s privy parts signifies above all else the humanation of God; it thus represents a quite conventional offshoot from the incarnational aesthetic that was so dominant in the period’s sacred representational codes: And because Renaissance culture not only advanced an incarnational theology . . . but evolved representational modes adequate to its expression, we may take Renaissance art to be the first and last phase of Christian art that can claim full Christian orthodoxy. Renaissance art – including the broad movement begun c. 1260 – harnessed the theological impulse and developed the requisite stylistic means to attest the utter carnality of God’s humanation in Christ.77 Steinberg thus curtails readings of Renaissance art that see it as representative of anything but ‘the theological impulse’. Perhaps the images in Steinberg’s corpus that have caused most offence to modern sensibilities are those depicting an ithyphallic Christ (Fig. 10.3).78 This is odd when one considers that the author initially situated the pictures in question within the context of ancient cults of the phallus in Roman and Egyptian mythology, thereby suggesting that the erect phallus’s participation in resurrection symbolism for a brief period in the sixteenth century was conceived with ‘a Christian will and de profundis’ as ‘the body’s best show of power’79 – and then in a later revision rejected the ‘resurgent flesh’ explanation in favour of another, even more orthodox (Augustinian) line of reasoning: that the erection motif represents Christ’s incorrupt nature by implying that he is in command of all his bodily faculties.80 At the risk of offending Steinberg’s critics further, might it not be worth asking whether the images that he himself interpreted in decidedly unerotic terms did in fact have the potential to signify erotically or even homoerotically? Richard Trexler has uncovered convincing evidence that ‘from early Christianity onward a powerful reason for keeping the crucified Jesus covered at the crotch was the danger that he would seduce other males’;81 Craig Harbison suggests that debates over the nakedness of Christ in sixteenth-century Germany ‘corresponded to a latent homoeroticism’ in devotional practices.82 Yet at the most basic level replies to the question remain speculative, even wishful. There are plenty of mystical visions and images that attest openly to the erotic valences of devotional desire, but there are no medieval texts and images, to my knowledge, that explicitly perceive visions of Christ’s body under the sign of the sodomitical. If, on the other hand, we are to take seriously Sarah Beckwith’s invitation that we see religion as an ‘insistently this-worldly activity, a set of structuring practices and processes in which human relationships, sexual, social, symbolic, are invested’,83 it is imperative that we recognise the ways in which Christ’s body was a fundamentally ambivalent symbol, invested with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic significance. We need, as she puts it, ‘terms of reference beyond the theological’.84 As it happens, Beckwith’s arguments ultimately centre on the ways in which images of Christ’s suffering are the ‘very means by which order and authority are created’,

Ecce Homo 165

Figure 10.3 Maertan van Heemskerck, ‘Man of Sorrows’, 1532. Source: Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten. © IRPA-KIK, Brussels

a symbolic order in which ‘retrospectively defined catholicity and protestantism play out their tropes and struggle for cultural capital’.85 I do not intend to expand on such an analysis in the present context. The point I wish to make is that we might interrogate Christ’s tortured body as a ‘vital cultural resource for those who sought legitimacy within their culture’,86 perhaps in an entirely different sense from the way in which Beckwith – presumably – wished those words to be understood. There are hints that we might at least keep an eye out for the articulation of what I have elsewhere theorised – after Simon Gaunt – as ‘queer wishes’ in relation to religious representation (even in as unlikely a place as Christological passion

166 Robert Mills imagery).87 The example I offer is one that Steinberg himself cites in the revised edition to his book.88 It appears in a letter of remission for one Guillaume Caranda, a young barber living in 1530 in the town of Senlis, France. The letter describes how Caranda, ‘on the day of the holy Sacrament of the Altar just past’, had acted the part of Jesus in the tomb, ‘in record and representation of his holy resurrection’. That evening, Claude Caure, the local toolmaker, approached Caranda in passing, exclaiming: ‘I see the god on earth. Did you keep your virile and shameful member stiff in playing God?’, uttering these dishonest words arrogantly and against the honor of Christianity. To which the supplicant responded that ‘his was neither very hard nor heated up, and that he [Caure] was gelded’, and after these words he and his company went on their way.89 Greeting the barber once again upon his return with the same ‘dishonest words, insulting to our Lord Jesus Christ and to the holiness of the day’, Caure proceeded to start a brawl. Caranda stabbed the aggressor in self-defence, the latter died, and the former fled in fear. A few weeks later, Guillaume Caranda was granted an official pardon. Steinberg interprets the episode as proving his point that there was, in this period, a ‘ready-made association’ between phallus and resurgent flesh.90 But surely, without wishing to downplay the explanatory force of this example in the context of the ‘res-erection’ images Steinberg cites, other interpretations are possible. For could it not also be the case that the episode demonstrates an awareness of the notion that the humiliating stance of the suffering Jesus might, in itself, be potentially erotic? Is it possible that the ensuing brawl was the result of accusations of perverse desire attendant in the toolmaker’s words and the barber’s allusions to castration (effeminacy/sodomy) in his reply?91 That offence was caused suggests something more was at stake than Christian orthodoxy, a discursive excess that could not be reined in by theological doctrine alone. Here is an example of the degree to which Christ’s body ‘makes meaning for its practitioners and interlocutors’,92 in ways that clearly implicate cultural anxieties about gender and sexuality as much as theological doctrine. Art historians are reluctant to look for eroticism in religious contexts: Anne Hollander suggests that the nude image of the crucified Christ in art was usually kept from being overloaded with erotic signification by the ‘force of its devotional meaning’ (though she does go on to label St Sebastian ‘the outstanding example of the emphatically sexy saint’);93 and Camille, discussing statues of St John the Evangelist asleep in the Lord’s bosom, rules that it ‘would be anachronistic to project homoerotic desires on to the makers and users of this image, who were for the most part nuns’.94 But we might take heed of Rambuss’s advice, in relation to medieval as well as early modern systems of representation, that we need to be wary of overplaying the hegemonic within the space of religious devotion, a space with its own heterotopic possibilities: a space, as we have

