Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature: Authority, Exemplarity and Femininity (Gender in the Middle Ages, 17) 9781843845898, 9781800101203, 184384589X

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Gender in the Middle Ages Volume 17

HOLY HARLOTS IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE

Gender in the Middle Ages ISSN 1742-870X Series Editors Jacqueline Murray Diane Watt Editorial Board Clare Lees Katherine J. Lewis Liz Herbert McAvoy This series investigates the representation and construction of masculinity and femininity in the Middle Ages from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. It aims in particular to explore the diversity of medieval genders, and such interrelated contexts and issues as sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Jacqueline Murray, Department of History, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada Professor Diane Watt, School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, UK Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the end of this book.

HOLY HARLOTS IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE

AUTHORITY, EXEMPLARITY AND FEMININITY

Juliette Vuille

D. S. BREWER

© Juliette Vuille 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Juliette Vuille to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2021 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978-1-84384-589-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80010-120-3 ePDF D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover: Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt with the Hermits, detail from Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb altarpiece. Source: Saint-Bavo’s Cathedral, www.artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost Design: Toni Michelle

For Catherine and Philippe Vuille, Who taught me everything. Through thick and thin, You are my rocks. I love you.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi List of Abbreviations

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Introduction 1 1. “Seo wæs ærest synnecge”: The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography Pelagia in the Old English Martyrology Mary Magdalene in the Old English Martyrology Afra in the Old English Martyrology The Pseudo-Ælfrician Life of Mary of Egypt

2. The Post-Conquest Harlot: Affective Piety and the Romance Genre Affective Piety and the Holy Harlot The Anglo-Norman T Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne The Early South English Legendary “Life of the Magdalene”

3. Heterodoxy, Patronage, and the Harlot in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography The Magdalene and the Wycliffites Mirk’s Festial The “Lyf of Marye Maudelyn” by Osbern Bokenham

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19 24 30 36 38

59 60 66 87

101 103 111 120

Contents 4. “She shal byn abyll to dystroye helle”: Gender and Authority in the Digby Mary Magdalene

141

The Magdalene and the Virgin as Vessels of the Word The Magdalene and Feminine Persuasion The Sexual Magdalene

147 156 167

5. Admiranda et Imitanda? Emulation of the Holy Harlot Type by Late Medieval Female Mystics Christina of Markyate Julian of Norwich Margery Kempe Elizabeth Barton

181 186 195 203 216

Conclusion: Holy or Harlot? The Early Modern Demise of the Saintly Prostitute

223

Appendix: Vernacular Lives of Holy Harlots in Medieval Insular Hagiography

231

Bibliography 241 Index 271

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.

Judith of Flanders as Mary Magdalene embracing the Cross. England, probably Canterbury, ca. 1065. The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.709, fol. 1v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photograph courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

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Figure 2.

Mary Magdalene preaching the Resurrection to the apostles, St Albans Psalter. Dombibliothek Hildesheim, MS St.God. 1 (Property of the Basilica of St Godehard, Hildesheim), p. 51. Photograph courtesy of Dombibliothek Hildesheim, Hildesheim

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Figure 3.

Christina of Markyate acting as an intermediary between God and the St Albans monks. Illuminated initial, St Albans Psalter. Dombibliothek Hildesheim, MS St.God. 1 (Property of the Basilica of St Godehard, Hildesheim), p. 285. Photograph courtesy of Dombibliothek Hildesheim, Hildesheim.

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The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

his book has been a labour of love and a constant in my life as I moved between countries and universities. It first took form in the English Department at the University of Lausanne, where I worked under the supervision of Denis Renevey. The debt I owe him, both as a former supervisor and current colleague and friend, is incalculable. His generosity and his invaluable advice and guidance have shaped me into the scholar I am today, and for that I am eternally grateful. My warmest thanks as well to Sarah Salih and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne for their careful reading of my work, the exchanges that helped shape my thoughts on the subject, and their continued advice and support, which has many a time renewed my faith in all things academic. My thanks are also due to Caroline Palmer of Boydell and Brewer for her enthusiasm in the development of the book project and her patience until it came to fruition. I am also particularly grateful to the series editors, Jacqueline Murray and Diane Watt, for their input and encouraging suggestions throughout the process. The insightful suggestions of the anonymous readers of the manuscript made a great difference on the quality of the final product. So many have contributed to this research, in sharing their own, offering advice, discussing my ideas, and reading draft chapters. For this, I thank most particularly Sarah Baccianti, Guillemette Bolens, Sarah Brazil, Amy Brown, Cynthia Turner Camp, Rory Critten, Irina Dumitrescu, Elizabeth Dutton, Mary Flannery, Vincent Gillespie, Simon Horobin, Peter Loewen, Erica Machulak, Camille Marshall, Anne-Claire Michoux, Anne Mouron, Marco Nievergelt, Gale Owen-Crocker, Lucy Perry, Steven Rozenski, Devani Singh, Annie Sutherland, Jennifer Thorburn, Philippe Vuille, Robin Waugh, and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa. Special thanks to Leah Schwebel, whose friendship, encouragement, and edits supported me through the final stages of this monograph, a difficult period of confinement due to the COVID19 pandemic. All inaccuracies that remain are of course my own. Several fellowships, archives, and institutions have helped me along in this journey. I am very grateful to have been a recipient of a Berrow Foundation Scholarship as well as a Swiss National Fund Early Postdoc.Mobility and Advanced Postdoc.Mobility, all of which enabled me to pursue my research at the University of Oxford and more particularly Lincoln College, which became xi

Acknowledgements a genuine home away from home. My thanks to all the Lincoln College staff, academic and otherwise, most particularly Professor Henry Woudhuysen, Dr Louise Durning, Carmella Elan-Gaston, and the amazing team of porters, who were always there to take delivery of important books, and whose smiles and assistance generally made my life better in Oxford. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the staff at the Oxford English Faculty Library and the Bodleian Libraries. I was also very fortunate in obtaining a Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grant, which enabled me to develop my thinking about holy harlots and books of hours. I am further indebted to the librarians and archivists at the Abbotsford Collection Trust and Advocates Library (in particular Angela Shofield), the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Lausanne (a most heartfelt thank you to Ramona Fritschi), the British Library, and Lambeth Palace Library. I want to thank from the bottom of my heart the administrative, teaching, and research staff, as well as the excellent students from the English Faculties and Departments at the Universities of Lausanne, Geneva, and Oxford, for their warm welcome and their continued support. I have presented versions of my research at different work-in-progress research seminars at all three universities and countless conferences, and want to thank everybody who contributed to my thinking on the subject. My special thanks to the organisers and respondents of the annual Research Research Day in Medieval English Studies sessions co-organised between Warwick University, the University of Lausanne, the University of Padova, and Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest: Catherine Batt, Julia Boffey, Tamás Karáth, Alessandra Petrina, Denis Renevey, and Christiania Whitehead. These intense sessions of exchange were influential in my research. Last but not least, I want to thank my colleagues and friends for their continued, caffeinated support throughout this process: Hazel Blair, Hélène Cordier, Rory Critten, Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà, Anne-Claire Michoux, Lucy Perry, Ana Rita Parreiras Reis, Steven Rozenski, Leah Schwebel, Devani Singh, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Kirsten Stirling, and Jennifer Thorburn. Special thanks go to Roberto Biolzi, Amaranta Cecchini, Mattia Egloff, Manon Favre-Bulle, Vladimir Loncar, Erica Machulak, Neil Rock, Katharine Turvey, Noémie Verdon, Simon Vuille, and Gavin Wiens. This book is for my parents, Catherine and Philippe Vuille.

xii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

A’

B

BHL BMK Bosworth-Toller DOE CCLME CCSL CCCM DM EEBO EETS e.s. S.S. o.s. ESEL Festial

Dolbeau, F., “La réfection latine A’,” in Pélagie la Pénitente, Métamorphoses d’une légende, ed. P. Petitmengin et al., 2 vols (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 181–216 Lévy, C., Petitmengin, P. et al. (eds), “La réfection latine B,” in Pélagie la Pénitente, Métamorphoses d’une légende, 2 vols (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 217–49 Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An AngloSaxon Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, repr. 1972). Dictionary of Old English (Toronto, 1986–) Cotton-Corpus Legendary Life of Mary of Egypt, ed. Hugh Magennis, Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002) Corpus Christianorum series Latina Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis Theresa Coletti (ed.), The Digby Mary Magdalene Play (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2018) Early English Books Online Early English Text Society extra series Supplementary Series original series Carl Horstmann (ed.), The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints, EETS o.s. 87 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1887–) Susan Powell (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial, EETS o.s. 334, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–10) xiii

Abbreviations JMEMS LME LMM n.s. OEM MED MEFRM PG PL PMLA SEL STC T Vita

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, Hugh Magennis (ed.), Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002) Mary S. Serjeantson (ed.), Legendys of Hooly Wummen by Osbern Bokenham, EETS o.s. 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) new series Christine Rauer (ed. and trans.), The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge: D.S Brewer, 2016) Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan Mélanges de l’école française de Rome : Moyen-Âge Patrologia Graeca, ed J.-P Migne (Paris, 1887) Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P Migne (Paris, 1841–64) Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill (eds), The South English Legendary, EETS o.s. 244, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) EEBO’s Short Title Catalogue T Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne, Peter F. Dembowski (ed.), La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne (Geneva: Droz, 1977) Latin Life of Christina of Markyate, Charles H. Talbot (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)

xiv

INTRODUCTION

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he concept of the holy harlot, a type of female saint defined by a youth spent in licentious sin, followed by repentance and a later life spent in an often eremitic and ascetic sanctity, may at first appear as a contradiction in terms. It implies the synchronic coexistence, within a single body, of holiness and harlotry, sin and virtue. This book will reveal that in many ways holy harlots – Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Thaïs, or Pelagia, to name but a few – are paradoxes that reflect and refract the shifting and multivalent conceptions of femininity as a whole in the medieval period, and especially as it intersects with notions of authority, holiness, and the body. Indeed, we shall see that the saintly prostitute constitutes a smorgasbord of medieval femininity, containing as she does the potential for both sin and virtue, Eve and Mary,1 sexual sin and virginity, youth and old age, submission and power, enclosure and geographical freedom, as well as barrenness and motherhood. Since Joan Wallach Scott memorably qualified gender “a useful category of historical analysis” that warrants the writing of a “new history,” what better way to adopt this approach for the Middle Ages than by providing the first literary history of the holy harlot,2 a figure that encompasses all aspects of the feminine?3 This book proposes to investigate the holy harlot as a category of saints in English religious literature, in texts that span the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, in Old English, Middle English, and in the French of England. The holy harlot is a particularly malleable and multivalent model, which welcomes all aspects 1

Dominique Iogna-Prat makes a similar remark about Mary Magdalene in particular. See her “La Madeleine du Sermo in veneratione sanctæ Mariæ Magdalenæ attribué à Odon de Cluny,” MEFRM 104 (1992), pp. 37–70, at p. 58. 2 The type of the holy harlot in late antiquity has been touched upon by Sister Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987). For the medieval period, only Ruth Mazo Karras has devoted more than a few passing references to it. See her Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 102–30. 3 Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in her edited collection Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 152–82, esp. pp. 154 and 175.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature of femininity but also comes, in the medieval period, to represent humanity as a whole and the hope for salvation through unconventional means. As such, she is an utterly relatable type of saint, most especially for women, but also for the laity, and ultimately for Everyman. Though it may appear strange to us that a male cleric should encourage, and be encouraged, to emulate the particular brand of femininity performed by female prostitutes-turned-saints, this is exactly what happens in the Middle Ages, for instance in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (see Chapter 2). The harlot saint’s gendered portrayal in the Middle Ages leads us to a far-ranging realisation about the valuation of femininity, notably as it relates to humanity, and how it evolves throughout the period. The holy harlot in early medieval England performs a particularly negative iteration of femininity before her conversion, and reaches holiness only through the queering of her gender. In this way, femininity is equated with fallen humanity, but departure from this state does not involve a gender inversion – with the performance of a masculinity that is conceived as hierarchically higher than the feminine, such as happens in Latinate sources of the Old English lives – but, rather, effects a movement from feminine to queer. Thus, in a post-lapsarian world, being human involves a performance of the feminine gender, and holiness can be reached only through a departure from this gender, or from any kind of gendered binary. This aspect is developed in the first chapter of this book. The second chapter, however, points to a shift in this portrayal in the twelfth century, brought about by several factors, including the rise of affective piety and the growing influence of the romance genre on hagiography. From then on, the holy harlot’s femininity still symbolises humanity, but it now figures it in both its lowest fallen state and its highest election in heaven. Womanhood, through the holy harlot, comes to represent Man(kind)’s best and worst features. The holy harlot is also a prime case study for the analysis of the ways femininity and authority are articulated in the medieval period, as she is particularly authoritative both as a harlot and a saint: she typically leads countless men into temptation or makes them repent their sinful ways even before her conversion, and then holds a position of great authority as a teacher and preacher after she sees the error of her ways. The harlot saint develops a particular brand of feminine authority poised as an alternative or even a substitute to more male and clerical forms of authority, an authority that is rooted in her body, her former sinfulness, her sexuality, and, especially in the later Middle Ages, her affective devotion and status as Bride of Christ. The authority she wields depends on the context of production, but the validation for it changes over time. In Old English texts, her power is rooted in the harlot saint’s charisma; later on, it is instead backed by the support of traditional male authorities, such as the clergy or God. This feminine authority leads medieval women, especially would-be saints, mystics, and women from the aristocracy, to emulate the harlot saint in order to give weight to their own 2

Introduction voices or validate their sometimes-unconventional lives as holy, as evidenced in Chapters 3 and 5 of this book. This is a testament to the opportunity that the holy harlot afforded in articulating ideas and concepts that were outside of the mainstream: she is often used to express dissenting or reformist beliefs, for instance when being moulded as the ideal figure of the Wycliffite preacher, as Chapter 3 makes apparent. Her adaptability and multivalence often lead the holy harlot to stand for seemingly irreconcilable notions: she can be the ideal “true” man for these fourteenth-century dissenters, but comes to represent the early sixteenth-century Catholic Church in its opposition to the Reformation. At the same time, gender and sex are often used as metaphors in holy harlots’ lives to signify different seemingly binary concepts, such as lay and religious, coenobitic and eremitic, male and female, saintly and sinful, but more often than not they are employed to link, rather than oppose, these binaries, and to show how each “side” can benefit from consideration of the other in the pursuit of salvation. In sum, the harlot saint, as her name indicates, is a bridging figure. Who, then, are these saints, and what makes them more flexible and relatable models than the other two principal categories of feminine sanctity: the virgin martyr and the holy mother?4 What makes these formerly lecherous women particularly authoritative and worthy of imitation, compared to other female saints? A survey of the most important holy harlots and the reasons that put them in this category of female sanctity will be useful here in order to begin answering this question. Mary Magdalene is the most popular example of the holy harlot type.5 The Magdalene – whose scriptural figure was conflated in 591 by Pope Gregory the Great with that of Mary of Bethany (Jn 11:1–45 and 12:1–8) and the anonymous sinner of the city who washes Christ’s feet with her tears (Lk. 7:37–50) – was believed, in the medieval period, to have been a prostitute, or at least a loose woman, before converting at Christ’s feet.6 This does not prevent her from gaining considerable authority when she is commanded by Christ (Jn 20:17) to announce the Resurrection to the apostles, so that she becomes the first recorded preacher in Christian history,7 On virgin martyrs as a type in medieval England, see notably Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001) and Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). On holy mothers, see Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1995) and Clarissa Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994). 5 For a history of the Magdalene legend (although centred on southern France and Italy), see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 18–46. 6 See Gregory the Great, Homiliae in evangelia 25 and 33. 7 Elaine J. Lawless, “The Issue of Blood: Reinstating Women into the Tradition,” in 4

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the apostolorum apostola.8 This religious authority is further enhanced in the eleventh century, when the legend of her preaching in Marseilles, which results in the evangelisation of Gaul, is added to her vita.9 In the late ninth century, a new vita eremitica is appended to her life. In it, she retires into the wilderness, eats nothing, and is lifted up several times a day by angels to be fed manna. She spends thirty or forty-seven years as a hermit, before being discovered by a male religious. She then receives the last unction and dies.10 This final episode is probably grafted onto her life from that of Mary of Egypt, the second most popular repentant harlot. Mary of Egypt spends seventeen years as a prostitute in Alexandria before travelling to Jerusalem, where she converts in front of an image of the Virgin Mary, having been refused entry to a sanctuary because of her sinfulness. She then crosses the Jordan and lives an ascetic life for forty-seven years before meeting Zosimus, a monk from a nearby monastery. She teaches him and advises him on reforms in his monastery before receiving communion from him. She dies and is buried by Zosimus with the help of a tame lion.11 Pelagia, for her part, is an actress who parades in the streets of Antioch. Upon seeing her, Bishop Nonnus repents the fact that she takes more care to please her earthly lovers than he does to please his God. She in turn repents from her sinful life,12 dons masculine clothing, and retires, under the name Pelagius, to a cell on the Mount of Olives. Her wisdom leads religious men far and wide Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 1–18, at p. 2. 8 The term appears to have first been coined by Hugh of Cluny (died 1109) in a sermon to the nuns of Marcigny: Commonitorium ad successores suos pro sanctimonialibus Marciniacensibus, PL 159: 952. On this, see Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene, pp. 62–5. 9 On this part of the story, commonly referred to as her vita apostolica, see Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, pp. 52–4, and Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie-Madeleine en Occident, des origines à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Auxerre: Publications de la Société des fouilles archéologiques de l’Yonne, 1959), as well as his Le dossier vézelien de Marie Madeleine: invention et translation des reliques en 1265–1267: contribution à l’histoire du culte de la sainte à Vézelay à l’apogée du Moyen Âge (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1975). 10 Saxer, Le culte de Marie-Madeleine, vol. 1, p. 126. 11 For a detailed history of the early developments of Mary of Egypt’s legend, see Jane Stevenson, “The Holy Sinner: The Life of Mary of Egypt,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 19–50. For the the legend in medieval England, see Simon Lavery, “The Story of Mary the Egyptian in Medieval England,” in the same volume, pp. 113–48. See also Hugh Magennis (ed. and trans.), The Old English Life of Mary of Egypt: An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-text Translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), pp. 1–50. 12 On actresses as loose women, see Ruth Mazo Karras, “Holy Harlots: Prostitute Saints in Medieval Legend,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990), pp. 3–32, at pp. 13–14.

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Introduction to come and consult her for her advice before her death and the miraculous “re-discovery” of her feminine gender.13 Thaïs, a prostitute, is converted by the monk Paphnutius, who poses as her client and gets her to reveal her knowledge of God’s omniscience by trying to find a more private place for their tryst than the bedchamber she offers, to which she responds that she can show him a more private room, but that God sees everything anyway. She repents and Paphnutius encloses her in a cell for three years, before ordering her to come out, something that she does after much resistance. She dies soon afterwards.14 This life seems to be related to that of Mary, niece of Abraham, who flees the anchorhold she shares with him to become a prostitute, only for the latter to track her down, present himself as a client, and upon her repentance bring her back to her ascetic life.15 Finally, Afra is a prostitute in Augsburg, her profession sometimes linked with her being a priestess of Venus. She – and at times her mother and three fellow prostitutes – converts to Christianity, only to be martyred for her faith in a way reminiscent of the virgin martyr’s plight.16 Many works have been devoted to the figure of Mary Magdalene,17 and a few to the other repentant prostitutes,18 but they have scarcely ever been analysed as a group.19 Notwithstanding, even a cursory overview as the one I have just offered demonstrates their relatedness, a categorical connection that late antique and medieval hagiographers must have readily identified, 13

For an account and history of Pelagia’s legend, as well as hagiographical sources and translations, see Pierre Petitmengin et al., Pélagie la pénitente: Métamorphoses d’une légende, 2 vols (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1984). 14 On Thaïs’s legend, see Andrew M. Beresford, The Legends of the Holy Harlots. Thaïs and Pelagia in Medieval Spanish Literature (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007), pp. 1–32. 15 On her legend, see Hellen Waddell, The Desert Fathers (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 285–7. 16 On Afra of Augsburg, see notably her legends in BHL 108 and 109. 17 See notably Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie-Madeleine, which focuses on the development of the Magdalene cult in France; Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, discusses notions of gender, authority and preaching in the Magdalene legend; Veronica Ortenberg, “Le culte de sainte Marie Madeleine dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne,” MEFRM 104 (1992), pp. 13–35, discusses the development of the Magdalene legend in early medieval England; finally, Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), masterfully develops representations of the saint in late medieval East Anglia. 18 Mary of Egypt and Pelagia’s legends have each warranted a collection of essays. See Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (eds), The Legend of Mary of Egypt, and Petitmengin et al., Pélagie la pénitente. 19 On the harlot saint as a type of female saint, see Karras, “Holy Harlots”; Patricia Cox Miller, “Is There a Harlot in This Text? Hagiography and the Grotesque,” JMEMS 33 (2003), pp. 419–35; Andrew Beresford rejects this classification on the grounds of a somewhat shaky methodology, but still makes use of it in his analysis. See his Legends of the Holy Harlots, pp. 33–62.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature since they tended to borrow events from one holy harlot’s life to supplement another’s. It indeed appears that the legend of the Magdalene is indebted to that of Mary of Egypt, in the same way that of Mary, niece of Abraham is reminiscent of the life of Thaïs. All these saints share a similar pattern of an early life of sin in the world, either implicitly or explicitly linked with sexual sin, followed by a dramatic conversion and, with the exception of Afra, a later life of strict ascetic penance. Most of them, too, enjoy a long and eventful life in the public eye, a great freedom of movement, and important sway over male religious, teaching them, advising them, and preaching to them. Finally, and most importantly perhaps, lives of holy harlots have this particularity that they present a mixed hagiographical model that one can adjust to incorporate different representations of saintly femininity: Pelagia is a cross-dressing saint, an anchoress, and a holy harlot; Mary Magdalene is a preacher, a hermit, and a composite of several scriptural women; Afra is a prostitute, but her sexual sin is so linked to her paganism that it is often conceived of as a by-product of it, so that she is paradoxically associated with the virgin martyr type. No wonder, then, that the repentant prostitute comes to represent the complexity of the feminine gender and of its intersections with sanctity in the medieval period! The holy harlot constitutes a specific type of female sanctity, one that is especially rooted in lechery and sin, that provides a much more multivalent model of femininity than that of the virgin martyr or the holy mother, and that is much more flexible and accessible for Every(wo)man to emulate. Female holiness is always anchored in gender and the body, being primarily defined by way of sexual status, as virgin, mother, or harlot.20 Among these, virgin martyrs’ and holy mothers’ lives usually present a quite linear path to salvation, involving a holiness that is present and unwavering since childhood, according to Caroline Walker Bynum.21 This can be opposed to the harlot 20

As opposed to male saints who tend to reach sanctity in their socio-professional quality, for instance as kings or abbots. On female virginity as a sexual classification, see Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 186, and Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 9–10. On male sanctity, see Katherine J. Lewis, “Male Saints and Devotional Masculinity in Late Medieval England,” Gender and History 24 (2012), pp. 112–33, at pp. 119–22 and p. 131, n. 83. Although the virginity of male saints was sometimes important, it rarely constituted a defining characteristic of their holiness. See John H. Arnold, “The Labour of Continence: Masculinity and Clerical Virginity,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 102–18. On female sanctity as centred on sexual status, see Brigitte Cazelles, Le corps de sainteté: d’après Jehan Bouche d’Or, Jehan Paulus, et quelques vies des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Geneva: Droz, 1982), p. 21. On the medieval association of men with their socio-professional status and women with their marital status, see Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–10, at p. 5. 21 See her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), esp. pp. 151–2 and 177–9.

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Introduction saint’s pattern of conversion, much more accessible for instance for female religious who would often have lived in the world before taking the veil, but is also much more universal, as it represents a movement from sin to God to which all could relate. Further, both virgin martyrs and holy mothers stand for a somewhat reductive and metonymic representation of femininity, defined either by their rejection of women’s socially acceptable procreative role or by its unqualified embrace. Not so for the harlot saint, who has sex, but not for any societally sanctioned reason: she just enjoys it. Hagiographers often underline the fact that she refuses payment for her favours, so that her actions are deemed even more sinful, not being motivated by need.22 Such an association with lechery and physical desire firmly links the repentant prostitute with femininity. The connection of femininity with a tendency to be excessively sexual is often made in medieval misogynist and misogamous texts in which “women were actually held to be more lustful creatures by nature.”23 One could argue that this assimilation of a woman with her sexuality is as reductive as equating her with her feminine reproductive role or her refusal thereof, but it is actually much less so: if sexuality underlies all aspects of femininity, and of female sanctity in particular, she represents femininity as a whole, and not only one specific iteration of the female gender. We shall indeed see that the harlot saint is truly a bridging figure that can be associated with virginity and motherhood as well as sexual looseness. The harlot saint’s voice, her aforementioned authority over male lay and religious leaders, is also atypical compared to other female saints. Of course, all female saints are by definition exceptional and atypical examples of their sex, breaching the boundaries usually ascribed to their gender in the medieval period, most notably because of their visibility and outspokenness in the public space. While women were traditionally associated with the domestic space and were tolerated in public only if silent and invisible,24 a female saint needs to undergo a very public “trial by disclosure” to establish her sanctity.25 She needs to be vocal as well to teach and convert others, thus breaching the Pauline interdiction for women to speak in public: “mulier in silentio discat cum omni subiectione; docere autem mulieri non permitto neque dominari in virum, sed esse in silentio” (1 Tim. 2:11–12).26 However, while virgin 22

Karras, “Holy Harlots,” p. 9. Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C.W. Marx (eds), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 5. 24 S. Salih, “At Home; Out of the House,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 124–40, esp. p. 125; Leigh Ann Craig, “‘Stronger than Men and Braver than Knights’: Women and the Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 29 (2003), pp. 153–75. 25 Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 43–61. 26 “Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or 23

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature martyrs such as Catherine of Alexandria or Cecilia are reputed preachers, they exercise their rhetorical hegemony over pagan men who are by Catholic definition inferior. Further, their teaching is limited both chronologically and geographically: they are often confined to a single town or even a single house, as in the case of Cecilia,27 and are usually martyred soon after at the tender age of twelve. In opposition, the harlot saint advises and preaches particularly authoritative, Christian figures – one may think of the apostles in the case of Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Egypt’s advice leading to the reform of Zosimus’s monastery – and they are not geographically confined when deploying such authoritative stances. Even when they are, like Thaïs and Pelagia, their ability to choose their environment is key: Thaïs refuses for the longest time to get out of her cell, and Pelagia steals away in the middle of the night to establish herself on the Mount of Olives. Why attribute such authority to the voice of a wandering woman, when feminine mobility was often perceived with anxiety by the patriarchy?28 One element of answer is that the harlot saint’s gendered authority is often used as a metaphor for other concepts, such as the value of non-traditional paths to salvation or of lay devotion. It may also be explained by the fact that she is a common woman in terms both of her harlotry and of her holiness, so that her behaviour does not necessarily need to change between the two, while her societal impact is diametrically different. We shall see that, from the twelfth century onward, the continuity in her performance of femininity between the time she is a whore to when she becomes a saint is foregrounded by hagiographers. Sin and sanctity arise from the same performance of femininity: a public, sometimes transgressive, iteration of femininity. As a figure of authoritative femininity and humanity through the harlot saint’s trajectory of life from sin to redemption, replicating the rise of Everyman’s soul from a fallen and sinful state to becoming a Bride of Christ, the holy harlot was particularly popular for medieval audiences, especially among women and the laity. However, her appeal is not the same depending on the locale or the time period. The decision to restrict this monograph to the study of insular sources is motivated by the particularly early and developed popularity that the harlot saint experiences in the British Isles (see Appendix). There are no less than forty-seven known separate lives of repentant prostitutes in the different vernaculars of the British Isles, namely to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.” See 1 Corinthians 14:34 for a similar statement. 27 See, for instance, her legend in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea: Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (ed.), Legenda aurea (Florence: Galluzzo, 1998), pp. 1180–8. 28 Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 107. On this more generally, see Karras, Common Women. For the notion of gendered space and the fear about a public, roaming woman, see Salih, “At Home; Out of the House,” pp. 124–40, and Leigh Ann Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2009), esp. pp. 1–20.

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Introduction eighteen independent versions of the life of Mary Magdalene, fourteen legends of Mary the Egyptian,29 eight lives of St Thaïs,30 six versions of the life of Pelagia,31 and one Old English life of Afra of Augsburg. In addition, the lives of Pelagia, Mary Magdalene, Afra, and Mary of Egypt all appear for the first time in Old English, before any other European vernacular. Several factors may explain this, such as the early vernacular development of Old English,32 and the influence in early medieval England of Irish monastic ascetic ideals.33 I would, however, argue that the principal impulse behind her early appearance in insular hagiography is the holy harlot’s appeal, one that is simultaneously universal and catering most especially to women: there is an important female interest in these lives in early medieval England, as intended audiences, and perhaps, in the case of the Old English Martyrology, even as female writers. I shall argue that early medieval English women, especially female religious, would have found in holy harlots a particularly apt model to imitate. Their non-traditional paths to sanctity may well have seduced women who, for one reason or another, had led a life in the world before devoting their time to God (one thinks of vowesses or aristocratic nuns and abbesses, for instance). The harlot saints’ spiritual martyrdom might also have appealed to early medieval English literary tastes, which valued strong, heroic women (as evidenced by the poems Judith, Elene, and Juliana) and epic battles.34 Further, it appears that this early popularity did not abate with the Norman Conquest, as the holy harlots’ fate became tied in different ways to that of the Virgin Mary, whose cult was also especially precocious and successful in England.35 The eleventh- and twelfth-century rise of affective piety led to the election of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene as the two archetypes of a sensual, affective, and participatory devotion to Christ’s humanity. Not only were both women reputed to have had a very tactile, loving relationship with the human Christ: they were also privileged witnesses to several of the most important episodes of Christ’s life and suffering on which the Christian was encouraged to meditate. A very early 29

Both saints’ legends are attested in Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Middle Welsh, and Medieval Irish. 30 In Anglo-Norman and Middle English. 31 In Old and Middle English. 32 See Joyce Hill, “Learning Latin in Anglo-Saxon England: Traditions, Texts and Techniques,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 7–30, and Richard Gameson, “Alfred the Great and the Destruction and Production of Christian Books,” Scriptorium 49 (1995), pp. 180–221, esp. p. 199. 33 Meyer Shapiro, “The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross,” Art Bulletin 26 (1944), pp. 232–45. 34 See Chapter 1, esp. pp. 27–30 and 42. 35 Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

9

Figure 1. Judith of Flanders as Mary Magdalene embracing the Cross, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.709, fol. 1v.

Introduction manifestation of the Magdalene’s increased popularity in connection to this affective trend is figured in an eleventh-century manuscript illumination representing Countess Judith of Flanders as the Magdalene embracing the Cross at the Passion, an image she commissioned in England just before leaving for the Continent in 1066 (Figure 1).36 The Magdalene’s accrued popularity concomitantly led to increasing interest in the other repentant harlots. At the same time, the Virgin Mary’s fame gave rise in England to the earliest collections of Marian miracles in which Mary of Egypt’s story was reframed and gained popularity.37 It seems, therefore, that England is a particularly fertile ground for the study of holy harlots, as their vernacular lives appear earlier, and more abundantly, than on the Continent. This book will for this reason centre on the representation of gender and authority in medieval vernacular lives of holy harlots in England. The choice to limit the area of study to the medieval period, stopping just shy of the mid-sixteenth century, is also very significant for the figure of the harlot saint, as the model does not survive the move to the early modern period unscathed, her holiness being wrenched apart from her harlotry. This is symptomatic of an important shift in the conception of femininity at the time, which sees the constriction of feminine valence as either saintly or sinful, a move that I discuss in the conclusion of this monograph. My decision to solely focus on vernacular sources arises from a desire to gauge the hagiographers’ ability to portray a formerly sexually sinful woman as an authoritative saint for an audience that is more inclusive than in Latin texts, as the latter often presuppose a masculine, religious audience. Mary of Egypt’s competing authority with Zosimus, for instance, seems to have been crafted in the ancient Greek and Latin versions of her life to help monks meditate on the “relative spiritual value of the monastic life versus the ascetic life,”38 without much consideration for the saint’s femininity. The translation of harlots’ lives into the vernacular spreads their diffusion to lay men and women, and thus poses new challenges, such as the possibility for women to identify and imitate these female saints’ authoritative stance. Discussing the gender and authority of holy harlots in medieval insular writings requires one to define what is meant by “gender” and “authority.” 36

The illumination can be found in New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib. MS 709, fol. 1v. It is reproduced in Elzbieta Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 900–1066 (London: Harvey Miller, 1976), plate 289. On this, see Ortenberg, “Le culte de sainte Marie Madeleine,” p. 33, and Magdalena E. Carrasco, “The Imagery of the Magdalene in Christina of Markyate’s Psalter,” Gesta 38 (1999), pp. 67–80, at pp. 72–3. 37 Richard W. Southern, “The English Origins of the ‘Miracles of the Virgin,’” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958), pp. 176–216. 38 Patricia E. Grieve, “Paradise Regained in Vida de Santa Maria Egipciaca: Harlots, the Fall of Nations and Hagiographic Currency,” in Translatio Studii: Essays by His Students in Honor of Karl D. Uitti for His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al. (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 133–54, at p. 138.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature The notional meaning behind these two words is influenced, in these pages, both by contemporary theories of gender and authority and by the medieval context they will be instrumental in describing. One must address the concept of gender first before moving on to the notion of authority, since power and authority are often represented through, and deeply intertwined with, issues of gender.39 The basis of my approach to gender is Butlerian: gender is in constant flux, being represented by the citation of acts and gestures which are conventionally interpreted as more masculine or more feminine in a given social context.40 Adopting such a post-structuralist standpoint for the medieval period has borne fruit in the past, with excellent studies by Dyan Elliott, Amy Hollywood, JoAnn McNamara, Barbara Newman, Rosalynn Voaden, and Caroline Walker Bynum, to name but a few.41 These scholars’ theoretical articulation has done much to inform my own. The conception of sex and gender is complex in all historical periods, and the Middle Ages is no exception. On the basis of Joan Cadden’s work on medieval medical conceptions of sex and gender, Lynda L. Coon argues that “there is, in truth, no single, early, Western model of sex and sexual difference.”42 Gender may reflect a seemingly stable two-sex model, a biological system of binaries opposing male and female, a system that is often used metaphorically to signify and categorise other concerns. It may also qualify more fluid gender identities, whereby gender constitutes a graduated scale along which one can move, from male to female and every queering of gender in between. As an example, a veiled nun or anchoress can be deemed more masculine than a sinful layman, the closing up or enclosing of her body being seen as a “masculinising” performance, whereas the laity is often associated with the feminine.43 Another instance of the fluidity of medieval gender is the case of 39

Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category,” esp. pp. 169–70. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 185–93, and her Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993). 41 See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); JoAnn McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150),” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Thelma S. Fenster, and JoAnn McNamara (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3–29; Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); and finally, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 42 Lynda L. Coon, “Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages,” Gender and History 20 (2008), pp. 463–86, at p. 479. See also Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 43 For the feminisation of lay male bodies, see Coon, “Somatic Styles,” pp. 465–6 and 469. 40

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Introduction virginity. Virginity makes paradoxical use of the performance of femininity to queer gender through a similar layering of contrasting gender performances which we will observe after the conversions of holy harlots in Old English texts. Indeed, a woman’s physiology was believed to be more porous and open than that of a man,44 so that the seal of virginity enabled a woman to close off her reputedly defective and “leaking” female body and thus to bring it closer to the ideal of the masculine body.45 Virginity therefore implied becoming more masculine, paralleling Jerome’s statement that “quamdiu mulier partui servit et liberis, hanc habet ad virum differentiam, quam corpus ad animam. Sin autem Christo magis voluerit servire quam saeculo, mulier esse cessabit, et dicetur vir.”46 This reflects the patristic tradition of the virile woman or virago outlined by Margaret Miles and others, which holds that, in order to become a saint, a woman has to relinquish her gender by “becoming male,”47 or by reaching a form of near-prelapsarian, “angelic” life on earth, one that would theoretically suggest a move from femininity to a queering of one’s gender, although in practice angels tend to be represented as male in the period.48 To sum up, the virgin performs her feminine gender by classifying herself For the veiling and enclosing of nuns as a “masculinising” act, see Anne Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 135–69, at pp. 139 and 156. 44 Clarissa W. Atkinson, “‘Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass’: The Ideology of Virginity in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983), pp. 131–43. 45 On woman’s porosity and leaking orifices, see in particular Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” esp. pp. 138–9. 46 “As long as woman serves for birth and children, she differs from man, as body from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be woman and will be called man.” Jerome, Commentarium in Epistolam ad Ephesios III.5, in PL 26: 567a. See Vern L. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1974), pp. 1381–94, at p. 1383. 47 Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), esp. pp. 53–77. See also Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines (eds), Not in God’s Image: Women in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); JoAnn McNamara, “Sexual Equality and the Cult of Virginity in Early Christian Thought,” Feminist Studies 3 (1976), pp. 145–58; Eleanor Commo McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls; Inequality of Sexes: Woman in Medieval Theology,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 213–66, esp. p. 234. 48 Tertullian mentions this before rejecting the very idea. See, for instance, Dyan Elliott, “Gender and the Christian Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 21–34, at p. 23. In Hali Meiðhad, virgins are, however, often paralleled with angels. See The Katherine Group MS Bodley 34, ed. and trans. Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2016), 8.15 and 12.5.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature according to her sexual status, as a virgin.49 This makes her more “masculine” on the gender spectrum, and thus queers her gender through this seemingly contradictory juxtaposition. By queer I mean any gendered performance that is or results in an indeterminacy which problematises any attribution to one or the other of the gender binary male/female.50 In this way, the sometimes rigid medieval association of the female with her marital or sexual status (or two-sex model) is counterbalanced, as Sarah Salih argues, by a fluidity of gender identities (one-sex model) whereby “a woman who is a man seems a less troublesome concept than a woman who does not have a man.”51 Male and female binaries with their concomitant climatic opposition between “masculine” concepts (such as hot, dry, closed, constant, spirit) and “feminine” attributes (cold, wet, open, mutable, material)52 are often used in our texts and beyond to signify – and sometimes to reconcile, as I shall argue – other binaries such as clerical and lay/alternative religious vocation. One cannot speak about authority in the medieval period without keeping in mind these fundamental concepts of gender. Authority is as relational as gender, and implies a hierarchy whereby one can impose one’s will over another. Women in the Middle Ages are by definition refused access to such power and right: both the “one-sex and the two-sex models place men at the top of the hierarchy – the one-sex paradigm devalues women through its claim of female inversion and defection from a masculine norm and the two-sex model through its privileging of male difference.”53 Authority in the Middle Ages therefore pertains in general to a masculine domain, especially with regard to religious authority, which was traditionally exercised by male clerics. Women’s access to preaching, speaking in public, or simply wielding power over men and/or the clergy, was delegitimised both by religious tradition54 and by the medical and moral belief that women were not qualified to occupy such an authoritative office. Humbert of Romans summarises the main medical/moral impediments to women’s religious authority, especially in terms of preaching, in this way: women are not learned enough, lack constancy, are descended from Eve and thus share her folly, and risk leading Gender and Genre, p. 186; Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 9–10. On this, see notably Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory, An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 51 Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 24. 52 Coon, “Somatic Styles,” pp. 467–8 and 471, similarly argues that early medieval churchmen would agree with Butler’s notion of performative construction of gender identity. 53 Coon, “Somatic Styles,” p. 471. See also her “Gender and the Body, c. 600–1100,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity 3: 600–1100, ed. Thomas F.Y. Noble and Julia M.H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 433–52. 54 The clergy made use of scriptural passages such as 1 Corinthians 14 or 1 Timothy 2 to anchor their gendered monopoly on religious ministry. 49 Gaunt, 50

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Introduction a male audience to lust.55 However, the same essentialist biology that enabled men to counter feminine aspirations to religious authority with accusations of inconstancy, weakness, and lustfulness also provided women with an alternative means to make their voices heard that bypassed to a certain extent patriarchal, clerical authority: by being deemed naturally more “porous” and open than men, women could claim to be more susceptible to receiving visions.56 Women were therefore choice subjects to communicate with the divine as mystics and prophets, enabling some women’s voices to be heard. However, women’s visions were always conceived as suspect, as they could as easily stem from the devil as from God. Needless to say, the burden of the discretio spirituum (ascertaining the divine or demonic origin of visions), always fell to the male clerical authority, which could therefore control this feminine privilege.57 Max Weber’s insistence on the importance of the legitimising body that validates authority is also crucial in this study, as while the holy harlots’ power does not radically change from one hagiographical account to the other, the validating authority that supports it varies. Weber defines three different types of authority according to the kind of legitimacy: “charismatic,” “traditional,” or “legal,” with which such power is exercised.58 The holy harlots’ authority, according to Weber’s tripartite classification, evolves in the medieval period from a chiefly “charismatic” legitimacy in early medieval England, where the saint’s authority rests “on devotion to [her] exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character,” to a more “traditional” authority in the later medieval See Humbert of Romans, De eruditione praedicatorum, in B. Humberti de Romanis Opera de vita regulari, ed. Joachim Joseph Berthier, 2 vols (Rome: Marietti, 1888–9), vol. 2, pp. 373–484, at pp. 406–7. On this, see Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 37–8. 56 For this notion in antiquity, see for instance Karen L. King, “Prophetic Power and Women’s Authority, The Case of the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene),” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 21–41, at pp. 27–33. For the medieval period, see Nancy Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000), pp. 268–306, esp. pp. 290–2. It is a matter of course that the laity in general is subjected in the same manner to the scrutiny of the clergy in the context of their visionary experience. On this, see the examples given by Robert Easting in his Visions of the Other World in Middle English, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature III (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). 57 See in particular Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in Middle Ages (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 19 and 274–320, and Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman. Lawless remarks this phenomenon is still ongoing, for instance in the Pentecostal Church. See her “The Issue of Blood.” 58 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. and trans. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 212–301. 55

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature period arising from “an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them.”59 In the later medieval context, traditional authority is constituted by the validating power of God through the bestowing of grace, more or less supported by the authority of the clergy, depending on the anxiety of the time with regard to dissenting beliefs. This, needless to say, constitutes a tendency, and does not mean that traditional authority does not play an important role in Old English texts, which all underline the clergy’s importance in the harlots’ lives, or that the saint’s holiness is not important in legitimising her authoritative sway in later sources. Chapter 1, “‘Seo wæs ærest synnecge:’ The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography,” looks at three lives of holy harlots in the Old English Martyrology as well as the pseudo-Ælfrician Life of Mary of Egypt. These texts demonstrate the flexibility of holy harlots’ lives in early medieval England, offering a nonconformist path to holiness to their mixed audience that has universal appeal, but providing a particularly desirable example for women who might have lived in the world before turning their sights to a religious life. The harlot’s early life is characterised by the negative assimilation of femininity with the concept of sin, whereas gender is transcended and becomes queer after repentance. Gender reversals are, however, still used to reflect on other important concepts, for instance to represent the variety of paths to salvation, or the validity of different – lay, religious, male, female, coenobitic, ascetic – voices for reform, which the lives show should enter into dialogue with the clerical mainstream more often. Chapter 2 moves on to two twelfth- and thirteenth-century lives of holy harlots in Middle English and in the French of England. Due notably to the strong influence of romance on hagiography and the importance of the harlot saint as a model of affective piety – which I demonstrate through Bernard of Clairvaux’s use of the type – the meaning of the holy harlots’ femininity is extended and comes to encompass both fallen humanity and spiritual election in heaven as Bride of Christ. The harlot saints’ gendered performance remains stable throughout their lives, as the harlot is holy, and the saint a harlot, from beginning to end. This is accompanied by a shift from charismatic to traditional authority for the saints, who find in Christ and the clergy a validation which their Old English counterparts had not needed. In Chapter 3, “Heterodoxy, Patronage, and the Harlot in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography,” two later Middle English lives of Mary Magdalene are pitted against each other in order to evidence the importance of the context of production in the portrayal of feminine authority. In light of the Wycliffites’ use of the harlot saint as a model for their dissenting portrayal of a preaching laity and one’s unmediated access to God, John Mirk’s representation of the Magdalene in his Festial reflects a commensurable 59 Weber,

Economy and Society, pp. 213–14.