Ecce Homo 167 seen, where the sacred may come to traffic with the excessive and the transgressive, even the otherwise culturally illicit.95 If Bynum is reluctant to admit the erotic as a meaningful corporeal category in relation to medieval Christian devotion, and Steinberg smuggles in the erotic only under the sign of extreme religious orthodoxy, a new analytical framework would involve understanding the ways in which passion iconography is and always has been a potential site of scandal. It is a site that, as Sedgwick shrewdly remarks, retains more than ever its transgressive force in that ‘efforts to disembody this body, for instance by attenuating, Europeanizing, or feminizing it, only entangle it the more compromisingly among various modern figurations of the homosexual’.96 Modern though these figurations arguably are, we should not, I think, ignore their medieval shadows.

Notes G.P.J. Epp, ‘Ecce Homo’, in G. Burger and S. Kruger (eds), Queering the Middle Ages, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 236–51 unfortunately appeared too late to be taken into account here. 1 Rupert of Deutz, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Mattheum, ed. H. Haacke, CCCM 29, Turnhout, Brepols, 1979, book XII, pp. 382–3. Rupert was born c. 1075 in or near Liège and died in 1129; the passage in question was written c. 1125–7, but recalls a vision the author had as a young man in his twenties. For a more conventional contextualisation of the episode than is offered here, see J.H. van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 50–2. 2 Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, trans. R. Misyn (1435), ed. R. Harvey, EETS os 106, London, Kegan Paul, 1896, book I, chap. 3, p. 7. Subsequent citations from the Middle English will refer to this edition by book, chapter and page number. 3 The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, trans. and ed. E.A. Peers, 3 vols, Wheathampstead, Anthony Clarke, 1974, vol. 1, chap. 4, pp. 338–9. St John of the Cross, who lived 1542–91, probably wrote ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, from which this extract is taken, after being kidnapped and imprisoned in Toledo in 1577–8. 4 So much so that the above-quoted episode from St John of the Cross was excised from certain editions and translations: see R. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998, p. 97. 5 Engen, Rupert of Deutz, p. 50. 6 M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 214. 7 Herbert of Torres, De Miraculis, PL 185, col. 1328. 8 D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 287–306. 9 The most explicit example of opposition to queer Christological response remains the case of blasphemy brought by Mary Whitehouse, in 1977, against Denis Lemon, editor of the British publication Gay News, for the publication of James Kirkup’s poem ‘The love that dares to speak its name’, which describes a Roman centurion interacting sexually with the dead body of Christ. This was the first successful blasphemy trial in fifty-five years; the British public is still not allowed to see the offending poem. R.H. Gorsline, ‘Facing the Body on the Cross: A Gay Man’s Reflections on Passion and Crucifixion’, in B. Krondorfer (ed.), Men’s Bodies, Men’s Gods: Male Identities in a (Post-)Christian Culture, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 125–45, is one of the notable exceptions to the general rule of academic silence on the matter of

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10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

contemporary queer Christological response: ‘Many gay men’, he writes, ‘experience Jesus as lover, not just the cosmic lover of humanity, but real, embodied, sweaty, sexy, passionate lover between the sheets, or on the beach, perhaps even on the cross’; p. 129. Also see the comments in E.K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, London, Penguin, 1990, p. 140. R.A. Kaye, ‘Losing his Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr’, in P. Horne and R. Lewis (eds), Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 86–105, surveys contemporary gay male appropriations of the iconography of St Sebastian; R.C. Trexler, ‘Gendering Jesus Crucified’, in B. Cassidy (ed.), Iconography at the Crossroads, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 107–20, provides examples of the ways in which Christ’s nude body could, in premodern contexts, arouse (homo)erotic response. ‘The paradox in some of his [Christ’s] sayings resembles the most sublimated form of the impression which we generally derive from the phenomena of masochism’; T. Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. M.H. Beigel and G.M. Kurth, New York, Grove Press, 1941, p. 347. For instance, see E. Lucie-Smith, Eroticism in Western Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1972, p. 216; G. Saunders, The Nude: A New Perspective, London, Herbert Press, 1989, pp. 27–8, 71. I am thinking here of T. McNally’s Corpus Christi: A Play, New York, Grove Press, 1999, which depicts the path of Joshua, a young gay man, on his spiritual journey from modern-day Corpus Christi, Texas, to ancient Jerusalem. He is portrayed as a Christlike figure and crucified as ‘King of the Queers’. In response to the production at the Pleasance Theatre, London, in 1999, the London-based Islamic fundamentalist group Al-Muhajiroun issued a fatwa against the playwright, reportedly handing out circulars outside the theatre in which the Prophet Mohammed was quoted as saying, ‘Whoever insults a messenger of God must be killed.’ Rambuss, Closet Devotions, especially pp. 42–9; K. Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, in K. Lochrie, P. McCracken and J.A. Schultz (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 180–200. See the analysis of the reception of Bynum’s work in K. Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 135–62. C.W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, Zone, 1992, p. 23. For a cogent deconstruction of the assumptions conveyed by the term ‘context’, see N. Bryson, ‘Art in Context’, in R. Cohen (ed.), Studies in Historical Change, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 18–42. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 23. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 25. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 26. E.K. Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think this Introduction Is about You’, in E.K. Sedgwick (ed.), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 1–37. C. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1999. S. Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 24. L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd edn, revised and expanded, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 389. Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, p. 383. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 85. S. Zˇizˇ ek, For They Know not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London, Verso, 1991, p. 102. J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Ecce Homo 169 28 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 85–6. It should be remarked that, citing Boswell in a footnote to an earlier essay, Bynum nonetheless surmises: ‘Gay males may, of course, have found erotic attachment to a male God an attractive metaphor’; C.W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, p. 161, note 167. 29 See on this J. Boswell, ‘Categories, Experience and Sexuality’, in E. Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, New York, Garland, 1990, pp. 133–73, which defends the use of terms such as ‘gay’ with the retort that since, in Latin, there is no word for religion – the term religio having a meaning quite different from the modern English ‘religion’ – this does not mean that we should assume that there was no ‘religion’ in Rome. 30 For an assessment of the ‘foundational categories’ implicit in Bynum’s work, see Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, p. 138. 31 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 86. 32 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 92. Bynum echoes here the sentiments of Jean Leclercq, who counsels that, in such matters as monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs, ‘we must be careful not to project on to a less erotically preoccupied society the artificially stimulated and commercially exploited eroticism of our own sex-ridden age’; J. Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-Historical Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 100. 33 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 117. Gorsline questions whether it is, in fact, desirable to identify with symbols that promote the ‘dignity’ and glorification of suffering: ‘The effect of imaging Jesus as lord and Saviour who died in a burst of bloody glory to save us all from sin serves the interests of patriarchs and their church to the exclusion of, and damage to, the lives of ordinary people, especially those who are oppressed by sex, race, or class’; Gorsline, ‘Facing the Body on the Cross’, p. 143. 34 See, for instance, the statements in C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 294–5 and Bynum, ‘Why all the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 1995, vol. 22.1, pp. 1–33. 35 Rambuss, Closet Devotions, p. 3. 36 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 161–2. 37 The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 320, line 999. 38 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 163. 39 Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, p. 186. 40 An argument implicit in Denys Turner’s account of eroticism in commentaries on the Song of Songs, which announces that the union of the lovers conveys ‘the tones distinctively of eros, the language of hetero-sexual love’; Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1995, p. 26. 41 N. Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 123. This book supplies the most comprehensive overview to date of Rolle’s career and literary output. 42 The Song of Songs also forms the basis for another of Rolle’s Latin meditations, the Super Canticum Canticorum, a lengthy exposition of the first two-and-a-half verses. The text is only available in an edition in thesis form; E.M. Murray, ‘Richard Rolle’s Comment on the Canticles’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham University, 1958; for an analysis of the text, with extensive citation, see Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, pp. 147–59. 43 As we are reminded in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 138, and Turner, Eros and Allegory, p. 25. The Latin version of Rolle’s book – available as The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. M. Deanesly, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1915 and in modern English translation as Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, trans. C. Wolters, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972 – does indeed employ the feminine-gendered noun

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44

45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54

anima several times in order to describe the soul’s relationship with Christ. Early on, for instance, Rolle writes: ‘Ad te suspirat anima mea’ (chap. 2, p. 151), ‘My soul pants for you’ (p. 52). Later, we are told: ‘Anima equidem a terrenorum uiciis separata, et a carnis uenenosa suavitate alienata, celestibus desideriis dedita immo et rapta, mirabili iocunditate perfruens, quia iam quodammodo amoris dilecti leticium sentit, ut limpidus contempletur et delectabilius efficiatur’ (chap. 26, p. 218), ‘The soul that is truly separated from vice, and is a stranger to venal and carnal sweetness, the soul that is wholly given to heavenly desire, and is enthralled thereby, enjoys quite remarkable pleasure because she is in some way experiencing the delight of her Beloved’s love’ (p. 125). See, for instance, The Incendium Amoris, chap. 32, p. 235 and chap. 34, p. 243. The twentieth-century English translation of the Latin text by Wolters interestingly mirrors its fifteenth-century precursor in neglecting to rein in the queer potentiality of these lines, describing an ‘elect soul’ who ‘transforms himself into his Beloved’, p. 144, and a lover who ‘strains with all his might to gaze upon his Beloved’, p. 152. As Trexler asserts, disputing the notion that a so-called covered Christ precludes eroticism and gender ambiguity, ‘Heaven does have gender’; Trexler, ‘Gendering Jesus Crucified’, p. 117. For another example of male-to-male devotion in English mysticism, see Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. M.G. Sargent, New York, Garland, 1992. This describes the ecstasy experienced by the ‘one person [parson] þat knowe now lyuyng & perauenture [perhaps] þere bene many þat I knowe not’, when touched by the touch of Christ: ‘alle þe membres of þe body bene enflaumede of so deletable & ioyful a hete þat him þenkeþ sensibly [perceives in his senses] alle þe body as it were meltyng for ioy as waxe doþ anentes [before] þe hote fire. . . . A lorde Jesu in what delectable paradise is he for þat tyme þat þus feleþ þat blessede bodily presence of þe . . . as he were ioynede body to body?’, p. 154. For a queer reading of the text, in relation to the erotics of eucharistic devotion, see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 82–3. B. Peters, ‘Rolle’s Eroticized Language in The Fire of Love’, Mystics Quarterly, 1995, vol. 21.2, pp. 51–8, p. 56. Peters, ‘Rolle’s Eroticized Language’, p. 55. Peters, ‘Rolle’s Eroticized Language’, pp. 53–4. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, p. 38. ‘Meditation B’, in Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, Edited from MS Longleat 29 and Related Manuscripts, ed. S.J.O. Thomson, EETS os 293, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988: ‘And yit, lord, swet Ihesu, þy body is lyk to þe nette, for as a nette is ful of holys, so is þy body ful of woundes. . . . Efte, swet Ihesu, þy body is like to a dufhouse, for a dufhouse is ful of holys: so is þy body ful of woundes’, p. 74. See also the opening epigraph for another example of the metaphor, in which Rolle asks to be ‘with þi bewte wounded’, book I, chap. 3, p. 7. For a review of this scholarship, with an argument that we entertain an ‘open mesh of possibilities’ in relation to the sacred wound, see Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, pp. 189–95; for a survey of visual images of the wound, see F. Lewis, ‘The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response’, in L. Smith and J.H.M. Taylor (eds), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, London, British Library, 1997, pp. 204–29. Jeffrey F. Hamburger resists what he dubs ‘reductive’ readings of images of Christ’s wound with a Bynumesque allusion to medieval alterity: ‘Where we are inclined to read the opening in Christ’s side as a fetish or an objectification of the body, nuns regarded it as an invitation to introspection, a literal looking inward’; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, p. 219. The archetypal example of which would be Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 1975, vol. 16.3, pp. 6–18. M. Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire, London, Laurence King, 1998, pp. 38–9.