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Introduction reduction of her preacherly authority for his largely uneducated audience. In contrast, Osbern Bokenham’s version, drawn from the same source, mirrors the demands of his influential patron, Countess Isabel of Eu, who requests a saint in her image. Chapter 4 turns to the portrayal of the holy harlot in the late fifteenth-century saint play the Digby Mary Magdalene. This text sees the culmination of later medieval intersections of gender and authority in holy harlots’ lives. Throughout, the play presents the saint as utterly feminine, at the same time as it successfully portrays the harlot’s authority and sanctity as derived from this same femininity. The Digby playwright pictures the saint as embodying several medieval stereotypes about women both before and after her conversion, and demonstrates how the performance of such femininity can lead to the worst sin as easily as to the highest rank in heaven. The final chapter, “Admiranda et imitanda? Emulation of the Holy Harlot Type by Late Medieval Female Mystics,” focuses on the ways in which medieval women, especially visionaries, managed to gather authority and validate their writings and the sanctity of their lives by modelling themselves on the holy harlot. The repentant saint’s well-accepted authority in the masculine religious sphere, her privileged access to God as a former sinner, as well as the non-traditional pattern of her life, makes her a particularly validating precedent for Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Elizabeth Barton. This, the first-ever study of the type of saints commonly called “holy harlots,” demonstrates that being a female saint did not necessarily involve virginity or holy motherhood in the medieval period. The Middle Ages were much more inclusive than that, and offered up the harlot saint, this hybrid woman who contains the seeds both of Eve and of Mary, of the whore and the virgin, as a model of femininity that women and men were encouraged to emulate. This realisation also has much wider implications with regard to the representation of femininity as a whole in the period: the holy harlot represents a multifaceted femininity that epitomises humanity as a whole, both fallen and saved. The performance of femininity, specifically of the holy harlot’s femininity, is thus generalised, acceptable as a model of behaviour for all Christians. It is, however, also a particular favourite of those on the margins of medieval society. Female mystics in quest for social acceptance, heretics, dissenters, proponents of newfangled devotional practices or reformist beliefs: all find in the holy harlot model the validation they seek. Just like Mary Magdalene is one of the so-called universal saints, the holy harlot is an all-encompassing model in the medieval period, so enmeshed in medieval conceptions of womanhood and religion that the Renaissance effectively sounded the death knell of this figure, as I demonstrate in the Conclusion to this book. The holy harlot is therefore an apparent outlier in the Middle Ages, one that nevertheless transformed mainstream concepts of piety and womanhood, and now stands poised to transform our understanding of medieval gender and faith.

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CHAPTER 1 “SEO WÆS ÆREST SYNNECGE” THE HOLY HARLOT’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN OLD ENGLISH HAGIOGRAPHY

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he lives of the holy harlots Pelagia, Mary Magdalene, and Afra in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology, as well as the late tenth-century Old English Life of Mary of Egypt,1 are the earliest extant vernacular accounts of these saints in medieval Europe. This testifies to their importance and early popularity in England before the Norman Conquest. This popularity is, I argue in this chapter, primarily due to the complexity of gender representation in these female saints’ lives which fits the flexible and multivalent conceptions of gender, and more specifically of the female gender, in early medieval England.2 Scholars have only recently started questioning their espousal of a binary gender perspective in their analysis of female saints and female heroes in Old English texts. They have often conceived women as performing either femininity or masculinity in their bid to become holy or heroic, and adopting stable notions of what constitutes such gendered performance.3 However, a clear-cut performance of either femininity or masculinity is not what can be observed in the Old English lives of holy harlots. The The editions used are that of Christine Rauer (ed. and trans.), The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge: D.S Brewer, 2016), hereafter OEM, and Hugh Magennis (ed. and trans.), The Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), hereafter LME. Translations from Rauer are my own, as my focus on gendered portrayal in the OEM lives of holy harlots often necessitated particular care in offering in translation as complete a range as possible of the gendered connotations of the original Old English word. 2 Other factors, discussed in the Introduction, contributed to this early vernacularisation. See p. 9. 3 For important correctives to this trend, see for instance Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncracies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and the edited collection by Carol Braun Pasternack and Sharon Farmer (eds), Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 1

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature hagiographers instead portray the harlot’s shift from sin to sanctity as a move from a femininity reductively symbolising sin and the fallen state of mankind, to a transcendence of gender: the newly formed saint becomes queer, in the sense that her gender becomes indeterminate, ambiguous, and her body incurs a desire that resists definition through binary sexual preferences.4 In opposition to this move from binary to queer, the Latin sources or analogues of these lives do effect a gendered inversion of the harlot in order for her to become a saint, in the hieronymian conception that a woman rejecting her feminine role within society must necessarily become male. This binary opposition is the same that has been promoted by scholars today when focusing on pre-Conquest gender representation in hagiography and epic poetry. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, for instance, acknowledge in the revised preface to their 2008 edition of Double Agents that they tended to adopt such a preconception in their past approach to hagiography.5 Hugh Magennis’s interpretation of Judith’s female heroism is similarly constrained by binary representations when he claims that “within the ideological world of traditional Old English poetry heroic action is the prerogative of men, not women,” while Jane Chance attributes Judith or Elene’s heroism to what she perceives is their feminine performance of chastity.6 However, the hagiographers of the lives of holy harlots do not depict their saints’ rejection of their pre-conversion femininity – which is equated with sin – as an adoption of masculinity, but rather as an indeterminacy which frees them from such societally dictated gendered roles. In other words, the human female becomes the queer saint, in the same way female heroes are not inverted males or women performing a female-inflected version of heroism: rather, their heroism queers their gender, so that they transcend straight conceptions to enact a queer form of heroism. Sanctity, in the same way as heroism, is therefore shown to lead individuals to transcend their gender. The female gender comes to represent earthly sinful life, which one can shed to perform queer sanctity. This can be interpreted as a negative representation of femininity as essentially fallen and sinful in ninth- and tenth-century 4

On ambiguity and resistance to definition as one of the main characteristic of what constitutes queer, see Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory, An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 1 and 96–7. 5 Clare A. Lees and Gillian Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). In offering a non-binary interpretation of Mary of Egypt’s gender, Clare A. Lees and Diane Watt, “Age and Desire in the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt: A Queerer Time and Place?”, in Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Sue Niebrzydowski (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 53–67 informed much of my thinking in this chapter. 6 Hugh Magennis, “Gender and Heroism in the Old English Judith,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature, ed. Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 5–18; Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography England, but can also be conceived as a universalisation of the feminine, which comes to represent the fallen state of humankind. The queering of the harlot after her conversion is then used by our hagiographers to represent desire for a union with the divine, for a queer sort of knowledge, or queer paths to salvation (queer in the sense that both depart from traditional and normative conceptions of knowledge and salvation, in this case male and clerical). This gender fluidity or indeterminacy is therefore used by hagiographers to comment on soteriological and epistemological questions, and whenever they do represent male and female gender performances in a binary opposition, it is to suggest the equality and complementarity of different types of sanctity and authorities: traditional and less widespread, religious or secular, revalorising lay spirituality and non-straightforward paths to holiness. This model would have been particularly interesting for women in the period, as this representation would suggest to them that they could conceive of a flexible, non-straightforward (queer) path to religion and holiness that does not necessarily take into consideration the male gender, and instead represents salvation as a move from feminine to queer. The female gender is not a limitation therefore, it is the basis, the natural origin of this evolution. Of course, it is also a relatable model for the laity, and Everyman in general, as femininity simply can be taken as a metaphor for fallen humanity. Indeed, only Mary of Egypt and Afra are explicitly associated with prostitution and lechery, so that the harlot saints’ trajectory from sin to repentance can have universal appeal. The holy harlots are therefore particularly popular in pre-Conquest England because they offer a flexible and relatable model of sanctity, one that in turn magnifies the malleability of conceptions of gender in the period. The pattern of holy harlots’ lives, in truth, is already queer, escaping definition in hagiographical terms.7 It often reflects a mixed hagiographical model that cannot easily be categorised, paralleling the multi-dimensionality of some feminine representations in Old English prose, poetry, and in historical records. The life of Mary of Egypt is itself particularly queer, as it arises from an adaptation of Jerome’s Life of Paul the First Hermit, in which some changes are already brought to the Greek and Latin lives to better suit Mary of Egypt’s gender.8 This portrayal is further queered in the Old English version. Similarly, Pelagia’s life is that of both a holy harlot and 7

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See Introduction, p. 6. Lynda Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 90. See John R. Black, “Tradition and Transformation in Text and Image in the Cults of Mary of Egypt, Cuthbert, and Guthlac: Changing Conceptualizations of Sainthood in Medieval England,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004, p. 31.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature a transvestite saint. The Old English saint’s cross-dressing does not cause her to perform masculinity as in the Latin sources but, rather, queers her performance into indeterminacy. All of these lives therefore display a complex representation of femininity as well as a non-linear path to religion, two elements that might have resonated with the pre-Conquest tradition of women taking a somewhat unconventional path to the religious life. One for instance thinks of the elite women who entered or founded convents and double monasteries, women who had sometimes been married earlier in life, and whose chastity was regularly reconstituted after the fact. The often-widowed vowesses living as solitaries or in small, informal communities described by Sarah Foot also come to mind.9 The parallelism between the lives of pre-Conquest aristocratic abbesses or Foot’s nunne and that of the holy harlots might not only explain the proliferation of harlot saints in the Old English sanctorale,10 but also the popularity of these lives in the vernacular. In fact, while the high level of Latinity in some pre-Conquest convents is well established, it is yet probable that vernacular translations of holy harlots’ lives would have been copied to cater more specifically for the needs of female religious, be they nuns or vowesses, and the presence of three of these lives in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology11 might be taken as an argument for a conventual context of production, an eventuality which is suggested by the Martyrology’s most recent editor, Christine Rauer.12 Although she notes elsewhere that the wide array of sources13 used in the compilation of the Martyrology would seem “incomSee her Veiled Women, 2 vols (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt’s names appear no less than twelve times in calendars dated prior to 1100, while Afra’s name is twice mentioned in a single calendar, the Leofric Missal. Further, both Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene are named in the Salisbury Psalter (Salisbury, Cathedral Library MS 150), the only pre-1100 calendar that can be traced back with any confidence to a convent, the nunnery at Wilton. On this, see Rebecca Rushforth, Saints in English Kalendars Before A.D. 1100 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 2008), pp. 24–5 and tables IV, VII, and VIII. See also Veronica Ortenberg’s “Le culte de sainte Marie Madeleine dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne,” MEFRM 104 (1992), pp. 13–35. 11 For the Martyrology’s date, see Rauer’s “Introduction,” OEM, pp. 1–3, as well as her online “An Annotated Bibliography,” s.v. “Studies: Date, Historical Background” and “Manuscripts,” https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~cr30/martyrology/. See also Janet M. Bately, “Old English Prose before and during the Reign of Alfred,” Anglo-Saxon England 17 (1988), pp. 93–138, at pp. 95–6. On its probable Anglian origin, see Günter Kotzor (ed.), Das altenglische Martyrologium, 2 vols (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 323–405, esp. pp. 400–5. Celia Sisam argues for a more specifically Mercian origin. Sisam, “An Early Fragment of the Old English Martyrology,” The Review of English Studies n.s. 4 (1953), pp. 209–20, at p. 214. 12 Rauer, OEM, p. 15. 13 Michael Lapidge suggests a pre-existing Latin Vorlage which would then have been translated, but he does so on somewhat tenuous grounds. See his “Acca of Hexham and the Origin of the Old English Martyrology,” Analecta Bollandiana 123 (2005), pp. 29–78. 9

10

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography patible with what we know about the libraries of female religious houses or the mobility of female monastic personnel in Anglo-Saxon England,”14 the multilingual context across Latin and different vernaculars of pre-Conquest convents and double monasteries might actually make its composition in just such a context the most plausible linguistic scenario. Indeed, recent work, notably by Diane Watt and Felice Lifshitz, warns us against discounting conventual learning in the early Middle Ages: Watt reminds us for instance that “women’s literary culture thrived throughout the early medieval period.”15 Sarah Foot has also noted that the Old English martyrologist takes great care in using a lexicon that distinguishes female monastic communities from their male counterparts.16 Whatever the case for its female authorship may be, it is clear that the Old English Martyrology, the “earliest prose vernacular martyrology in Europe,”17 was catering to an audience interested in holy women who were not stock saintly characters or easily defined according to their sexual status as “fæmne” (virgin) or “widuwe” (widow). Instead, the holy harlot lives of the Old English Martyrology focus on female saints whose queer resistance to categorisation reproduced the complexity of their female audience’s individual life trajectory. Indeed, both Mary Magdalene and Afra “deviate from the formulaic norm” when they are introduced in their respective lives, as they are neither martyrs nor widows, neither queens nor abbesses, neither virgins nor ladies.18 Effectively, they resist categorisation. That such a portrayal was popular is evidenced by the fact that the lives of holy harlots tend to be lengthier than other entries, and that only one of these holy harlots is effectively martyred,

Rauer, “Female Hagiography in the Old English Martyrology,” in Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Paul Szarmach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 13–29, at p. 15. 15 Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 18; Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). See also Jane Stevenson, “Brothers and Sisters: Women and Monastic Life in Eighth-Century England and Frankia,” Dutch Review of Church History 82.1 (2002), pp. 1–34; An interesting case study is presented by Patrick Sims-Williams in his article “Cuthswith, Seventh-Century Abbess of Inkberrow, near Worcester, and the Würzburg Manuscript of Jerome on Ecclesiastes,” Anglo-Saxon England 5 (1976), pp. 1–21. 16 See S. Foot, “Anglo-Saxon Minsters: A Review of Terminology,” in Pastoral Care before the Parish: Studies in the Early History of Britain, ed. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 212–25, at p. 222. 17 James E. Cross, “English Vernacular Saints’ Lives before 1000 A.D.,” in Hagiographies: International History of the Latin and Vernacular Hagiographical Literature in the West from Its Origins to 1550, ed. Guy Philippart (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), vol. 2, pp. 413–27, at p. 423, emphasis in the original. 18 Rauer, “Female Hagiography,” p. 20. 14

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature a point that further highlights the extraordinary character of these lives’ presence in a martyrology. PELAGIA IN THE OLD ENGLISH MARTYROLOGY Pelagia of Antioch (19 October) appears in the Old English as a beautiful, sinful, and bejewelled actress whose encounter with Bishop Nonnus leads her to repent and don masculine clothing before travelling to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. She lives there for three years in a cell, without anybody knowing whether she is a man or a woman, until she dies and the “miracle” of her femininity is revealed.19 The hagiographer condenses, as is his or her wont,20 several Latin sources: in this case the mid-ninth-century Réfection B with variants taken from the early ninth-century Réfection A’.21 Pelagia’s sinful femininity is turned into a queer performance after her conversion. Before her repentance, Pelagia is unambiguously portrayed as a woman, a representation of femininity that is wholly negative and in line with my argument that the martyrologist represents the pre-conversion harlots as embodiments of a womanhood that is reductively assimilated with sin. Pelagia’s early life is one of excessively transgressive femininity. She is an actress, a profession strongly associated with sexual sin,22 and is inescapable in the public space through her ostentatious adornments and expensive perfumes. Pelagia “wæs æryst mima in Antiochia þære ceastre, þæt is scericge [scearecge C] on urum geðeode”23 (OEM 210). The Old English martyrologist’s distinctive habit is to translate as literally as possible from the Latin, in 19

For a general account of the life of Pelagia in medieval England, see J.E. Cross, “Pelagia in Mediaeval England,” in Pélagie la pénitente: Métamorphoses d’une légende, ed. Pierre Petitmengin et al., 2 vols (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 281–93. The Life of Pelagia does not appear in manuscripts of the Martyrology before the eleventh century, something Cross blames on the fragmentary state of earlier manuscripts. See Cross, “Pelagia in Mediaeval England,” p. 282, and Sisam, “An Early Fragment,” p. 213. 20 For the martyrologist’s use of sources, see C. Rauer, “The Sources of the Old English Martyrology,” Anglo-Saxon England 32 (2003), pp. 89–109; J.E. Cross, “On the Library of the Old English Martyrologist,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 227–49. 21 For a discussion of the sources for Pelagia’s life, see Cross, “Pelagia in Mediaeval England.” Réfection B is edited in Carlos Levy, Pierre Petitmengin, et al., “La réfection latine B,” in Pélagie la Pénitente, vol. 1, pp. 217–49. Réfection A’ is edited by François Dolbeau in the same volume, pp. 181–216. Hereafter B and A’. 22 Timothy D. Barnes, “Christians and the Theater,” in Roman Theater and Society, ed. William J. Slater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 174–80. See also Ruth Mazo Karras, “Holy Harlots: Prostitute Saints in Medieval Legend,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990), pp. 3–32, at pp. 13–14. 23 “Was first a mima in the city of Antioch, that is an ‘actress?’ in our language.”

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography terms of both vocabulary and syntax:24 the Latin word “mima” is glossed here with the Old English (and possibly corrupt) equivalent “scericge” or “scearecge.”25 In so doing, the hagiographer insists on the fact that Pelagia is a female actress, in adding the emphatically feminine Anglian suffix “-icge”26 to “sceáwere,” meaning “watchman, buffoon, actor.”27 This hapax legomenon further associates in the mind of the early medieval English audience the repentant “actress,” femininity, and such notions as “scern/scearn,” “dung, filth,”28 and “scer/sceár,” “scissors,”29 alongside its connotation of dividing. The pre-conversion Pelagia is also associated with sins traditionally connected with the feminine: pride and ostentation.30 She appears adorned with gold and jewels, “gold ond gimmas” (OEM 210), a portrayal reminiscent of the whore of Babylon’s being “inaurata auro et lapide pretioso” (Revelation 17:4).31 Her figurative representation as the whore of Babylon associates her with “an incarnation of lust, idolatry and shamelessness,” and presents her in an “intensely feminised and degraded image.”32 The Latin text allows such ostentation to be viewed in a positive light, when Nonnus expresses the wish to take as much care to adorn his soul as Pelagia did for her appearance.33 This potential is lost in the Old English abridgement, although the association of women with gold and jewels can hold positive overtones in Old English poetry.34 Furthermore, the martyrologist implicitly presents the saint as a second Eve. Pelagia’s confession to Bishop Nonnus is couched in terms of her being OEM, pp. 8 and 10. This word has been linked by Pieter Jacob Cosijn with “scirenige,” which he emends into “scericge” in Riddle 8 of the Exeter book and translates as “minstrel/actress?”. On this, see Cosijn’s “Anglosaxonica IV,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 23 (1898), p. 128, cited in Rauer, OEM, p. 299, n. 330, and Craig Williamson, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 158. 26 H. Sauer, “Old English Word-Formation: Constant Features and Changes,” in Aspects of the History of English Language and Literature, ed. Osamu Imahayashi et al. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 19–38, at p. 31. 27 Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “sceáwere.” 28 Ibid., s.v. “scearn.” 29 Ibid., s.v. “sceár.” 30 R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 37–47. See also Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 76–8. 31 “Glittering with gold and precious stones.” 32 Patricia Cox Miller, “Is There a Harlot in This Text? Hagiography and the Grotesque,” JMEMS 33 (2003), pp. 419–35, at p. 427. Coon, Sacred Fictions, pp. 28–9, also suggests she figures the apostate harlot of Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah. 33 A’ 65–74. 34 Helen Damico, “The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature,” in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 176–90, at p. 182. 24 Rauer, 25

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature tempted by deadly tricks and in turn tempting others, something that a medieval audience would automatically connect with Eve’s being tricked by the serpent, leading her to tempt Adam and cause his fall: “ic wæs synna georn ond in deaðlicum listum ic wæs beswicen ond ic beswac monige þurh me” (OEM 210).35 In associating Pelagia with Eve, the author links femininity with the destructive and deceptive potential of temptation, in line with the medieval understanding of temptation as arising naturally within women, while men’s fall from virtue traditionally has an external cause, most often the entrapment by a woman.36 Moreover, while both Latin and Old English versions present the harlot saint as utterly feminine before her conversion, her female gender in the two Latin Réfections provide varied, sometimes positive, figurative associations, which pre-figure Pelagia’s later sanctity. She is, for instance, associated with Mary of Bethany, the woman of Samaria, the Bride of the Song of Songs, and Luke’s anonymous sinner of the city.37 This is lost in the Old English version, which, in the account of Pelagia’s early life, simply equates womanhood with sinfulness. After her conversion, the harlot’s gender is rendered ambiguous, and her body becomes impossible to apprehend from a binary perspective: when Pelagia is in Jerusalem, “nænig mon ne wiste hwæðer hio wæs wer ðe wif, ær ðon ðe heo forðfered wæs” (OEM 210).38 Enclosed bodily in a cell for three years until her death, Pelagia never resurfaces. During this time, the status of her gender, much like Schrödinger’s cat, is impossible to pin down. It is only when a bishop prepares her body for burial that her gender is (re)discovered: “Ða onfand se biscop on Hierusalem, þær he hyre lichoman gyrede, þæt heo wæs wif ” (OEM 210).39 Concomitant with this queering of the saint’s body is the identification of Pelagia with both scriptural men and women,40 so that, according to Marianne Alicia Malo Chenard, she seems androgynous, and her “gender is perceived as liminal and indeterminate.”41 The converted Pelagia is indeed both Christ and his Bride in the Old English life. Immediately after her baptism, the saint performs an imitatio Christi when she is tempted by 35

“I was devoted to sins, and by deadly tricks I was deceived, and I deceived many through me.” 36 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 177. 37 Mary of Bethany: A’ 244–5 and B 254–5; the woman of Samaria: A’ 128–9; the Bride of Christ: A’ 61–4 and 156, and B 61–4; the anonymous sinner of the city: A’ 151–3 and B 135–7. 38 “Nobody knew whether she was a man or a woman before she departed.” See also Marianne Alicia Malo Chenard, “Narratives of the Saintly Body in Anglo-Saxon England,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Notre Dame University, 2003, pp. 155–68. 39 “Then the bishop in Jerusalem discovered that she was a woman when he prepared her body.” 40 Miller, “Is there a Harlot in this Text?,” pp. 426–7. 41 Chenard, “Narratives of the Saintly Body,” p. 163.

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography the devil, an element reminiscent of Jesus’s own temptation at Satan’s hands. Pelagia then leaves Antioch to go to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where she builds herself a small cell in the exact location, the martyrologist is careful to point out, where “Crist him gebæd þa he wæs mon on eorðan” (OEM 210).42 She lives enclosed there for three years before her death, evoking the three days Christ spent hidden from sight before his Resurrection. At the same time, the repentant harlot also explicitly defines herself as a Bride of Christ. She is “nu in Cristes [C: brid]/bure” (OEM 210).43 Simultaneously Bride and Bridegroom, Pelagia’s gender is non-binary, representing a holiness that is in equal parts gendered masculine and feminine, so much so that her gender is emphatically conceived as unknowable, queer, until her death. The repentant saint’s queer post-conversion gender in the Old English life is further reinforced by the martyrologist’s heightening the ambiguity of the harlot’s cross-dressing already present in the Latin versions A’ and B. While cross-dressing is already a queer gender performance, the Latin versions present it as a straightforward gender inversion: Pelagia puts on Nonnus’s clothes and is therefore “literally donning masculine disguise to hide a female form – and presumably ‘female’ desire.”44 Instead, the Old English version states that she clothes herself in a “hærenre tunecam ond mid byrnan, þæt is mid lytelre hacelan” (OEM 210).45 The hair shirt and the little “hacelan,” or short cloak, are both unisex garments,46 so that her clothes define her first and foremost as a penitent rather than suggesting anything about her gender. The martyrologist’s use of the term “byrne” in this context goes in the same direction of a post-conversion Pelagia whose gender is not performed as particularly masculine or feminine through her clothes or her actions. The word “byrne,” “coat of mail,” is usually employed in poetry.47 The martyrologist translates the Latin birrum, “a cloak to keep off rain,”48 with the relative equivalent lytelre hacelan, “a little mantle,”49 and, as is usual in the Old English Martyrology, adds the word byrne as an explanation for the Latin birrum, because of the words’ resemblance. In doing so, the 42

Where “Christ had prayed when he was man on earth.” She is “in Christ’s bridal chamber.” 44 Chance, Woman as Hero, p. 53. 45 She dressed in “a hair shirt and a birrus/coat of mail, that is a short cloak.” 46 Gale Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 212 and 239. 47 Rauer, “Pelagia’s Cloak in the Old English Martyrology,” Notes and Queries 57 (2010), pp. 3–6, at p. 3. See also DOE, s.v. “byrne.” 48 Liza Cleland, Glenys Davies, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Greek and Roman Dress from A–Z (London: Routledge, 2007), s. v. “birrus.” See also Mechthild Müller, Die Kleidung nach Quellen des frühen Mittelalters (Berlin: Gruyter, 2003), p. 87, n. 120, and p. 142, n. 405. 49 Rauer, “Pelagia’s Cloak,” p. 6. For a list of all such phrases in the Old English Martyrology, see Kotzor, Altenglische Martyrologium, vol. 1, pp. 245–8. 43

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature hagiographer draws further meaning from “the unexpected connotations for an Old English audience (poetic [… and] martial in the case of byrne).”50 Yet this does not necessarily link Pelagia with the masculine, for the word appears in connection with both male and female protagonists in heroic poetry. One thinks, for instance, of Elene’s woven coat of mail, “brogden byrne,” or of Judith’s receiving Holofernes’s “byrnan” from the Bethulians as spoil.51 Pelagia, like the heroines Judith and Elene, can therefore be read as a miles Christi without her role necessarily being associated with a masculine performance or emphatically masculine clothes: her coat of mail does not automatically associate her with the masculine, and her cloak is not explicitly that of Nonnus. Rather than linking her clothing with a gender performance that is more or less feminine or masculine, her clothes reflect how she departs from such binaries, how she becomes a queer figure that is rather defined by her penitence – because of her hair shirt – and her heroic status as miles Christi – through her byrnie. This is a good way also to think about female heroes in Old English poetry: rather than perceiving them as female and heroes and, like Jane Chance, Hugh Magennis, or Stacy Klein, seeing them as performing a particularly feminine inflexion of heroism,52 it might be useful to see Judith or Elene’s heroism as queering them, so that these figures, one a widow, the other a married woman and a mother, can transcend their gender to become queer heroines. Likewise, Pelagia can be portrayed as a heroic figure after her conversion, without being associated with one or the other gender. For all of these women, heroism and sanctity (or divine election in the case of Judith), lead them to transcend gender binaries, and the queering of their gender signifies their privileged, changed status. One can imagine what a breath of fresh air such a portrayal might have been for an audience of religious or semi-religious women. Usually confronted in Latin writings with a holiness that is either masculine (categorised according to profession or activity: the holy king, the holy hermit, the holy confessor, etc.) or feminine (grouped according to sexual status: the holy widow, the holy virgin, the holy mother), a female audience could find in Pelagia a model of holiness that is queer, that effectively takes gender out of the equation. While the epithet “holy harlot,” like “holy mother” or “virgin martyr,” might suggest a path to sanctity anchored in one’s gendered sexuality, Pelagia demonstrates that this is actually not the case. The Old English holy harlot does not actually

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Rauer, “Pelagia’s Cloak,” p. 6. P.O.E. Gradon (ed.), Cynewulf ’s Elene (London: Methuen, 1958), line 257, and Benno Johan Timmer, Judith (London: Methuen, 1966), line 337. On Old Norse examples of byrnie-wearing women, see Damico, “The Valkyrie Reflex,” p. 181. 52 Chance, Woman as Hero, pp. 31–52, Magennis, “Gender and Heroism,” pp. 5–18, Stacy Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 88–9. 51

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography represent, as Lees and Watt argue, a fourth female estate of “whoredom”53 but, rather, a state that transcends gender (transgender) to embody a sanctity that exists beyond gender binarism. And indeed, the martyrologist does not stop at making Pelagia’s cross-dressing queerer, but also changes several elements so as to tone down the Latin source’s representation of the holy harlot’s conversion as a reversal of gender. For instance, in the Old English text, James the Deacon is not sent by Nonnus to Jerusalem with the preconception that he will meet a male monk or eunuch named Pelagius.54 Removing the notion that Pelagia’s sanctity is predicated upon her transvestism and her performance as a male religious leads the Old English martyrologist to alter the type of authority that the saint wields after her conversion. Since she is not shown as having the kind of traditional authority validated by her position as Pelagius the monk, which in the Latin version permits her to become a famous teacher and advisor for the surrounding coenobitic communities,55 Pelagia’s authority must derive from a source other than her masculine garb. The martyrologist emphasises instead the holy harlot’s more charismatic authority as a Sponsa Christi. In the Latin Réfections, becoming a Bride of Christ gives Pelagia legitimacy from having a mighty male protector, Christ, rather than agency or autonomous power. In the Old English life, however, Pelagia derives great authority for herself thanks to her bridal status. One example suffices by way of illustration. In the Latin A’ version, Pelagia expresses her rejection of the devil’s temptation in a passive way: “Deus meus qui me eripuit de medio dentium tuorum et induxit in caelesti thalamo suo, ipse tibi resistit pro me” (my emphasis).56 God was the one who snatched her from the devil and established her in his bridal chamber, and he is now the one resisting Satan on her behalf. The language employed by the Old English martyrologist, however, turns this passivity into an active role for the holy harlot: “Ic ðe wiðsace, forðon ic eom nu in Cristes [C: brid]/bure” (OEM 210, my emphasis).57 Here, empowered by her spousal connection with Christ, Pelagia is the one to reject the devil. In the Old English life of Pelagia there can be seen the genesis of an unusual sanctity, defined by a queering, rather than an inversion, of gender. What a fitting exemplum for pre-Conquest women, especially female religious, then!

53

Lees and Watt, “Age and Desire,” p. 60. A’ 213 and B 246. See also Chenard, “Narratives of the Saintly Body,” p. 164. 55 James the Deacon talks about Pelagius’s “salutary doctrine,” his “salutaribus docrinis” (Petitmengin, 1, apparatus criticus, 215); according to Réfection B, “the great reputation of master Pelagius spread everywhere by means of the monasteries,” “ubique magna domini Pelagii fama in monasteribus ferebatur” (B 247). The phrasing is similar in A’ (see A’ 214). 56 “My God, who snatched me from the midst of your teeth and took me in his heavenly bridal chamber, he himself resists you for me” (A’ 211). See also B 244. 57 “I renounce you, because I am now in Christ’s (bridal) chamber.” 54

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Pelagia, like Elene and Judith in Old English poetry, provides a precedent for women who have led their lives strongly anchored in the world, but who choose to turn to religion later in life. The martyrologist tells them, through Pelagia, that they need not effect a hieronymian shift in their gender to become devoted to God. Devotees should, rather, relinquish the question of gender altogether, forget it is there, so that, like the holy Pelagia before them, the rediscovery of their physicality and of their gender upon their death can be deemed a miracle: “ða onfand se biscop on Hierusalem, þær he hyre lichoman gyrede, þæt heo wæs wif. Ða cwæð he: ‘God, þe sy wuldor. Ðu hafast monigne haligne ofer eorðan ahyded’” (OEM 210).58 While such a remark in the Latin is directly drawn from other transvestite saints’ lives, and implies the wonder that a woman could have “passed” as a wise and holy man, the martyrologist’s decision to render the cross-dressing much less present in the Old English also causes this sentence to stand out: the discovery of Pelagia’s femininity is the miracle, not her ability to perform as a man. The harlot’s sanctity queers her gender and gives her a particularly charismatic authority that rivals the traditional influence of the masculine, clerical voice. MARY MAGDALENE IN THE OLD ENGLISH MARTYROLOGY The Old English Martyrology life of Mary Magdalene parallels that of Pelagia in identifying the harlot’s pre-conversion femininity with sin, and her postrepentance holiness with a queering, an “ambiguisation,” as Julia Kristeva would put it, of her gender identity and her body.59 The life of Mary Magdalene in the Old English Martyrology is a condensation of several different sources.60 The Magdalene, a sinner, comes to the house of a Jewish scribe where Christ is eating, washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and anoints them with a precious unguent. Christ then forgives her sins. Once risen, 58

“Then the bishop of Jerusalem, when he was preparing her body, discovered that she was a woman. Then he said: ‘God, glory be to you. You have hidden many a saint on earth.’” 59 “Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward,” in Desire, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: ICA Documents, 1984), pp. 22–7, at p. 23. 60 The Bible, Bede’s commentaries on Luke and Mark, and Gregory’s Homiliae in evangelia 25 and 33 for her life up to Christ’s Resurrection. See C. Rauer, “The Sources of the Old English Martyrology (Cameron B.19),” Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register (2000), at http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/, s.v. “Mary Magdalen,” and her “Female Hagiography,” pp. 23–8. See Raymond Etiax (ed.), Gregorius Magnus: Homiliae in evangelia, CCSL 141 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 204–16 and David Hurst (ed.), Bedae Venerabilis opera 2.3, CCSL 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960), pp. 3–425 and 427–648. J.E. Cross, “Mary Magdalen in the Old English Martyrology: The Earliest Extant ‘Narrat Josephus’ Variant of Her Legend,” Speculum 53 (1978), pp. 16–25, identifies BHL 5453 as a source for Mary Magdalene’s eremitic life. While there is no evidence that BHL 5453 actually predated the OEM, or ever circulated in England, I adopt it here as a close variant.