Ecce Homo 171 55 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 82. 56 J.F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 72. 57 Camille, The Medieval Art of Love, p. 39; Hamburger, too, posits the existence of a gendered ‘role reversal’, ‘the Sponsa penetrating Christ with her phallic spear’, Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, p. 76. 58 Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, pp. 155–9, p. 296, note 1. 59 Lewis, ‘The Wound in Christ’s Side’, p. 215. For a more conventional account of the iconography of the sponsa, which interprets the soul’s femaleness as ‘the condition of embodiment, gendered female in Christ, through which both sexes could identify with him in his humanity’, see S.L. Smith, ‘The Bride Stripped Bare: A Rare Type of the Disrobing of Christ’, Gesta, 1995, vol. 34.2, pp. 126–46, p. 139. 60 S. Salih, ‘Queering Sponsalia Christi: Virginity, Gender and Desire in the Early Middle English Anchoritic Texts’, New Medieval Literatures, vol. 5, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2002, argues a case for viewing sponsalia Christi as ‘not conducive to heterosexual stability’ with far more depth and sophistication than can be attempted here, specifically in relation to deployments of the topos in thirteenth-century virginity literature. 61 S. Stanbury, ‘The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde’, in R.A. Shoaf (ed.), Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Subgit to alle Poesye’: Essays in Criticism, Binghampton, Pegasus, 1992, pp. 224–38. The image of the lover’s gaze being pierced through the eye by the object of their affection can be understood in the light of medieval optical theories describing the operation of visual ‘rays’ down which looks are projected and up which images penetrate the eye. On the scientific matrix within which these theories were constructed, see D.C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp. 88–140. 62 The term employed by Rambuss to describe the closeted expression of Christian devotions in early modern literature, a ‘space where the sacred may touch the transgressive, even the profane’; Closet Devotions, p. 135. On the inappropriateness of the closet as a metaphor for describing premodern sexualities, see A.J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1998, pp. 3–5, p. 13. As Frantzen himself admits, however, by the mid-eleventh century ‘secrecy and concealment’ had indeed become attached to same-sex acts – suggesting that the ‘epistemology of the closet’, in Sedgwick’s formulation, may provide a helpful paradigm for exploring late-medieval sexualities after all. 63 Rambuss, Closet Devotions, p. 57. 64 Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, pp. 2–4. 65 Quoted in M. Camille, ‘Obscenity under Erasure: Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts’, in J.M. Ziolkowski (ed.), Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, Leiden, Brill, 1998, pp. 139–54, p. 153. 66 De inspirationibus, sermon III, article II, chap. 1, in S. Bernardini Senensi Opera Omnia . . . Studio et Cura pp. Collegii S. Bonaventurae, Florence, Ad Claras Aquas, 1950–65, vol. 6, p. 259. The gender of this person (‘persona’ in the Latin) is ambiguous: given Bernardino’s virulent sodomophobia in his other sermons, it seems likely that he is referring to a male here. 67 See, for instance, the comments of Neu-Karsthans in ‘Gesprechbiechlin neüw Karsthans’, quoted in M. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, p. 88. 68 Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors, p. 89: ‘Here stands a Magdalen painted as so whorish that even the priests have all said again and again: How could a man take mass devoutly here? . . . There stands a Sebastian, a Maurice and the gentle John the Evangelist, so cavalier, soldier-like and pimp-ish that the women have had to make confession about them.’ See also the opinion of Jacob Wimpfeling who declared, in the early sixteenth century: ‘In order to stimulate feelings, it is not necessary that hanging

172 Robert Mills

69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91

on the Cross, Christ naked all over without a covering expose the most abstruse and secret parts of his body for human eyes to see’, quoted in Trexler, ‘Gendering Jesus Crucified’, p. 113. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H.J. Schroeder, Rockford, Tan Books, 1978, pp. 216–17. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, p. 97. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, p. 216. Camille, ‘Obscenity under Erasure’, p. 141 and fig. 2. See, related to this point, J.M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986, which suggests that biographical/ psychological modes of criticism, aimed at uncovering the intentional ‘homosexualisation’ of Ganymede in Renaissance art, provide an important dimension to our knowledge of the meanings he embodied. For a critique of approaches of this sort, see A. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, London, Thames and Hudson, 1997, especially pp. 26–32. Solomon-Godeau prefers to employ concepts of ‘homosociality’, unconscious meaning and cultural mentalité. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 85; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 307, note 3. For the objections of other scholars, see the summary in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, pp. 326–9. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 327. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 365; as such, I disagree with Rambuss’s argument on this score in Closet Devotions, p. 44. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, pp. 70–1. For a detailed explanation, spelling out precisely why paintings like that reproduced in Figure 10.3 depict Christ with an erection discernible beneath his loincloth, see Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, pp. 313–14. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 89. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 323. Trexler, ‘Gendering Jesus Crucified’, p. 116. C. Harbison, ‘The Sexuality of Christ in the Early Sixteenth Century in Germany’, in G.T. Clark (ed.), A Tribute to Robert A. Koch: Studies in the Northern Renaissance, Princeton, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1994, pp. 69–81, p. 75. S. Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 18. Miri Rubin, like Beckwith, suggests that religion is best understood ‘if it is not set apart from the social, not seen as an entity sui generis but rather as culture, a system of meaning which represents and constructs experience and imagination’; M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 7. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 2. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, pp. 116–17. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 117. R. Mills, ‘“Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me!”: Masculinity, Masochism and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom’, Exemplaria, 2001, vol. 13.1, pp. 1–37, p. 3, drawing on S. Gaunt, ‘Straight Minds / “Queer” Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1995, vol. 1.4, pp. 439–57, pp. 441–2, p. 453. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 317. The full French text, with English translation, is given in N.Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France, Cambridge, Polity, 1987, pp. 30–1, pp. 124–6. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 317. Discussing the late fifteenth-century English moral drama Mankind, for instance, Garrett P.J. Epp suggests that by this period ‘effeminacy’ and ‘sodomy’ had become virtually interchangeable terms; Epp, ‘The Vicious Guise: Effeminacy, Sodomy, and

Ecce Homo 173

92 93 94

95 96

Mankind’, in J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, New York, Garland, 1997, pp. 303–20. I am tentatively suggesting in this context that the death of the toolmaker Caure was possibly bound up in what Sedgwick calls ‘male homosexual panic’, a phrase derived from the defence strategy used to mitigate the sentences of those accused of gay-bashing in US court practice; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 19–20, pp. 182–212. Caranda’s offence, after all, is derived from the fact that his ‘virile and shameful member’ becomes the subject of the ‘gelded’ toolmaker’s imagined gaze; the resulting brawl seems to constitute a hyperbolic, paranoid response to the situation at hand. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 3. A. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975, pp. 181–2. Camille, The Medieval Art of Love, p. 129. Boswell illustrates his analysis with such an image and characterises the ‘example of Jesus and John’ as an important model for monastic concepts of passionate male friendship; Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, fig. 13, pp. 225–6. Hamburger shows how the Evangelist was singled out as the ‘prototypical Sponsa Christi’, a model for both monks and nuns; Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, p. 78. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, pp. 107–8. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 140.

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Index

Abelard, Peter 10–11, 17–18 21n, 22n adultery 95 Ælfric 87 Aelred of Rievaulx 15, 17, 87 Aers, David 5 Alexandra, Empress 69, 75, 77 Althusser, Louis 124, 125 Amice de Haddon 106 anchoresses 6, 28, 36–44, 45, 46, 128 Ancrene Wisse 28, 36–44 Angela of Foligno 148 Anne of Bohemia 86, 89–91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98n, 100n armour 72–5, 84n Ashton, Gail 67, 121 Astbury (Cheshire) 78 Athanasius 69, 72 Audelay, John 108 authority 4, 7, 39, 56, 74, 86, 89, 93, 130, 135–6, 139–40, 144, 145, 146, 150n, 164 Barclay, Alexander 78 Beckwith, Sarah 37, 38, 40, 41, 47n, 128, 164–5, 173n Bell, Rudolph M. see Weinstein, Donald Bell, Margaret 92 Biddick, Kathleen 3, 168n Boanas, G. 142 body 1, 3, 6, 9–18, 19n, 20n, 29, 33n, 36, 37, 38–41, 44, 45n, 47n, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 81n, 82n, 84n, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 129, 149, 153, 156, 157–67, 168n, 170n, 172n body substitution 75 Boehner, Scott 126 Bokenham, Osbern 130 Bonaventure 53