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography Christ honours her by appearing to her first on Easter Sunday, so that it is she who announces the Resurrection to the apostles. After Christ’s Ascension, full of longing for him, the Magdalene cannot bear the sight of anybody else and decides to go into the desert, where she lives alone in a cave for thirty years, lifted up to the sky by the angels to be fed by heavenly sounds. She is then discovered by a mass-priest who leads her to his church, and administers the Eucharist to her, after which she dies. The Old English Martyrology version constitutes the first extant vernacular account of the vita eremitica episode of Mary Magdalene’s life, and demonstrates the influence of the life of Mary of Egypt on that of Mary Magdalene. Victor Saxer has argued that the episode has its origins in Latin in late ninth-century southern Italy.61 Since the Old English Martyrology version can be similarly dated, it might be useful to revisit Saxer’s position and either propose an earlier date for the appearance of the vita eremetica or, better, an insular origin for it instead, as this would make sense in light of the early popularity of eremitism and of the lives of holy harlots in England. From the first, Mary Magdalene is associated with the figure of Eve, and her femininity is synonymous with sinfulness and lechery: “seo wæs ærest synnecge” (OEM 133).62 The martyrologist may be playing here on the ambiguity of “ærest,” whether as an adverb (she was, at first, a female sinner) or as a strong adjective (she was [the] first female sinner), thereby connecting the Magdalene with Eve. Furthermore, in the use of the hapax legomenon “synnecge,” a combination of “synn,” sin, with the Anglian feminine ending “-cge” already noted in Pelagia’s “scericge/scearecge” (OEM 210), there is a linguistic and conceptual correlation between “sin” and the subject’s female gender. In other words, sin becomes synonymous here with femininity. Probably a neologism, like “scericge,” this term reflects a difficulty in expressing the unusual and complex status of these saints. This can be paralleled with the liminal circumstances of the female audience, perhaps made up of vowesses or nuns who joined the convent after a life in the world.63 While “synnecge” simply denotes female sinner, its association with Mary Magdalene, along with the equating of female sin with lechery that exists as a subtext in Gregory and Bede’s treatment of the saint, have connected the term,

See Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie-Madeleine en Occident, des origines à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Auxerre: Publications de la Société des fouilles archéologiques de l’Yonne, 1959), vol. 1, p. 126. 62 “She was first a female sinner/she was the first female sinner.” 63 On this, see Rauer, “Female Hagiography,” p. 20. She notes the recurrence of newly coined words to describe women, remarking on the fact that most of these terms hold negative connotations, such as “scinlæce,” female witch, for Agnes. 61

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature then and now, with sexual sin.64 Indeed, most dictionaries of Old English reflect this preconception.65 The correlation of feminine gender with the notion of sin is therefore sufficient to convey Mary’s licentiousness to both medieval and modern audiences, in the same way the mention of “mima” evoked sexual promiscuity for Pelagia. However, it is important to note that the Old English Martyrologist does not explicitly associate the Magdalene, or Pelagia for that matter, with sexual sin before their conversion. The choice not to focus so heavily on the sexual aspect of their sins might be meant to increase their particular relevance for early English audiences who would have conceived of the holy harlot type as a universal model for the rise from sin to salvation. It is more important for the martyrologist to link the repentant saints’ femininity with sin in general, so that the feminine gender comes to represent the fallen state of humanity as a whole. The hagiographer goes on to emphasise the conflation of femininity with sinfulness in the person of Mary Magdalene, telling us that “heo wæs mid seofon deoflum full, þæt wæs mid eallum uncystum” (OEM 133).66 The notion of the Magdalene as containing the seven deadly sins corresponds to the traditional understanding of women as vessels.67 The martyrologist’s phrasing hints at the association between the saint’s possessed state and her female body’s ability to bear children. In the Old English Martyrology, then, the femininity of both pre-conversion Pelagia and Mary Magdalene is seen in a wholly negative light, and is linked with sin, Eve, and the devil. While the hagiographer emphasises the Magdalene’s physicality up to and including her conversion,68 after her repentance the saint’s body is no longer visible: Mary Magdalene leaves for the wilderness, where she remains

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Chenard, “Narratives of the Saintly Body,” p. 140. For instance A Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Jane Roberts et al., s.v. “synnecge”: “an adulterer/-ess, whore, prostitute.” Dennis Joseph Enright, in his monograph Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), notes that “synnecge” is a euphemism for whore (p. 23). See in contrast the Bosworth-Toller, which does not make this leap: s.v. “synnicge” (-ecge): “a sinner, a sinful woman; peccatrix.” 66 “She was filled with seven devils, that is with all vices.” 67 See Marsha Waggoner, “Dismembered Virgins and Incarcerated Brides: Embodiment and Sanctity in the Katherine Group,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2005, p. 150; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 21; and Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 19–45. For the medieval medical understanding of women as passive vessels, notably during pregnancy, the best reference is still Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 178. 68 OEM 133. 65

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography “unknown” to all, “eallum monnum uncuð” (OEM 133),69 and her body is never again mentioned, whereas it is present in the Latin source BHL 5453.70 Chenard argues that this “would have served as an unwelcome – and frankly titillating – distraction from the issue of Mary’s repentance, which is at the very heart of her sanctity.”71 While I agree that a naked Magdalene might have been a distraction, I would suggest that the hagiographer was not shying away from representing an exciting nakedness but, rather, wanted to highlight the lack of importance of the body after the harlot’s repentance. Her penitence, like that of Pelagia, is key, but it is now the queerness of her post-conversion gender that represents her transcendence of the fallen, physical, state. This movement, from being emphatically gendered as feminine to becoming queer, is reproduced in the shift in the portrayal of Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Christ, from physical to spiritual. Indeed, Mary Magdalene’s tactile connection with Christ when he is “mon on eorðan” (OEM 133), “man on earth,” on which the hagiographer particularly insists, very much revolves around a sensual relationship between the two scriptural figures. After the transformative experience of her conversion, the physical aspect of the Magdalene’s relationship with Christ is negated, and any notion that this gendered connection between two ontologically disparate beings could be seen against the backdrop of the saint’s past or future relationships with other “men on earth” is carefully excised in the Old English version. Indeed, the Latin gives the suggestion of such an association when it is explained that the post-conversion Magdalene had such ardent love (“ardente caritate”) for Christ that she “numquam virum videre voluit neque ullum hominem suis oculis.”72 This phrasing, repeated a few lines later, effectively connects the human Jesus with other men, suggesting that the relationship between the Magdalene and Christ is still very much perceived in gendered terms. In opposition to this, the martyrologist states: “ond æfter Cristes upastignesse heo wæs on swa micelre longunge æfter him þæt heo nolde næfre siððan nænge mon geseon” (OEM 133, my emphasis).73 The hagiographer uses here the generic term mon rather than the gender-specific wer, the logical translation of the Latin vir (especially when the translation of birrum with byrnan exemplifies the Old English martyrologist’s habit of substituting Latin words with similarsounding Old English words). The Old English Martyrology therefore removes this potential connection between Mary’s spiritual caritas for Christ and any intimacy she could share with other, human, men. This careful separation of 69

“Unknown from all men.” Chenard, “Narratives of the Saintly Body,” p. 135. 71 Ibid., pp. 154–5. 72 “Never desired to see any man, nor any person with her eyes ever again.” BHL 5453, p. 21, my emphasis. 73 “And after the Ascension of Christ she had such a great longing for him that she could no longer cast her eyes on any man/human being.” 70

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the holy harlot’s life before and after her conversion stands in stark contrast with later medieval portrayals of repentant prostitutes, who are feminine and sexual throughout their lives, as will become clear in the following chapters. In emphasising the negative femininity of Pelagia’s and the Magdalene’s early lives, and by queering the saints’ post-conversion gender, the hagiographer might be following Paul, when he suggests in Galatians 3:28 that once one is converted and baptised, “non est Iudaeus neque Graecus non est servus neque liber non est masculus neque femina omnes enim vos unum estis in Christo Iesu.”74 However, as for instance Elizabeth Castelli makes clear, in late antiquity and during the medieval period this apparent “transcendence of gendered differences” has been interpreted “by reinscribing traditional gender hierarchies of male over female, masculine over feminine,” by representing transcendence of the female gender as “becoming male” in the sense of Jerome’s Commentarium ad Ephesios.75 Not so, it appears, in the Old English Martyrology (nor in the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, as will become apparent). In these texts, the turn to God is represented as a shift from gender binarism to non-binarism. The martyrologist figures conversion through the symbolic representation of gender. The audience understands conversion as a turn from the sinful and gendered flesh to a spiritual state that is beyond gender. While this implies that femininity signifies fallen and sinful humanity, it also suggests that the martyrologist does not present femininity as hierarchically lower than masculinity: he or she conceives of gender as lower than spirit, and femininity stands here for gender. Like Pelagia, Mary Magdalene’s particularly authoritative stance in the Old English is linked to her bridal status, a status that is presented as emphatically spiritual and divorced from any parallelism with the harlot saint’s early sin. Since Origen, the Magdalene has been associated with the figure of the Bride of Christ, a connection that is recalled most influentially by Gregory the Great.76 The Bride’s search for her beloved at night-time (Cant. 3:1–3) was paralleled with the Magdalene’s search for Christ at the tomb, and this pericope from the Song of Songs would come to be read on the occasion of the saint’s feast day.77 The martyrologist puts much emphasis in this abbreviated account on 74

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 75 See Elizabeth Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 29–49, at p. 33. On Jerome’s conception of becoming male, see Introduction, p. 13. 76 Marjorie M. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen’s Origins and Metamorphoses (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), p. 65. Gregory the Great, Homiliarum in Evangelia 25, PL 76, 1190a–1a and 33, PL 76, 1243d–4b. 77 Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “The Bride of Christ: The Iconography of Mary Magdalene and Cistercian Spirituality,” Poetica 47 (1997), pp. 33–47, at p. 36.

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography the caritas shared between the Magdalene and Christ as her bridegroom, and insists on the authority this role bestows upon her. Indeed, Christ’s love for her is presented as the reason she is chosen to announce the Resurrection to the apostles: “ond heo wæs siððan Criste swa gecoren ðæt he æfter his æriste ærest monna hine hire æteawde, ond heo bodade his ærist his apostolum” (OEM 133).78 Among all the scriptural accounts of the Resurrection available, the martyrologist selected John 20:11–18, the pericope that would imbue Mary Magdalene with the most authority: it presents the Magdalene as the sole witness to Christ’s Resurrection, and – in opposition to Mark’s account (Mk 16:9–12) – there is no mention of the apostles’ failing to give credence to her words. The author bestows the Magdalene with considerable power over the apostles, and thus provides a rare account of this episode in the period: early medieval hagiographers usually shy away from a woman being portrayed with authority over the higher-ranked members of the Church. This authority is further increased by way of the hagiographer’s choice of the verb bodian – to tell, announce, but also to preach – to describe her action.79 It is therefore possible to imagine that the martyrologist intended the audience to understand that Mary preached to the apostles. At least, the author was not uncomfortable with this interpretation, as there exists a wide array of other verbs from which to choose, that do not combine the meaning “to announce” with the notion of preaching, for instance (a)beodan, (a)cyðan, abannan, or (a)tellan. It thus appears that Mary Magdalene is still especially authoritative as a charismatic saint even though her sanctity so escapes definition that the martyrologist cannot encapsulate it with a gendered epithet such as “fæmne” or “abbodesse,” when introducing the saint.80 She can preach the Resurrection to the apostles, and she is the only female figure in the Martyrology whose mediatory powers translate into posthumous miracles on the site of her tomb.81 That the Magdalene is an important precedent for validating women’s voices is made clear by the eleventh-century Goscelin of St Bertin, who supports his choice to use the nuns of Wilton’s accounts as sources for his life of St Edith by mentioning the Magdalene’s role in witnessing and announcing the Resurrection.82 Likewise, the Life of Christina of Markyate draws upon the holy harlot model, and most notably Mary Magdalene, to validate Christina’s authority and sanctity.83 78

“And she was afterwards so beloved (precious/chosen/elect) by Christ that after his Resurrection he appeared first to her of all people, and she announced his Resurrection to the apostles.” 79 DOE, s.v. “bodian.” 80 Rauer, “Female Hagiography,” p. 20. 81 Jacqueline Stodnick, “Bodies of Land: The Place of Gender in the Old English Martyrology,” in Writing Women Saints, pp. 30–52. 82 Vita of St Edith 24, cited in Watt, Women’s Writing, p. 124. 83 On this, see Chapter 5, pp. 186–95.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Mary Magdalene and Pelagia, then, can wield great charismatic authority after their repentance, enough to tower over the devil or the apostles, in their queer performance as Brides of Christ. The martyrologist creates a shift from the female gender to gender queer to signify conversion, something that could be didactically useful for any audience, lay or religious, male or female. Nevertheless, the complexity of the gendered portrayal, the insistence on femininity before conversion and the relinquishing of the female gender when turning one’s life to Christ, all fit a religious or semi-religious female audience. The care to represent these saints as three-dimensional and authoritative suggests the Old English martyrologist aimed this portrayal at an audience that would identify with women whose paths to a religious vocation may have been less than straightforward. To these women, the martyrologist offers the possibility to relinquish their physical bonds and live for the spiritual as Brides of Christ. AFRA IN THE OLD ENGLISH MARTYROLOGY The account of the last holy harlot to be represented in the Old English Martyrology provides a limiting case for the portrayal of repentant prostitutes, at the same time as it exemplifies the flexibility and variety of the hagiographic morphology of the holy harlot. In truth, although Afra is the only “holy harlot” in the Old English Martyrology to actually be called a prostitute – she is a “forlegorwif ” and a “meretrix” (OEM 149) – her promiscuity is conceived by the author as but one aspect of her heathenism, one that is wholly forgiven and erased when she converts to Christianity.84 Afra’s life is defined from the beginning as a martyrdom, a “þrowung” (OEM 149). She converts and receives baptism without displaying any tearful repentance for her sinful profession, and she does not share with other holy harlots a long, solitary life post-conversion: she is martyred soon after she becomes a Christian. This corresponds well to the popular early medieval understanding of Afra as one who had served as a prostitute in the temple of Venus, providing a Classical/Antique version of holy harlotry, the sexually active counterpart to the Vestal Virgins. The difference between the lives of Pelagia and Mary Magdalene and that of Afra can be evidenced in the portrayal of Afra’s gender and authority. Her feminine body does not disappear or become ambiguous when she repents; rather, it becomes the symbol of her sanctity. Afra’s naked body is tortured in the public square for all to see: “ða het se dema hi nacode gebindan to anum stænge ond hi bærnan mid fyre […] ond Cristene men gemitton hire lichoman gesundne æfter þam fyre” (OEM 149).85 The wholeness of her body after her 84 85

Karras, “Holy Harlots,” p. 16. “Then the judge ordered her to be tied to a pole, naked, and to be burned with fire […]

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography death becomes a token of her sanctity, as well as an indication of her purity and of her reconstituted virginity: according to Newman, a body’s incorruptibility in torture is a mark reserved for the physically virginal.86 Afra’s exposition of her body stands in clear contrast to the removal of the bodies of Pelagia and the Magdalene from the Old English accounts of their lives. Afra parallels the virgin martyr’s performance of sanctity that Sarah Salih theorises: the virgin martyr tests and performs her virginity by disrobing, rejecting and chastising the persecutor’s interpretation of her nakedness as sexual, inscribing it instead with purity and sanctity.87 Afra’s life, however, also universalises, as that of the other holy harlots, her sexual sin: it becomes a symbol of general sinfulness. When the judge Gaius tries to tempt her back to paganism by insinuating that since she is a prostitute, she cannot be saved by Christianity, she answers that Christ gave up his life for sinful people, thereby extending the significance of her own sexual sin to show that any past sin is redemptible (OEM 149). Her reformed virginity not only suggests kinship between the models of holy harlot and virgin martyr, but also opens another path to conversion and religion to all people, and especially to every woman. Be she a widowed nunne or a previously married aristocratic woman who enters, founds, or heads a convent, a woman would be offered with Afra another path to the religious life than that set out in the lives of Mary Magdalene and Pelagia: they could indeed hope for a complete re-virginisation. Such inviolability of a repentant harlot’s body is perhaps not so surprising in pre-Conquest England, where St Ætheltryth, despite having been married twice, was refigured a virgin when she became an abbess (a queen, she may have been repudiated because she was childless), and again when her re-virginisation is metaphorically enacted on her body after her death, when a scar disappears from her corpse. The link between the repentant prostitute’s life and that of abbesses or vowesses who previously lived in the world is made elsewhere in the Old English corpus, suggesting indeed how much the holy harlot’s existence paralleled these real-life pre-Conquest women, influencing them and being influenced by them. In the tenth-century Benedictional of Æthelwold, Mary Magdalene is given the same clothes the Virgin Mary wears in the Annunciation scene and is represented as heading the choir of virgins with none other than Ætheltryth.88 Be she a re-virginised Afra or a queer Pelagia, the holy harlot and Christians found her body unharmed after the fire.” On the sources for Afra’s life, see Rauer, Fontes, s.v. “Afra.” 86 Newman, From Virile Woman, pp. 30–1. 87 Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 90 and 96. See also Shari Horner’s discussion of Juliana in Representing Women in Old English Literature: The Discourse of Enclosure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 101–30, esp. p. 112. 88 On this, see Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 179 and p. 282, n. 71.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature provides a model for all and sundry, but one particularly fitting for women religious. The Old English martyrologist, whether a man or a woman, saw how topical these examples were for an intended audience that comprised at least some religious women, and adapted the lives to enhance their relevance and meaning. THE PSEUDO-ÆLFRICIAN LIFE OF MARY OF EGYPT Mary of Egypt, in the late tenth-century Pseudo-Ælfrician account of her life, reflects a similar tendency to represent queer, alternative paths to salvation for Everyman, but most particularly for women. As Lees and Watt have argued, this text offers Mary’s life as “one that resists aspects of conventional expectations of the female estate.”89 Mary of Egypt becomes a particularly authoritative saint whose conversion is portrayed through a shift in her gendered performance, from feminine to queer. The Old English hagiographer uses gender to signify alternative paths to salvation, as well as non-traditional access to the divine and to knowledge. When gender inversion is portrayed, in the relationship between Mary and the monk Zosimus, it is to reflect upon the relationship between coenobitism and eremitism and the religious and the secular. Given that Mary of Egypt appears as a saint in only late sixth- or early seventh-century hagiography, her early popularity in England is remarkable: she already figures in no less than twelve late ninth- and early tenth-century insular calendars, prompting Veronica Ortenberg and Simon Lavery to suggest her cult was introduced in pre-Conquest England as early as the seventh century.90 The Life of Mary of Egypt reflects this popularity. Of probable Anglian origin, it is a remarkably faithful translation of a particularly popular eighth-century Latin vita by a certain Paul the Deacon, specifically of a version that appears in the English Cotton-Corpus Legendaries.91 The 89

See their “Age and Desire,” p. 61. Saints in English Kalendars, Table IV; V. Ortenberg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 115; S. Lavery, “The Story of Mary the Egyptian in Medieval England,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 113–48, at p. 113; See also L.M. Cantara, “St. Mary of Egypt in BL MS Cotton Otho B. X: New Textual Evidence for an Old English Saint’s Life,” unpublished MA Dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2001, pp. 3–4. 91 The Latin is itself a close translation from a Greek life influenced by Jerome’s Life of Paul the First Hermit. The Greek version appears in PG 87.3, 3697–726, the Latin version in PL 73:671–90. The former is translated in Maria Kouli’s “Life of Mary of Egypt,” in Holy Women of Byzantium, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot (Washington: Dumbarton, 1996), pp. 65–93. On the Greek version and its origins, see ibid., pp. 65–7 and Efthalia Makris Walsh, “The Ascetic Mother Mary of Egypt,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 34 (1989), pp. 59–69, esp. pp. 60–1. For the popularity of Paul’s version, see Konrad Kunze, 90 Rushforth,

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography first European version of Mary of Egypt’s life in the vernacular, it is one of four non-Ælfrician lives copied into the main manuscript of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, London, BL Cotton Julius MS E vii.92 Ælfric originally wrote the Lives of Saints for Æthelweard and Æthelmær, two noble lay patrons. This, alongside the vernacularity of the Lives, would point to a secular audience for the Life of Mary of Egypt, although one cannot discount a potential religious readership. Much lengthier than the lives of holy harlots in the Old English Martyrology, the Life of Mary of Egypt begins after a short preface with an account of the sanctity of the monk Zosimus, and his Lent-time walkabout in the desert where he meets a fleeing figure, Mary of Egypt, whom he eventually reaches after a long chase. She asks for his mantle to cover herself as she is naked, levitates, and recounts her life story: her seventeen years spent as a prostitute in Alexandria, her travels to Jerusalem, and, once there, her being miraculously prevented from entering a church because of her sinfulness. She tells of her repentance before an image of the Virgin, and her flight to the desert, where she lives for forty-seven years, during the first seventeen of which she is plagued with temptations. She explains how she survived on three loaves of bread and the herbs she could find, and that her clothing fell apart, leaving her naked body exposed to the elements. Having finished the narrative of her life up to that point, Mary commands Zosimus to come back the following year and bring her the Eucharist, predicting that an illness will prevent his leaving his monastery before the end of the Lenten period. Zosimus comes to the River Jordan at the appointed time, and Mary walks on water in order to join him. He gives her the Eucharist and, after advising him that reforms are needed in his monastery, she again asks him to come back the following year. On his arrival, Zosimus finds her lifeless body on the ground alongside a written message revealing her name. A tame lion then joins him and helps him dig a grave for the saint. After this, Zosimus comes back to his monastery and recounts Mary’s miraculous life and death to the other monks. Mary is almost caricaturally feminine during her early life of sin. Once she has repented, however, her gender portrayal changes dramatically. Scholars Studien zur Legende der heiligen Maria Ægyptiaca im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1969), pp. 174–80; Magennis (ed.), Old English Life, pp. 12–13; Cantara, “St. Mary of Egypt,” p. 3. For the relationship between the Life and the Cotton-Corpus Legendaries, see Jane Stevenson, “The Holy Sinner: The Life of Mary of Egypt,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt, ed. Poppe and Ross, pp. 19–50, and Magennis, Old English Life, p. 30. The edition of the Latin text used here, hereafter CCLME, is that found in Magennis, Old English Life. 92 Peter A.M. Clemoes, “The Chronology of Ælfric’s Works,” in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter A.M. Clemoes (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959), pp. 212–47, at p. 219, n. 2. The issue of the Life’s attribution to Ælfric has been tackled most extensively by Magennis. For a summary of his position, see his Old English Life, pp. 21–5. The Life also survives in two other manuscripts, albeit in fragmentary form. See ibid., pp. 35–43.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature disagree on how exactly her gender is represented after conversion. Onnaca Heron, for instance, argues for a gender reversal between Zosimus and Mary, so that the latter becomes an “immasculated” female saint while the monk is “emasculated.”93 Andrew Scheil as well as Clare A. Lees and Diane Watt are instead of the opinion that Mary transcends her body and her gender so that both become indeterminate: unknown for Scheil, transgender or “genderqueer” for Lees and Watt, a position I share.94 Indeed, Mary of Egypt’s gender and ontology are purposefully left uncertain, mirroring the portrayal of the Magdalene and Pelagia in the Martyrology. The hagiographer plays with the discrepancy between the signifier (the body) and the signified (what this body actually means or evokes for Zosimus and the audience), piling layer upon layer of meaning over Mary of Egypt’s naked body in order to render it queer. I agree with Heron that Mary is often linked with masculinity, but she is as often associated with femininity, creating a general indeterminacy as to her gender (something which is also replicated in Zosimus, who is both masculine and effeminate).95 As with the Old English Martyrology Magdalene and Pelagia, this gender indeterminacy is equated with masculinity in the Latin source of the Old English Life, but in the Old English she is just, to use the expression of Lees and Watt, “beyond gender.”96 In the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, the Egyptian’s queer body becomes a signifier for wisdom, holiness, and the divine, and it excites a desire that is as queer as the saint’s gender. The representation of Mary of Egypt as queer renders her relatable for both genders, while it also permits her to represent a desire for the divine that exists outside the boundaries of gender. It is neither homo- nor heteroerotic, it is a queer desire that literally transcends the flesh. Mary’s gender appears fixed only when the hagiographer presents Mary’s relationship with Zosimus, using binary gender to articulate the tension and sometimes opposition between eremitism and coenobitism, secular and clerical, novelty and tradition, as well as spiritual versus carnal relations. Mary of Egypt’s charismatic authority, drawn from her sanctity, her experience in sin and her repentance, as well as her privileged access to the divine, is there established as on a par with Zosimus’s traditional authority supported by his clerical, monastic, habit: she signifies the validity in early medieval England of non-straightforward paths to salvation and holiness, the legitimacy of non-traditional religious professions. Although our first encounter with Mary of Egypt occurs when she is already repentant and living in the desert, the description she gives of 93

See O. Heron, “The Lionness in the Text: Mary of Egypt as Immasculated Female Saint,” Quidditas 21 (2000), pp. 23–44. 94 Andrew P. Scheil, “Bodies and Boundaries in the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt,” Philologus 84 (2000), pp. 137–56; Lees and Watt, “Age and Desire,” pp. 53–67. 95 Lees and Watt “Age and Desire,” p. 64. 96 Lees and Watt, “Age and Desire,” p. 62.

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography herself when she recounts her early sinful life to Zosimus parallels the pre-conversion accounts of the Old English Martyrology repentant prostitutes: Mary associates her younger self with several topoi of misogynist literature, linking her femininity with lechery and sin. The Egyptian insists on her pre-conversion licentiousness in a plethora of hyperbolic phrases: she speaks of how she “unablinnendlice and unafyllendlice þam leahtrum þæra synlusta læg underþeoded” (LME 366–8),97 talks about “þa scyldfullan gewilnunga mines forligeres” (LME 379),98 and about her “unafyllendlice gewilnunga” (LME 382).99 This extreme lust has been considered as a particularly feminine trait since antiquity. Jerome, for instance, states that “uxoris […] ardentissimam gulam fortuita libido restinguat.”100 The pre-conversion holy harlot is also a figure of Eve, the cause of men’s fall into sin: “Ic hi þa ealle sona to þam manfullum leahtrum […] astyrede” (LME 422–4).101 Mary even refers to herself as a teacher of sinful activities, already announcing a similar (though this time virtuous) role as advisor and teacher to Zosimus: “Nis nan asecgendlic oððe unasecgendlic fracodlicnysse hiwung þæs ic ne sih tihtende and lærende, and fruma gefremed” (LME 432–4).102 The violence and excess of Mary’s sexuality might even have been too much for the early English scribes, who sometimes tone down Mary’s feats of sinfulness. For instance, the scribe of London, BL MS Otho B x makes mention of the “unfylledan bryne,” the “unfulfilled fervor/fire” of Mary’s vices (LME 370), a phrase which foregrounds her insatiable sexual appetite; the London, BL Cotton Julius MS E vii scribe has “unalyfedan,” “unlawful/illicit,” putting emphasis on Mary’s recognition of the unlawful, unnatural quality of her past desires instead.103 Similarly, of the sentence “and hu ic to syngigenne genydde ægðer ge þa earman willendan and þa earman syllendan” (LME 430–32),104 Irina Dumitrescu remarks that the Julius scribe writes “syllendan” (those who gave) instead of “nellendan” (the unwilling ones), seemingly shying away from the potential that Mary may have sexually assaulted her fellow travellers.105 97

How she “unceasingly and licentiously lay enslaved to the vices of desires for sin.” “The disgraceful desires of [her] sexual depravity.” 99 “Insatiable desires.” 100 “The casual lust of a woman […] extinguishes the fiercest appetite.” Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, PL 23, col. 295c. 101 “I excited them all then to wicked sins.” For similar remarks, see also LME 431, 438–9, and 449–51. 102 “There is no form of obscenity, speakable or unspeakable, of a kind that I did not incite and teach, after becoming its instigator.” On the pre-conversion Egyptian as a figure of Eve, see also Suzanne Winter, “Sex and the Single Saint: Physicality in Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Athens, GA, 2004, pp. 88 and 91. 103 Cantara notes this alternative reading in her “St. Mary of Egypt,” p. 14. 104 “And how I forced to sin both the poor willing ones and the poor ones who gave.” 105 I. Dumitrescu, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 198. 98

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature The fact that both scribes may have had misgivings in representing such a rampant, violent, and insatiable sexuality for the future saint emphasises how extreme the portrayal of her sin was before her repentance, a particularly feminine sin, connected as it was with lechery and Eve-like temptation. After her conversion, Mary of Egypt is linked at the same time with opposing sides of different binaries – male and female, earthly and heavenly, sentient being and beast, black and white, devil and saint – so much so that she becomes non-binary. This is in contrast to her gendered representation in the Latin source, where her conversion led to an inversion of her gender. The incipit of her Latinate life reflects this well, connecting the heroism of her asceticism with a performance of masculinity: “Incipit conversio virile et magnum certamen venerabilis marie egyptiace; […] et penitentie magnum virileque certamen venerabilis Marie Egiptiae (CCLME 140).106 However, the Old English Life, similar to Pelagia’s wearing a byrnie without having to perform masculinity, does not link the heroism of her actions with a necessarily masculine performance: Mary’s “deeds” (“dæda” LME 1) and “very brave struggle” (“ellenlic gewinn” LME 2–3), both terms that associate her performance of sanctity with heroism, make her a “worthy,” “arwurðan,” Mary (LME 3), rather than a virile one. From the incipit of the Old English Life, then, it appears that Mary of Egypt, like Judith, Elene, or Pelagia before her, is offered up as a heroic and saintly model, one whose holy heroism leads her to transcend her gender rather than adopt masculinity, further supporting the notion that heroism and sanctity should be seen as queering gender rather than inverting it in Old English texts. When the audience first encounters Mary of Egypt through Zosimus, the author plays on different generic conventions to show how she departs from them and cannot be clearly apprehended through binary conceptions of gender or genre: she escapes definition, something that constitutes one of the most important aspects of queerness.107 Zosimus and the audience have expectations based on generic conventions of what they will encounter in the desert, and these are consistently overturned. The hagiographer plays with the monk’s inability to read the Egyptian’s body in order to show that gender and genre are transcended, queered, in one’s quest for salvation.108 The early English hagiographer first destabilises the audience’s expectations of a begins the conversion and the great and virile battle of the venerable Mary of Egypt; […] and the penance and the great and virile battle of the venerable Mary of Egypt.” See also CCLME 619 and 899, where her actions are again deemed “virile” and “viriliter.” 107 Jagose, Queer Theory, pp. 1–3. 108 On Zosimus’s inability to interpret Mary’s body and gender, see notably Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 132–51, and Robin Norris, “Vitas Matrum: Mary of Egypt as Female Confessor,” in The Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, ed. Donald G. Scragg (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005), pp. 79–109. 106 “Here

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography female-gendered Mary of Egypt when planting in the mind of Zosimus, and of the audience through him, the preconceived idea that the monk will meet the traditional male hermit, ubiquitous in the lives of the Desert Fathers: “he gewilnode […] þæt he sumne fæder on þam westene funde” (LME 193–5, my emphasis).109 The hagiographer establishes parallels through word-echoes to strengthen in the audience the association of learning with a male teacher, and therefore the expectation that the learning Zosimus seeks will be bestowed by a traditional source of learning: one that is male and clerical. Indeed, he sets out to look for “learning” and “an example,” “lare” and “bysene” (LME 61), qualities for which he himself has a reputation (“lare” and “bysne,” LME 38), and has come to seek at the monastery near the River Jordan – he has come “for reasons of learning,” “for lare intingan” (LME 87). Every mention of learning, therefore, evokes a male coenobitic teacher. The overturning of this gendered expectation when Zosimus meets Mary gives emphasis to the angel’s wish at the beginning of the story to teach Zosimus “hu miccle synd oþre hælo wegas” (LME 73–4).110 This also seems to be the main aim of the hagiographer: to demonstrate through Mary of Egypt and her transgender representation the unexpected paths to salvation available to both genders, and the unexpected sources of learning available to reach salvation. When Mary of Egypt eventually appears in the text, the expected male teacher transforms in Zosimus’s eyes into a spirit, the author again playing on the Life’s intertextual connection with eremitic male saints’ lives in which encounters with evil spirits abound, for instance in the lives of Saint Anthony, Saint Paul the first Hermit, and Saint Guthlac.111 The monk sees a “mennisce gelicnysse on lichaman” (LME 207–8), literally a “human/man’s shape in the body,” which he thinks might be “sumes gastes scinhyw” (LME 209–10), “the shape of a spectre.” These two phrases emphasise even more the removal of Mary’s body from any physical or tangible reality: she is the shape, the “hyw,” of a “scin,” a deceptive appearance (often used for fallen angels), of some spirit, “sumes gastes.” Of course, “scin” as evil spirit is homophonous with “scin,” “brightness, shine,” while “hyw” may also mean beauty, so that the compound suggests the shape’s simultaneous connection with an (evil) spirit and with holiness and femininity. Like Judith’s “ælfscinu” (Judith, line 14), Mary’s “scinhyw” links her with beauty and a potentially titillating desirability.112 desired […] to come across some Father in the desert.” See also Alison G. Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 67–8 and 126–9. 110 “How great are other paths to salvation.” 111 See Scheil, “Bodies and Boundaries,” p. 154, n. 16. On other examples of saints being mistaken for devils, see Coon, Sacred Fictions, p. 73 and p. 183, n. 80. 112 On the Old English poetic vocabulary of beauty, with special reference to scin(n), see Paul Beekman Taylor, “The Old English Poetic Vocabulary of Beauty,” in New Readings on Women, pp. 211–22, esp. pp. 212–13.

109 “He

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature This can be paralleled with another traditional topos of the lives of the Desert Fathers: demons disguised as women to tempt holy men.113 These connotations open up the potential for an audience to replace in their mind’s eye the anticipated male spiritual guide with that of an evil spirit, which in this case and by analogy is gendered feminine for the textual community. The Egyptian’s shape metamorphoses again in Zosimus’s perception when he crosses himself, and the seemingly ephemeral spirit becomes anchored in the physical female bodily form. In making the sign of the cross, Zosimus demonstrates his faith so that the veil is lifted and the true meaning of the vision is revealed: Mary of Egypt is at last described literally as a human being, and then precisely as a woman with blackened skin and short white hair: He þa his eagan bewende and þær soðlice man geseah […], and witodlice þæt wæs wifman þæt þær gesewen wæs. Swiðe sweartes lichaman heo wæs for þære sunnan hæto, and þa loccas hire feafdes wæron swa hwite swa wull and þa na siddran þonne oþ swuran. (LME 213–18)114

By crossing himself, the monk, and in turn the audience, is allowed to see the mennisclice shape for what it really is. However, through this description, this figure is connected with an additional intertextual frame of reference: with both male and female scriptural figures. Evoked here in Mary’s portrayal is the Bride of the Song of Songs, who is “nigra […] sed formosa” (Cant. 1:4–5), and the Son of Man in Revelation, with his white hair and blackened body (Revelation 1:13–15).115 Mary’s blackened body can also be reminiscent of the blackness of some evil spirits in Desert Fathers’ lives, such as the devil appearing in the form of a black boy in the Life of St Anthony.116 In this way, the first time Zosimus explicitly categorises Mary’s body as female, the layers of figural and metaphorical gender that her portrayal evokes present the audience with a puzzling array of dichotomies: old and young, black and white, male and female, and sin and redemption. Although Zosimus seems to have a clear notion that what he sees is female, his great desire to reach her (LME 225 and 230) obscures once again his perception, and he misinterprets what he sees, believing Mary to be a wild beast: “he forðy arn geornlice and gewilnode to oncnawenne hwæt þæt wildeora wære þe him æteowde” (LME 225–6).117 The hagiographer therefore Sacred Fictions, p. 93. then turned his eyes and really saw there a human being […], and it was actually a woman that appeared there. She was extremely black in her body because of the sun’s heat, and the hair of her head was as white as wool and no longer than down to her neck.” 115 Scheil, “Bodies and Boundaries,” p. 154, n. 19, also notes this parallel. 116 Athanasius, The Life of St. Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 34–5. 117 “Therefore he ran eagerly and desired to learn what kind of wild beast that might be

113 Coon, 114 “He

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography plays with Zosimus’s faulty expectations as well as intertextual associations to render Mary’s gender ambiguous. Mary herself attempts to correct Zosimus’s misreading, and to re-establish her femininity by asserting, throughout the text, that she definitely is a woman, a gender she keeps on connecting with sin and weakness of the flesh. She is a sinful woman, a “synful wif ” (LME 272 and 343), and a wretched harlot, “earmlicre forlegenre” (LME 702), who needs to cover her “wiflican tyddernysse” (LME 259), “womanly weakness.” This metonymic epithet equates the reproductive organs with femininity and weakness. These assurances, however, do not succeed in convincing Zosimus. Although he refers to her throughout as a woman – a handmaid of God, “Godes þeowen” (LME 236 and 290–1), a mother, “modor” (LME 289, 312, 409, and 689) and a lady, “hlæfdige” (LME 591 and 613), the monk still suspects she may be a spirit, “gast” (LME 338), and later pursues her as a hunter would the “sweetest beast,” “sweteste wildeor” (LME 874). There is thus a dichotomy between the queer object of desire Zosimus sees and pursues (a “gast,” a “wildeor,” and a “fæder on þam westene”), and the woman he in fact knows Mary to be. The hagiographer uses gender here to overturn expectations and revalorise the greatness of “oþre hælo wegas,” “other paths to salvation” (LME 73–4) than that traditionally conceived as male, clerical, and coenobitic. Mary of Egypt’s unconventional route to holiness might even be deemed superior to that chosen by Zosimus. The monk had indeed asked the angel “hweðer ænig þæra sy þe westen lufiað þe me on his dædum beforan sy” (LME 65–6, my emphasis),118 and in Mary he indeed finds the superior example. These non-traditional paths would then probably have provided affirmation to a non-traditional audience, one that included laymen and (semi-)religious women whose decision to turn to the spiritual life would probably have come about unconventionally. While it is difficult to know how a contemporary female audience would have responded to such a portrayal of sanctity, Diane Watt suggests that the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate might provide evidence of later reception of Mary’s life. The similarities between the two hagiographical accounts suggest that both Christina and her hagiographer were drawn to and influenced by Mary of Egypt’s unusual salvific trajectory.119 In a quest to reverse expectations, therefore, the hagiographer shows how the “lare” and “bysene” (LME 61) Zosimus expects from “sumne fæder on þam westene” (LME 195) can come in different forms. The writer describes how Mary of Egypt dons the outward integumentum of clerical authority,

which appeared to him.” there anyone among those who love the desert who is superior to me in his actions?” 119 Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 64–7. See Chapter 5, pp. 186–95 for a fuller discussion of Christina’s modelling of her own sanctity on the holy harlot type. 118 “Is