Borbjerg (Denmark) 78 Boswell, John 156 Bourdieu, Pierre 6 Bravmann, Scott 155 breast(s) 19n, 49, 50, 56, 57, 61, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 155, 157 lactation, 11, 157 Brihtwald, Bishop of Wiltshire 95 Brinton, Bishop 113 Bristol 78 Brook (Kent) 109 Bruges, William 71, 80 Bullough, Vern 20n, 92 Butler, Alban 65–6 Butler, Judith 6, 37, 125, 131 Bynum, Caroline Walker 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 121, 137, 149, 153–8, 159, 161, 163, 167, 169n Cadden, Joan 37 Caesarius of Heisterbach 12 Camille, Michael 160, 161–2 Capgrave, John 122, 127 Caranda, Guillaume 166 Cassian 15 castration 10, 11, 17, 18, 21n, 22n, 84n, 166 Cathars 145, 147 Caure, Claude 166 celibacy 16, 95, 110, 122, 139 see also chastity Chalfont St Giles (Buckinghamshire) 107 Chamberlayne, Joanna 88 Chanteussée (France) 110 charity 4, 5, 65, 66, 81n, 90, 98n, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 135–49, 150n, 151n, 152 Charles of Blois 138, 147–8 chastity 11, 12, 16, 17, 28, 37, 38, 52, 65,

196 Index 67, 68, 71, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85n, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97n, 98n, 121, 122, 129, 130, 131, 139, 147 see also celibacy Chaucer, Geoffrey 150n, 157 Chester Nativity 143 childbirth 11, 27, 28–9, 30–1, 32, 52, 99n, 127, 128 childlessness 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99n, 100n, 106, 135, 141 Christ 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 26, 33n, 41, 44, 47n, 50, 52, 53, 55, 63n, 67, 68, 77, 82n, 87, 88, 105, 107, 115, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 140, 142, 143, 144, 147, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167n, 168n, 169n, 170n, 171n, 172n imitatio Christi 67, 70, 158 Incarnation 9, 12, 18, 144 ithyphallic Christ, 164 Resurrection 9, 12, 18 Christine de Pisan 135 Clare of Montefalco 148 Cohen, Esther 51 Coletti, Theresa 126 Colton (Norfolk) 103, 110 Columba of Rieti 142, 144 Confessio Amantis see Gower, John confession 42–3 Constantine the African 15 Corby Glen (Lincolnshire) 102, 106 corporeality see body Council of Trent 163 Coventry 106, 107 Cranach, Lucas 61 Craymer, Suzanne L. 123 Croughton (Northamptonshire) 104, 106 Dacian, Emperor 69, 74 Daniel, Walter 15 Davidson, Clifford 128, 129 decapitation see execution Decius 59 Delphine of Sabran 148 demons 11, 13, 20n, 24–32, 33n, 35n, 101, 108, 110 Tutivillus, 101 devils 1, 13, 14, 28, 42, 65, 88, 110, 125, 126, 159 Digby Conversion of St Paul 123–7, 131 Digby Mary Magdalen 123–31 Dinshaw, Carolyn 155 Diocletian, Emperor 24, 69

Dorward, Helen 96n dragons 24–32, 33n, 34n, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 83n, 85n Dugdale, William 71 Book of Monuments 71, 72 Eaton (Norfolk) 110 Eberly, Susan 123 Edith, wife of St Edward the Confessor 87, 89, 90, 94–5, 98n, 100 Ednes-Pierotti, Jennie 116n Edward III 78, 90, 92, 98n Edward IV 88 Eleanor of Provence 87 Elliott, Dyan 46n, 121 enclosure 38, 45n, 46n England 37, 41, 46n, 49, 82n, 85n, 86, 88, 90, 94, 95, 101, 120n, 121, 137 Epiphanus 104 Epp, Gareth 167n, 172n Evangelium de Nativitate 104 execution 50, 54–6, 57, 60–2, 72, 81n, 84n fertility 92, 156 see also childlessness Fletcher, Chris 91, 96n, 99n Forli, Jacopo 37 Foucault, Michel 42, 47n Fradenburg, Louise O. 36 Frances of Rome 141, 142, 144, 145 Frantzen, Allen J. 3 Fredell, Joel 129 French, Katherine 116n, 120n Gaunt, Simon 4, 8, 83, 89, 97, 99, 165, 172 Gelasius, Pope 69 genitalia 4, 10, 13, 17, 18, 53, 57, 60, 72, 78, 79, 84n, 92 erections 18, 92, 152, 155 impotence 14, 17, 91–2, 160 masturbation 13, 41 menstruation 11, 15, 18, 20n nocturnal emissions 11, 12, 13, 20n, 97n seminal emissions 14–15 see also castration Gerald of Aurillac 13–14, 16, 17 Gerald of Wales 1, 13, 15, 16, 18 Gerson, Jean 163 Gilchrist, Roberta 131 Godric 15, 17 Golden Legend see Jacobus de Voragine

Index 197 Gordon, Bernard 37, 45n gossip 101, 108–10 Gower, John 93 Grosseteste, Robert 14–15 guilds 31 Haddon Hall (Derbyshire) 107 Hamburger, Jeffrey 161–2, 170n, 173n Harbison, Craig 164 Heal, Felicity 137 Heloise see Abelard, Peter Henry III 86, 87 Henry IV 89, 91, 99n Henry VI 87 Herbert of Torres 153 Hereford 102, 107 Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans 13 Hollander, Anne 166 Homobonus 146, 148, 151n homosexuality 3, 99n, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168n, 172n, 173n ‘How the Good Wijf tau
te Hir Dou
tir’ 101, 106, 108, 110, 113 Hugh of Avalon 17 humoural theory 12, 14–15, 18 Huntington, Joanna 96n, 97n Incendium Amoris see Rolle, Richard interpellation 124–5, 127, 128, 131, 134n Isabella of France 86, 90, 92, 93, 100n Jacobus de Voragine 29, 49–62, 77, 81n, 82n, 87, 97, 130, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150n Jacques de Vitry 12, 16, 17, 108 James of Milan 160 Jan van Eyck 30 Jean de Vignay 49 Jeanne de Bourgogne 49 Jesus see Christ John of Bromyard 113 John of Gaunt 89, 98n, 99n John of Salisbury 55 Jones, Graham 116n Kelly, Joan 4 Kelly, Kathleen Coyne 36, 47n Kempe, Margery 4, 6, 68, 88, 114, 121–31, 132n, 143 Kieckhefer, Richard 3, 122, 131n kingship 4, 6, 7, 68, 86, 88–90, 93, 96 Kirkup, James 167n Kitchen, John 6

La Selle (Normandy) 70, 78, 83n Laqueur, Thomas 82n Latton (Essex) 107 Lay-Folks’ Prayer Book 143 Lawton, David 132n Le Roman de Silence 51 Legenda aurea see Jacobus de Voragine Légende dorée 49 Lemon, Denis 167n Lewis, Flora 162 Lindley, Phillip 116n literacy 4, 105–8 Little Melton (Norfolk) 103, 119n Lochrie, Karma 38, 41, 153, 157, 170n Lollardy 2, 7n, 107 Louis VII 16 Love, Nicholas 143, 170n Lydgate, John 78, 87 Magnificat 142–4 Manuel des Péchés 153 Margaret of Cortona 141, 148 Margery de Crioll 102, 106 marriage 16, 30, 37, 47n, 67, 78, 86–96, 97n, 101, 103–4, 112, 121, 122, 127, 157 Marseilles 127, 128, 130 martyr, martyrdom 4, 7, 26, 32, 49–62, 65–81, 84n, 87, 88, 90, 95, 129, 137 virgin martyrs 7, 32n, 66–7, 71, 77, 80, 82n, 122 Mary of Oignies 16, 122 Meale, Carol M. 123 Meditationes vitae Christi 53 Mentmore (Buckinghamshire) 105 Merback, Mitchell B. 61 Milner, Susannah 127 Mirk, John 83n, 109, 115, 139 Monk of Evesham, The 91 Mooney, Catherine M. 122 Moser, Lucas 130 mothers, motherhood 14, 26, 27, 28–9, 30–1, 34n, 68, 88, 90, 104, 106, 108, 135, 141, 142 pregnancy 31, 90 Moulton St Mary (Norfolk) 103, 112, 115 nakedness 1, 42, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57–61, 67, 75, 112, 130, 161, 164, 172 Northmoor (Oxfordshire) 102, 107 Norwich 114, 123 N-Town Play [The Mary Play] 143 nuns 1, 24, 37, 38, 106, 128, 156, 160–1, 166, 170n, 173n

198 Index Odo of Cluny 13, 14 Olibrius 24, 26, 28 Oliva, Marilyn see Gilchrist, Roberta Origen 17 Ormrod, Mark 96n Osbert of Clare 87 pain 40, 51, 52–3, 55, 56, 58, 61, 62, 160 philopassianism 51 Palmer, John 92 Park, David 116n, 119n Paschasius 57 Pasicrates 69 Peters, Brad 159, 160 Peters, Christine 114 Philip III 49 Philippe de Mezières 90 Policraticus see John of Salisbury Potter Heigham (Norfolk) 111–12 preaching 127 priests 24, 65, 128, 139, 171 prostitution 12 Protoevangelium 103 Rambuss, Richard 153, 157, 160, 166 Ratcliffe-on-Soar (Nottinghamshire) 78 Reading (Berkshire) 110 relics, reliquaries 28, 31 Rhetorica ad Herennium 61 Richard II 6, 7, 82n, 86–96, 98n, 99n, 100n Robert de Vere 91 Robert of Jumièges 94 Robertson, Elizabeth 2 Rogier van der Weyden 130 Rolle, Richard 158–62, 170n Rome 56, 140, 144, 145, 147, 151n, 169n Root, Jerry 126 Roper, Lyndall see Boanas, G. Rothschild Canticles 160, 161, 162 Ruabon (Clwyd) 113 Rupert of Deutz 153, 157, 167n Russell, Alice 92 Saints: St Agatha 49, 52, 71, 75 St Agnes 70 St Alexis 147 St Ambrose 52 St Anastasia 49, 58 St Andrew 60 St Anne (Anna) 30, 101–8, 109, 115 St Anselm 53 St Apollonia 71