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Zosimus’s own mantle (“scyccels,” LME 256),120 but she does so only when she needs to cover her own avowed “feminine weakness,” her “wyflican tyddernysse” (LME 259). As Pelagia, then, the Egyptian’s cross-dressing is not straightforwardly to adopt masculine clothes and to perform masculinity: she reasserts her femininity at the precise moment when she puts on Zosimus’s cloak, and gains the appearance of male clerical authority that the cloak bestows upon her only because she is none of those things, because she is female, lay, and weak. In opposition to virgin martyrs’ lives where the naked virgin is unashamed, encoding her nakedness with prelapsarian, asexual virginity and innocence,121 Mary of Egypt’s feeling of shame shows she is still gendered, still a possible object of desire, but she queers this desire, linking it both with female weakness (her body) and male learning (her mantle). Mary’s gender is not only queered through Zosimus’s miscomprehending gaze. The Life of the Egyptian, we have seen, is already queer due to its being an adaptation from a male hermit’s vita, Jerome’s Life of Paul the First Hermit. Mary’s sanctity thus owes much to Desert Father lives. She might be naked and ashamed, but, like the Desert Fathers, she moves freely in a natural prelapsarian landscape where animals are tame.122 This, of course, brings us back to the reflection that holy harlots’ lives are particularly flexible in representing a variety of different non-binary genders, and non-traditional paths to salvation. This state of affairs leads Paul Szarmach, for instance, to argue that Mary of Egypt’s Life was akin to that of a female virgin martyr,123 while Robin Norris can claim a parallelism between the trajectory of Mary’s life and that of a male confessor.124 Both are right in their reading, but rather than align the holy harlot with either one of these traditionally “male” or “female” paths to holiness, it is more productive to think about the flexibility of the holy harlot model. The ambiguous post-conversion gender of the holy harlot model provides possibilities that allow the expression of the universality of unconventional ways to salvation. These are open to all, irrespective of their gender and past life. This might have come as a freeing example, especially for women, whose path to sainthood was conceived in the medieval period as one that was constant from birth or early childhood, while men were allowed a life of sin before a dramatic conversion.125 In the Life, this “gendering” is reversed: Mary is the one who experiences conversion, while Zosimus is emphatically

sciccels was probably a unisex piece of clothing, but Mary of Egypt dresses up here in a man’s sciccels. See Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 77 and 238–9. 121 Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 84–5. 122 Coon, Sacred Fictions, p. 73 and Stevenson, “The Holy Sinner,” pp. 29–30. 123 Paul E. Szarmach, “More Genre Trouble: The Life of Mary of Egypt,” in Writing Women Saints, pp. 140–64. 124 Norris, “Vitas Matrum.” 125 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 27–51, esp. pp. 33–4. 120 A

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography represented as one who was born and remained saintly.126 The holy harlot appears therefore as a gender equaliser, drawing from both male and female paths to sanctity, and signifying that sanctity is not to be associated with one or the other gender but, rather, with a transcendence of gender binarism. This ambiguity is reproduced and further developed by different figural associations, in parallel with her connection with the Bride and the Son of Man. Indeed, she is also paralleled with Eve and Adam.127 Before her repentance, Mary was an enticing Eve, tempting men into sin. Her acceptance of food from Zosimus (LME 842–52) may also associate her with Eve being tempted by the devil (turning the tables on her portrayal as a potentially evil spirit), but the same episode also casts her in the role of Adam, eating at the request of Eve. Mary is after all like Adam, inhabiting a symbolically prelapsarian world which is disrupted only with the arrival of Zosimus-Eve, when shame, and the need to cover one’s nakedness, surfaces. Similarly, Mary and Zosimus can be conceived as alternatively representing both the Bride and the Bridegroom. Zosimus effects an imitatio Christi in fasting for forty days in the wilderness, before encountering what might be an evil spirit, perhaps sent to tempt him.128 Mary, on the other hand, possesses a “Christ-like power of clairvoyance,”129 and imitates Christ throughout her life as a convert. From the first, Mary paraphrases Christ’s last words on the cross, “Deus Meus, Deus Meus, quid dereliquisti me?” (Matt. 27:46) when before the icon of the Virgin Mary: “Eala þu hlæfdige, […] Ne forlæt þu me” (LME 560–2).130 Other Christic echoes include her baptising herself in the River Jordan next to the church of St John the Baptist, recalling Christ’s own baptism at John’s hands,131 her temptation in the desert which echoes that of Christ,132 and her walking on water.133 Further, Zosimus twice washes her feet with his tears, evoking Christ who receives a similar treatment from Luke’s sinner of the city – assimilated with Mary Magdalene since Gregory the Great at least.134 Finally, Zosimus’s care for Mary’s body after her death may further be paralleled with the Magdalene’s desire to anoint Christ’s body after the passion,135 and this, along with the tradi126 LME

26–7; see also LME 40–1 and 55–8. Mary of Egypt as Eve, see Coon, Sacred Fictions, pp. xiii–xiv. On her as a “New Adam,” see David William Foster, “De Maria Egyptiaca and the Medieval Figural Tradition,” Italica 44 (1967), pp. 135–43, at p. 141. 128 Coon, Sacred Fictions, p. 86. 129 Ibid. 130 “O lady, […] do not forsake me.” On this, see Catherine Tkacz, “Byzantine Theology in the Old English De Transitu Mariae Ægyptiace,” in The Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, pp. 9–30, at pp. 26–8. 131 Matt. (3:13–7), Mk (1:9–11), and Lk. (3:21–2). 132 Matt. (4:1–11), Mk (1:12–13), and Lk. (4:1–13). 133 Jn (6:16–21), Matt. (14:22–3), and Mk (6:45–52). 134 See Introduction, p. 3. 135 See Lk. 24:1. 127 On

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature tional connection between Mary Magdalene and the Bride of Christ, figures Zosimus too as Sponsa Christi. The Bride of Christ is typologically linked with the Church and the Virgin Mary, so that Mary of Egypt’s analogical figuration as the bride links her too with these two figures. Mary’s association with the Virgin is reinforced by their sharing a name, and by other word echoes throughout the text which signal the Virgin’s role as Mary’s guide, parallelling Mary’s status as Zosimus’s teacher. Indeed, just as the Egyptian sees an icon, an “anlicnysse” (LME 491 and 495) of the Virgin and dubs her a (glorious) lady, “wuldorfæste hlæfdige,” “hlæfdige” (LME 493 and 560), Zosimus deems Mary of Egypt a “glorious icon” and a lady: “wuldorfæstlicnysse,” “hlæfdige” (LME 707 and 591). The association of the Virgin Mary with the holy harlot enables the Egyptian to regain in some way her long-lost virginity: while the Virgin’s body is pure/clean, “unwemmed” (LME 499), Mary of Egypt’s soul is allowed to become “unwemme” (LME 851). Like Afra and Pelagia, then, Mary of Egypt is another harlot that provides a fitting example for pre-Conquest women who could find comfort and inspiration in the portrayal of a woman who had sinned and lived in the world, but who could be cleansed and live thereafter in a purity akin to that of the Virgin Mary. As Lees and Overing point out, the plethora of figural representations of gender linking Mary of Egypt to Adam and Eve or to both the Bride and Christ, “produces and multiplies meaning.”136 The association of Mary of Egypt with scriptural figures is facilitated by the emphasis on when and how Zosimus first sees Mary’s body. The hagiographer tells us that she appears to him “on his right side, at noon that day during prayer after looking to the heavens,” details which, according to Lees, all constitute “reminders of the world of scriptural allegory in which he is placed.”137 This further anchors Mary of Egypt and her gendered portrayal in the allegorical and figural realm, so that Zosimus’s expressed desire for the holy harlot can be redirected onto a metaphorical and queer body that symbolises something else, be it God or the knowledge of God.138 Indeed, the hagiographer represents Zosimus’s clear desire for Mary and her body, but at the same time queers the object of this desire. When the monk sees Mary, he looks at her intently and runs after her in a way reminiscent of the erotically charged motif of the male god in Classical mythology, who,

and Overing, Double Agents, p. 134. On this multiplication as annihilating meaning instead, see Colin Chase, “Source Study as a Trick with Mirrors: Annihilation of Meaning in the Old English Mary of Egypt,” in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1986), pp. 23–33, at p. 31. 137 Clare A. Lees, “Vision and Place in the Old English Mary of Egypt,” in The Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, pp. 57–78, at p. 69. 138 On this, see Lees and Overing, Double Agents, p. 133, and Clare A. Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England,” JMEMS 27 (1997), pp. 17–46, at p. 43. 136 Lees

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography seized with love, pursues a young nymph.139 Zosimus’s pursuit of Mary is a transgression: of his vow not to seek human contact in the desert, but also of a key precept of the Desert Father life, that on seeing a woman one should run in the opposite direction.140 The hagiographer describes Zosimus as wanting to “geðeodan” (LME 230) with that which he chases, a verb that may mean “to engage with,” but is mostly used in Old English literature, notably in the Penitentials, to refer to sexual relations: he wants to “unite” with Mary.141 Zosimus’s desire to reach her and see her is reiterated time and again, using the verb “(ge-)wilnian,” “to desire,”142 a term strongly associated with sexual desire in the Life itself, particularly to describe Mary’s excessive lust before her conversion.143 The monk’s desire to stay with the Egyptian seems again to imply he is enamoured: “Eala, wære me gelyfed þæt ic moste þinum swaðum fyligan and þines deorwurðan andwlitan gesihðe brucan!” (LME 840–2).144 Mary is thus the object of Zosimus’s desire, a desire riddled with sexual ambiguity, which several critics have seen as a means of titillating the audience of the Life.145 I would rather argue that the hagiographer uses the memory of Mary’s past sexuality, the queerness of her post-conversion gender – as well as the figural, allegorical, or metaphorical meaning of her body after her conversion – to parallel sexual and spiritual desire. By turning sexual desire into spiritual desire, the hagiographer provides a relatable, earthly, and fallen point of reference which allows the audience to grasp the nature of spiritual desire. To use Ælfric’s terminology, the hagiographer attempts to replace the lichamlice (carnal) meaning of Mary the Egyptian’s body with a gastlice (spiritual, allegorical) significance.146 This is apparent in the multiplication of Mary’s figural associations, as well as in her portrayal as a figure of ambiguous or queer gender whenever Zosimus is shown to desire her. Indeed, when the monk expresses his longing for Mary’s body, it is usually a queer body which is described. For instance, the translator explains that is labelled by William Hansen as “the Pursuit Myth.” See Hansen, Classical Mythology, A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 288. 140 Stevenson, “Holy Sinner,” pp. 35–6. 141 For instance in the Shriftboc. See Allen J. Frantzen (ed.), “Shriftboc,” in The Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database, www.anglo-saxon.net/penance/index.php?p=JUNIU S_91a&anchor=X09.09.01. 142 LME 225, 230, 646, 731, etc. 143 LME 377, 379, 382 and 402. 144 “O that I might be allowed to follow in your footsteps and enjoy the sight of your precious face!” 145 Elliott, Roads to Paradise, p. 128 n. 62; Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 64. 146 On Ælfric’s interpretation of the sacred text, or nacodon word, naked word, in terms of corporeality and spirituality, see Horner, Discourse of Enclosure, pp. 133–6. 139 This

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the monk “desired to unite himself with that which fled there,” he “gewilnode hine geðeodan þan þe ðær fleah” (LME 230).147 When the monk pursues her, the Old English translator uses metaphors of the hunt. Zosimus is the most skilful hunter, the “gleawesta hunta” (LME 874), while she takes on the role of the wild beast in the metaphor: she is the “wildeora” and the “sweteste wildeor” (LME 226 and 874). While the image of the hunt is often imbued with sexual overtones,148 the use of the neuter pronoun and Zosimus’s avowed uncertainty as to what kind of beast he is actually pursuing effectively direct his desire toward a queer object, which stands for the monk’s craved knowledge of God. Indeed, the sexual ambiguity of such aforementioned verbs as gewilnian (to desire) and geðeodan (to unite) is mitigated by their use in a religious context in the Life before they are ever associated with the holy harlot: Zosimus, for example, desires edification (“gewilnian,” LME 193), and leaves for the wilderness to unite himself with God: “to Gode geðeode” (LME 181). Furthermore, even as Zosimus pursues Mary, his desire is for knowledge of the nature of her body, rather than of her body itself: he “gewilnode to oncnawenne hwæt þæt wildeor wære” (LME 225–6, my emphasis).149 In this way, the expected spiritual knowledge finds its embodiment in Mary’s body, which becomes the site of Zosimus’s union with God. While Mary’s past sexuality permits a parallel between spiritual and sexual desire, this does not mean that Zosimus’s desire for learning from a Desert Father, or indeed his subsequent desire for Mary, is sexual. Lees and Watt argue that Zosimus sexually desires this queer Mary, and that Mary’s desire for the Virgin is homoerotic.150 However, and while I agree that this desire may be queer in nature, it is queer only on a spiritual level, as the association with sexuality simply offers a relatable frame of reference to explicate one’s transcendent desire for holiness, knowledge, and God. This metaphorical representation is supported by Clare Lees’s remarks on desire in Old English: it can either be saintly or heroic, but it is rarely sexual.151 In religious texts, she explains, “only when the body is represented as wholly metaphorical or symbolic can it be represented as erotic.”152 Thus, “the implied audience is invited to use sensuality as a means of exploring spiritual knowledge.”153 This definition of desire in Old English literature fits the representation of sexuality in the Life of Mary 147 See

also on this Scheil, “Bodies and Boundaries,” pp. 143–4. Frye, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1976–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 69. 149 “Desired to learn what kind of wild beast that might be.” 150 Lees and Watt, “Age and Desire,” pp. 57–8. 151 Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire,” p. 22. See also Hugh Magennis, “‘No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons’? Attitudes to Sexuality in Old English Prose and Poetry,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 26 (1995), pp. 1–27. 152 Ibid., p. 26. 153 Ibid., p. 31. 148 Northrop

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography of Egypt, where Mary may be a literal object of desire, but she is also a figural and metaphorical one, one that is both of this world and of the next, a beast, a spirit, and a queer body, all at once. In the same way Mary represents numerous scriptural figures, her literal, female, body is also metaphorised when her body’s nourishment and clothing are presented as symbols for her spirituality. For instance, the repentant harlot tells Zosimus that her body is maintained by spiritual food: “soðlice ic eom afeded of þam genihtsumestan wistmettum minre fylle, þæt is mid þam hihte minre hæle” (LME 680–1).154 Her body is in addition “þam oferbrædelse Godes wordes, se ðe ealle þincg befehð and befædmad” (LME 682–3).155 Further, it is buried in periphrastic turns of phrase: Mary’s body is not naked, it is “eallunga lichamlicum wæfelsum bereafod” (LME 254–5),156 her genitalia are referred to as her shame, “sheame” (LME 255), her womanly frailty, “wiflican tyddernysse” (LME 259), and as “þam dæle þe heo mæst mihte and mæst neod wæs to beheligenne” (LME 269–70).157 With such symbolic associations and circumlocutions, the hagiographer “conjures a body metaphorized out of physical existence with the aid of the reading subject’s effort, imagination and intellect.”158 The text, like Mary’s body, is therefore set by the hagiographer at the crossroads of two competing representations of meaning. On the one hand, the lichamlice reminiscence of Mary’s desirable flesh is still present after her repentance and offers a metaphor for the reinscription of her now queer identity with gastlice meaning. As Irina Dumitrescu outlines, it is this transformation from sexual desire to spiritual knowledge that is difficult to navigate. Mary of Egypt employs desire in order to edify. The vocabulary used to portray Zosimus’s desire in the Life echoes that of the Song of Songs, “represent[ing] a similar understanding of the way desire is evoked, frustrated, and increased,”159 but there is a certain danger inherent in such representation,160 a danger personified in Zosimus, who repeatedly fails to grasp the difference between lichamlice and gastlice. However, the potential for misunderstanding is countered by Mary of Egypt, who constantly chastises

154 “Truly,

I am nourished to satiety with most abundant sustenance, that is, with the hope of my salvation.” This passage further links Mary of Egypt with Christ, who metaphorises the meaning of food, notably during the temptation. See Matt. 4:4; Lk. 4:4, or Jn 6:26. 155 “Clothed with the garment of the word of God, who embraces and encompasses all things.” 156 “Completely bereft of bodily clothing.” 157 “The parts she was most able to and which there was most need to conceal.” 158 Lees and Overing, Double Agents, p. 123. 159 Dumitrescu, The Experience of Education, p. 144. 160 Ibid., pp. 148–51.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Zosimus for his mistakes, and the hagiographer’s use of gender drives this point home. Mary of Egypt defines herself as a fallen, sinful woman only in reaction to the gaze of Zosimus. When she repeats that she is indeed a woman, it is only in response to the monk’s inability to grasp what he sees. In Beauvoir’s terms, she defines herself as Other only because she is faced with Man, Zosimus, and in turn Zosimus gains knowledge of himself because he is confronted with her otherness.161 Indeed, Mary would not need to cover herself were it not for his presence. Her body, then, is weak and womanly only in the potential it holds to excite the masculine gaze. She defines herself a “weak woman” only in order to chastise the unperfected male and his misreading of her nakedness. Mary, in this way, is female only if and because he is male. As such, these binary gender categories are used by the hagiographer to signify that wisdom, teaching, and holiness in general can be found anywhere. The writer chastises the audience through the figure of Zosimus, attempting to overturn biases by showing how Zosimus himself has mistaken preconceptions about in what form the learning and wisdom he seeks will appear. As Klein remarks, Old English writers seldom used the female gender to reflect on overt misogyny or feelings of marginality, disempowerment, or compassion. Rather, they deployed it to “explore and to express their views on the most difficult and debated issues of Anglo-Saxon society: conversion, social hierarchy, heroism, counsel, idolatry, and lay spirituality.”162 Here the hagiographer deploys gender to revalorise lay spirituality, eremitism, and a non-straightforward path to holiness, which are presented as equal or superior to the holiness Zosimus attains through a more traditional holy life. The knowledge and learning that Mary of Egypt and Zosimus possess could not be more different. Mary is an illiterate laywoman who draws authority from the prescience and near-omniscience that her holiness affords her as well as from her past experience with sin. Zosimus, on the other hand, is an educated and supposedly perfected monk, who has the authority of his knowledge of the Scriptures and of his clerical status to enable him to perform the sacraments. Yet the hagiographer demonstrates that Mary’s and Zosimus’s knowledge (and the authority they gain from it), is equal, and perhaps even complementary, both being represented as “lare,” albeit that one arises from traditional teaching and the other comes from within (“innan” LME 697). Mary’s authority is near-clerical, as she performs apparently sacramental acts normally reserved to the clergy, such as baptising herself in the river (LME 578–82) or blessing the waters of the River Jordan (LME 803–5). She also blesses Zosimus after a contest which lasts several hours, during which both ask for the other’s blessing, a contest that further demonstrates their de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), esp. introduction, pp. xxxvi–lv. 162 Klein, Ruling Women, p. 4. 161 Simone

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography equal status (LME 276–302). Although competitive humility is a recurrent topos in Desert Fathers’ lives – and the meeting between Zosimus and Mary of Egypt is probably modelled on Paul and Anthony’s competition over who should break the bread in Jerome’s Life of Paul the First Hermit – the fact that Mary is a woman changes the significance of the episode. Rather than pitting male hermit against male hermit, Mary and Zosimus oppose, and present as equal, masculine and feminine, coenobitic and eremitic, holy life and holy penitence, as well as learned and inspired. Each reinforces and validates the other’s authority, presenting both traditional and unconventional authority as complementary. Indeed, Mary’s decision to yield to Zosimus permits her to outline the importance of his priestly status, an authority justified by his learning and his ability to perform the sacraments (LME 282–3). Zosimus, on the other hand, validates her authority by claiming her foreknowledge as a sign of grace which is “not recognised on grounds of rank,” “ne bið oncnawen of þære medemnysse” but is, rather, indicated “by the works of the soul,” the “sawla dædum” (LME 295–6). Her prescience is further shown to benefit not only Zosimus, but the entirety of the coenobitic community, the Old English hagiographer amplifying the harlot’s authority in comparison with his Latin source. Indeed, the Latinate Mary of Egypt perceived “things” (“aliqua,” CCLME 710) which were in need of correction in the monastery, leading the abbot to correct the behaviour of some lost sheep “in need of censuring,” “quosdam emendari corripiendos” (CCLME 896). The Old English Mary of Egypt, on the other hand, reforms the faulty “practices” of the monastery as a whole (“wisan” and “mynsterwisan,” LME 746 and 955). The hagiographer similarly shows Mary as particularly authoritative with regard to Zosimus. She addresses him often in the imperative, forbidding him a certain behaviour, “forbeodan” (LME 811). Her authoritative stance over him is best expressed by the chiastic structure used to reflect his powerlessness to change her mind: “he ne geðyrstlæhte æniga þinga heo to letenne; heo æniga þinga gelet ben ne mihte” (LME 856–8).163 This accrued authority may represent the Old English hagiographer’s opinion that both secular and priestly worlds should contribute to religious reform. In addition, having a woman deliver the advice through preternatural knowledge employs the recurrent motif in Old English literature of prescient women whose advice was valued and respected.164 This is supported by the fact that both Mary of Egypt and the Virgin are shown as shining lights in 163 “He

did not dare to hinder her in any respect; in no respect could she be hindered.” Robinson, “The Prescient Woman in Old English Literature,” in Philologia Anglica: Essays Presented to Professor Yoshio Terasawa on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Kinshiro Oshitari and Yoshihiko Ikegami (Tokyo: Ken Kyusha, 1988), pp. 240–50; Klein, Ruling Women, p. 35; Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate? (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992), pp. 151–78, esp. at p. 156.

164 Fred

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the text, something that may link them with the literary figure of the “shining woman,” who is often described as “sunsciene,” “sunshining,” and adorned with gold in poetry.165 The shining woman typically is an “intelligent, strongminded, usually glowing or shining, verbally adept woman whose actions are resolute and self-initiated.”166 When Mary of Egypt prays in front of the image of the Virgin, she experiences a “leoht gehwanon me ymbutan scinende” (LME 639–40),167 and while the Latin has Zosimus raise his eyes to the sun and find her body only because it lies in that direction (CCLME 824–6), the Old English Zosimus usually locates the Egyptian through the light she emits: she is bathed in the glow of the moon, which lights up the whole sky as she blesses the waters of the Jordan (LME 805–6), and her body appears like a shining sun when she is dead, a “scinende sunne” (LME 883–4).168 This links both the Virgin and Mary of Egypt with women whose authoritative advice is respected. The Virgin Mary is often assimilated with the figure of the shining woman,169 but a number of other women are associated with this ideal, including Beowulf’s Wealhtheow, Widsith’s queen Ealhhild, Judith’s Judith and Cynewulf ’s Juliana.170 This tradition is reproduced to some extent in the authoritative stance of some real-life pre-Conquest women, notably abbesses. Some of these admittedly privileged women, often born of aristocratic or royal stock, headed the renowned double-monasteries that housed both men and women under the direction of a single abbess.171 There exist several examples of these abbesses being famed for their good advice: Saint Hild, who probably founded the monastery of Whitby in the seventh century, was praised by Bede as a great adviser,172 and her successor, Eanflæd, widow of King Oswiu, “was sought after by the archbishop of Canterbury for 165 This

tradition is traced by Pat Belanoff, in her article “The Fall(?) of the Old English Female Poetic Image,” PMLA 104 (1989), pp. 822–31, at pp. 822–4. 166 Belanoff, “The Fall(?),” p. 822. 167 “A light shining everywhere about me.” 168 This association may further have led the hagiographer to describe Mary as a “goldhord,” a “treasure of gold,” as it would have resonated with figures such as Elene or Judith, who are often “‘gold-’ or ‘ring-adorned’, ‘goldhroden’ or ‘beaghroden.’” On Elene and Judith, see Belanoff, “The Fall(?),” p. 822. 169 Ibid., p. 823. The Virgin is for instance presented in accordance to this literary tradition in Christ A. 170 Ibid. 171 On the intersectionality between class and gender in Old English literature, see for instance the collection of essays edited by Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing: Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For insular double monasteries, see Patricia Ranft, Women and the Religious Life in Pre-modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996) esp. pp. 24–9, and the two articles by John Godfrey mentioned in the bibliography. 172 HE, IV, 23, 408, in Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (eds and trans), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 409. See also Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, p. 135.

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography advice.”173 For the Old English hagiographer, therefore, a prescient woman is something to be respected. This is perhaps the reason why, when Zosimus is unable to go out of the monastery because of a sickness Mary foresees, he remembers her warning words as a “holy command” (“halgan gebod,” LME 770), whereas the Latin saw it as a prediction (“predictum,” CCLME 728). The Old English version reflects the almost performative power of a prescient woman’s prophecy. It is in this context that one should interpret the Old English hagiographer’s decision to emphasise the expansion of Mary of Egypt’s authority over Zosimus’s monastery: the author reproduces a feminine advisory role which is present in pre-Conquest culture, at the same time as reinforcing through this considerable feminine influence the importance of the clergy and its sacramental role. Simultaneously, the hagiographer offers up Mary of Egypt’s example for contemporary laymen and laywomen to aspire to in their quest for the “oþre hælo wegas.” The hagiographer presents Mary as queer, and effects a binary gender reversal in Mary and Zosimus’s interaction only to create meaning. For instance, to represent Zosimus’s inability to interpret Mary and her body correctly, the author inverts Zosimus and Mary’s gender performance. When Zosimus expresses an inappropriate desire to remain with her and enjoy the “sight of [her] precious face,” “þines deorwurðan andwlitan gesihðte brucan” (LME 841–2), the hagiographer chooses this moment to have him perform actions traditionally connoted as feminine, while Mary of Egypt is left to fulfil the masculine role in the relationship. This reversal is notably apparent in the portrayal of Zosimus as particularly emotional and exuding liquids, whereas Mary is defined by her calm reasoning. According to medieval medical and religious writers, following the Hippocratic and Galenic theory of the four humours, men are generally associated with dryness and warmth, while women are cold and wet.174 This concept is also linked with the traditional gendered binary that established reason as a masculine, and emotion as a feminine concept.175 In opposition to these broad generalisations, Zosimus is shown to embody the feminine in his relationship with Mary: each of his emotions, be it fear, awe, or desire, is expressed through liquid coming out of his body, for example when he breaks into sweating fits or when he weeps (no less than fifteen times).176 He does so, however, only when he is in the Women and the Religious Life, p. 27. L. Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973), pp. 485–501, at pp. 491–2. 175 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 75. She argues that male and female values such as intellect/body, active/passive, rational/irrational, reason/emotion, selfcontrol/lust, judgement/mercy and order/disorder were contrasted. See Norris, “Vitas Matrum,” p. 102, for the Old English emphasis on the strength of Zosimus’s emotions. 176 For Zosimus sweating, see LME 287 and 334–5. For his crying, see LME 235, 240, 246–7, 359, 408, 705, 789, 794, 854, 856, 876, 887, 908–9 and 940–2 twice. See also on this Norris, “Vitas Matrum,” p. 86, n. 30, and Coon, Sacred Fictions, p. 88. 173 Ranft, 174 Vern

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature presence of Mary, who is remarkably calm, and becomes tearful only once during their encounter, when she is given the Eucharist (LME 830).177 This exception confirms the hagiographer’s use of gender and gender reversal to signify: in representing Mary’s breaking into tears at the exact moment Zosimus shows her the Eucharist he has consecrated, gender performance and biological gender are suddenly realigned, pointing to the importance of Zosimus’s sacramental role. The hagiographer shows through this inversion of gender roles Zosimus’s inability to understand the situation, and normalises them when Zosimus is performing according to his rank as a priest. The monk misreads the situation in which he finds himself, firstly in anticipating that he will receive knowledge from a male hermit, secondly in his believing that Mary of Egypt’s sanctity is superior to his own priestly power, whereas the hagiographer presents both as of equal value, and thirdly in his failure to comprehend the spiritual meaning of Mary of Egypt’s teaching. The flexibility of holy harlots’ lives offered their mixed pre-Conquest audience a relatable and non-traditional path to holiness, one that presents a turn to God as a way to move beyond trajectories set by one’s gender. The type of the holy harlot saint includes a helpfully large umbrella of models which influence each other, peddling universal examples of life journeys from sin to conversion. In parallel, hagiographers represent such saints as Afra and Mary of Egypt as having regained a virginal quality that would have been particularly inspiring for female religious who had lived in the world earlier in their lives. It is my belief that the particularly early popularity of holy harlots in pre-Conquest England derives at least partially from this flexibility and this relatability. At the same time, this model is also versatile for hagiographers who use the portrayal of the harlot saint’s body and gender to emphasise important concepts, or to designate certain behaviours as laudable and others as reprehensible. The assimilation of femininity with sin before the prostitutes’ repentance represents the writers’ equation of femininity with fallen humanity, something which will reappear in the later medieval period. The shift from femininity/fallen humanity to a state of queerness (as opposed to the tendency of Latin sources to represent this shift as one from female to male) enables hagiographers to portray the decision to devote one’s life to God as altogether moving beyond social or gendered conceptions of the self. In addition to this queering of genders, it is clear that the hagiographer of the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt was adept at using gender reversal to 177 Other

elements of gender reversal can be mentioned in passing, for instance, Zosimus’s caring for the Egyptian by feeding her, mourning her, or caring for her body after death, actions traditionally considered the prerogative of women. On this, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 219, and her Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 191.

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The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography express both complex ideas about the diversity of paths to salvation and the validity and equality of voices for reform from different agents of change. The representation of the holy harlot as queer changes dramatically with the end of the early medieval period. The tenth-century Benedictine Reform is widely recognised to have led to a hardening of gender boundaries, at the same time as the Norman Conquest brought along not only a new elite but also a new language and a new genre, romance, which offers stereotypical representations of gender that will influence the portrayal of the repentant prostitute saint in the later medieval period.

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CHAPTER 2 THE POST-CONQUEST HARLOT: AFFECTIVE PIETY AND THE ROMANCE GENRE

T

he post-conquest repentant harlot has surprisingly little in common with her Old English counterpart, as the late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne (or T Vie)1 and the late thirteenth-century Middle English Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalene will make plain. This shift is at least partially caused by the cross-fertilisation of hagiography with romance from the twelfth century onward, as well as the rise in popularity of a more affective piety centring on the human Christ and revalorising performances of femininity. This causes the prostitute-turned-saint to be transformed into a romance lady whose femininity and concomitant sensuality are stable and unchanging throughout her life, so that femininity in these lives represents both the most condemnable of sins and the highest heavenly rewards. In other words, the harlot saint has the potential to be the worst sinner and the most revered saint throughout her life: she just needs to redirect her early lecherous excesses towards a more deserving object, Christ, and express them in the language of bridal imagery. As such, she offers a highly relatable model for Everyman. As Christ’s bride, her trajectory mirrors the ascent of the Christian soul from an earthly to a heavenly plane. Further, through their representation as Brides of Christ, holy harlots become linked with the Virgin Mary, and regain a form of honorary virginity. In truth, their affective stance leads them to represent all facets, or extremes, that femininity encompasses: from most lecherous to utterly virginal, from maidservant to queen, the holy harlot is all women, and all woman. We have seen in the previous chapter that the Old English repentant harlot’s conversion already entailed much less of a gender inversion than that of her Latinate predecessor, so that becoming a female saint did not mean 1

The adoption of the terminology T Vie for the life reflects Peter F. Dembowski’s classification in his edition of the life: La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne (Geneva: Droz, 1977). Hereafter abbreviated as T.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature for them performing masculinity but, rather, queering one’s gender, moving away from gender binaries to rise above the rest of humanity. This departure from masculinity is completely realised in the two harlot saints presented in this chapter, who, instead of becoming queer, perform femininity in sin as well as in sainthood. Their stories reflect the movement, sketched by Barbara Newman, from the early “hieronymian” model of female sainthood, the virago or virile woman who becomes male through her virginity, to the later WomanChrist model, whereby the female saint could practise an imitatio Christi through a performance of femininity, claiming “for women not mere equality, much less identity, with the problematic male norm, but a set of alternative and ostensibly superior values.”2 Indeed, the repentant harlots’ femininity is revalorised in the two lives under scrutiny in this chapter, and this does not prevent them from being paralleled more strongly than before with Christ. This feminisation of the harlot’s post-conversion gender is accompanied by a shift in the type of legitimacy used to validate the harlot’s authority, as the saint’s charismatic power is somewhat belittled to make way for more traditional authorising figures: that of Christ and the clergy. The harlot wields impressive power both before and after her repentance. Her voice, left unchecked when she is a common woman, is depicted as utterly destructive, reflecting deep misogynistic anxiety about women left to roam the public space unchecked. After the repentant saint’s conversion, however, her speech is still particularly enticing but is conceived positively, though it is now framed by masculine authority. As in the Old English lives, gender also serves here as a metaphor for the relationship between the laity and the clergy. The holy harlots’ feminine and sensual body becomes a canvas used as a multivalent symbol that can straightforwardly signify sin, virtue, sex, and femininity, but also comes to represent the laity and humanity in general, reflecting concepts such as penitence and the different paths to salvation for Everyman. AFFECTIVE PIETY AND THE HOLY HARLOT Scholars have argued that the growing focus on a compassionate meditation upon Christ’s humanity and crucifixion was the result of the “influence of innovative men – John of Fécamp, Anselm of Canterbury, Goscelin of St Bertin, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, Francis of Assisi.”3 While these men, as well as the Cistercian and Franciscan orders as a whole, were indeed instrumental in the popularisation of affective piety, Sarah Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 3. 3 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 17. 2

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The Post-Conquest Harlot McNamer has since posited that works for and sometimes by women offered a more convincing point of origin for this movement.4 The revalorisation of femininity and of female saints, especially of holy harlots, which occurs at the same time and in correlation with this devotional turn is a strong argument for the particular agency of women in the popularisation of affective piety. From wherever this affective turn originates, its ties with the holy harlot, and especially Mary Magdalene, are promoted by the mendicant orders and by an important proponent of this new affective focus: the immensely influential Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux.5 Bernard “loved the concrete and experiential. From experience he took his starting point, and it was to experience that he wanted to lead.”6 In this context, the harlot saints’ sexual experience is key, so that Bernard takes the holy harlot’s life as his model in his De diligendo Deo and his Sermones super cantica canticorum for the movement of the Christian faithful from an experiential, earthly carnal love, to a carnal love towards Christ, and finally to spiritual love for God.7 The Sponsa Christi first had to purify herself from sin, which she does by kneeling corporeally in front of Christ and carnally kissing his feet, just as Mary Magdalene did in Luke 7:38: “corporalibus pedibus corporaliter incubans, et corporalibus labiis pedes eosdem deosculans.”8 She then moves on to kissing his hands,9 a kiss conducive to love, virtue, and knowledge, so she can finally reach up and anoint or kiss Christ’s head, like the Magdalene who is then rebuked by the apostles for her waste (Matt. 26:8–10), an action symbolical of spiritual Affective Meditation, pp. 58–85. For affective spirituality and its connection with the Cistercians, see notably André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du Moyen Âge latin (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1971), and André Vauchez, La spiritualité au Moyen Âge occidental: VIIIe–XIIe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1994). See in particular Katherine Ludwig Jansen, “Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995) pp. 1–25, and Daniel Russo, “Entre le Christ et Marie: La Madeleine dans l’art italien des XIIIe–XVe siecles,” in Marie Madeleine dans la mystique, les arts et les lettres, ed. Eve Duperray et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), pp. 172–90, at pp. 176–87. Jean Leclercq, “General Introduction to the Works of Saint Bernard (III),” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 40 (2005), pp. 365–93, at pp. 365–6. See also Michael Casey, Athirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1988), esp. p. 55. On this, see in particular Casey, Athirst for God. See also Denis Renevey, “Enclosed Desires: A Study of the Wooing Group,” in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 39–62, at p. 53. For the Magdalene’s importance to the Cistercians in general, see Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “The Bride of Christ: The Iconography of Mary Magdalen and Cistercian Spirituality,” Poetica 47 (1997), pp. 33–47. “By prostrating herself corporeally at the lord’s corporeal feet, and by kissing these feet with her corporeal lips.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons sur le Cantique, ed. Jean Leclercq et al., trans. Paul Verdeyen, 5 vols (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1996–2007), vol. 1, Sermones super cantica canticorum, Sermo 6, PL 183, 805a. Ibid., sermones 7–9.

4 McNamer,

5

6

7

8

9

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature union.10 Bernard even imagines himself in these different roles, enacting the Magdalene’s scriptural roles in order to figure himself as a Bride:11 nonnunquam ego, ut modicum faciam excessum, cum sederem mihi ad pedes Jesu moerens, et offerens sacrificium spiritus contribulati in recordatione peccatorum meorum; aut certe ad caput, si quando vel raro starem, et exsultarem in recordatione beneficiorum ejus, audivi dicentes: Ut quid perditio haec? Causantes videlicet quod soli viverem mihi, qui, ut putabant, multis prodesse possem. Et dicebant: Potuit enim venundari multo, et dari pauperibus (Matth. XXVI, 8–10).12

Bernard thus takes the Magdalene as his overarching model for the Soul’s spiritual ascension as Bride of Christ: she represents Everyman’s quest for salvation. Bernard uses the scene at Simon’s house as an example of the Soul turning away from her earthly lovers to her heavenly Spouse,13 a seamless movement we will recognise in lives of holy harlots in this chapter. In this way, carnal experience need not be erased, hidden, or punished out of existence, it needs only to be redirected toward God. In fact, the harlot’s early lechery even facilitates her becoming a Sponsa, so that a sin that is traditionally associated with the feminine constitutes a gateway to reaching the highest union with Christ as his Bride, another heavily gendered concept. We will see in Chapter 5 that Margery Kempe, for instance, took her cue from the holy harlot type to constitute herself an early life of sin that would match her later bridal status.14 Her insistence on her past sexual sin seems to reinforce her later claim to be a Bride of Christ. Bernard is only the most influential figure establishing the repentant harlot’s femininity as stable, connecting her early life of sexual sin and her later sensuality as a Bride. We have seen that in the Old English lives the saintly harlot was already sometimes associated with bridal imagery as well as with the Virgin, and that this enabled her to regain some sort of virginal purity which permitted her

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo 12, PL 183, 831a. Bernard felt no qualms in associating both men and women with the figure of the Bride of Christ. On Bernard’s gendered conception of the Bride as an admixture of feminine and masculine, see Shawn M. Krahmer, “The Virile Bride of Bernard of Clairvaux,” Church History 69 (2000), pp. 304–27. 12 “Often myself, if I may digress a little, when I sat myself down sadly at Jesus’s feet, offering up the sacrifice of a broken spirit in the memory of my sins; or again, but more rarely, when I stood by his head and was filled with happiness at the memory of his favors, I could hear people saying: ‘Why this waste?’ They complained that I thought only of myself when, in their view, I could be working for the welfare of others. In effect they said: ‘This could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor’ (Matt. 26:8–10).” Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo 12, PL 183, 832a. 13 Ibid., Sermo 9, PL 183, 815 a–b. 14 See Chapter 5, pp. 205–6. 10 11

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The Post-Conquest Harlot to be associated with the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs (Cant. 4:12).15 With the shift, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from a Hieronymian conception of virginity as primarily physical, to an Augustinian definition of it as spiritual, “ultimately defined by the will,”16 re-virginisation being obtained by way of confession and repentance,17 the holy harlots in this chapter are further permitted the favour of a second virginity. Their sexual-turned-bridal activity leads to their re-virginisation, paradoxically enabling them to become assimilated with the Virgin Mary herself. Hagiographers often pun on the fact that Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene share their name with the Virgin, and it sometimes becomes arduous to distinguish which Mary, of the harlot or the Virgin, is being referred to in the text. The holy harlots’ ability to evolve from being sinners to honorary virgins and Brides of Christ offers them up as much more accessible models than the Virgin to medieval women who had lost their virginity. This approachability accounts for the repentant harlots’ continued popularity at this point in time, when other examples of female sainthood all privileged virginity. Indeed, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne notes that female virginity so dominates vernacular hagiographical narratives in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt are the only two non-virginal female saints to appear in Anglo-Norman lives.18 Further, it seems that the holy harlot model was seductive for men as well as women. All could hope to affectively identify with the Virgin by turning around their sin in imitation of the harlot saint’s life. Female sexuality and lechery are used in our texts as metaphors for sin in general, so that the harlot’s regained virginity can represent absolution from sin for everybody, a washing away of past transgression that would be utterly tempting for men and women alike. The rise of affective Christocentric piety effected other important changes in the medieval mentality that would ultimately render the holy harlot’s post-conversion feminine gender increasingly prestigious. The shift in focus from Christ’s divinity to his suffering humanity leads to the revalorisation of femininity and female sanctity, as Christ’s humanity and compassionate 15

On the Virgin’s assimilation with the figure of the Bride in literature, see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 151–77. 16 Clarissa W. Atkinson, “‘Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass’: The Ideology of Virginity in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983), pp. 131–43, at pp. 134–5. See also Newman, From Virile Woman, pp. 30–1. 17 Atkinson, “‘Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass,’” p. 137. See also Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 123–50, and Cindy L. Carlson and Angela J. Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 18 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991), pp. 314–32, at pp. 314–15.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature emotionality, concepts that are linked with the feminine, come to be valued over divinity and dispassionate reason, traditionally associated with masculinity. Indeed, the “feminine” emotionality which facilitates affective meditation on Christ’s suffering is increasingly praised. Similarly, because Christ had received his divinity from his Father and his humanity was bestowed by his mother, his humanity came to be associated with the feminine.19 The increasing importance given to Christ’s suffering humanity exacerbated the tendency to portray Christ as feminine. The rise of Eucharistic devotion intensified the notion of a nurturing, feminine Christ, and Christ’s wounds came to be seen as representing feminine “porosity,” to the point that his side wound, conceived as Eucharistic nourishment, was sometimes paralleled with the Virgin’s lactating breasts.20 The portrayal of a nurturing, wounded, and feminine Christ led to the praise of actions and concepts linked with femininity. Women could thus not only perform an Imitatio Christi without relinquishing their gender; their femininity facilitated such a performance. This tendency should be seen in parallel with the later medieval trend, influenced by Anselm, the Cistercians, and the Franciscans, that saw the appropriation of feminine images by the male self. This is discussed, among others, by Barbara Newman, Caroline Walker Bynum, and JoAnn McNamara.21 The feminine comes to be associated with notions of humanity, emotion, laity, and so on, and writers use gender in order to articulate their complex reflection on these other categories. At the same time as Christ becomes feminised, the Cistercians give a larger role to women, and female saints take on greater importance than male ones, especially the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. The Cistercians establish the Virgin Mary as their patron saint,22 and elevate the status of the Magdalene and holy harlots on account of their bridal status, but also because Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. pp. 151–80. See also Theresa Coletti, “A Feminist Approach to the Corpus Christi Cycles,” in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. Richard K. Emmerson (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1990), pp. 79–89. 20 Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 126 and 140. She for instance mentions Bernard of Clairvaux, who assimilates Christ’s nurturing qualities with that of a breast-feeding mother. See ibid., p. 115. See also Chapter 4, p. 178. 21 Newman, From Virile Woman, pp. 26, 138 and 144; Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 135–54; JoAnn McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994), pp. 3–29; and David Damrosch, “Non Alia Sed Aliter: The Hermeneutics of Gender in Bernard of Clairvaux,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 181–95. 22 Georges Duby, Le temps des cathédrales: l’art et la société, 980–1420 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 150. 19

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The Post-Conquest Harlot they represent an eremitic model that they favour and admire, as well as a turn from worldly cares to a religious life which a lot of early Cistercians could relate to. Concomitantly, the popularity of all the holy harlots, as hermits and ascetics, gains momentum.23 It is not a coincidence that, in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there are an increasing number of female saints’ lives in comparison to male ones at the same time as the popularity of Marian piety and holy harlots gains momentum.24 This “mariological” turn, incidentally, influences the form and popularity of one of our holy harlot’s lives, that of Mary of Egypt. Indeed, her story is incorporated into collections of Marian miracles, so that the life’s account of the miracle effected in front of the image of the Virgin in Jerusalem takes centre stage, and its structure is amended accordingly: events are now recounted chronologically instead of starting with Zosimus’s discovery of Mary of Egypt in the desert. Alongside femininity, the connotation of sensuality becomes more positive than before. In Anselm’s Orationes sive meditationes or Bernard of Clairvaux’ Sermones super cantica canticorum, the sensual does not exclusively belong to the domain of the sinful, as the five senses come to represent avenues to know God. Bernard of Clairvaux masterfully depicts in his Sermones the mystical experience of knowing God by evoking the sensuality of touching, tasting, seeing, and hearing the divine. As Walker Bynum argues, “to Cistercians, learning by experience becomes deeply affective and sensual: experience means ‘tasting,’ ‘embracing’ – an almost tactile meeting with God.”25 Sensual pleasure is then seen as a metaphor for the divine mystical union, and, as already mentioned, the holy harlots’ early sexuality in our texts is quite naturally conceived as a metaphor for their later saintly life, their earthly lovers paralleled with their divine Bridegroom. “For Bernard, the human experience of love opened a unique path to the divine. Love is a mode of knowing (amor intellectus est): the knowing of God through the knowing of the self.”26 Sensual love is therefore conceived as a gateway to understanding and experiencing the divine union. Vauchez, La spiritualité, pp. 102–4. Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 185. For the Magdalene’s popularity in later medieval England, see Introduction, pp. 3–4. For her popularity in France, see Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie-Madeleine en Occident, des origines à la fin du Moyen Age, 2 vols (Auxerre: Publications de la Société des fouilles archéologiques de l’Yonne, 1959). For the rise of Marian piety in the twelfth century, see notably Luigi Gambero, Mary in the Middle Ages (Milan: San Paolo, 2000), and Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 25 Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 79. See also Michael Casey, Athirst for God. 26 Jeanne A. Nightingale, “Inscribing the Breath of a Speaking Voice: Vox Sponsae in St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Canticles and in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide,” in Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness, ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 489–506, at p. 494. 23 André 24

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Finally, and this is also the logical outcome of the Cistercians’ paralleling of earthly love with divine union, our two texts evidence the bridging of the boundary between saints’ legends and romance that happens in literature from the twelfth century onward.27 Bernard’s writings assimilate the romance and courtly influences with which he had become conversant during his youth as an aristocrat. Romance provided him with new ways of voicing religious experience: Christ becomes the Lover-Knight as well as the human Bridegroom.28 “Although Bernard publicly chided the excesses of courtly romance lovers, he structured his own personal vision of love for God in terms of the erotic passion of a lover for his beloved.”29 Bernard mainly used the language of courtly love to speak of the Soul’s union with God for the benefit of many of his aristocratic friends turned Cistercians: they could leave behind a life often devoted to a secular love and turn to God in the monastery while still keeping a courtly frame of reference. Of course, this “romancisation” of the religious is not only due to the Cistercians: it can be observed in other orders and other genres than in hagiography. The lover-knight Christ that appears in part 7 of Ancrene Wisse or in The Wooing of our Lord is a good example of this.30 From the twelfth century onward, then, the holy harlot’s life represents femininity in its most sinful and holy realisations, and this femininity makes her particularly relatable to men and women alike. THE ANGLO-NORMAN T VIE DE MARIE L’EGYPTIENNE The late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman verse T Vie is the earliest vernacular version adopting the new mariological structure of lives of Mary of Egypt. Of uncertain origin, both in terms of source and geography,31 we at least

See notably Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Anne Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 28 Marie Le May, The Allegory of the Christ-Knight in English Literature (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1932) and Rosemary Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature,” The Review of English Studies n.s. 13 (1962), pp. 1–16. 29 Nightingale, “Vox Sponsae,” p. 494. 30 Bella Millett (ed.), Ancrene Wisse, A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from other Manuscripts, 2 vols, EETS o.s. 325 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), part VII; Catherine Innes-Parker (ed. and trans.), The Wooing of Our Lord and The Wooing Group Prayers (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015). 31 Dembowski, Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, p. 14. This will be the edition used for the T Vie. For some suggestions about possible sources, though all of these retain the “older,” non-chronological, narrative structure, see Alfred T. Baker “Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne,” Revue des langues romanes 59 (1917), pp. 145–401, at p. 170. 27

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The Post-Conquest Harlot know that the life was influenced by a Latin collection of Marian miracles, something that would support its English origin. Indeed, the earliest Latinate collections of Marian miracles were written in England by Dominic of Evesham and William of Malmesbury, and became popular in France only later, in the course of the thirteenth century.32 Several other elements point to an Anglo-Norman provenance for the T Vie.33 One may, for instance, mention the distinctively Anglo-Norman poetic style of the Vie,34 and the text’s circulation and popularity in England.35 Half of the T Vie manuscripts are of Anglo-Norman origin, and the vernacular poem itself can demonstrably be identified as the source of at least two later Anglo-Norman Vies of Mary of Egypt.36 It follows that the T version was popular enough in England to be copied there and to inspire insular hagiographers, thereby warranting its inclusion in the present study. The Anglo-Norman author of the T Vie presents the Egyptian as feminine and romance-like throughout the poem. After her conversion, the saint’s femininity and eroticism become a metaphor for her life as a whole, as well as imbuing her with bridal attributes and associating her with the Virgin. While female prostitution and Bridal virginity might be thought to represent polar opposites in terms of feminine sexuality, the hagiographer parallels the two: both lead women to reject their traditional reproductive role within Richard W. Southern, “The English Origins of the ‘Miracles of the Virgin,’” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958), pp. 176–216. The most extensive study on Marian collections is still Adolf Mussafia, “Studien zu den mittelalterlichen Marienlegenden,” in Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Classe der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, vols 113 (1886), 115 (1887), 119 (1889), 123 (1893), and 129 (1899). 33 An argument supported by Alfred Baker and Duncan Robertson, though questioned by Peter Dembowski and Michele Schiavone de Cruz-Saenz. See Baker, “Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne,” p. 187, and Duncan Robertson, “The Anglo-Norman Verse Life of St Mary the Egyptian,” Romance Philology 52 (1998), pp. 13–44. Dembowski “Le Poème anonyme sur sainte Marie l’Egyptienne est-il anglo-normand ?” in Atti del XIV Congresso Internazionale di Linguistica et Filologia Romanza, ed. A. Varvaro (Naples: Macchiaroli; Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1978), pp. 445–65, and Michele Cruz-Saenz (ed.), The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt (Barcelona: Puvill, 1979). 34 Robertson, “Anglo-Norman Verse Life.” 35 Dembowski, Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne, p. 17. Cruz-Saenz, Mary of Egypt. There is at least enough evidence of “insular circulation or connections” for this life to be included in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s list of Anglo-Norman verse saints’ lives. See her “‘Clerc u lai, muïne u dame:’ Women and Anglo-Norman Hagiography in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 61–85, at pp. 76–7. 36 See Robertson, “Anglo-Norman Verse Life,” p. 16. For the two Anglo-Norman versions, see Dembowski, Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne, pp. 18–19; Baker, “Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne,” p. 380; and Robertson, “Anglo-Norman Verse Life,” pp. 16–18. Dembowski edits these two versions, which he calls N and W. See his Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne, pp. 153–69. 32

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature society, and both cause them to become “common,” belonging to no one and everybody at once, either as a harlot or a saint. Lechery and Bridal virginity thus arise from very similar performances of femininity, so that the harlot is privileged in becoming a saintly Bride, compared to virgin martyrs and saintly mothers. In parallel with the saint’s continuous femininity, her voice is also demonstrably and consistently powerful from her early life of sin to her later eremitic retreat in the wilderness. This, however, with different results: before the saint’s conversion, her rhetorically convincing and enticing speech is utterly destructive. After her repentance, the same persuasive power yields positive results, enabling the holy woman to teach Zosimus through seduction. While the Egyptian’s voice may be powerful and associated with her feminine sensuality throughout the Vie, it becomes acceptable only when put under the legitimating aegis of the Virgin and of Zosimus. The T Vie is a striking example of the twelfth-century influence of secular romance on hagiography: it virtually becomes “a courtly romance.”37 The setting is particularly romance-like. Mary departs on her journey to Jerusalem “en mai” (T 217), the month during which heroes traditionally set out for new adventures;38 when she journeys to the wilderness, the hagiographer has her stop and sleep “sous un arbre” (T 604), a resting locale that usually holds great significance in romances and is often conducive to a visit from a fairy or a dream vision.39 Finally, Mary’s eremitism does not take place in the desert; it is instead set in a forest, a “bocaige” (T 615), the theatre of many a romance.40 This “romancisation” extends to Mary of Egypt, who, before her conversion, possesses the romance heroine trifecta of beauty, youth, and nobility: she is “jovente” (T 66), “de grant parage” (T 89), her speech is courteous (T 189–90), and she is promised a “rice mari” (T 86).41 The long, descending catalogue devoted to her voluptuous curves is one that Robertson deems “any heroine of Chrétien de Troyes would have been proud to wear.”42 It definitely emphasises the eroticism of her female body. In it, as Simon Gaunt remarks, 37

38

39 40

41 42

Robertson, “Twelfth-Century Literary Experience: The Life of St. Mary the Egyptian,” Pacific Coast Philology 22 (1987), pp. 71–7, at p. 71. See also Dembowski, “Literary Problems of Hagiography in Old French,” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976), pp. 117–30, at p. 125. Judith Weiss, “The Metaphor of Madness in the Anglo-Norman Lives of St Mary the Egyptian,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 161–74, at p. 166. See, for instance, such episodes in Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther or Sir Launfal. It might also be that an audience unfamiliar with deserts would find it more relevant to imagine the saint in a woodland. On this see, for instance, Jane Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p. 138. See also T 65, 212, and 352. T 157–90. See Robertson, “Twelfth-Century Literary Experience,” p. 73, and Gaunt, Gender and Genre, pp. 217–19.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot “Marie is being held up as a spectacle and as an object of desire; particular attention is paid to her breasts, which are often passed over discreetly in courtly descriptions.”43 The future saint’s unbridled, excessive sexuality is dwelled upon without extended moralisation. The societal liminality of the female prostitute and the virginal saint is at once paralleled and opposed. Indeed, like a virgin martyr, the twelve-year-old Mary of Egypt argues with her parents (T 99), refuses their plans to marry her off (T 86), and flees into another realm because of her faith – though this faith is in her youth rather than in God (T 66).44 The Egyptian’s ability to satisfy all of her lovers day and night on the ship to Jerusalem is deemed miraculous,45 and her sexual sin acts as a mock martyrdom within the story, her body, narratively exposed through the descending catalogue, paralleling the virgins’ naked, public exposure.46 Her suitors look on while old wise men pity her for her lechery, paralleling the onlookers at a virgin’s torture who lament her choice because she is beautiful and young.47 At the same time these similarities highlight the differences: she acts in a wholly sinful way, whereas virgin martyrs are holy. Notwithstanding this, Mary of Egypt’s excessive sinfulness already heralds her sanctity: both she and her body remain unchanged throughout her life, as Mary’s ability to push her body to extremes, be they of virtuous asceticism or of lecherous sin, remains constant, and is repeatedly interpreted as miraculous. Far from condemning her, the internal audience of the life still lavishly praises her for her beauty and nobility.48 Duncan Robertson notes that, before the saint’s conversion, “the poem presents a lyrical celebration of beauty and sexuality such as few texts in Old French can match – and this in a saint’s life.”49 Why, then, this choice on the hagiographer’s part to focus so much attention on Mary’s sensual body, and on her lechery? While it is possible it be to satisfy his audience’s desire to be titillated, as Simon Gaunt

Gender and Genre, p. 219. See T 177–80. Emma Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), p. 159. 45 T 316–24. Brigitte Cazelles, “Modèle ou mirage: Marie l’Egyptienne,” The French Review 53 (1979), pp. 13–22. 46 See Cazelles, Lady as Saint, pp. 43–61, and Chapter 1 above, p. 7. 47 T 206–8. Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives, p. 160. For other ways in which Mary’s early life evokes religious concepts and mocks them, see Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 87. 48 T 203–16. 49 Robertson, “Poem and Spirit. The Twelfth-Century French ‘Life’ of Saint Mary the Egyptian,” Medioevo Romanzo 7 (1980), pp. 305–27, at p. 316. 43 Gaunt, 44

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature argues,50 it is more probable that the emphasis on Mary’s loose sexual mores is rather intended to evidence more colourfully the intentio auctoris expressed at length in the Vie’s preface: to illustrate the power of penitence (T 13–54). Mary of Egypt’s lust is therefore a metaphor for sin in general. While the repentant saint’s feminine beauty and sexuality may be celebrated, the power of persuasion she derives from it is shown to be particularly disruptive to society, something that will disappear in later holy harlot lives of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The hagiographer offers a graphic representation of Mary’s suitors slaughtering one another at her door, their violence flooding the streets with a literal river of blood while Mary laughs, carefree, in the background.51 This unframed, unrestrained charisma, drawn from the harlot’s enticing femininity, is so dangerous for society that both Alexandria and the entirety of the countryside around it are affected by her behaviour: “Le vile iert de li empirie, / Auques estoit ja mehaignie, / Et le païs tot environ / En iert en grant perdicion” (T 153–6).52 The hagiographer gives voice to medieval anxieties about women being free from patriarchal constraints, displaying here the destructive potential that they might have on society.53 The societal dangers of an unchecked female body are reinforced by that of an unchecked feminine voice, as Mary of Egypt is shown before her conversion already wielding the persuasive rhetoric she will employ later, but she first uses it for the satisfaction of her own excess, and in so doing entices all who are exposed to her sin. Her speech is rhetorically adept and seductive, for instance when she couches her offer to sell her body as payment for her passage to Jerusalem as a request for Christian charity: Seignur, dist ele, pelerin, Dex vos amaint a bone fin, Et vos doinst tele volenté Que me fessissiés carité; Je sui chi une povre feme, Et si sui nee d’autre regne, Gender and Genre, pp. 227–9. Gaunt posits a mainly masculine intended audience for the T Vie, in order to fit with his argument. However, the celebration of unapologetic sexuality would be pleasurable and titillating to masculine and feminine audiences alike. 51 T 129–48. 52 “The city was worsened by her, was somewhat now in mayhem, and the countryside around it was in great destruction.” All translations from the French of England are mine. On similar representations of the holy harlot’s destructive pre-conversion charisma, see the version of the Egyptian’s life in Adgar’s Gracial, lines 9–22, and the early thirteenth-century N version, lines 31–6. Both appear in Dembowski, La Vie de sainte Marie, pp. 154 and 160. 53 On this, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 50 Gaunt,

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The Post-Conquest Harlot Je n’i ai ami ne parent, Se m’i esta molt malement, O moi je n’ai argent ne or, Tot poés veïr mon tresor. Je n’i ai autre manandie, Mais molt pris vostre compaignie. Se jou laiens o vos estoie, Molt volentiers vos serviroie. (T 267–80)54

The young men are addressed in their Christian quality as pilgrims, their charity appealed to. The speech is rife with double entendres, “tot poés veïr mon tresor” being used as proof of her poverty, but also hinting that her body, and the selling thereof, is the commodity, the “manandie,” she is offering. Similarly, “molt pris vostre compaignie” can refer to her valuing greatly the opportunity to accompany them, but can also refer to the great price at which she values “associating with them,” i.e. having sex with them. Her offer to “service” them once inside the boat is again eminently suggestive. The threat of temptation is palpable here: Mary of Egypt is disruptive, and dangerous for society, because she is in control of her body, and disposes of it as she wishes. In addition, this passage links the Egyptian’s feminine wiles with rhetorical conceits. Such a connection was not new to the twelfth century, as Augustine (and Tertullian before him) already “link[ed] feminine sexuality and the snares of rhetoric:”55 “the seductiveness of the feminine is for the medieval Christian West virtually synonymous with delusiveness of language embodied in rhetoric.”56 This is of course used to ban women from preaching, as a woman’s beauty would divert the listener from the object of the predication, and would cause them to develop lecherous thoughts about the preacher herself.57 The poet thus warns the audience of the great danger to individuals, and society as a whole, that a beautiful and sinful woman’s voice may present in the public space. It however appears, as will become clear, that the hagiographer does not dismiss female speech out of hand: the saint’s post-conversion speech, which remains 54

“Pilgrim, she said, the Lord God put you in a good disposition, and give you such a desire to be charitable to me; I am here a poor woman, born of another realm, I have here no friend or family, my condition is so poor, I have with me no silver or gold: you may see [here] my whole fortune. I do not have another possession here, but I attach a great price to associating with you. If I were with you in there, I would serve you very willingly.” 55 Claire M. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 80. 56 Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 49. 57 Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, pp. 73–95. Late antique and medieval thinkers never seem to stop and question their assumption that women are always beautiful and their charms inevitably enticing: it is a lieu commun that woman is “essentially” sexual and desirable.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature seductive, is presented in a very positive light in the Vie. The purity of the speaker’s intent, the privacy of the setting in which the speech occurs, and the presence of a controlling authority which might potentially interject, are all elements which turn a woman’s speech from destructive to laudable. It is perhaps not solely women’s public speaking which the Anglo-Norman poet sees as dangerous, but more generally any deceitful, artificial, and rhetorically adorned speech. In this way, the holy harlot’s femininity would represent the snares of any unchecked rhetorical speech. Although, then, the utterly erotic and feminine portrayal of Mary the Egyptian before her conversion can and should be interpreted as a celebration of her lechery, the hagiographer does so in order to focus on the universality of forgiveness and the power of penance, highlighting at the same time the destruction that such an unchecked and public female body and voice would provoke in society. Although several scholars argue that Mary of Egypt loses her femininity and sensuality after conversion,58 I will show that she actually retains her seductive potential in her later life, as it no longer hinders her representation as a saint. This preserved eroticism and Mary’s lasting portrayal as a romance heroine take on a new significance after the saint’s repentance: as in the Old English life, Mary’s body comes to represent knowledge of God, the revealing of the Anglo-Norman Egyptian’s desirable body becoming a metaphor for the revelation of her life and the uncovering of the workings of penitence. Indeed, the Anglo-Norman text reduces any suggestion that Mary might be ontologically ambiguous or queer, in comparison for instance with the Old English life of the Egyptian. The altered structure of the Anglo-Norman Vie enables the author to establish more firmly Mary’s feminine gender as continuous throughout the narrative, and her newly acquired hair, which flows down to her feet (T 841–4), removes any earlier connection with the Son of Man from Revelation, linking her, rather, to a number of Anglo-Norman romance heroines.59 She might graze like a beast (T 616, 674–5), and appear queer at Zosimus’s first sight, but this ambiguity is immediately quashed by the narrator: “Un ombre vit son essient / Qui estoit ou d’ome ou de feme / Mais ele estoit de l’Egyptiene” (T 824–6).60 What Zosimus goes on to chase is repeatedly deemed a “dame.”61 Her association with masculinity is no more than superficial: she takes on the role, alternatively, of romance hero, wise hermit, and performs an Imitatio Christi, but does all of this without having to Medieval Saints’ Lives, pp. 160–1; Dembowski, “Literary Problems,” p. 125; and Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 219. 59 For instance Medea in Hue de Rotelande’s twelfth-century Protheselaus. Anthony J. Holden (ed.), Protheselaus, Hue de Rotelande, 3 vols (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1991–3) vol. 1, lines 2956–62. 60 “He saw [what] to his knowledge [was] a shadow, that was of a man or of a woman, but it was that of the Egyptian.” 61 T 849, 857, and 861. 58 Campbell,

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The Post-Conquest Harlot relinquish her gender or her sensuality. When the Egyptian leaves Alexandria for a journey, it is as if she were setting out on a quest. When Mary is refused access to the church in Jerusalem, she sees a great throng of knights barring her from entering, a detail that was added by the Anglo-Norman hagiographer and which is reminiscent of many scenes encountered by romance heroes.62 In becoming Zosimus’s spiritual guide, Mary also performs towards Zosimus the role of the male hermit, a frequent feature of Arthurian romances.63 Her active journeying may further be likened to a masculine performance, romance heroes being more active than their female counterparts, although Judith Weiss points out that Anglo-Norman poets tended to represent more active heroines than writers on the Continent.64 As soon as Zosimus enters the narrative, however, he takes on the function of the male hero as he goes into the forest on a quest to meet a hermit.65 Zosimus’s gendered relationship with Mary at once repositions the saint as a romance heroine, as the goal for the male hero’s quest. Mary may be performing the “masculine” roles of romance hero and hermit, but this does not seem to affect her gendered identity, as the continuity between Mary of Egypt’s pre- and post-conversion depiction as a romance heroine is strongly emphasised by the Anglo-Norman hagiographer. This is for instance evident in their inspection of the saint’s body through a courtly descriptio that is very similar to the one to which Mary was subjected before her conversion. The second catalogue highlights the changes which extreme asceticism has wrought upon her body, now thin and blackened; but the focus on her body, on her breasts, and the way the two catalogues echo each other lexically, suggests the saint’s gender is stable throughout the life, and that the hagiographer wished for the audience to have the former catalogue in mind when confronted with the second. Mirroring similes are used: if her neck is “blanc com ermine” (T 175) at first, it is then her hair that “blanche devint com une hermine” (T 630); the sinful Egyptian’s breasts are “blanche conme flor d’espine” (T 180), while her hair later becomes “tant blance conme flor d’espine” (T 842). Modern scholars vary in their reading of this passage, some arguing that the author wished to show how Mary’s beauty has been destroyed, while others contend that the second description evidences the contrast between the Egyptian’s ugly body and the beauty of her soul.66 The Although in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide a damsel is refused passage by a dwarf and is wounded by him. See Glyn S. Burgess (ed.), Chrétien de Troyes: Erec et Enide (London: Grant & Cutler, 1984), pp. 155–274. 63 Angus J. Kennedy, “The Hermit’s Role in French Arthurian Romance,” Romania 95 (1974), pp. 54–83, at p. 58. 64 See her “Insular Beginning: Anglo-Norman Romance,” in A Companion to Romance, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 26–44, at p. 41. 65 Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 187. 66 Dembowski, “Literary Problems,” p. 125, describes Mary as an “anti-beauty” after 62

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature parallelism of the two descriptions, however, leads to the conclusion that Mary is essentially unchanged: she is still white as a hawthorn and an ermine before and after her conversion.67 In paralleling each other, the two courtly descriptions indeed reveal that the holy harlot is holy, and a harlot, throughout the poem. The symbolic associations iterated in the two catalogues show that the Egyptian’s sinful body already holds the potential for virginal sanctity, while her saintly body is still reminiscent of the Egyptian’s destructive eroticism. For example, the hawthorn mentioned in the two descriptiones (T 180 and 842) is associated with the arbor cupiditatis,68 and constitutes a symbol of carnal love in medieval literature,69 thereby linking Mary with carnality throughout her life. Further, the hawthorn’s connection with May festivities and with the fairy world continues to link the Egyptian with the world of romance, and the figure of the courtly lady.70 Similarly, the mention in both depictions of “ermine,” a lieu commun of literature that signifies chastity and virginity, establishes continuity between both pre- and post-conversion bodies and virginal purity.71 In her youth in Alexandria, Mary’s neck is as white as the fur of an ermine and she wears an ermine coat,72 while in the wilderness the long hair that covers Mary’s body becomes white as an ermine (T 630), so that she is symbolically clothed in purity and virginity both pre- and post-conversion. These two courtly catalogues thus have Mary’s saintly body resonate with sexual overtones as well as sanctity and virginity throughout her life. In sum, she comes to embody femininity in all of its extremes, from virginal saint to unrepentant harlot, at all times. Mary of Egypt’s descending catalogue later in life is not the only element pointing to the lasting eroticism of her body. Although Mary had already appeared scantily clad before her conversion, she is now naked for Zosimus and the audience to see, the latter desiring and pursuing the fleeing form of the unclad Egyptian with Zosimus. This reaction echoes the desire the saint her conversion. For the opposite argument, see Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives, pp. 160–1, and Sandra Lowerre, “To Rise Beyond Their Sex: Female Cross-Dressing Saints in Caxton’s Vitas Patrum,” in Riddles, Knights and Cross-Dressing Saints, ed. Thomas Honegger (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 55–94, at p. 88. 67 Robertson, “Twelfth-Century Literary Experience,” p. 74. 68 Peter Dronke, “Arbor Caritatis,” in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett, ed. Peter L. Heyworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 207–53. 69 Susan S. Eberly, “A Thorn Among the Lilies: The Hawthorn in Medieval Love Allegory,” Folklore 100 (1989), pp. 41–52, at p. 41. 70 Ibid., pp. 43–4 and 47. 71 Hope B. Werness, The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 168. Although the ermine was an attribute of the Virgin Mary in early Tudor England, I have not been able to trace this association earlier than the sixteenth century. 72 T 175 and 200.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot elicited from her young lovers before her conversion. Zosimus’s relationship with the Egyptian has been associated with a type of the romance “amor de lonh.”73 The monk desires to see Mary of Egypt no less than thirteen times,74 and the hagiographer seems intent on implying that their relationship could be interpreted as sexual: they look at each other seemingly constantly, “molt s’entregardent ambedui” (T 956, 1188),75 and when Zosimus begs Mary to be allowed to stay with her, she refuses in these terms: “Nenil, fait ele, par me foi, / Car n’est pas gent que soie o toi” (T 1039–40).76 This implies that, should the monk stay, this relationship would be considered improper by an onlooker. The fact that only one manuscript should have these lines suggests that scribes felt uncomfortable representing Zosimus and Mary’s relationship in this way or that their connection was interpreted as ambiguous by one scribe, who then added the detail.77 The ambiguity of the pair’s involvement might, of course, not be solely connected to romance, and may be influenced by the “discourse of familiarity” that arises in the correspondence of spiritual friendship between monks or clerks, and later between male ecclesiastics and nuns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the Continent. Beside the longing and great desire to see the other, several additional features of the genre find their way into our Vie, such as the humble and subservient attitude of both monk and female hermit, which appears as a topos at the beginning of a letter.78 The post-conversion Mary of Egypt is therefore still emphatically involved in a gendered relationship with Zosimus, and her body continues to be desirable, the subject of the monk’s (and the audience’s) scopophiliac gaze, a gaze that Sarah Salih reminds us is inherently sexual.79 Mary’s body does not disappear from the text, and still retains an ambiguous meaning, between sexuality and virginity/sanctity, as Howie argues: “sex perpetually threatens to disclose itself together with, or in the place of, sanctity”80 in the text. He notes that the body presented to the audience in the desert is an “eroticized penitent body,”81 and speaks of an excess of exposure “in both saintly and sinful ways.”82 Such post-conversion representation may be interpreted as 73

Robertson, “Twelfth-Century Literary Experience,” p. 74. T 838, 839, 891, 956, 1139, 1142, 1152, 1153, 1188, 1350, 1353, 1356, 1357. 75 “They looked at each other a lot.” 76 “No, says she, by my troth, as it is not courteous that I be with you.” 77 This remark only appears in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS fr. 23112. 78 Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 86–114. 79 Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 83. See also A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–25. 80 Cary Howie, “As the Saint Turns: Hagiography at the Threshold of the Visible,” Exemplaria 17 (2005), pp. 317–46, at p. 319. 81 Ibid., p. 324. 82 Ibid., p. 327. 74

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature a way to entertain and titillate the audience, something that both Allison Elliott and Simon Gaunt acknowledge as constituting one of the functions of hagiography.83 It is my belief, however, that Mary of Egypt’s body problematises, in its continued exposure, the notion of the female body as site of both sin and sainthood. Mary’s body is the signifier of her sinful life before her conversion, but her performance of sanctity requires her to display her body to Zosimus in order to signify her sanctity, and teach him and the audience to read this sanctity correctly, in the same way virgin martyrs must make a spectacle of their bodies in order to show they are saints.84 Indeed, all female saints have to experience a “trial by disclosure,” whereby their bodies are shown and inscribed with their sanctity: “martyrs, virgins, married heroines, innocent as well as repentant hermits all undergo the ordeal of disrobing; and each of them achieves holiness as a result of circumstances that involve voyeuristic incarnation.”85 Virgin martyrs stage in this way the difficulty of reading their nakedness, as their persecutors interpret it as a shameful signifier of sexuality while the virgins themselves inscribe it with the unashamedness of prelapsarian purity.86 This spectacle of the body is even more difficult to navigate for the repentant harlot, whose sensual body did signify sexual sin before her conversion, but comes to represent sanctity in her later life. The hagiographer, then, does not deprive the Egyptian of her feminine sensuality after her conversion. Rather, it is then used to teach the audience, through Zosimus’s gaze, to effect a correct interpretation of her body and its inherent sexuality. Indeed, every time the Egyptian’s naked body and the desiring gaze which envelops it are emphasised, the hagiographer immediately diverts the latter by concealing the revealed flesh or by pointing out its ugliness, redirecting the scopophiliac gaze onto the transformation of this female flesh through penitence. This happens time and again in the narrative, even when the poet describes the saint’s dying moments, which suggests this was intentional. Here follows an example of this technique:

Gender and Genre, pp. 218–20, and Alison G. Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987). 84 Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 90, and Emma Campbell, “Sacrificial Spectacle and Interpassive Vision in the Anglo-Norman Life of Saint Faith,” in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 97–115. 85 Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 53. She discusses the “Trial by Disclosure” topos on pp. 43–61. See also Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 84–5. 86 Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 90. 83 Gaunt,

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The Post-Conquest Harlot Le figure vit de Marie; De Marie vit le figure, Apertement sans couverture. Environ li estoit se crine, Tant blance conme flor d’espine. Li blanc cavel et li delgiés Li avaloient dusc’as piés; El n’avoit altre vestement, Quant ce li soslevoit le vent, Dessous paroit le char bruslee Del soleil et de le gelee. (T 841–8)87

In this passage, the hagiographer’s chiasmus (“Le figure vit de Marie; / De Marie vit le figure”) reflects Zosimus’s desiring gaze on the completely exposed body of Mary. Yet, as soon as the audience pictures to itself this nakedness, it is entirely covered up by her hair. The audience’s gaze is therefore diverted, but not for long, as the wind plays with the saint’s hair to reveal her naked flesh underneath. However, the gaze is again redirected to the female flesh’s transformation through penitence: this desirable sight is actually charred and blackened by the sun and the frost. This last glimpse of the female body gives a clue as to how one should actually read it: as that of the Bride, who is black, but beautiful, darkened by the sun (“nigra sum sed formosa, […]. nolite me considerare quod fusca sim, quia decoloravit me sol” (Cant. 1:4–6)). The connection between the Egyptian’s charred, blackened flesh and the Bride of the Song of Songs is strengthened when one realises that the main theme which runs through the second descending catalogue is Mary’s change of colour from white to the blackness of the Bride.88 The desire to see Mary’s body is possibly erotic and titillating, therefore, but it is redirected into the revelation of the work of penitence revealed in the changed appearance of the saint’s body, rendering it bridal: black, but beautiful. She is both femininity and humanity perfected. The metaphorical interpretation of Mary’s female flesh is reinforced when the Egyptian herself reveals to Zosimus that her nakedness should be understood symbolically as a signifier for her life as a whole. She assimilates her displayed body with her disclosing her life of sin in confession to Zosimus:

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“He saw the shape of Mary; of Mary he saw the shape, openly without covering. Around her was her hair, white like the hawthorn flower. Her white tattered hair fell down to her feet; she had no other clothing, and when the wind lifted her hair, underneath appeared her flesh, charred by the sun and the frost.” Other passages where the hagiographer does this can be found at T 663–4, 1305–8, 1296–307, and 1372–80. 88 See, for instance, T 625–46, which contains such phrases as “li chars de li mua coulor,” “tout li noircirent li costé,” “coulor mua,” “toute noirchie,” “tant noir,” “noire estoit,” “toute muee, ” “noire et muee,” “plus noirs que nule pois.”