St Augustine 12, 52, 136 St Barbara 32n, 66, 67, 70 St Bartholomew 49 St Bernard 153, 163 St Bernardino of Siena 136, 163, 144 St Blaise 54, 77 St Bridget of Sweden 122 St Cecilia 52, 81n, 82n St Christopher 106 St Cyriacus 60 St Daria 52 St Dionysius 60 St Dominic 144–5, 147, 148 St Edmund 87, 96n St Edward the Confessor 82n, 86–96, 97n, 98n, 100n St Elizabeth 30, 142–3 St Elizabeth of Hungary 65, 114, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150n St Elizabeth of Portugal 65 St Erasmus 71 St Felicitas see St Perpetua St Felicula 50–1 St Francis of Assisi 138, 144, 145–6, 147, 148, 153 St George 4, 7, 32, 68–81, 82n, 83n, 84n, 85n, 128 St Gilbert of Sempringham 1, 128 St Hippolytus 59 St Hugh of Lincoln 17 St Jerome 12, 18, 52, 140 St Joan of Arc 72 St John of the Cross 167n St John the Almsgiver 138, 139, 140, 144 St John the Baptist 87, 96n St John the Evangelist 68, 71, 82n, 166 Sir John Schorne 65 St Julian the Hospitaller 20, 138–9, 140, 144, 150n St Katherine (Catherine) 29, 31, 32n, 66, 70, 71, 84n, 101, 113, 122 St Kenelm 82n St Laurence 49, 60 St Louis 138 St Lucy 57, 70 St Margaret of Antioch 7, 23–32, 33n, 34n, 66, 70, 71, 81n St Margaret of Scotland 5, 65 St Marina 23–32, 33n, 35n St Mary Magdalen 52, 123–31 St Mary of Egypt 52, 123 St Matthew 56 St Maurice 56, 171n

Index 199 St Mercurius 78 St Michael 28, 29, 32 St Nicholas 138, 139–40, 144 St Paul 12, 18, 53, 55, 56, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 140 St Paula 52, 140–1, 150n St Perpetua 51, 68, 82n St Peter 50, 56, 95 St Petronilla 50 St Sebastian 49, 71, 72, 166, 168n, 171n St Simon 56 St Thais 52 St Thomas Aquinas 12, 20n, 61, 130, 136, 138, 144 St Tibertius 82n St Ursula 52 St Valerian 82n St Walstan 66, 81n, 113 St Yves (Ivo) of Brittany 65 St Zita 65, 141, 144 Savage, Anne 40, 47n Scherb, Victor I. 128 Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts 37 Scottish Legendary 78 Sedgwick, Eve 155, 167, 171n Sedgwick, William 71 Senlis (France) 166 servants 65, 66, 69, 82n, 136, 141, 142, 153 Seven Corporal Works of Mercy 101, 102, 103, 110–15 Seven Deadly Sins 102, 109, 116n, 129 sexual intercourse 13, 15, 16, 20n, 78 abstinence from 16, 94 see also chastity sexuality 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 28, 37, 41, 51, 52, 54, 59, 61, 67, 71, 79, 88, 92, 93, 121, 130, 162, 163, 166 see also homosexuality sin(s) 9, 12, 13, 18, 27, 28, 31, 41, 42, 43, 47n, 52, 79, 109, 126, 127, 129, 130, 163, 169n Skathelok, John 92 Slapton (Northamptonshire) 102, 107, 109–10 South English Legendary 29, 32n, 33n, 34n, 81n, 130 Spirbeck (Lincolnshire) 107 Sponsler, Claire 128 Stafford, Pauline 94, 95, 100n Staley, Lynn 128 Stamford (Lincolnshire) 71, 72, 74, 78, 80, 82n, 83n, 84n Stanzaic Life of Christ 143

Steinberg, Leo 2, 10, 155, 156, 157, 163, 164, 166, 167, 172n Stimulus Amoris see James of Milan St Neot (Cornwall) 78, 83n Stokesby (Norfolk) 110 Stratton Hawley, John 5 Swinefield, Dean 102, 107, 108 taboo 11, 15 Taylor, Craig 96n temptation 40 Tertullian 36, 43, 52 The Book of the Knight of the Tour Landry 101 The Conversion of Saint Paul 126 Thetford 105, 123 Thomas de la Mare 102, 108 Thompson, Victoria 96n ‘Three Ages of Woman’ 112 Thurlby (Lincolnshire) 105 torture 6, 24, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 82, 83n, 84n, 157, 158, 160, 162, 165. Towcester (Northamptonshire) 77 Towneley Salutation of Elizabeth 143 Trexler, Richard 164, 168n, 170n Tristram, E.W. 107 Trotton (Sussex) 102 Turner, Denys 3, 169n Valdes, Peter 146–7, 148 Van Engen, John 4, 167n Vincent of Beauvais 110 Virgin Mary 30, 31, 45, 53, 77–8, 80, 83n, 84n, 85n, 87, 101–8, 109, 112, 123, 142, 143 virgins, virginity 3, 6, 12, 13, 32n, 36, 37–44, 45n, 47n, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 61, 65–81, 82n, 84n, 86–9, 93–5, 100n, 112, 121, 122, 128, 131, 140, 141, 161, 171n virility 10, 91–2, 131 Vita Aedwardi Regis 94 Walsingham, Thomas 91 Warning to Gossips 101, 108–10, 115 Warning to Swearers 108 Watson, Nicholas 40, 47n Weinstein, Donald 5, 89, 121, 137 Westminster Abbey 86, 87, 96n Whitehouse, Mary 167n Wickhampton (Norfolk) 103, 112, 115 widowhood 112, 121, 135, 137 William of Malmesbury 95

200 Index Wilton Diptych 86, 89, 92, 93, 96n, 97n Windsor: St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle 65, 74, 78, 82n, 83n Winstead, Karen A. 7, 67, 118n Wiston (Suffolk) 109 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 27, 46n, 70

Womack, Peter 126 Woodville, Elizabeth 88 Worcester 107 Wotton Wawen (Warwickshire) 107 Zˇizˇek, S. 155 Zwingli, Ulrich 163