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature “Dame,” dist il, “saintisme feme Dont es tu nee et de quell regne Descoevre me tote te vie Por dieu nel me celer tu mie. Dis le moi par confession, Que diex te fact voir pardon.” “Sire,” che li respont Marie, “Je ne le te celerai mie, Quant tu nue m’as esgardee, Ja me vie ne t’iert celee. Trestoute te le conterai, Si que ja rien n’en celerai.” (T 1013–18, my emphasis)89

For Mary, her nakedness is to be equated with confession of her sins.90 The emphasis the hagiographer puts on verbs of showing and concealing strengthens the parallel the saint makes between her life and her body, as both are alternatively revealed and concealed within the narrative. In linking her confession to her nakedness, not only does Mary imbue her confession with sexual meaning, but she also renders her nakedness metaphorical, displacing it from her body to her soul. She shows in this way that her erotic nakedness should be seen as a signifier for her life as a whole, the transformation of her flesh as a symbol for the workings of penitence. More than this, her revealed body signifies a revealed mystery of God, who arranged the meeting between Mary of Egypt and Zosimus because he wanted the latter to “descouvrir” Mary, not desiring anymore for her to be “celee” (T 828–9). The Egyptian’s naked post-conversion body is therefore to be interpreted by Zosimus and the Vie’s audience as a desirable instantiation of the power of penitence. The continued eroticism of Mary of Egypt represents the rise of the sinful soul to the state of Bride of Christ. The scriptural association of the Egyptian with the Sponsa Christi is made even stronger by the poet’s introduction of a new protagonist in the Vie, Christ himself. Although he never actually appears within the narrative, he and his Eucharistic body are a constant presence, and the love between the Egyptian and her Bridegroom is put on the foreground. Mary addresses herself to Christ, explicitly establishing herself as his Bride: “Le canteroie o tes ancelles / En tes cambres qui tant sont beles / Le cant nouvel o le douç son / Que canta li rois Salemon. (T 1241–4).”91 In another address, she shows herself secure of his love for “‘Lady,’ he said, ‘most holy woman, where were you born and in what kingdom? Uncover all of your life to me; by God, do not conceal any of it from me. Tell it to me by way of a confession, that God may grant you a true pardon.’ ‘Sir,’ Marie answers him, ‘I will not conceal anything, seeing as you have seen me naked, my life surely shall not be concealed to you. I will tell it all to you so that truly none of it shall be hidden.’” 90 Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives, p. 162. 91 “I would sing with your servants, in your chambers that are so beautiful, the new song with the sweet sound that king Solomon sang.” 89

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The Post-Conquest Harlot her: “sai je bien que tu m’as chiere” (T 1289),92 and the hagiographer tells the audience that they should pray to her as a mediatrix specifically because Christ loved her: “Qu’ele deprit Nostre seignor / a cui il ot tant grant amor” (T 1527–8).93 Further, the Anglo-Norman poet emphasises the eroticism of Mary and Christ’s reciprocal giving and receiving of each other’s body. When the Egyptian is given the Eucharist, Christ’s flesh replaces Mary’s as the erotic body on display in a detailed description of the event. Whereas Mary was the object of Zosimus’s desiring gaze, Christ’s body is now the focus of Mary’s senses: “le saintisme cors li moustra / Le sainte dame li ora. / Il li dona, el le rechut, / Le cors menga et le vin but” (T 1215–18).”94 The sensuality of the Eucharistic communion is here emphasised: the Egyptian sees the body, touches it and tastes it, engaging her senses in a very Bernardine, sensual, experience of Christ’s body, a body that, like that of Mary, is a signifier for another revelation in the text: the truth of transubstantiation and its redemptive power: “del cors Nostre Seignor / Par cui erent salf peceor” (T 1191–2).95 The reception of the Eucharist as spiritual union with Christ is not unusual in the Middle Ages, as testifies for instance Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, where the mystic has a vision of a woman receiving the Eucharist as dowry for her spiritual marriage with the Bridegroom.96 Benjamin Semple argues that the Eucharist is Mary of Egypt’s “chief way of uniting with Christ.”97 She reciprocates when, dying, she entrusts her own body to the Son with a similar multiplication of verbs: “A toi le puisse je livrer / et otrier et conmander” (T 1287–8).98 Christ’s love for Mary of Egypt, his gift of his body to her, and the fact that she reciprocates in kind, corresponds well to Bernard of Clairvaux’s understanding of the union between the Bride and the Bridegroom as arising from a mutual, sensual, and experiential love for one another.99 Mary of Egypt’s role as Bride of Christ, her continued sensuality after her conversion, and the carnal exchange of bodies that the poet describes in order to signify the union between the saint and Jesus, are in tune with the popularity of “nuptial mysticism” or Brautmystik, from the

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“I know well that I am dear to you.” So “that she [should] pray to our lord, she whom he loved so much.” 94 “He showed her the holiest body. The holy woman worshipped it. He gave it to her, she received it, she ate the body and drank the wine.” 95 “The body of Our Lord, through which the sinner is saved.” Mary’s explanation of the Eucharist’s significance for Man’s salvation occupies lines 1200–12. 96 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias 2.6, cited in Owen F. Cummings, Mystical Women, Mystical Body (Portland: Pastoral Press, 2000), p. 12, commentary pp. 5–15. 97 Benjamin Semple, “The Male Psyche and the Female Sacred Body in Marie de France and Christine de Pizan,” Yale French Studies 86 (1994), pp. 164–86, at pp. 169–70. 98 “I can deliver it to you / and grant it and entrust it.” 99 Casey, Athirst for God, pp. 190–1. 93

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature twelfth century onward, when one sees more and more “female erotic and sexual experience [being] used to describe the Soul’s union with Christ.”100 In sum, Mary of Egypt appears in this text as a type of the Sponsa Christi. The hagiographer is influenced by both religious treatises and the romance genre in representing the Egyptian as an erotic Bride, but the audience is still carefully redirected from a potential literal reading of her body as titillating to a more metaphorical understanding of it as bridal and as a symbol of successful penitence. Mary of Egypt is privileged by her early life of sin to ultimately become a Bride of Christ. She does not need to change, only to redirect, her miraculously excessive eroticism. Christ becomes her “novel seignor” (T 540), her “new lord/husband,” implying that he replaces others before him in her affections. This is very much in line with Bernard of Clairvaux’s attitude when he conceives of the Bride turning away from her earthly lovers to return to her heavenly husband, picturing her at Christ’s feet in an image reminiscent of another holy harlot, Mary Magdalene, at Simon’s house: “cum aversa et alienata ires post amatores tuos, cum quibus male erat tibi, compulsa tandem reverti ad virum tuum priorem, nonne ut saltem merereris tangere pedes, multis precibus et fletibus institisti?”101 The sinful harlot thus becomes a model for the Soul and the Church itself in her new role as Bride of Christ. Her female gendered behaviour is not changed, but takes on another female gendered, symbolic, meaning.102 Not only is Mary of Egypt a Bride of Christ, she also performs a particularly feminine iteration of an imitatio Christi. Caroline Walker Bynum points out in her seminal study Holy Feast and Holy Fast that eating nothing but the Eucharist, as Mary of Egypt does in the Anglo-Norman text, began to be conceived in the later medieval period as a devotional practice that was gendered female,103 and which constituted a particularly feminine realisation of imitatio Christi: “both fasting and eating the broken body of Christ were acts of suffering and to suffer was to save and be saved.”104 Food, she contends, is the only element late medieval women could freely control in their environment, and one should not see feminine ascetic practices as internalised misogyny or hatred of the feminine body, but as women’s realisation of the “possibilities provided by fleshliness” in order to gain authority,105 although Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 171. having turned away from the right path to follow your lovers, after they had abused you, you were finally compelled to return to your first husband, did you not beg him with numerous prayers and tears to be allowed at least to touch his feet?” Sermones super cantica canticorum, Sermo 9, PL 183, 815a–b. 102 See Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives, pp. 214–15, who reaches a similar conclusion. 103 On this, see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 104 Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 129. 105 Ibid., p. 6. For Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt as important figures both of fasting and of “holy feasting” in Eucharistic piety, see ibid., pp. 81 and 94. 100 Walker

101 “When,

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The Post-Conquest Harlot I would argue that one does not necessarily exclude the other. Indeed, one can think of such practices as both internalised misogyny and taking advantage of the positive affective associations of the body. The association between Mary’s handling of food and imitating Christ can be evidenced in the text. Indeed, when the hagiographer describes the Egyptian’s ascetic practices in the wilderness, the T Vie departs from other versions which usually divide her forty-seven years of penance into a first period of seventeen years (to mirror her seventeen years spent as a prostitute in Alexandria) during which she still feels the pangs of temptation, and another thirty lived in relative tranquillity. The Anglo-Norman hagiographer introduces instead her time of temptation in the wilderness as lasting “plus de quarante ans” (T 663), and mentions how her two loaves of bread turn to stone during this time (T 667–70), thereby effecting a rapprochement between her experience and Christ’s forty-day fasting in the desert, complete with his temptation by the devil to turn stones into bread. In this way, the holy harlot’s extreme asceticism can be seen as a feminine performance of imitatio Christi. Nancy Caciola, for her part, argues that “many practices that are particularly characteristic of feminine piety, such as the cult of virginity or extended fasting, might be read as attempts to ‘seal’ the body,” which in turn corresponds to the ideal of a masculine body in the medieval period, women being conceived as more porous than men, whose bodies contained fewer “holes.”106 In this way, although Mary’s performance of asceticism may be understood as feminine, she attempts to regain a virginal body, one that by definition is closed off to mimic a masculine one.107 Mary’s body is indeed depicted as closing up through fasting, enabling the saint to produce, through this performance, a newly virginal body: “Ses mains croisa seur se poitrine / Et s’envolepa en se crine / Et clost ses iex avenanment, / Sen nés et se bouce ensement.” (T 1297–300).108 In closing up her body, not only her eyes and mouth, but – miraculously? – her nose as well, she becomes a true reconstituted virgin. In death, her body acquires the quality of incorruption that traditionally signifies sanctity and virginity (T 1317–27), as it did in the Old English Martyrology life of Afra. In closing up so entirely her body in death that no outside force can disturb it, Mary becomes the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs (Cant.

106 Nancy

Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000), pp. 268–306, at p. 290. 107 For virginity as the closing up of one’s body, see in particular Marsha Waggoner, “Dismembered Virgins and Incarcerated Brides: Embodiment and Sanctity in the Katherine Group,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2005, pp. 142–81. 108 “She crossed her hands on her breast and wrapped her hair around herself and closed her eyes fittingly, both her nose and her mouth.”

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature 4:12). In fact, it appears that, through her spiritual re-virginisation, she regains a form of physical virginity. Mary of Egypt’s re-virginised body, and her status as Sponsa Christi, further enables her to become assimilated with the Virgin Mary. The hagiographer plays with the fact that the two women are namesakes, at first to point out that although they share the same name, they dramatically differ in what these names signify: “‘Un non avons ce est Marie, / Molt est diverse nostre vie. / Tu amas tous tans caasté / Et jou luxure et ordeé’” (T 465–8).109 Later on, however, the Anglo-Norman poet demonstrates that the discrepancy between signifier and signified has been resolved, as the two Marys have become symbols of sanctity and purity.110 Both saints are referred to with similar – sometimes courtly – epithets which connect them at once to the figure of the Bride of Christ:111 the Virgin is Christ’s “douce amie” (T 526) to Zosimus’s description of the Egyptian as “m’amie” (T 1537). Both women define themselves as God’s “ancele” (T 426, T 1227), and the Virgin is Christ’s “douce Mere” (T 515, 522), while Zosimus calls the Egyptian “Bele mere” (T 1156). Finally, Mary of Egypt and the Virgin Mary’s affective intimacy with Christ establishes both as mediatrices between the sinner and God. When Mary prays to the Virgin in Jerusalem, she emphatically links the Virgin’s ability to intercede with God on her behalf with her connection with God and Christ’s humanity as a Bride of Christ.112 Similarly, we have seen that Christ’s love for the Egyptian is evoked at the end of her life as the reason why the audience should choose her as their intercessor. As in the Old English life, the Virgin is to Mary of Egypt during her conversion in Jerusalem what the Egyptian is to Zosimus later on, but in the Anglo-Norman the Egyptian Mary even replaces the Virgin as mediatrix: she becomes the main intercessor for the coenobitic community within the text, and, in the epilogue, for the Vie’s audience.113 While, then, the Egyptian had mentioned in Jerusalem her shared name with the Virgin to emphasise the fact that they were opposites, both Marys come to have the same meaning 109 “We

have one name, that of Mary, but our lives greatly differ. You always loved chastity and I loved lechery and uncleanness.” Both Gaunt and Campbell note that this parallel between the saints’ names is much more developed in Rutebeuf ’s Life of the Egyptian. See Gaunt, Gender and Genre, pp. 223–5 and Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives, pp. 170–6. 110 See also Robertson, “Poem and Spirit,” pp. 318–20, and Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 215. 111 The mariological interpretation of some parts of the Song of Songs became particularly popular from the twelfth century onward. On this, see Judith Glatzer Wechsler, “A Change in the Iconography of the Song of Songs in the 12th and 13th Century Latin Bibles,” in Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday by His Students, ed. Michael Fishbane and Paul R. Florh (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 73–93, at p. 79. 112 T 416–26, 437–8, 452–60, and 475–7. 113 On this, see also Gaunt, Gender and Genre, pp. 215–16.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot at the end of the T Vie; so much so that the hagiographer needs to specify which Mary his audience should pray to in the epilogue to the Vie: “ceste Marie / Dont nos avons oï le vie” (T 1525–6, my italics).114 Mary of Egypt, then, is portrayed as performing femininity throughout her life. Femininity was traditionally connected with excessive carnality as well as purity in the Middle Ages,115 and the saint manages to redirect her performance of one to become a model of the second. As we have seen, she is both holy and a harlot, from her youth to her old age. She is the virginal Mary and Mary the seductress, from beginning to end. The hagiographer simply manages to change the meaning of Mary’s female body from one of lechery to one of virginity, although both meanings coexist throughout the narrative. The holy harlot appears in this text as a bridging figure whose femininity means both options at once in a two-sex context. Her seduction remains, but the moral to be drawn from it moves from a statement about the dangers of temptation to a message of penitence and salvation. The harlot saint’s association with the Bride of Christ enables her to become re-virginised, permitting her to be associated with the Virgin Mary, but also to perform a particularly feminine iteration of an imitatio Christi. One should consider the appeal of such a model for the faithful: through the accessible holy harlot model, the repentant sinner could imagine him- or herself as performing an imitatio of the holiest of holies: the Virgin Mary and Christ. Further, women who had lost their virginity could conceive of themselves as re-virginised by modelling themselves on the holy harlot type. How does this new affective, “romantic,” representation of the harlot’s femininity influence the repentant prostitute’s authority? The short answer is that she is very authoritative indeed throughout her life. At the beginning of the Vie, Mary is associated with other sinners of considerable authority: the hagiographer mentions the apostles who repeatedly sinned (“par maintes fois pechié firent,” T 31) and St Augustine (T 43), before moving on to the Egyptian, something that of course establishes the holy harlot as a powerful influence, but also represents her as a valid model of redemption for all genders. We have seen the hagiographer describe Mary’s authoritative and persuasive rhetoric before her conversion as a bane on Alexandrian society as a whole. While after her repentance the saint is as persuasive as before, her voice is now seen in a positive light, notably because the Anglo-Norman poet manages to frame it with the validation of the Virgin or of Zosimus, and to move it from the public to the private sphere. Indeed, once Mary has repented, she expounds the Scriptures and the meaning of the sacraments in two speeches that display her learning and 114 “This

Mary, the life of whom we have heard.” for hagiographers is never straightforward; it can connote virtue, purity, weakness, passivity or carnality depending on the situation.” Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 233.

115 “Femininity

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature which can be likened to sermons, the traditional domain of the priesthood. In the first, she quotes John’s Gospel (T 482) and recounts the whole of Christian history, from the sin of Adam to the Second Coming (T 482–530). In the second, she interprets the figurative meaning of the blood of Christ and comments on transubstantiation (T 925–8 and 1200–10). Her clerical learning is such that it is not surprising the mid-thirteenth-century AngloNorman N version of Mary of Egypt’s life, closely based on the T Vie,116 should have understood her authority as particularly clerical: “E si cum unke ne sout lettrure, / Ele li pricha de l’Escripture / Si ben de parfunde cleregie, / Cum ele ust leüe tute sa vie / De devinité en escole, / Tant fu clerigele sa parole (N 295–300).”117 Mary of Egypt’s voice, like that of her pre-conversion self, is particularly influential for audiences, both within and without the Vie: she is in effect expounding, to the Vie’s audience, the entirety of salvation history in her first didactic sermon, and in her second speech she influences Zosimus and sends through him a message for Abbot Jean, asking him to take care of his flock (though not, as in the Old English version, to reform his monastery (T 1047–52)). The Egyptian is therefore presented as particularly authoritative, and seemingly claiming for herself a priest-like role without there being any inkling of the hagiographer’s past anxiety over her pre-conversion speeches. One reason why that might be the case is the question of intent: while Mary then only led men into sin with her speeches, she now uses her wiles to edify. Another point is that whereas in Alexandria she spoke in public, her sermons are now delivered in private, the first to the image of the Virgin in Jerusalem, the second in the wilderness with only Zosimus as witness. The Virgin and Zosimus act as guarantors of the suitability of Mary’s speech through their validating silence: they are on hand to correct her if she preaches erroneously. The hagiographer does not stop here in framing the saint’s authoritative voice: emphasis is put in the Vie on notions of celer and descouvrir, on the fact that Mary of Egypt’s life and speeches are revealed to a larger public only through this version, see Hildting Kjellman La deuxième collection anglo-normande des miracles de la sainte Vierge et son original latin (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1922), pp. 49–60, and Dembowski, Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne, pp. 18–19 and 159–69. 117 “And although she did not know any writing/learning at all, she preached the Scriptures to him so well from profound learning that it were as though she had read/studied theology her whole life in school, so learned her speech was.” “Clerigele” and “cleregie,” according to the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, refer to a lexical field of learning and scholarship, but also of clergy. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne mistakenly ascribes this passage to Mary Magdalene. However, she uses this Anglo-Norman example to evidence the authoritative character of the holy harlot at that period, and therefore her remark also applies to Mary of Egypt. See her “Women’s Formal and Informal Traditions of Biblical Knowledge in Anglo-Norman England,” in Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, Festschrift in Honour of Anneke Mulder-Bakker on the Occasion of Her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Mathilde van Djik and Renée I.A. Nip (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 85–109, at p. 106. 116 On

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The Post-Conquest Harlot the framing authority of Zosimus and that of the poet, with the express backing of God. Not only is the post-conversion harlot’s voice framed, it is now validated through Mary of Egypt’s reintroduction within the gendered economy of the patriarchal, though divine, family in her role as Sponsa Christi, whereas the pre-conversion Mary breached gendered roles and spaces. Mary of Egypt refused the socially acceptable role of wife when in Egypt, but she metaphorically enters into a comparable relationship with Zosimus and with Christ as his Sponsa. As Christ’s Bride, her power no longer originates solely in her own charismatic presence and her titillating body, being rather directly indebted to the traditional authority of the Son. Indeed, the hagiographer connects the authority of both the Virgin and the harlot saint as Sponsae Christi with their adoption of a subservient status: they are Christ’s “ancelles.” When the Blessed Virgin is first introduced in the narrative, the hagiographer suggests that her current authority and status in heaven as a “Roïne” is a direct result of her acceptance on earth of her subordinate status of “ancele”: “Quantque il dist, tu otrias / Et soie ancele te clamas. Et por che iés ore Roïne” (T 425–7).118 In parallel with her namesake, Mary of Egypt strongly links her authoritative position as Sponsa Christi with her subservience to Christ as his servant: she tells Christ to do with her as he likes, “fait de t’ancele a ton plesir” (T 1227) and expresses her belief as his Bride that she will sing the Song of Solomon “o tes ancelles” (T 1241) with Christ’s maidservants, promising to serve him until her death: “tous tans mais lui servirai” (T 439).119 While this subservience might be conceived as gendered in its connection with the Virgin’s and the Egyptian’s bridal status, it actually represents the change every Christian must undergo in accepting God as their lord. The gendered subservience of the bridal “ancelle” is here used to represent the importance of Christian humility, reflecting again the way the holy harlot’s performance of the feminine gender can be metaphorical, and have universal valence. Similarly, Mary, who was so emancipated as to travel on her own from Egypt to Jerusalem, is now entirely dependent on God and his Mother for survival: when she goes into the wilderness, she relies on the Virgin Mary’s mercy for protection against the devil, and on Christ and God for sustenance: Marie va par le gastine, Souvent deprie le Roïne Que ele avoit mise en hostage Le jor devant, devant l’ymage, Par se merchi ne le guerpisse Et del deale le garisse.

118 “When

[Gabriel] announced [that to you], you granted [his request] to him, and called yourself his servant, and for this reason you are now Queen.” 119 “Do with your servant as you wish,” “with your maidservants,” “I will serve him always.”

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Par le gast va grant aleüre En Dieu se fie, toute est seüre, […] Ele n’ot que deus pains et demi, Or ait Jhesus merchi de li, De ciax ne vivra ele mie, Se Dex ne li fait autre aïe. (T 595–608)120

In opposition to the Latin and Old English lives, in which Mary does not eat anything until Zosimus gives her some lentils, this Mary’s lack of food instead testifies to her dependence on Christ’s help to feed herself. The hagiographer further emphasises Mary’s need for the Virgin and Christ at other moments of the text, repeating the lexical field of fiance: “en son novel Seignor se fie, / En luis mist tote se fianche” (T 540–1), “En li a toute se fiance” (T 549).121 This reliance on Christ implies she is privileged by him and chosen as his Bride, which in turn imbues Mary with great authority: we have already seen that Christ’s great love for her legitimises her important role as mediatrix for the Vie’s audience. However, again, this gendered relationship is a metaphor for a more universal concept: the need for blind faith to reach salvation. The hagiographer emphasises this theme throughout the Vie. Not only does the T Vie Egyptian rehearse time and again her fiance in God, but emphasis is also put on her blind belief at the exact moment when Zosimus’s own faith wavers (T 994–8). In this way, the subservience and blind faith that characterise the Egyptian are gendered feminine, but become universal attributes Everyman should seek to acquire on the path to salvation, thereby ascribing increasing value on the performance of femininity as a whole. Mary of Egypt is thus gaining authority in a very feminine, bridal performance. She also does so through her desirability, which permits her to gain power in her relationship with Zosimus within their spiritual amicitia, and even privileges her in becoming his eremitic counsellor. Sex and sensuality, we have seen, are valued as useful tools for teaching after the harlot’s conversion, so that every time Zosimus and the audience misread Mary’s nakedness, it gives her the opportunity to teach them about the importance of priesthood, the sacraments, repentance, confession, or blind faith.122 Mary, then, wields tremendous authority, though this is mostly framed by Zosimus, as a stand-in for the male clergy. The hagiographer takes pains 120 “Marie

went into the wilderness, and often prayed the Queen, that she had held in pledge the day above [in the story] in front of the image, that by her mercy she should not abandon her, and that she protect her from the devil. She goes in the wilderness with great speed, she puts her faith in God, believing completely. […] She only has two and a half loaves of bread, now have Jesus mercy upon her, she will not live on that at all, if God does not give her any other help.” See also T 684. 121 “She has faith in her new Lord, in him she put all her faith/belief,” “in him she has complete faith.” 122 T 915–34, 989–1000, 1036–40, and 1167–8.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot to foreground the complementarity of Mary’s and Zosimus’s authority, an element which already appeared in the Latin and Old English versions of the Egyptian’s life, but here the Egyptian’s authority is specifically used to “prop up” Zosimus’s clerical stance. Indeed, while each reinforces the authority of the other, notably when they debate who should give whom the first blessing, Mary subtly backs up Zosimus’s priestly authority by emphasising his privileged access, as a member of the clergy, to mass, the sacraments, the altar, etc. (T 915–28). The insistence on the clergy’s sacramental role is such that the Vie’s editor, Dembowski, removes at that juncture two lines which are concerned with Zosimus’s priestly access to the altar (“Congié as de messe chanter / Ta main pues metre sor l’autel”) and which appear in all manuscripts,123 probably thinking them too repetitive. At the same time as the Egyptian strengthens Zosimus’s authority, she expounds on the significance of the Eucharistic miracle and transubstantiation, thereby bolstering the centrality of clerical authority with her teaching. Other elements emphasise the importance of the clergy’s role: Mary’s life story is now a “confession” (T 1011), and while in earlier versions of her life Mary only baptised herself in the waters of the Jordan river, she now stops by the monastery of St John the Evangelist (T 586–7) to receive communion. This accrued focus on the clergy’s importance may be explained by new concerns that started to arise about the role of priests in the last decades of the twelfth century, concerns that would ultimately lead to the establishment of a more specialised, but also more authoritative, priestly status at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Presenting the post-conversion Mary of Egypt as a Sponsa Christi and an enticing romance heroine gives the holy harlot tremendous power, a power that arises from her feminine holy harlotry. While, then, the repentant prostitute’s authoritative sensuality, her gender, and her liminal status do not change throughout the life, the meaning of it turns metaphorical, and the legitimisation that lies behind Mary’s authority shifts with her conversion. Whereas she still possesses the same powers of persuasion after her repentance, she now defers to Christ as his Sponsa and “ancelle.” Similarly, her voice may be as powerful after her conversion as before, but her speech is now private and/ or framed by authority figures which ensure the acceptability of her sermons. THE EARLY SOUTH ENGLISH LEGENDARY “LIFE OF THE MAGDALENE” The late thirteenth-century Early South English Legendary “Life of the Magdalene” offers a very similar portrayal of the holy harlot’s gender and authority to the Anglo-Norman Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne. As the Vie, the “Life” is strongly influenced by the romance genre, with the Magdalene as 123 Dembowski,

Vie de sainte Marie l’égyptienne, T, apparatus criticus to line 922, p. 95.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature its romance heroine. The harlot saint is feminine and seductive throughout, and although the hagiographer emphasises the dangers of a beautiful female speaker before the saint’s conversion, she is allowed near-clerical authority later on in her life. The presence in the text of a deep suspicion about such an enticing female speaker alongside a strong respect for her still-seductive speech after the conversion can again be explained by two main factors: the holy harlot gains legitimacy in her gendered relationships with both male clerical figures and Christ, and her authority is framed by a very strong clerical presence. The South English Legendary is a collection of vernacular verse lives of saints and feast days of the calendar church year. It is sometimes dubbed South English Legendaries, on account of it being an extraordinarily dynamic example of mouvance,124 from its origin in the south-west of England in the second half of the thirteenth century (1270–80), to its many scribal reformulations throughout the later medieval period.125 The versatility of this compilation makes it impossible to pinpoint a simple origin for it, be that an author, authors, or a specific source.126 More than this, its plurality renders such a line of questioning rather moot. It is, however, important for our purpose to distinguish between two widely different “Lives” of Mary Magdalene appearing in the South English Legendary manuscript tradition. The first, which for convenience’s sake will be called the Early South English Legendary (hereafter ESEL) “Life,” is a stanzaic poem with mid-rhymes, extant in the earliest manuscript of the text as well as in two others.127 The second is an extensive reworking of this older poem to fit the metrical form of the other mouvance, see Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972). the South English Legendary, see the foundational work by Manfred Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary (Leeds: The University of Leeds School of English, 1974). His approach, which privileged stable redactions, is however usefully challenged in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s edited volume, Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). See especially the Introduction and William Robins’s article, “Modular Dynamics in the South English Legendary,” at pp. 187–208. Gail Ashton follows Görlach’s lead in positing several revisions for the text, originating in Worcestershire in the 1270s and being “completed at Gloucester some ten years later.” See Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 23. 126 For an overview of scholarship on single authorship, see Görlach, The Textual Tradition, pp. 45–50. For proponents of a multi-authored legendary, see Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” pp. 187–208. On sources and influences, see Sherry Reames “The South English Legendary and its Major Latin Models,” in Rethinking the South English Legendaries, pp. 84–105 and E. Gordon Whatley, “Pope Gregory and St. Austin of Canterbury in the Early South English Legendary,” in the same collection, pp. 271–94. 127 The late thirteenth-century Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS Laud Misc. 108, as well as Cambridge, Trinity College MS 605 and London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 223. On Laud Misc. 108, see Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (eds), The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative (Leiden: Brill, 2011). See also John Frankis, “The Social Context of Vernacular Writing 124 On 125 On

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The Post-Conquest Harlot Legendary lives.128 The text that will interest us in this chapter is the earlier, ESEL version of the Magdalene’s life, as the second often only summarises the contents of the former, and the first has garnered comparatively little critical attention.129 No definitive source can be ascertained for the “Life,” but its similarity with the slightly antedating version appearing in the Legenda aurea (1255–70) suggests that the ESEL version is based on the Legenda or on one of the Legenda’s sources.130 The ESEL “Life of Mary Magdalene” is another instance of the permeability between hagiography and romance, testifying to what Wogan-Browne deems the “limited meaningfulness” of such generic distinction when one considers their similar “social functions and the diverse and overlapping materials which are used in their service.”131 The shared readership of romance and hagiography revealed in the manuscript context of the earliest extant ESEL “Life of the Magdalene,” Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS Laud Misc. 108, similarly thwarts any attempt at generic distinction: two romances are interspersed with saints’ lives, and one of them, Havelok, is even titled a vita.132 Presumably, the Laud manuscript’s mixture of religious and secular matter would have appealed to a lay audience made up of aristocrats and aspiring gentry, people in search of “pious edification,” but “who on other occasions might wish to divert themselves with romances.”133 In such a context, it is not surprising that in Thirteenth-Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts,” in Rethinking the South English Legendaries, pp. 66–83. 128 The ESEL version is edited in Carl Horstmann, The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints, EETS o.s. 87 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co 1887), and in Sherry L. Reames, Middle English Legends of Women Saints (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2003). The edition used here will be that of Horstmann. The later SEL version is edited by Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, in their The South English Legendary, 3 vols, EETS o.s. 244 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). On the relationship between the two lives, see Görlach, The Textual Tradition, pp. 181–2 and Thompson Everyday Saints, p. 94. 129 The two versions are often confused by scholars. Academics who have commented on the ESEL “Life of Mary Magdalene” are Ashton, Generation of Identity, pp. 28–30; Thompson, Everyday Saints, pp. 90–8; and Bell and Couch (eds), Texts and Contexts, esp. pp. 24, 204–7, and 214–15. A few others mention the “Life” in passing. 130 For the Legenda aurea as a potential source, see Thompson, Everyday Saints, p. 94. 131 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “‘Bet … to … rede on holy seyntes lyves …’: Romance and Hagiography again,” in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 83–98, at pp. 83 and 88. 132 Kimberly K. Bell, “Resituating Romance: The Dialectics of Sanctity in MS Laud Misc. 108’s Havelok the Dane and Royal Vitæ,” Parergon 25 (2008), pp. 27–51; Annie Samson, “The South English Legendary: Constructing a Context,” in Thirteenth Century England I, ed. Peter R. Coss and Simon D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1986), pp. 175–84. 133 Julia Boffey, “Middle English Lives,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 610–34, at p. 620. On the audience of the SEL and of MS Laud Misc. 108 in particular,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the ESEL “Life of Mary Magdalene” hovers between romance and hagiography, according to the distinctions in style, lexical field, themes, and “memes” identified by modern scholars.134 Thompson notes the thematic influence of contemporary insular romances on the life.135 The life of Mary Magdalene already had a romance “feel” in earlier iterations: the Legenda aurea Magdalene was a lady descended from kings and travelling on a rudderless boat, a typical figure in romance literature. This romance colouring is, however, greatly amplified in the ESEL. The saint now resides in the “castel of Magdale” (ESEL 17). She is born of royal blood (ESEL 20–6), and her brother Lazarus appears as the embodiment of chivalry: “Lazarus spendede al is þouȝht: op-on his chiualerie, / Of oþur þingus ne tok he no ȝeme” (ESEL 55–6). The abundance of catalogues – for instance the enumeration of the ancestry of the Magdalene and of her landed wealth, or the catalogue of venison the prince takes on board for his pilgrimage – is also indebted to romance narratives,136 as is the “classic romance invitation”137 that prefaces the story: Sleiȝe Men and egleche: and of redes wise and bolde, Lustniez nouþe to mi speche: wise and vnwise, ȝongue and olde: No-thing ich eov nelle rede ne teche: of none wichche ne of none scolde, Bote of a lif þat may beo leche: to sunfule men of herte colde. Ich nelle eov noþer rede ne rime: of kyng ne of Eorl, of knyȝht ne of swein, Ake of a womman ichchulle ov telle: þat was sunful and for-lein. (ESEL 2–6)

The hagiographer plays here with the generic blurring between romance and hagiography. The audience’s expectations are overturned as to what the story will consist in. By suggesting that the text could have been a poem about a knight, a king, an earl, or a young man, the poet deftly traces a parallel between see Frankis, “The Social Context,” pp. 66–83, and Annie Samson, “Constructing a Context,” pp. 185–95. 134 Helen Cooper introduces the notion of memes as recurring narrative units or motifs. See Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 106–36. 135 See Thompson, Everyday Saints, pp. 90–8, and Görlach, “The Auchinleck Katerine,” in So meny people, longages and tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Medieval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. Michael Benskin and Michael L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 211–27, esp. p. 213. 136 This is, for instance, evident in Chaucer’s Sir Topas, a burlesque of late medieval romances replete with catalogues. See Larry Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 213–17. 137 Thompson, Everyday Saints, p. 91.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot romance and the present life, even if it is through negation. At the same time, this also suggests how different it will be: from romance to hagiography, from a male to a female lead, from the coldness of male sinners (“sunfule men of herte colde”) to the more feminine-gendered affective healing of the female sinner. Mary Magdalene is a romance heroine: feminine, desirable, and this throughout the text. She is a young and beautiful landed lady, complete with “yeoluwe” (ESEL 96), “faire here” (ESEL 133).138 Like the Egyptian, the pre-conversion Magdalene is primarily defined by her gender, her wealth, and her sinfulness. As we have seen, the ESEL author introduces her as a “sunful” “womman,” contrasting and marginalising her gender by opposing it to what the audience expects to be the subject of the text. In parallel with other versions of her life, Mary loses her name to become the “sunfole wumman” (ESEL 68). Later on in the poem, she is repeatedly called “þis wumman,” or “fair wumman,” her name rarely being mentioned even after her conversion. The Magdalene therefore embodies female beauty (“fair wumman”) and sin (“sunfole wumman”) at the same time as, through her, these concepts are associated. Like the Anglo-Norman Mary of Egypt, Mary Magdalene’s pre-conversion femininity is seen in a negative light, being associated with sinfulness and “folie.”139 The inherent danger of feminine beauty is emphasised as a gateway to sin: the fairer she becomes, the more sinful she is: “So more fairore þat heo bi-cam: þe more of hire was prys, / þe more fol womman heo wax: and sunful and unwys” (ESEL 65–6). As in the Anglo-Norman T Vie, the transgressive nature of the harlot roaming freely in the public space is put on the foreground: she only wants “for-to walke a-boute: to don hire flechses wille, / To gon and eorne feor and neor: boþe loude and stille” (ESEL 51–2). The unrestrained, unframed woman who can walk and run, both far and near, is therefore seen with deep suspicion in the ESEL poem, but this freedom of movement also enables Mary to obtain absolution for her sins, as it allows her entry into Simon’s house. After her repentance, Mary’s situation does not change in terms of geographic freedom; on the contrary, her ability to move freely between public and private spaces will become a foundational trait of her sanctity: she goes from Jerusalem to Marseilles, from her public preaching to her appearance in the king of Marseilles’ bedchamber, from Marseilles to an island to Rome and back, from earth to the air where she is fed manna by angels, and finally from the wilderness to Maximus’s church. Of course, after her repentance, the Magdalene’s changed intent, as well as the validation of also ESEL 8, 17, 63, 65, and 230. for instance, ESEL 7, 66, or 111. Judith Weiss has connected the notion of “folie” in the Anglo-Norman lives of Mary of Egypt with an influence of French and French of England romance literature on hagiography. See her “The Metaphor of Madness,” p. 162.

138 See

139 See,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature her authority through her very explicit role as Christ’s lover and bride, render this mobility acceptable, and so she comes to embody the upward mobility of the Bride. Feminine speech is seen with suspicion by the ESEL poet when it is uttered by the sinful Magdalene or the pre-conversion queen of Marseilles. Their voice is closely linked with bad advice, folly, seductive temptation, and is more generally associated with the figure of Eve. As we have seen, Mary Magdalene grows more unwys (foolish, ignorant) the more beautiful and folle she becomes. The queen is also “puyrliche vnwys: in saw and in spelle,” in “speech and in report” (ESEL 250), when she fails to relay Mary’s message to her husband and is further accused by the Magdalene of being mad: “þi wif, þe Naddre, heo is a-mad: ich holde hire puyr wod” (ESEL 257). In prefacing both vnwys and wod with puyrliche and puyr, the poet hints that not only is the queen mad and foolish, but that she is totally, completely, and even perhaps, as a woman, essentially so.140 The connection made between the woman’s bad/mad advice and the serpent, Naddre, further links femininity with the seductive temptation of the devil and Eve, which would ultimately lead to the Fall. In this case, of course, the queen is vnwys because she actually remains silent and fails to deliver Mary Magdalene’s message to her husband. In the one case where one’s enticing feminine rhetoric was acceptable – within the confines of the marriage bed – the queen fails to make use of it.141 In the case of the pre-conversion queen and Mary Magdalene, therefore, women’s advice is linked with that of the serpent, and is conceived as essentially unwise and mad. More than this, it is the more misleading and foolish the more beautiful the speaker is. Not so at all, however, after both women’s conversion: the feminine, enticing, and affective quality of their speech still endows them with persuasive power, but it is now conceived in a purely positive and affective light. In the same way that the Anglo-Norman Mary of Egypt used her seductive wiles to exert her gendered authority over Zosimus and teach him, Mary Magdalene’s beauty is a tool that enables her to convert her audience to the path of Christianity. Where the Magdalene’s beauty was dangerous, it is now represented as the reason her speech is so convincing. She is described as preaching “with briȝht neb and glade chere” (ESEL 203), the king listening to her because he is entranced by her beauty: “To Maries prechingue: he lustnede ful sone; / For þat heo was so fair a þing: to hire huy token guod gome” (ESEL 238–9). In opposition to other versions of the Magdalene’s life such as the Legenda aurea, 140 For

the medieval association of femininity with irrationality and emotionality, see notably Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 75. See also this chapter, p. 55. 141 Sharon Farmer, “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61 (1986), pp. 517–43.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot the ESEL hagiographer does not attribute Mary’s persuasiveness as a preacher to her lips having touched Christ’s feet.142 Mary’s feminine beauty is here the reason behind her success as a preacher, so that she performs a feminine interpretation of preaching, whereby her femininity becomes a rhetorical tool that enables her to convince her audience.143 It is no coincidence, indeed, that the holy harlot should here be objectified by the king’s male gaze (she is “so fair a þing”) and that, in opposition to other lives of the Magdalene which have the queen being converted by the saint’s words before the king,144 the latter is here the first to be seduced. In this way, the post-conversion Magdalene is still very much an object of desire.145 Indeed, the Magdalene’s beauty converts not only the Marseilles audience, but also the external audience of the “Life,” as she is an object of pleasure throughout the text. The retelling of her story even provides satisfaction to the hagiographer, who writes that “to speken of hire ich am wel fous, and it likez me ful murie” (ESEL 19). Similarly, the queen’s post-conversion voice is now seen from a wholly positive perspective. The episode of her convincing her husband to take her with him on his sea-journey is punctuated in most versions with a snide comment on the wits and obstinacy of women, for instance in the Legenda aurea: “et contra illa instabat femineum nec mutans femina morem” (LA 632).146 In the ESEL, however, the queen is allowed to plead her case lengthily, resting on arguments of reciprocal love (ESEL 314–16, 325–31), and her speech is validated by the king rather than being censored. At the end, the latter deems himself “ful glad” (ESEL 333) that she should come. In this way, the hagiographer presents feminine speech as holding particular persuasive powers, linked with female beauty and affectivity. As in the T Vie, women’s voices are therefore powerful, and either particularly dangerous or positive, depending on the intent and context of the women’s speeches. The power that the post-conversion Magdalene wields is, however, very much validated, and therefore dependent upon, her affective intimacy with Christ as his Sponsa. The holy harlot does not need to change in order to become a Bride of Christ: while the pre-conversion Magdalene grew in 142 See also Reames, Middle

English Legends, pp. 83–4. LA 631, in Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (ed.), Legenda aurea (Florence: Galluzzo, 1998), p. 631. 143 See also Susan Carter, “The Digby Mary Magdalen: Constructing the Apostola Apostolorum,” Studies in Philology 106 (2009), pp. 402–19, who comes to a similar conclusion at p. 408. 144 The earliest example of the queen being converted before the king is the early thirteenthcentury Anglo-Norman Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie’s “Romanz de sainte Marie Magdaleine.” It is edited in Olivier Collet and Sylviane Messerli (eds), Vies médiévales de Marie-Madeleine (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 131–61. 145 This runs counter to Ashton’s argument that Mary’s beauty is “defused and desexualized” after her conversion. See her Generation of Identity, p. 29. 146 “And she persisted against [his decision to leave her at home], being, typically for a woman, obstinate in the customary way of women.” My translation.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature beauty and in prys, gathering the love of “riche men” who “hire leiȝen bi” (ESEL 54), she later on replaces her lovers with Christ. Emphasis is put on the intimacy and reciprocity of their relationship. The poet focuses on Mary’s sensual caring for Christ’s body, conflating two scriptural passages, Luke 7:38, where she anoints his feet, and Mark 14:3, where she puts ointment onto his head: “Heo custe is fiet and wusch al-so: with hire wete teres, / And wipede heom aftur-ward: with hire ȝeoluwe heres, / Out of hire boxe heo nam: Oynement ful guod / And smeorede ore louerdes heued: with ful blisful mod (ESEL 95–8). The ESEL gives even more importance to this event by having Christ recount it again just a few lines later (ESEL 126–34). This is strongly reminiscent of Bernard of Clairvaux’s description of the Sponsa’s movement from kneeling by Christ and kissing his feet to anointing his head, symbol of the spiritual union.147 The ESEL author therefore seems to evoke the Bernardine interpretation of the Song of Songs in this description, presenting this episode as the holy harlot’s affective rise from the status of sinner to that of Sponsa Christi. Her sensual care for the Son’s body thus elevates her to the rank of Christ’s Bride. In return for this corporeal care, Christ also tends to her body, driving seven devils out of her (ESEL 138). The reciprocity is further emphasised a few lines after this intimate exchange when their love for each other is pinpointed as the basis for the Magdalene’s authority: “Ore louerd makede hire is procuratour, his leof and is hostesse; / heo louede him with gret honour: in pays and in destresse” (ESEL 139–40, my emphasis). Their relationship is likened here to a marriage, as the phrase “in pays and in destresse” would have been reminiscent, for a medieval audience, of the marriage vow to have and to hold “in sickness and in health.”148 The Magdalene, as would his wife, keeps house and provides food for him and his disciples, so much so that they consider it their own home: “heore in huy gonne cleopie and ase heore owene it nome” (ESEL 151). This is a departure from the Gregorian conflation of the Magdalene with the contemplative Mary of Bethany, while her sister Martha is seen as the proponent of the vita activa (Lk. 10:38–42), and might explain why the Bethany episode is not narrated in the ESEL. In return for her bridelike hospitality, he cares for her family by healing her sister. In this way, Mary is represented quite literally as Christ’s Sponsa, feeding him and taking care of him (replacing Martha as Christ’s “hostesse”). She loves him, and he loves her, “in pays and in destresse.” It is revealing that it is at this precise moment that the Magdalene is first imbued with near-clerical power, and her speech validated: her intimacy with Christ enables her to become his procuratour (spokesperson, person sent as an official representative). Not only is the term procuratour usually used 147 See

this chapter, pp. 61–2. an example of medieval marriage vows, see Connor McCarthy, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 83.

148 For

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The Post-Conquest Harlot with reference only to men in medieval literature,149 but to be named God’s representative on earth puts her on an equal footing with Peter. After this initial authorisation of the saint’s apostolic mission, Christ explicitly sends her out to preach before his death, in a departure from all other lives of the holy harlot. This further links her with the apostles, who are said to do the same in the Bible:150 Crist hire hauede a-boute i-sent: to sarmoni and to preche: To sunfole men heo was ful rad: to wissi and to teche, And to sike men heo wa[s] ful glad: to beon heore soule leche; Mani on to cristinedom: heo brou3hte, and out of sunne, Fram lecherie and hore-dom: þoru schrift, to Ioye and alle wunne. (ESEL 158–62)

Mary Magdalene’s authority appears as particularly priestly and official in this passage. Indeed, in the context of Kienzle and Walker’s argument that the label used to describe women’s voices depends on whether their authority is perceived as valid,151 the hagiographer is here not afraid to define the Magdalene’s speech in quick succession with two verbs connoting male, clerical authority: sarmoni and preche. She is delivering a sermon and preaching. The representation of Mary as curing “sike men,” being “heore soule leche,” also links the Magdalene with Christ as his procuratour: in the same way that he cured both her and Martha, she in turn becomes the physician of sick and sinful men (ESEL 136–9, 142–7). This also connects her with priestly office, as the image of the priest as a physician of souls is popular from its first appearance in the Gospels.152 Further, the ESEL Mary is able to deliver the sacrament of absolution as though she were a confessor: she brings many “þoru schrift, to Ioye” (ESEL 162). The use of the preposition þoru suggests a certain agency on the part of the Magdalene in the process of absolution: just a few lines before this, Christ performs the same service for the repentant harlot: “of me þou art i-schriue” (ESEl 136). This parallelism furthers the Magdalene’s imitatio Christi as his procuratour. To represent the Magdalene, a woman, with such clerical only other instance of the term ascribed to a woman is negative: in Book to A Mother, woman is the “deuelis massanger, procuratour, maister, and modir.” See Adrian J. McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother (Leiden: Brill, 1981), line 122. 150 See Mk 6:7–13, Matt. 10:1, 5–15, Lk. 10:1–20. On this, see Reames, Middle English Legends, p. 82. There is no mention in the ESEL of Christ’s commissioning the Magdalene to preach his Resurrection to the apostles, and indeed, there is no need of one, as he had already made her his procuratour in life. 151 Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, “Preface: Authority and Definition,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xiv. 152 Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 157. 149 The

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature authority that she could administer a sacrament, could be problematic for the author or the scribe, especially at the end of a thirteenth century that saw the establishment of a well-regulated and increasingly restrictive access to the clerical status, notably due to the Fourth Lateran Council, which for the first time explicitly excluded women from the priesthood.153 It appears that such an authoritative portrayal proved problematic for at least some of the scribes copying the ESEL life, as this reading appears only in MS Laud Misc. 108. The other two manuscripts amend “þoru” to “to,” thus lessening Mary’s implied agency. This scribal intervention supports the interpretation that “schrift” was understood as belonging to the register of the priest, or that it was at least ambiguous enough to warrant correction from an anxious scribe. This suggests the exceptional character of this authorisation in MS Laud Misc. 108. This authority is, we have seen, legitimised by Mary’s privileged relationship with Christ as his “bridal” procuratour. In the same way that a thirteenthcentury woman would be allowed to represent her husband in his absence,154 Mary, as Christ’s leof, becomes his procuratour in abstentia. Such authorisation enables the Magdalene to wield great authority: later in the text, she is seen teaching (ESEL 158, 279, 283), preaching (ESEL 158, 229, 277, 282, 522), and delivering sermons very openly to the people of Marseilles on three different occasions. She even appears, upon the king and queen’s return to Marseilles, to be preaching in ceremonial vestments, “i-reuested” (ESEL 520), to the crowd, a verb usually employed in reference to bishops and abbots elsewhere in Middle English texts.155 Bishop Maximus, like Christ, is presented as a validating figure. He frames the harlot saint’s i-reuested preaching, as his name is mentioned both immediately before and after this passage (ESEL 516 and 527). Maximus’s clerical authority is especially emphasised in the ESEL in comparison to other versions of Mary Magdalene’s life, which mention him only as being present during the sea voyage to Marseilles, and as administering the last rites to the Magdalene at her death. In the ESEL, his controlling presence is felt throughout. His narrative and geographical framing of the Magdalene can be paralleled to the role Zosimus and the Virgin Mary played in the legitimisation of Mary of Egypt’s authority in the T Vie.156 153 This,

however, remained a thorny issue in the later medieval period. See Gary Macy and Bernard Cooke (eds), A History of Women and Ordination, vol. 1: The Ordination of Women in a Medieval Context (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2002), “Introduction,” and Macy’s “The Ordination of Women in the Early Middle Ages,” in the same volume, pp. 1–30. 154 See, for instance, Sarah Salih, “At Home; Out of the House,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 124–40, at pp. 128–9. 155 See, for instance, the ESEL life of St Brendan (ESEL line 274). 156 For a different interpretation of Mary as preaching “passively,” see Ashton, Generation of Identity, p. 29.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot As Christ’s procuratour, we have seen, Mary’s feminine and bridal authority rivals the masculine clerical supremacy of Peter over the Church. She is referred to as “oure Maister” by her siblings (ESEL 602), a term used elsewhere in the text only for Christ (ESEL 115, 124, 212) and St Peter (ESEL 284), and thus suggesting she may be considered the leader of the Christian throng in Marseilles. This word never appears in other versions of the Magdalene’s life and is removed in one manuscript version,157 something that suggests that it empowered and authorised the female saint in a way that would perhaps have been problematic for a portion of the medieval audience. Mary Magdalene’s status as a Christian leader is further reinforced by the emphasis the ESEL poet puts on the parallelism between St Peter’s role as teacher and guide of the Marseilles king and her teaching and guidance of the queen. Both king and queen are “ladde” places, and “i-schewed” things (ESEL 494–5, 499–500) by either St Peter or the Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is therefore Christ’s procuratour, the Christians’ maister, able to preach, teach, convert, be clothed in ceremonial vestments, and, in some manuscripts, give the sacrament of penance. Her authority appears to be very similar to that of a priest, and is one that she legitimises by way of her adoption of the accepted, normalised gender role of Sponsa Christi. In order to wield such an authority, however, the holy harlot’s voice must be tested and controlled by a strong clerical presence that contextualises her authority within the constraining “bounds of patriarchy.”158 As in other versions of her life, Mary Magdalene’s preaching is repeatedly doubted, at which point she validates it the best way she knows how: by framing it with the authority of the “other” – this time male and clerical – procuratour of Christ: St Peter. When asked for proof of her preaching’s veracity, she confesses herself ready to teach “bi ore maistres conseile: and mid is holie speche / þat is seinte petre of rome” (ESEL 284–5). The prepositions bi and mid signify the Magdalene’s deference to clerical authority as a guarantor of the truth of her speech, but also conflate his speech with her utterance, rendering them indistinguishable: she speaks “mid is holie speche” in his name, as any preacher would. The Anglo-Norman Mary of Egypt and the Middle English ESEL Mary Magdalene therefore both retain their femininity and female sensuality after their conversion, in opposition to the shift in gender performance noticeable in Old English texts. Although the Anglo-Norman and Middle English hagiographers represent feminine seductive speech as disruptive and potentially dangerous for society as a whole, they do so only when the intent behind the holy harlots’ speech is nefarious. Their feminine speech is now both powerful and morally neutral, holding the potential to be utterly destructive or highly redemptive. In order to be conceived in a positive manner, however, 157 Trinity

College MS 605. Generation of Identity, p. 29.

158 Ashton,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature hagiographers often need to emphasise the repentant harlots’ role as Sponsa Christi, and to put in the foreground the controlling and validating presence of mostly male, and mostly clerical, authorities. A last aspect of the Magdalene’s authority in the ESEL will serve here as transition between this chapter and the next, which will deal with the influence that a particular context of production can have on the representation of the holy harlot’s gendered authority. The ESEL Magdalene’s authority in her dealings with the Marseilles people, anachronistically portrayed as Muslims, is presented in violent military terms, suggesting her authority and her role as leader of the Christians in Marseilles could have been influenced by the English involvement with the Ninth Crusade, which would in turn put the date of the ESEL Magdalene composition sometime in the early 1270s. Indeed, while the association of Muslims with pagans is ubiquitous in the literature of the later medieval period, the hagiographer takes pains to emphasise the connection, and present the “Sarasins” (ESEL 194, 227, 231…)159 as particularly threatening and violent worshippers of “Mahun” (“a corruption of ‘Mohammed’”)160 and “teruagaunt” (ESEL 205, a “fictitious deity, supposed to be worshipped by Moslems”).161 Whereas the Marseillais are not usually menacing in lives of the Magdalene, the ESEL “Sarasins” announce themselves ready to kill the newly arrived Christians, should the latter not convert to their religion: “heom boden fiȝht” (ESEL 194), “with þretningue and with strif ” (ESEL 198). This threat of violence is opposed head-on by the Magdalene, whose courageous sermon – she speaks with “wordes bolde” (ESEL 203) – highlights the military might of Christ, the “worldes maister” (ESEL 212): “Ahe huy þat wullez a-ȝein him fiȝhte: to grounde he wole felle” (ESEL 222). Similarly, the ESEL hagiographer modifies the traditional threat the saint makes to the person of the king, by turning it into a political one that involves the whole of the Marseilles kingdom:162

159 MED

s.v. “Sarasin(e):” “a Turk; also, an Arab; also, a Moslem; – often with ref. to the Crusades.” 160 Reames, Middle English Legends, p. 83. See also Robert Mills, “The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language, and Belief,” in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. K.K. Bell and J. Nelson Couch (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 197–222, at p. 214. 161 MED s.v. “Termagaunt.” 162 See, for instance, LA 632. On this particular development in ESEL, and its link with contemporary insular romances, see Thompson, Everyday Saints, p. 90.

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The Post-Conquest Harlot Swuch a fier schal op-on eov come: þat schul eov so fur-fare And a-quellen eou and eouwer folk: huy nellez eov no-þing spare. […] þare schal so strong folk come þe a-ȝein: þat wollez þe luytel spare, With sweord and spere huy schullen þe sle: and al þi folk fur-fare. (ESEL 247–8 and 261–2, my emphasis)

Not only does the Magdalene threaten the entirety of the king’s people in this passage, she literally tells the prince that she will send the armies of God to settle the matter, should he not cooperate. In turning the Christians’ arrival and subsequent difficulties in Marseilles into a violent political strife between Christians and Muslims, the ESEL poet may be influenced by similar treatments in Crusading romances of the time,163 but may also more specifically reflect the events surrounding the Ninth Crusade in the early 1270s. This would help explain why the Magdalene is Christ’s procuratour and the Christians’ maister, presented as the leader of the army of Christ threatening a reluctant king to help Christianity. This is reminiscent of the strife between Bishop Turpin and Charlemagne in the fourteenth-century Sege of Melayne. Like Charlemagne, the king is then marked by the Magdalene with the sign of the cross and embarks for Jerusalem (ESEL 336). The holy harlot may be seen here as embodying Barbara Newman’s “weak woman” type, who chastises men for their shortcomings. It is no coincidence that the hagiographer shows only Christian men as wavering in their faith and looking to flee when faced with the Saracens’ threat of violence (ESEL 194–5), while the Magdalene stands firm and speaks with “wordes bolde” (ESEL 203). In presenting a formerly sinful woman as an authoritative pillar of the faith in the face of adversity, the hagiographer emphasises the power of the Christian God: “even” a woman, if protected by the true religion, can succeed. The figure of the Magdalene was important in the context of the Crusades, as it is from her abbey in Vézelay – where the relics of the saint were reputed to be kept – that Bernard called for the Second Crusade in 1146. It is from there too that Philip Augustus and Richard Lionheart left for the Third Crusade in 1190. Such events situated both the Magdalene and her abbey under the sign of the cross.164 The ESEL Magdalene, represented as she is as the leader of the “Crusade” against the Marseilles Saracens, is portrayed here as a rallying point 163 Emily

Lavin Leverett, “Holy Bloodshed: Violence and Christian Piety in the Romances of the London Thornton Manuscript,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2006, p. 40. Similar passages occur elsewhere, for instance in The Sege of Melayne, or at the beginning of Oteo. 164 Victor Saxer, Le dossier vézelien de Marie Madeleine: invention et translation des reliques en 1265–1267: contribution à l’histoire du culte de la sainte à Vézelay à l’apogée du Moyen Âge (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1975), p. 127. The ESEL poem was written just before the great decline of that abbey in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. On this see ibid., p. 185.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature (much like her abbey in Vézelay) for a justified Crusade, as was her portrayal as a crusader wearing a cape and destroying the Marseilles idols in an illumination of the mid-fourteenth-century Hungarian Angevin Legendary.165 The Magdalene’s history as a witness to the crucifixion and her origin in Jerusalem further link her with a rightful possession of the Holy City by Christians. In presenting the Magdalene in this authoritative way, the hagiographer may have wanted to impress upon the English audience the legitimacy of another, a ninth, Crusade to regain Jerusalem in the context of the late thirteenthcentury’s abating crusading spirit, after a number of controversial enterprises, for instance the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). We will now see in Chapter 3 that the context of production of the lives of holy harlots, when available, is similarly very influential in the portrayal of the saint’s gender and authority.

Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 78.

165 Katherine

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CHAPTER 3 HETERODOXY, PATRONAGE, AND THE HARLOT IN FOURTEENTH- AND FIFTEENTH-CENTURY HAGIOGRAPHY

T

he argument that the Early South English Legendary poet’s portrayal of a particularly powerful Magdalene should be read against the backdrop of the Ninth Crusade illustrates the influence that specific historical contexts of production could wield on the representation of holy harlots’ authority. This interpretation, however, derives more from elements found in the text than from any secure knowledge about the poem’s context of production. In this chapter, two late medieval lives of holy harlots exemplify that a specific context of composition, when it is known, can help us understand widely diverging representations of female saints’ authority and exemplarity. Femininity, sexuality, and authority intersect at different points depending on the date, locale, authorship, patronage, and socio-economic circumstances of hagiographical production. The valuation of outspoken and repentant saintly women does not therefore evolve monolithically, solely influenced by such far-reaching movements as the rise of affective piety or the influence of the romance genre over hagiography (as Chapters 1 and 2 of this monograph might have hinted at): it also varies depending on the specific context of production. To facilitate comparison, the two texts focus on the same holy harlot, Mary Magdalene. Both are based on Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea and are written, during a time when John Wycliffe’s reformist ideas had a strong impact on literary production, by Augustinian friars who explicitly positioned themselves against the heresy. The first text under consideration in this chapter is the life of Mary Magdalene in the Festial, a collection of prose saints’ lives penned in the late 1380s by John Mirk, an Austin canon from Lilleshall in Shropshire. The second work is a mid-fifteenth-century verse life of Mary Magdalene by Osbern Bokenham, Austin friar from Clare Priory in Suffolk, East Anglia. Both Augustinians explicitly position themselves on the side of the orthodox Church, rejecting what they conceive pejoratively as the Lollard heresy. This 101

Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature last piece of contextual information is crucial to this chapter, as I will show that even though the radical potential contained in holy harlots’ lives made repentant prostitutes particularly fertile ground for use by dissenters, our two hagiographers treated their Magdalene very differently because they each had a very different intended audience. Indeed, the first part of this chapter will establish that Mary Magdalene and other holy harlots were choice models for the “true preacher” or “true man” propounded by Wycliffite reformists, and for the latter’s justification of some of their most controversial tenets – such as the defence of silent confession, the criticism of clerical mediation in one’s access to the divine, or the promotion of lay, unlicensed, or female preaching. Both Mirk and Bokenham were aware of the holy harlot’s importance for the heretics, but while Mirk reduces his saint’s predicative authority for his mostly rural and uneducated lay audience, Bokenham portrays a particularly authoritative and feminine saint because his patron, a noble East Anglian woman, expressly asks him for such a representation. He does so despite the fact that East Anglia was very fertile ground for the so-called Lollards. As will become clear, Bokenham’s depiction of a preaching, teaching, Mary Magdalene is to be linked to the socio-economic status and gender of his patroness. In addition to this, the locale of production matters: East Anglia, where Bokenham was writing, produced atypical literary portrayals of female sanctity when compared to the rest of England, perhaps because of its geographical and economic proximity with the Continent and the resulting influence of Continental female mystics in the region. These diametrically different portrayals of the repentant harlot saint exemplify how, despite an unfavourable religious context for the representation of an authoritative preaching harlot, patronage and the geographical or socio-economic position of a work’s intended audience can influence the hagiographer. Before delving further into these two lives, it is important to ascertain the centrality of Mary Magdalene in contemporary debates about the Wycliffite heresy in order to gauge the specific religious landscape which our two writers had to navigate when writing a life of the Magdalene. Before this, I will define the terminology adopted here when talking about John Wycliffe and those who, in the late fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century, expressed dissenting or reformist views often connected with Wycliffe. Since Anne Hudson championed using the term Wycliffism and Lollardy interchangeably in her seminal The Premature Reformation,1 much of the scholarly production on Lollardy and Wycliffism has centred on discussing or defining these terms, connecting them with either the academic or the extramural, the elite or the mainstream, the Continental or the Insular.2 What these discussions have evidenced is that neither the heretics, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 2 See, for instance, Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: 1

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography be they deemed Wycliffites or Lollards, nor the Church, were ever monolithic entities sharing common ideas and stable definitions of themselves and of their enemies. Most importantly, the term Lollard was used by different people for different purposes and at different times: sometimes pejoratively, but also at times in a positive manner.3 What this suggests is that Lollardy truly lies in the eyes of the beholder, so that when Mirk mentions Lollards, it is in the sense used by the orthodox Church’s reflection on Wycliffite writings, a sense which flattens out the term’s polysemy: instead of representing the complexity of each individual person or work’s dissenting ideas, it evokes a stereotypical and easily recognisable caricature of heresy and of Wycliffite “error” in particular. Since I wish to exemplify how John Wycliffe, his followers, and those accused of Lollardy (or heretical beliefs associated with John Wycliffe) made use of Mary Magdalene, before showing how two hagiographers explicitly on the side of orthodoxy reacted to her role in the dissenting controversy in their treatment of the saint’s life, I want to be as inclusive as possible while avoiding the pejorative associations of “Lollard.” I will therefore use such terms as Wycliffite or heretical, and write about dissenting or reformist tendencies more generally. Indeed, some of these ideas might not actually have been shared by Wycliffe and his followers, and they might have belonged to one dissenter only or have been linked with other reformist impulses elsewhere in Europe. By Wycliffite, then, I mean very broadly any idea or tenet that is influenced by John Wycliffe and his followers, that often circulates alongside any such, or that is retroactively ascribed to Wycliffites or Lollards in heresy proceedings.4 THE MAGDALENE AND THE WYCLIFFITES Speaking of the importance of a saint for the Wycliffites may appear paradoxical: there is strong evidence of their disdain for mainstream cults of saints. However, some allowances were made for saints who appeared in the Scriptures.5 Mary Magdalene is explicitly mentioned as one such exception Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. pp 72–4; Fiona Somerset, Feeling like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); some of the essays in Kantik Ghosh and Vincent Gillespie’s edited conference proceedings, After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012); and finally, Kantik Ghosh, “Wycliffism and Lollardy,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol 4: Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 433–45. 3 On this, see Cole, Literature and Heresy, and Somerset, Feeling like Saints, p. 274. 4 This definition owes much to Fiona Somerset’s “Lollard writings,” which she understands as any writing that draws upon Wycliffe’s thoughts and shares prevalent traits with other writings which were influenced by him. See her Feeling like Saints, p. 16. 5 Anne Hudson remarks that very few saints appear in the English Wycliffite Sermons, the majority of which are of biblical origin. See her Premature Reformation, pp. 197, 270,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature by John Wycliffe,6 which makes her of particular interest, and especially useful for Wycliffites. Indeed, Fiona Somerset has shown that Wycliffites encouraged their fellow dissenters to “feel like saints,” to identify emotionally with them, notably through representations of narrative confessions of faith.7 Since the Magdalene’s weeping at Christ’s feet and her role as apostolorum apostola figured such confessions of faith, she was naturally front and centre in Wycliffites’ minds. In both scriptural events, her actions – telling the truth and speaking up about her faith in Christ and the Resurrection despite the social stigma this admission may engender – present her as a figure of the “true man,” or Wycliffite,8 par excellence. Mary Magdalene is therefore a model to be imitated by all dissenters, but her scriptural role of announcing the Resurrection to the apostles also constitutes an important precedent for reformists to promote lay, and even female, preaching. Female and lay preaching are treated together here, as more often than not Wycliffites defended female preaching only as an extreme case of lay preaching, used to validate the latter rather than truly championing women’s right to preach. Behind this is the logic that if even a woman could preach, the male laity certainly should be allowed to do so as well. The Magdalene’s femininity therefore comes to exemplify the dissenting laity. The holy harlot is positioned as a model for all Wycliffites, and especially for their asserted freedom to become lay preachers. More importantly, even, this is because of attributes that she possesses and which are traditionally associated with the female gender. Such attributes include, for instance, affective, bridal love, a tendency to be easily persuaded, and even garrulousness. In grounding the Magdalene’s status as an ideal “true man” in her femininity, the Wycliffites revalorise femininity at the same time as they assimilate its attributes with that of the reformist laity. Once again, one can witness the potential of the holy harlot’s gender and sexuality to represent and bolster the value of femininity as a whole, something that will be developed further in the next chapter. The following passage from the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels on John 20 in Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS Bodley 243 presents the Magdalene preaching the Resurrection as an ideal Wycliffite preacher:

and 302–3. There is, however, some evidence that this rejection of hagiolatry may have been overgeneralised. See Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 185, n. 31, and Somerset, Feeling like Saints, p. 139. 6 John Wycliffe, Dialogus sive Speculum Ecclesie Militantis, ed. Alfred W. Pollard (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1886), p. 27. 7 Somerset, Feeling like Saints, pp. 145 ff. 8 On Wycliffite texts referring to fellow dissenters as “true men,” see Hudson, Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), pp. 166–7.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography while men gon awey, stronge loue haþ set þe womman in þe same place. Austyn. Marie Mawdelen þat was a synful womman in þe cite, in louynge þe treuþe, waschide þe filþis of greet synne. Hou greet myʒt of loue kyndlide þe soule of þis womman, which ʒede not awey fro þe lordis sepulcre: ʒhe þe disciplis goynge awey, sche aloone þat abood to seke […] Gregory the Great. […] Bi þis þat Marie telde to disciplis, þat Crist roos aʒen, alle men ben monestid, ond so most þey þat han office of preching, þat if ony þing of heuene is schewid to hem, bisily þey telle it to her neiʒboris. Bede.9

The Magdalene acts here as a precedent for unlicensed preaching: “ony þing of heuene” should convince one who has “office of preching” to teach.10 She offers a model for true men, as her preaching is motivated by her “louynge [of] þe treuþe.” This model is particularly associated with qualities that are often considered as essentially feminine, like her blind faith and love, qualities which elevate her above her male protagonists to receive the office of preaching. Indeed, the Magdalene’s affective love for Christ causes her to stay at the tomb, and her easy persuasion by “any sign of heven” opposes her not only to the figure of the disciples who fled, but also to men in general, and especially licensed preachers (“alle men ben monestid, ond so most þey þat han office of preching”).11 Finally, the garrulousness often ascribed to women in medieval misogynistic texts is here valued as a positive attribute, transformed into the preacher’s readiness for pastoral care: the image of the gossip who is quick to repeat what she saw to her neighbours (“bisily þey telle it to her neiʒboris”) becomes the ideal Wycliffite preacher’s dynamism in addressing his flock.12 Another Wycliffite text, an English Wycliffite Sermon for Easter Thursday, repeats the notion that the Magdalene’s great love and her easy persuasion (explicitly categorised as a feminine trait: “for wymmen ben freele as water and taken sunnere prynte of bileve”) made her an ideal candidate to become apostolorum apostola.13 In other words, she is the perfect preacher because 9

MS Bodley 243, fol. 171rv, my transcription. This passage is also mentioned in passing by Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 126. 10 Although “office of preching” may be understood to refer to a person having an official licence to preach, its meaning in the context of the Magdalene’s unlicensed preaching of the Resurrection suggests rather whoever has received a sign of heaven. 11 On the medieval tradition of women as being easily persuaded, see further below, pp. 156–67. 12 On the portrayal of women as gossips, see Joyce E. Salisbury, “Gendered Sexuality,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 81–102, at p. 87. 13 Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon (eds), English Wycliffite Sermons, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–86), vol. 3, Sermo 65, p. 199. The particular love guiding the Magdalene and other women at the tomb is also put on the foreground in Sermo 68 (English Wycliffite Sermons, vol. 3, p. 13).

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature she is a woman. The holy harlot is further mentioned in her capacity of apostolorum apostola by John Wycliffe himself in his De Civili Dominio, where he invokes Magdalene’s femininity as an “extreme” case of laity explicitly. Here, Wycliffe argues that the militant Church, the “ship of Peter,” may consist exclusively of laymen, since at one time it was occupied only by a woman, the holy harlot, when she was the only one clinging on to her faith on Easter Sunday.14 The Magdalene therefore repeatedly appears in Wycliffite sources as the paragon of the true preacher, an explicitly feminine model to be followed, an important authorising precedent in the dissenters’ promotion of unlicensed preaching and a lay Church. I connect the distinctive feminine features of the preaching that the Magdalene is used to promote here with my argument – developed in Chapter 4 of this monograph – that the holy harlots’ femininity represents an ideal for both male and female laity. This may offer further support to Cole’s argument that dissenting concepts had particular influence in mainstream literature and thought:15 the holy harlot type being used by dissenters and being associated by them with the laity may have influenced her becoming a model for lay emulation. Yet it is always difficult to gauge where influences arise: was the holy harlot model particularly relevant for the laity, and then adopted by Wycliffites, or vice versa? Or, and that would be my opinion, did it simply occur organically in both reformist and mainstream texts at approximately the same time? This portrayal of a particularly feminine ideal for dissenting preachers may clash with current scholarly questioning of whether Wycliffites actually championed female preachers, and whether such preachers indeed existed.16 Although there is evidence that exceptional women, who managed to attain an unusual level of learning and authority, existed among the Wycliffites,17 Wycliffe nevertheless positioned himself against female preachers,18 and women within dissenting communities seemed to have been confined to “roles that kept them Reginald L. Poole (ed.), Joannis Wyclif De Civili Dominio, vol. 1 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1885), p. 392. 15 Cole, Literature and Heresy. 16 See, for instance, Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers, Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 49–70; Alcuin Blamires, “The Wife of Bath and Lollardy,” Medium Aevum 58 (1989), pp. 224–42 and his “Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saints’ Lives,” Viator 26 (1995), pp. 135–52; Fiona Somerset, “Eciam Mulier: Women in Lollardy and the Problem of Sources,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 245–60; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Eciam Lollardi: Some Further Thoughts on Fiona Somerset’s ‘Eciam Mulier: Women in Lollardy and the Problem of Sources,” in the same collection, pp. 483–92. 17 On this, see Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 49–70 and Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 109–24. 18 Kerby-Fulton, “Eciam Lollardi,” p. 38. 14

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography close to the domestic centre [while] men were the public leaders.”19 Indeed, contrary to the common belief that women were drawn towards heresy in order to escape the “institutional, doctrinal, and sexual constraints they encountered in orthodoxy,”20 Wycliffism differed from other reformist movements such as the Cathars or the Waldensians in offering comparatively fewer avenues for female authority and priestly status than did, for instance, the model of the Magdalene preaching in “mainstream” hagiography. This short overview of the Magdalene’s portrayal in writings by Wycliffites has, however, shown that while the latter might not have championed women’s preaching in deed, their theoretical understanding of preaching was, notwithstanding, feminised, and it may have even reflected an openness to women’s voices that remains difficult to tease out from historical sources. Beside providing a template for the ideal Wycliffite preacher, the Magdalene also appears in the most famous debate on female preaching of the period as an important precedent for female preaching. In the trial for heresy of the “Lollard” Walter Brut in 1391–93, she takes centre stage in the biased accounts and trial records of Brut’s accusers, who need to demonstrate that her preaching was exceptional, and not an authorising model for later female preachers. Whether Brut himself truly supported female preaching is still a point of contention among scholars: Fiona Somerset has shown that Brut defended female preaching only once, within a broader discussion on the sacrament of the Eucharist.21 All his accusers, however, mention that he champions female preaching, quite possibly indicating that Brut’s position was unusual among Wycliffites.22 His accusers’ insistence on this point may also suggest that supporting female preaching might have constituted a ready way to condemn his beliefs as a whole as heretical. Brut, according to the biased report offered in the Register of Bishop Trefnant, is said to have held the view that while Paul prescribes for women to learn in silence, he did not explicitly ban them from teaching or exercising authority over men (“non possunt docere neque in virum dominari”), as evidenced by the “women and holy virgins who preached the word of God and have converted many men” (“mulieres, sancta virgins, constanter predicarunt verbum Dei et multos ad fidem converterunt”).23 Gender and Heresy, p. 4. Blamires, “Women and Preaching,” p. 135. See also Eleanor McLaughlin, “Les femmes et l’hérésie médiévale: un problème dans l’histoire de la spiritualité,” Concilium 111 (1976), pp. 73–90. 21 Somerset, “Eciam Mulier,” p. 249. 22 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests he was rather more influenced by Continental apocalyptic writings than Wycliffism. See her Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 261–78. 23 William W. Capes, The Register of John Trefnant, Bishop of Hereford (Hereford: Cantilupe Society, 1914), p. 345. 19 McSheffrey, 20

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature The centrality of the Magdalene in this debate becomes at once apparent when one of Brut’s accusers naturally infers that Brut’s preaching “mulieres, sancte virgines,” be Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha of Bethany: “multe mulieres constanter predicaverunt verbum quando sacerdotes et alii non audebant verbum loqui et patet de Magdalena et Martha.”24 Another instance of the Magdalene’s importance in the debate on female preaching, loosely connected to Brut’s trial, appears in the Quaestio Utrum liceat mulieribus docere viros publice congregatos, copied in London, BL MS Harley 31.25 The quaestio is closely based on the Summa quaestionum ordinarium, a thirteenthcentury Parisian tract by Henry of Ghent written in the context of the Cathar and Waldensian heresies, which evokes the late medieval belief that Mary Magdalene and Martha were with the apostles when they received the Holy Ghost, and were thus de facto not only allowed, but required to preach.26 Similarly, the Harley quaestio mentions the Magdalene as a precedent for female preaching: “confirmatur, nam legitur de beata Maria Magdalena quod publice predicavit in Marcilia et in regione adiacente quam sua predicacione ad Christum convertit. Quare vocatur apostolorum apostola gratia etc.”27 The quaestio author very cleverly modifies his source so that the Magdalene’s role as apostolorum apostola is not linked to the Pentecost anymore, as it was in Henry of Ghent, but is now uniquely ascribed to her preaching in Marseilles, displacing it to a part of the harlot’s life which Wycliffites would have rejected as legendary and inauthentic.28 However, the fact that the author takes pains

24

“Many women steadfastly preached the Word when priests and others did not dare speak the Word, and this is shown by Magdalene and Martha.” My translation. MS Harley 31, fol. 219r, cited in Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. 52, n. 14. The mention of Mary Magdalene as one of the “mulieres, sancte virgines” furthers the thesis, developed in the last two chapters, that the holy harlot is indeed re-virginised after her conversion in the later medieval period. 25 This manuscript is an “anti-Wycliffite miscellany” from the early 1390s. See Alcuin Blamires and C.W. Marx, “Woman Not to Preach: A Disputation in British Library MS Harley 31,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (1993), pp. 34–63, at p. 38. Extracts of the quaestio are translated in Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C.W. Marx (eds), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 251–5. 26 Henry of Ghent, Summa quaestionum ordinarium I, 11, 2.3, cited in Blamires and Marx, “Woman Not to Preach,” p. 50. See also ibid., p. 136. On the Magdalene and the gift of tongues, see also below, pp. 152, and 213–14. 27 “It is confirmed, for we read that the blessed Mary Magdalene preached publicly in Marcilia and in the area round about, which through her preaching she converted to Christ. Because of this she is called the ‘Apostle of Apostles.’” Blamires and Marx, “Woman Not to Preach,” p. 56. Translation Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, pp. 251–2. 28 In addition to this, the quaestio author removes the scriptural basis for Henry’s argument (Peter 1:4) that one must minister to others if one receives a gift, and suppresses the claim that Martha and Mary had received the gift of tongues alongside the apostles.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography to invalidate the Magdalene’s teaching and preaching attests to her centrality in the debate. Reformists evoked the figure of the Magdalene in contexts other than female/lay preaching. Taking up the tradition of using the Magdalene’s femininity to champion lay encroachment on clerical privileges, Brut is said in the Register of Bishop Trefnant to argue that since the sheer power of the Magdalene’s prayer moved Christ to raise Lazarus, then a devout woman’s words should have the strength to consecrate the bread. This again uses the Magdalene and her gender as an extreme form of laity: if the Magdalene can access the sacraments, laymen definitely should,29 and conversely then, the sacraments should not be the sole prerogative of the clergy. Holy harlots are also at the fore of the Wycliffite argument in favour of silent or private confession. The Magdalene is the main figure in this controversy,30 as she was often hailed as the first penitent of Christianity in her guise as the anonymous sinner of the city (Lk. 7:37), and as such had come to represent the sacrament of penance itself for the Church.31 The fact that the first person to confess had done so silently presented a conundrum for the Church, providing dissenters with a very useful precedent to validate their beliefs. John Wycliffe, for instance, mentions her alongside Peter and Paul in his treatise De Eucharistia et Poenitentia Sive de Confessione as an example of the validity of the remission of sins without the need for oral confession.32 Similarly, a Wycliffite sermon on Luke 7 states: “And Iesu seyde to þis woman ‘þi bileve haþ maad þee saf. Go þou in pees.’ He[e]re may we see hou pryvey shrifte is autorisid of oure Iesu.”33 Love acknowledges in his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ – an early-fifteenth century work explicitly conceived as an antiWycliffite tract – that the Magdalene would seem to constitute “gret evidence” in support of silent confession.34 He, however, goes on to refute the example of the Magdalene as a possible precedent, arguing that the physical presence of Register, pp. 346–7, translation Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, pp. 259–60. See on this Somerset, “Eciam Mulier,” p. 253. On this, see the second of the “Sixteen Points on which the Bishops accuse Lollards” in Anne Hudson’s Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 19. See, for instance, Mirk, Festial, lines 5–8. The edition used here is that of Susan Powell, John Mirk’s Festial, EETS o.s. 334, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–10), hereafter Festial. On the Magdalene as representative of the sacrament of penance, see in particular Jansen, “Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995) pp. 1–25, and her Making of the Magdalene, pp. 5–6. Johann Loserth, Iohannis Wyclif De Eucharistia Tractatus Maior. Accedit Tractatus De Eucharistia et Poenitentia Sive De Confessione (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1892), p. 333. Hudson and Gradon, Wycliffite Sermons, vol. 3 Sermo 231, p. 299. Michael G. Sargent (ed.), Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), pp. 90–1.

29 Capes, 30

31

32

33

34

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Christ at the scene effectively removed the need to speak, as Christ knew the sin and repentance in the heart of the Magdalene. The idea that in the absence of Christ’s preternatural knowledge one should still voice one’s confession to a priest is implicit here. It then appears that the Magdalene is a cornerstone in Wycliffites’ articulation of some of their most important tenets, being used to support anti-sacramental beliefs, and to bolster lay, and in some extreme cases female, access to priestly functions. The Wycliffites’ use of another repentant harlot exemplifies that it is not only Mary Magdalene, but all holy harlots, whose distinctive disregard for shame and social pressure to confess one’s faith constituted models to imitate for dissenters. Raab, a Jericho prostitute, appears in a Wycliffite interpolation in the longest of three versions of Rolle’s commentary on the psalter (Commentary on Psalm 87). In this commentary, Raab, who hid God’s messengers and is thus rewarded, is offered as an example that a confession of truth and faith makes one elect of God (this confession is, as Somerset notes, assimilating confession of faith with a “kind of extrasacramental penance”)35 and therefore saved. Her exemplarity, linked with her acknowledgement of truth, is underlined by the author of the interpolation, who acknowledges her “trewe shrifte to God.” She is to be a model for all sinners: “If by Raab’s example they stand faithfully in the fear of God, having pity toward their fellow Christians, acknowledging the truth, whatever they ask, they must believe, and it shall be granted to them.”36 In this way, all repentant prostitutes lend themselves to use as figures of the fluidity of the boundary between male and female, clerical and lay, orthodox and dissenting. Mary Magdalene is, however, the most important of these harlot saints, appearing front and centre in debates on the most important aspects of the Wycliffite heresy: lay and/or female preaching, anti-sacramentalism, and silent confession. It is thus likely no coincidence that Thomas Brunton, bishop of Rochester, chose to give his sermon refuting Wycliffes’ conclusions on the sacraments of Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist on 22 July 1382, the feast day of the Magdalene.37 Nor can it be mere chance that William Waynflete should have chosen to name the new Oxonian college he founded in 1458 Magdalene College, since he dedicated it specifically to training theologians against the Wycliffite heresy.38 It is in the context of this particularly controversial moment in the history of the Magdalene figure that Mirk and Bokenham wrote their lives of Mary Magdalene. Feeling like Saints, p. 151. J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Stephen E. Lahey, and Fiona Somerset (eds and trans), Wycliffite Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), pp. 231–5, at p. 234 (in Modern English translation). It is excerpted in Middle English in Somerset, Feeling like Saints, pp. 151–2. 37 Sister Mary Aquinas Devlin, “Bishop Brunton and His Sermons,” Speculum 14 (1939), pp. 324–44, at p. 343. 38 Hudson, Premature Reformation, p. 444.

35 Somerset, 36

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography MIRK’S FESTIAL John Mirk was acutely aware of the problem that the Wycliffite heresy presented for the late medieval Church. One of his three extant works, the Manuale Sacerdotis, comprises a long passage rejecting Wycliffites and their position on transubstantiation.39 This treatise, the only one he wrote in Latin and for a fellow priest, operates, according to Susan Powell, at a “more advanced and intellectual level” than Mirk’s other two vernacular works – the Festial and the Instructions for Parish Priests. These were intended as preaching tools for an “illiterate audience, or for semi-literate priests.”40 The audience for these works was ultimately a mostly rural, uneducated laity. The subject of heresy is therefore not tackled as openly in these two texts as in the Manuale, Mirk probably considering that “such discussion was not appropriate” for an uneducated audience.41 Nevertheless, the Festial, a collection of seventy-four saints’ lives presented as sermons on the occasion of each saint’s feast day, was written, according to Judy Ann Ford, with a “desire to dissuade the masses from Lollardy and revolt by providing an avenue of vernacularity, lay agency, and participatory ecclesiology within the orthodox church.”42 Even though Mirk mentions the heresy only twice in his Festial, and these references are either vague or come about in an unexpected context,43 his disapproval of Wycliffism is implicit throughout, prompting Alan Fletcher to concur with Ford and argue that Mirk’s motivation in writing this collection of saints’ lives arose at least partly from a desire to counteract the popularity of the heresy that the hagiographer saw growing in his parishioners.44 Although the scarcity of direct references to Manuale Sacerdotalis, Part IV, chs 11–13, in Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS Bodley 632, fols 90v–92r. See also Powell, “John to John: The Manuale Sacerdotis and the Daily Life of a Parish Priest,” in Recording Medieval Lives, ed. Julia Boffey and Virginia Davis (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2009), pp. 160–76. 40 Powell (ed.), Festial, pp. xxvii and xliii. 41 Ibid., p. xliii. 42 See her John Mirk’s Festial: Orthodoxy, Lollardy, and the Common People in FourteenthCentury England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p. 143. 43 In his sermon for Trinity Sunday, a feast traditionally associated with preaching against heretics, Mirk rejects Lollards’ beliefs on the Trinity but is vague in his connection of age-old heretics with present-day “Lollards.” In his sermon for Corpus Christi, again a feast-day connected with the revolt of 1381 and the suppression of Wycliffite thought, he defends images, although iconomachy is a little-known Wycliffite tenet. See Powell, Festial, pp. 151 and 157, and her “Lollards and Lombards: Late Mediaeval Bogeymen?”, Medium Aevum 59 (1990), pp. 133–9. See also Ford, Orthodoxy, Lollardy, p. 145. On iconomachy as Wycliffite, see, for instance, the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, pp. 364–5; Hudson and Gradon, English Wycliffite Writings, p. 27, and notes pp. 153–4; H.S. Cronin, “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” English Historical Review 22 (1907), pp. 290–304, at pp. 300–1. 44 On the Festial as an anti-Wycliffite work, see Alan Fletcher, “John Mirk and the Lollards,” Medium Aevum 56 (1987), pp. 217–24; Ford, Orthodoxy, Lollardy; A.I. Doyle 39

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Wycliffism prompts Powell to discount such a position, she agrees that the Festial held “at least a tacit role in countering the Lollard threat,”45 because its sermons “certainly offered a basis for such a counter-attack in their deliberate populism.”46 Mirk’s concern with Wycliffism, even if it is not explicitly voiced, transpires in the text, particularly in the life of Mary Magdalene. The hagiographer does not, as some did, supply the Magdalene with an oral confession before she is absolved by Christ.47 However, he takes pains to present the episode at Simon’s house in ambiguous terms, so that the Magdalene is seen as addressing Christ within herself, but loudly so: “bot no worde spake scheo þat man myght here, bot softely in hyr herte heghly scheo cried to Criste of mercy and made a vow to hym þat scheo wolde neure trespace more” (Festial 35–8). The Magdalene’s confession may have been silent, but she “cried” it to Christ, and vowed to him not to sin again, as though she were speaking to him. While “crien” may signify to lament, pray, or beg, its primary denotation is to cry out, and the juxtaposition of “crien” with “heghly,” often used in conjunction with the meaning of “crying out loudly” would have led the Festial audience to understand this silent confession as paradoxically being a loud one.48 Mirk’s choice to define the Magdalene’s action with adverbs that hold contradicting meanings – “softely” and “heghly” – suggests moreover that he wishes to highlight the loudness of this silent confession. The confession is both silent and loud, expressed affectionately (MED “softely”) and “with great feeling” (MED “heghly”). Although seemingly paradoxical, these word choices demonstrate Mirk’s desire to foreground the exceptional character of the Magdalene’s confession, which is loud for Christ, but which no (other) “man myght here.” In so doing, he refers to the already-mentioned argument that a priest, not being omniscient, cannot reproduce Christ’s feat offers an argument in support to Fletcher and Ford, noting that the area of heaviest distribution of the Festial corresponds with that of the Wycliffite sermon cycle. See his “Publication by Members of Religious Orders,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 109–24, at p. 115. 45 Susan Powell, The Medieval in the Sixteenth Century: The Post-Reformation History of a Fourteenth-Century Sermon Collection (Salford: European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford, 1998), p. 27. 46 Powell, Festial, p. xliii. 47 An oral confession is added, for instance, by Innocent III, Odo of Cluny, and in both the Pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes vitae Christi and its translation into English by Nicholas Love. Innocent’s version is edited in Katherine Ludwig Jansen, “Innocent III and the Literature of Confession,” in Innocenzo III: Urbs et Orbis, ed. Andrea Sommerlechner (Rome: Società romana di storia patria, 2003), pp. 369–82. For Odo of Cluny, see PL 133, col. 715. For the Meditationes and Love’s translation, see C. Mary Stallings-Taney (ed.), Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones vite Christi, pp. 110–15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), and Sargent (ed.), Mirror, pp. 89–94. 48 MED s.v. “crien” and “heghly.”

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography of absolving a silent repentant. It therefore appears that Mirk was very aware of the Magdalene’s controversial status as an authorising precedent for some of the Wycliffites’ beliefs, and chose his words in consequence. It is in this context that one should understand Mirk’s reinterpretation of Jacobus de Voragine’s vita Mariae Magdalenae. Mirk parallels the portrayal of holy harlots seen in Chapter 2 in many ways – in his distrust of the enticing nature of feminine speech pre-conversion and in his representation of the Magdalene as a particularly feminine romance lady/Bride of Christ, drawing authority from her gendered relationship with the Son of God. The harlot’s preaching is, however, more suspect than in earlier lives, as we shall see, and she appears as a very passive recipient of God’s grace when she speaks in public, while her authority and sanctity are both defined as arising exclusively from her privileged, tactile, relationship with Christ. Mirk’s Magdalene is a romance lady from beginning to end, described as the fair-haired lady of Magdalen Castle.49 As in the ESEL, she is continuously referred to as “þis woman,”50 and her sinfulness leads her to lose her name/ identity, becoming simply “þe synful womman” (Festial 23). Such words render the Magdalene a stereotype of femininity’s association with sin and lechery. The Magdalene’s gender is put in doubt only once, by the preacher who encounters her in the wilderness (Festial 160), but it is immediately reasserted by the Magdalene herself, who tells him she is the “synful womman” (Festial 161). From beginning to end, therefore, the holy harlot’s status as a woman, and its “inherent” sinfulness, is stable: she is and always will be the embodiment of female sinfulness, whether a harlot or a saint. In addition to this, the Magdalene’s sojourn in the wilderness is not especially ascetic, as she seems to eat her fill of heavenly manna. This reinforces her representation as feminine and removes any notion that her feminine body needs to be chastised for her previous sins. Mirk takes pains to emphasise throughout the Magdalene’s gendered status, particularly in relation to the male protagonists of the Life. She is her father’s “doghtyr” (Festial 17), John the Evangelist’s fiancée (Festial 19–21), only to become the Marseilles queen’s “mydwyf ” (Festial 135) who nurses the infant prince (Festial 136). Mirk attributes the Magdalene’s fall into sin to her failed marriage with John, who chooses instead to follow Christ. This version of events had some currency in medieval literature,51 and is mentioned only

Festial 16–17 and 33. See, for instance, Festial 5, 12, 13, 23, 25, and 161. 51 See, for example, the version narrated in the Cursor Mundi, where John and the Magdalene are the bride and bridegroom of the wedding in Cana during which Christ performs his first miracle: Richard Morris (ed.), Cursor Mundi, EETS o.s. 62 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1876), p. 770. See also Frederick S. Ellis, The Golden Legend of Master William Caxton Done Anew (London: Dent, 1900), IV, p. 87. A new edition 49

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature to be discarded as “falsa et frivola” in Voragine’s Legenda.52 Mirk’s unusual departure from his source puts greater emphasis on the Magdalene’s femininity by portraying her in another gender-specific role, at the same time as he reinforces the crucial importance of men in the creation of the Magdalene’s identity as a woman, a sinner, and a saint: a man causes her to sin, and another is responsible for her redemption. This leads to a portrayal of the harlot saint as unchanging, but also incidentally establishes the repentant prostitute as a mirror image of Man, who was famously lost through one woman (Eve), and saved thanks to another (Mary). Although a gender-reversal is effected here, the harlot saint comes to represent mankind as a whole. This departure from Mirk’s source also strengthens the Magdalene’s portrayal as Bride of Christ, as her affection for John is quite naturally replaced by her love for Christ: she exchanges one earthly lover for another. Mirk strongly emphasises the loving relationship between the Magdalene and Christ, as well as her uninterrupted access to his body. This particularly gendered and privileged intimacy with Christ validates the Magdalene’s sanctity and her authority, even though the latter is still reduced in comparison to Mirk’s source. As in the Anglo-Norman Vie and the ESEL, the holy harlot’s relationship with Christ is underscored by the reciprocity of their love and of their care for each other’s body: scheo ȝode behynde hym and toke hys fette in hyr handes and, for sorow þat scheo hadde in hur herte, scheo wepte so tendurly þat terus of hur heyen woschon Cristes fette. þan wyth hyr fayre fax sche wypud hem aftur, and þan wyth alle þe love þat was in hyr herte scheo cussyd hys fette and so wyth hyr box anoynted hem. […] þan hadde Criste compassion of hur and clensed hur of vij fendes þe whyche scheo hadde wythinne hur. (Festial 31–9)

Here, Mirk expands his source where he usually condenses it. The hagiographer foregrounds the intimacy between Christ and the Magdalene, insisting upon the physical contact between the protagonists, from the relative spatial position of each of their bodies, to every touch, tear, or kiss. Mirk develops Christ and Mary’s reciprocal love to such an extent that it becomes the main characteristic of Mary Magdalene’s sanctity. Love is the reason behind her continuous presence at his side, even when she has to brave armed knights to anoint his body after his death (Festial 43–5 and 48). It is evoked to explain Jesus’s decision to appear to her first on Easter Sunday, and for his curing her sister’s illness and raising her brother (Festial 43–5, 51–3, and 55). It is knowledge of this love that leads the Jews to exile the Magdalene (Festial 57–9). Indeed, the Magdalene’s life is even introduced in a statement of Caxton’s Golden Legend was just published by John Scahill, Mayumi Taguchi, and Satoko Tokunaga, as EETS o.s. 355 (London: Oxford University Press, 2020). 52 LA 641.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography that depicts her most salient saintly characteristic as the love Christ had for her: “Gode men, suche a day ȝe schul haue þe feste of Mary Magdale, þat was so holy þat oure Lorde Ihesu Criste aftur hys modur he louid hir moste of alle wommen” (Festial 2–4). At the end of the text, this notion is reiterated. Her tomb is engraved with a narrative of her life, “in worchep of God þat dud so goddely be hur, and in honour of hyre” (Festial 172). God’s honouring of her is seen here as the most prominent aspect of her life, while Mary’s own identity and sanctity become auxiliary to what she truly represents: an example of God’s grace. The Magdalene is therefore mostly remarkable for her affective intimacy with Christ/God. Femininity, as it is defined in the Festial depiction of Mary Magdalene, is remarkable only in connection to a woman’s capacity for love. The Magdalene’s female sanctity is established in her relationship with men and their positive (Bride of Christ) or negative (John the Evangelist’s fiancée) influence on her. We have already seen that Mirk put emphasis on the Magdalene’s touching of Christ’s feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee. The hagiographer omits the Legenda’s reference to Simon’s concern about this transgressive touch of a sinful woman on the Son of God,53 and will continue to describe the Magdalene as having unlimited access to Christ’s body, even if it contradicts the scriptural account. It will become apparent that Mary draws her authority from this privileged connection with Christ as his Bride, and that Mirk’s decision to insist upon it derives from his need to validate the saint’s authoritative stance, even after he has downplayed it. Mirk establishes the Magdalene as the quintessential woman, as Everywoman, and as a Bride of Christ whose affective example may inspire Mirk’s audience. In doing so, however, he must also represent her female preaching as something that is safely set in the past, something that cannot be reproduced by contemporary laymen or -women. The way he establishes these two seemingly incompatible aims is by making physical touch the origin of her pastoral authority, something even mystics or women identifying with the Bride could not boast to possess. While Mary’s loving and intimate relationship with Christ comes to an end in both the scriptural account and the Magdalene legends, Mirk insists on the continuity of their physical proximity even after death: their love is the same, their access to each other’s bodies is repeated, even after Christ’s ontology has changed. Mirk emphasises the unchanged nature of her love for him: “þus scheo louid Criste boþe levyng and dede” (Festial 50–1). Christ’s love for her is likewise unchanged, his body as accessible as before: while “in hys lyue” (Festial 51) he healed Martha and raised Lazarus, and after he has died “for love of hur […] whan he rosse from deth to lyfe, he aperud to hur bodyly furste of alle othyr and suffred hur to touche hym an cussyn hys fette” (Festial 51–6). This passage is remarkable, in that Mirk draws on John 20:11–18 for his 53

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature account of Christ’s first apparition to the Magdalene, but completely contradicts verse 17, the noli me tangere episode, where Christ refuses her continued touch. Mirk’s extreme departure from the scriptural account would have clashed with the expectations of the sermon’s audience, which was no doubt very familiar with this episode from its being often rehearsed in sermons and in the Easter liturgy.54 Mirk aimed in this way to make his audience dramatically aware of his modification of the episode, and thus of the Magdalene’s uninterrupted access to Christ’s body. This contradiction of the scriptural passage is not unheard of in late medieval literature, as it also appears in Johannes de Caulibus’ Meditaciones vite Christi (second half of the fourteenth century), as well as in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, an early fifteenth-century translation of de Caulibus’ work.55 Such a reaction to the noli me tangere episode can be explained by the fact that it stood in stark contrast to the medieval representation of the Gregorian Magdalene’s emotional and physical closeness with Christ during his life, as well as by the rise of affective piety which associated the Magdalene with the figure of the Bride of Christ.56 All three works establish in this way the Magdalene’s authority as more somatically based than in the Scriptures, and cut through theological complexity for hearers and readers alike, presenting a less conflicting account of the Magdalene’s interaction with Christ than in the Scriptures. Mirk’s emphatic representation of the Magdalene’s sanctity as relying solely upon her relationship with Christ, and especially on Christ’s love for her, enables him to “safely” depict the holy harlot as authoritative. In his text, her power is mostly intercessory, drawing authority from her privileged access to the divine. Implicit in this portrayal is that this power cannot be emulated, the Magdalene being sought not for imitation, but for mediation, thereby reinforcing the intercessory power of saints and the orthodox Church, as opposed to the Wycliffites’ desire for more immediate access to the divine.57 When the king asks Mary for the miraculous impregnation of his wife, he does so, as in the Legenda aurea, by requesting her intercession,58 and later on in the Life, when Peter reassures the king of Marseilles about his wife and child, no mention is made of the Magdalene’s role in their miraculous salvation, or of her good counsel, as was the case in the Legenda. Instead, Peter mentions Louise M. Bishop, Words, Stones, and Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 171. 55 See Stallings-Taney (ed.), Meditaciones, pp. 304–6 and Sargent (ed.), The Mirror, p. 198. 56 For more on this, see Juliette Vuille, “‘Towche me not’: Uneasiness in the Translation of the noli me tangere Episode in the Late Medieval English Period,” The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age, ed. Alessandra Petrina (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 213–23. 57 Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 311–13. 58 Festial 71–2, LA 632. 54

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography only God’s power, and the king ascribes the reason behind the Magdalene’s successful miracle to her power as intercessor, in a departure from his source:59 “O Mary Magdaleyne, þou arte of grete myght wyth God þat þus haste kept and fede þis schylde” (Festial 130–1). The Magdalene’s bridal status therefore enables her to call upon her Bridegroom for intercession, securing in this way her authoritative stance as a saint. Her authority is drawn solely from the traditional legitimacy of God, and not from any charismatic authority she could possess – that she does to a certain extent possess in the Legenda. Mirk in this way removes any of his source’s mention of the Magdalene’s threefold apparition to the princely couple at night, an episode presenting the Magdalene at her most authoritative and charismatic, not dependent on Christ’s help to feed the Christians but, rather, providing for them on her own. The Festial Magdalene’s controversial preaching is similarly reduced in comparison to the Legenda aurea, and authorised by the saint’s tactile relationship with God/Christ. Indeed, the Magdalene’s role as apostolorum apostola is removed,60 thereby suppressing any mention of her potential authoritative hold over the apostles. In addition, Mirk follows the Legenda only indirectly, describing her preaching rather than including it as direct speech, opposing other accounts such as the ESEL version of the Magdalene’s life. Indeed, Mirk goes so far as to remove most of the passages of the Legenda which bear quoted speech by the Magdalene,61 allowing her a mere six words of direct speech, when she arranges for Bishop Maximin to perform the last rites at the end of her life.62 The Magdalene is thus effectively silenced by Mirk: she speaks only in order to defer to the clergy. Furthermore, while Jacobus de Voragine does not hesitate to refer to the Magdalene as preaching on seven different occasions, Mirk mentions this occupation only three times,63 two of which appear in a context where the Magdalene’s truthfulness is doubted by the king of Marseilles.64 While doubting the truth of the new religion is a topos of conversion narratives, Mirk’s choice of qualifying the Magdalene’s speech as preaching in precisely the two passages where such doubt is expressed cannot be a coincidence. I suggest that, at the very least, this decision betrays some ambivalence on the hagiographer’s part as to female/lay preaching. When the Magdalene actually preaches, Mirk takes pains to present her as a passive, feminine vessel for God’s grace, so that again her gendered intimacy with the divine is used to authorise her. The efficacy of Mary’s speech is shown to be directly incumbent on her role as a passive recipient: 59 60 61

62 63 64

LA 635. LA 631. LA 631–2, 637, 641–2. “For þere I wul meton hym,” Festial 163. Festial 71, 76, and 144. Festial 70–2 and 75–7.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Magdaleyne was so ful of grace of þe Holy Goste þat scheo be hur gracious wordys turned hem alle aȝeyne hom. And for þis lorde sethe hyr ful of alle swetnesse and gentryes, he had grete luste to heron hyr spekyn. (Festial 67–70, my italics)

Mirk’s emphasis on the Magdalene’s capacity as a vessel, her ability to be full of the divine in the context of her preaching, effectively presents the holy harlot as a passive mouthpiece for God’s words, grace, and sweetness. This is a far cry from the Legenda’s narration of this event, where the Magdalene speaks with “uultu placido, facie serena, lingua diserta,”65 using rhetorical speech and performance to convince the people to renounce their idolatry. In the Legenda, Voragine makes clear that it is art, or at least craft, that renders the Magdalene’s speech so effective: it is her words and physical appearance that make her presentation so appealing. Voragine thus exploits the usually negative association current in the medieval period between rhetoric and feminine seduction,66 subverting this stereotype by presenting these traits as positive. Not so in the Festial, where human agency is secondary to her role as vessel for divine truth: the Magdalene’s seductive beauty and speech are of no consequence in the saint’s conversion of the Marseilles people. The saint’s words are not rhetorically adept but are, rather, imbued with grace by the Holy Ghost. In this way, the Magdalene’s speech is not her own anymore, but that of God. This on the one hand authorises her voice, but on the other removes any agency she might have had in the conversion of the Marseillais. This representation of a Magdalene as metaphorically impregnated with God’s grace is particularly feminine, and parallels the authorisation of holy harlots through their femininity, as discussed in Chapter 2. However, in opposition to the two previous texts, Mirk’s concerns with Wycliffism lead him to put more emphasis on the harlot’s gendered relationship with Christ/God at the same time as he reduces the amount of authority this type of legitimisation brings about. The holy harlot, much like her twelfth- and thirteenth-century counterparts, is rarely left to her own devices, her body and her authority always being handled by a controlling masculine authority. Indeed, the only moment in her life when she is not defined in terms of her relationship to men – when she is not her father’s daughter, John’s bride, or Christ’s Sponsa – is the moment she becomes a “common” woman, a harlot. Implicit in Mirk’s portrayal is the idea that women should always be kept in check by male authority, or, from a different perspective, that uncontrolled femininity leads to vice. By adding the episode of her betrothal with John, Mirk highlights the dangers to which a woman who stands outside of accepted feminine 65

“With a quiet countenance, a serene face, and an eloquent tongue.” My translation. LA 631. 66 Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 73–95.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography roles and forgoes masculine control exposes herself. The single independent decision she is allowed to make is to retreat to the wilderness (Festial 151–3), where she remains for thirty years, “vnknowon of alle men” (Festial 153). It therefore appears as though the only acceptable initiative for a woman is to remove herself and her female body from the sight of the world (and, concomitantly, from alle men).67 This passivity and submissive conduct on the part of the Magdalene become particularly evident at the end of the Life, where passive verbal constructions and Mary’s recurrent position as a direct object within each sentence describing her actions puts a strong emphasis on her feminine docility: “whan God wolde þat scheo schulde passon oute of þis worlde, he made an holy preste to sene how angelus beron hur vp and doune. […] þan sawe he Magdaleyne borne vp wyth angelus too cubitus fro þe erthe” (Festial 155–72).68 The hagiographer’s choice to emphasise her passivity through verbal constructions which effectively, grammatically, objectify her suggests a desire to highlight her authority as a mediatrix saint, through whom one could worship God “þat dud so goddely be hur,” rather than as an active figure in her own right. Similarly, in the wilderness, angels lift her up seven times a day, “angelus beron hyr vp into þe ayre” (Festial 154), at which point she is “fullud wyth melody of angellus” (Festial 154–5). This passive phrasing reinforces both Mary’s quiet submission and her function as a vessel – her feminine ability to contain. Mirk’s repetition on three separate occasions in the span of fifteen lines that angels lift Mary up to heaven in order to feed her,69 as well as his insistence that this act is in itself repetitive (Festial 153), reinforces the Magdalene’s feminine compliance and dependency. Mary Magdalene’s reliance on God, angels, holy priests, and Maximinus during her vita eremitica cements Mirk’s portrayal of a particularly feminine holy harlot framed and handled by male authoritative figures. In sum, Mirk’s representation of Mary Magdalene parallels many features of the portrayal of holy harlots in earlier Middle English and Anglo-Norman lives, from her femininity and adoption of accepted feminine roles to her gaining authority through such roles, as for instance that of Sponsa Christi. Although she does wield power as a preacher, a saint, and especially a mediator between human and divine realms, the Festial offers a relatively tame holy harlot in comparison with the Anglo-Norman Vie or the ESEL life, one whose preaching voice is nearly silenced and whose authority is greatly reduced. Mirk takes pains to present the harlot’s preaching at several removes from his intended audience, both historically and socially: she is For a similar representation in the Digby Mary Magdalene, see Chapter 4, p. 157. My emphasis: masculine subject in italics, the holy harlot underlined when appearing as direct object of the action. 69 Festial 152–5, 157, and 165–6. 67

68

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature uniquely privileged with a physical connection to Christ. She is also a landed aristocrat, whose social status would have allowed her liberties and lent her an authoritative stance that his lower-class or bourgeois audience could only imagine. In fact, Mirk’s Magdalene shares a very similar social rank with Lady Bourchier, the patroness who commissioned Osbern Bokenham’s diametrically different rendition of the repentant harlot’s life. Yet, whereas Mirk limits the Magdalene’s capacity to preach, Bokenham is much less fearful than his near-contemporary in his representation of feminine authority. As I will argue, this difference in portrayals stems from the fact that an authoritative, preaching Magdalene was seen as much less disruptive for an audience of a higher social status than that of Mirk, one that already wielded important social and political power. Bokenham does not write for an illiterate audience, or to provide homiletic material for uneducated preachers: he writes in the high literary style of the long saint’s life made popular by such poets as Lydgate and Capgrave,70 for well-to-do lay audiences, responding in this case to the commission of a powerful woman who requested just such a representation of a strong female saintly lead. THE LYF OF MARYE MAUDELYN BY OSBERN BOKENHAM Osbern Bokenham’s Lyf of Marye Maudelyn indeed offers a strikingly different representation of the holy harlot’s authority than that of its late fourteenthcentury counterpart. The Lyf appears in two manuscripts, a collection of thirteen verse female saints’ lives in London, BL MS Arundel 327 (often referred to as the Legendys of Hooly Wummen), which were seemingly compiled by a Cambridge friar friend of Bokenham’s, Thomas Burgh, to be given to the latter’s sister’s East Anglian convent,71 and the relatively new (2004) discovery of Bokenham’s translation of the whole of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea with a few additional lives not found in the Latin source, in prose and in verse, in the so-called Abbotsford manuscript.72 This legendary contains all but four 70 On

this, see in particular Catherine Sanok, “Saints’ Lives and the Literary after Arundel,” in After Arundel, pp. 469–86, at p. 479. I would argue that Chaucer’s lost life of Mary Magdalene would probably have been of that ilk: “He made also, goon ys a gret while, / Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne.” Legend of Good Women G, lines 427–8, in Larry Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). On this version, see John P. McCall, “Chaucer and the Pseudo Origen De Maria Magdalena: A Preliminary Study,” Speculum 46 (1971), pp. 491–509. 71 Mary S. Serjeantson edits this collection. See her Legendys of Hooly Wummen by Osbern Bokenham, EETS o.s. 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). On this, see p. 289. The text will be quoted from this edition, hereafter LMM. 72 On this discovery, see Simon Horobin, “Politics, Patronage, and Piety in the Work of Osbern Bokenham,” Speculum 82 (2007), pp. 932–49, and his “A Manuscript Found in the Library of Abbotsford House and the Lost Legendary of Osbern Bokenham,” in Regional Manuscripts 1200–1700, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (London: The British Library,

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography of the Legendys verse lives, these presumably missing because of lost leaves at the beginning and end of the manuscript. Many of the Arundel lives can boast paratextual material in the form of a prologue – and in the case of Mary Magdalene, both a “prolocutorye” and a prologue – with specific information about the writing of the life as well as the patron who requested its composition. We therefore learn in the “prolocutorye” that the life was commissioned in 1445 by Bokenham’s most important aristocratic patron,73 Isabel Bourchier, Countess of Eu and sister to Richard of York. The Abbotsford Legendary, on the other hand, seems to have been compiled for Cecily Neville, or possibly her husband, Richard, duke of York, sometime in the 1450s.74 The dedication, in the Arundel manuscript, of Mary Magdalene’s life to the most prestigious patron of Bokenham in that collection, as well as the wealth of paratext for that life (making it the “most overt example of elevated poetic discourse” in Bokenham’s hagiography, according to Cynthia Turner Camp)75 and its central position within the lives all suggest the importance of the holy harlot type in the hagiographer’s conception of female sanctity. The presence of lives of no less than three other holy harlots in the Abbotsford Legendary (Mary of Egypt, Thaïs, and Pelagia) confirms this trend.76 Further, the fact that the life of Mary of Egypt is one of the very few new verse lives (there are eight in total) which are included in the manuscript may suggest another commission by a patron, most probably a female patron (since all of the verse saints’ lives in the Arundel are so commissioned), and may reflect the audience’s interest in this relatable model of sanctity that is the holy harlot. This is further suggested by the faded appearance of the ink on the first two folios of the Lyf of Marye Maudelyn in the Arundel manuscript (fols 135v–136r), which indicates that the manuscript was often opened and read at that particular point. The Prolocutorye to Mary Magdalene’s Lyf gives very specific information regarding the circumstances of the work’s commission. On Twelfth Night

2008), pp. 130–62. The Abbotsford Legendary is edited in Simon Horobin, Osbern Bokenham, Lives of the Saints, EETS o.s. 356 (London: Oxford University Press, 2020). A digital copy of the manuscript is online: http://lib1.advocates.org.uk/legenda/. 73 On Lady Isabel Bourchier, see in particular Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints and Society in Fifteenth-Century England; The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 21–2. Other patrons mentioned in the Legendys are all wealthy and influential women. See ibid., pp. 16–21. The Lyf is, allowing for scribal variation, much the same in the two manuscripts. 74 Horobin, “Politics, Patronage, and Piety,” pp. 932–49, and his “A Manuscript,” pp. 144–5 and 150–2. Cynthia Turner Camp suggests two dates for this compilation, 1454 and 1461. See her “Osbern Bokenham and the House of York Revisited,” Viator 44 (2013), pp. 327–52, at p. 346. 75 Camp, “Bokenham and the House of York,” p. 338. 76 Respectively fols 86v–88v (Mary of Egypt), fols 202r–202v (Pelagia), and fols 202v–203r (Thaïs). The life of Mary Magdalene appears on fols 135v–140r.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature 1445, while Bokenham is at Isabel Bourchier’s house, he recounts the countess’s commission of the life in reported speech: “I haue,” quod she, “of pure affeccyoun Ful longe tym had a synguler deuocyoun To þat holy wumman, wych, as I gesse, Is clepyd of apostyls þe apostyllesse; Blyssyd Mary mawdelyn y mene, Whom cryste from syn made pure & clene.” (LMM 5065–70)

The unique quality of this commission is highlighted by Catherine Sanok: it is “the only narrative representation of a woman’s commission of a Middle English text – certainly the only one that specifies in such detail the social context for the request, its relationship to the literary activity of other women, and the patron’s personal intentions and interests.”77 The countess “is interested in Mary Magdalene not as humble penitent but as public preacher, with authority even over Jesus’s chosen apostles”:78 she requests a holy harlot whose life is characterised both by her predicatory authority over the apostles as apostolorum apostola and her privileged interaction with Christ, her election by him above others. “The noblewoman fixes on the saint’s authority and privilege, attributes with which Isabella herself was likely to feel some kinship.”79 Lady Bourchier is asking for a literary likeness of herself as the Magdalene, a request almost anticipating a similar one by her niece, Margaret of York, who, around 1500, commissioned a Flemish deposition painting portraying her as the Magdalene.80 One should not underestimate the influence of medieval female patrons or commissioners’ exigencies on the textual product.81 Bokenham seems to have felt this influence strongly, describing Lady Bourchier’s desire as “a myhty comaundement” (LMM 5084).82 Although Sanok argues that Bourchier’s influence on the text is “impossible to identify, let alone quantify,” and that “the debate about it has come to an impasse,”83 we will see that the countess of Eu’s request for a strong Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 51. 78 Ibid., p. 78. 79 Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 74. 80 Ibid., pp. 73–4. 81 Loveday Lewes Gee, “Patronage: Female Initiatives and Artistic Enterprises in England in the 13th and 14th Centuries,” in Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Therese Martin, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2012), vol. 2, pp. 565–632, at p. 565. On female patronage, see also the collection of essays edited by June Hall McCash, Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 82 Bokenham repeats this notion twice more at LMM 5117, 5361. 83 Sanok, Her Life Historical, p. 55. For scholars who argue for a strong influence of the 77

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography and authoritative preaching Magdalene is respected by Bokenham, despite his writing in a context that saw the Wycliffite heresy only become more popular, and the Church’s response to it more drastic, since Mirk wrote his Festial. Although Bokenham writes the Lyf some seventy years after Mirk’s Life, the dangers of adhering to dissenting opinions had become even more obvious, especially in the East Anglian landscape of the author’s residence. This part of the country had by the late fourteenth century become “an area associated with intense piety, orthodox and heterodox.”84 As Sheila Delany and Alice Spencer have emphasised, the perils of being a Wycliffite would have presented themselves acutely for Bokenham, who must have been aware that the first Lollard to be executed under the 1401 De comburendo haereticis statute hailed from nearby Bishop’s Lynn in 1401.85 He would also probably have heard of William White, a reputed East Anglian itinerant dissenting preacher, who was executed in 1428, while his wife, Joan, was imprisoned in 1424. He was probably also acquainted through his friend Capgrave’s residence in Bishop’s Lynn with the existence of Margery Kempe, who on several occasions was accused of Wycliffism and unlicensed preaching.86 Between 1428 and 1431, in Norwich alone, sixty men and women were interrogated, and at least three were burned.87 John Bury, one of Bokenham’s peers at Clare Priory, sat as a commissioner at some of these trials.88 If anything, therefore, dissenters were more visible than seventy years prior, as were the efforts of the clerical establishment to suppress their beliefs, especially in East Anglia. It is in this context that Bokenham writes his Lyf of the Magdalene. Now, there is no scholarly consensus about the extent to which the Wycliffite controversy affected Bokenham. Delany and Spencer might be overstating the women patrons on Bokenham’s writings, see Gail McMurray Gibson, “Saint Anne and the Religion of Childbed: Some East Anglian Texts and Talismans,” in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 95–110; Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, pp. 141–6. For those who put more emphasis on the debt to masculine literary tradition, see Ian Johnson, “Tales of a True Translator: Medieval Literary Theory, Anecdote, and Autobiography in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen,” in The Medieval Translator 4, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), pp. 104–24, and Delany, Impolitic Bodies, esp. pp. 89–105. 84 Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 90. 85 See Delany, Impolitic Bodies; Alice Spencer, Language, Lineage and Location in the Works of Osbern Bokenham (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), esp. pp. 5–6 and 20. Although quite a few of Delany’s conclusions have since been refuted by scholars, her overview of the Church’s reaction to dissenting beliefs in East Anglia still stands. See also Sanok, Her Life Historical, pp. 69–70. 86 Paul Price, “Trumping Chaucer: Osbern Bokenham’s Katherine,” The Chaucer Review 36 (2001), pp. 158–83, at p. 168, Delany, Impolitic Bodies, pp. 9, 29, and 91. 87 Delany, Impolitic Bodies, p. 90. 88 Ibid., p. 91.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature “anxiety” that Bokenham could have felt in response to reformist impulses, as they do not take into account, first, the relative freedom that the “categorical orthodoxy” of the saint’s life afforded,89 something which of course also applies to John Mirk’s writings, but was magnified by the emergence in the fifteenth century of the stand-alone “literary saint’s life,” à la Lydgate, Capgrave, or, in this case, Bokenham, complete with aureate poetics, paratext, and frequent citation of Chaucer,90 and which also implied a particularly wellto-do, aristocratic audience that was of necessity less concerned about dissent – and likewise less concerning for the Church. I would argue for a middle ground, here, one which leans less heavily on the notion that “anxiety” would have been Bokenham’s chief concern in his portrayal of authoritative female saints, but which still acknowledges that there might have been moments of uneasiness and that a certain care and reflection went into such portrayal. I suggest that he is sensitive to the issue of Wycliffism when writing his life of the Magdalene, but that the importance of his patroness’s request for an authoritative female saint trumps his concerns. Karen Winstead argues for a Bokenham whose attitude actually got bolder between the writing of individual verse lives represented in the Arundel manuscript, which she sees as reflecting what Rita Copeland has characterised as the post-Arundelian stance of a “systematized pedagogy of infantilization, an ‘education’ structured around conserving ignorance,”91 and that reflected in the Abbotsford collection, where theology is less bolstered by blind faith than by eloquent, intellectual discourse, often uttered by female saints.92 Although my argument slightly qualifies that of Winstead, in that I already see in the Arundelian Lyf of Marye Maudelyn a tendency to focus on rational teaching rather than faith as a means of conversion, her point remains that Bokenham was very aware of current theological controversies, be they about pastoral didacticism or reformist, dissenting ideas, and that these informed his writing accordingly. 89

Sanok, “Saints’ Lives and the Literary,” p. 469. On this, see A.S.G. Edwards, “John Lydgate’s Lives of Sts Edmund and Fremund: Politics, Hagiography and Literature,” in St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saints, ed. Anthony Bale (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 133–44, and Sanok, “Saints’ Lives.” I would actually argue it is possible that Chaucer was among the precursors of such an aureate hagiographical style, which he may have developed in his lost life of Mary Magdalene: “He made also, goon ys a gret while, / Origenes upon the Maudeleyne.” LGW 427–8, in Larry Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 91 Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 123. 92 See Karen Winstead’s two articles: “Hagiography after Arundel: Expounding the Trinity,” in After Arundel, pp. 487–502, and “Osbern Bokenham’s ‘Englische Boke’: Re-forming Holy Women,” in Form and Reform, Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, ed. Shannon N. Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2011), pp. 67–87. 90

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography Bokenham’s writing was therefore “nuanced by an awareness of the religious tensions within [his] own community,”93 while I would not go so far as Catherine Sanok in her claim that the poet “represents his literary enterprise […] as dangerous to himself: in the current climate, he suggests, even the translation of traditional hagiography is risky.”94 Bokenham is nevertheless “an energetically orthodox translator”95 who parallels Mirk’s rejection of dissenting views on the Trinity. He prefaces the Lyf with a long prayer to the “souereyn & most blyssyd trynyte” (LMM 5143),96 seemingly defending this orthodox belief by adding such comments as “as clerkys preue” (LMM 5149) or “as we bele[u]e” (LMM 5150). The conclusion to this prayer, “and þis is þe uery ymage of þe” (LMM 5170), may further be a critique of the iconomachy associated with Wycliffism, for instance, it seems, by Mirk himself.97 Bokenham supplies an even more developed inward confession than Mirk to the Magdalene when she stands at Christ’s feet in Simon the Leper’s house, insisting on Christ’s extraordinary ability for insight, and thus strongly implying that any “other” priest would need to hear the confession aloud: And þow with hir mouth outwardly To hym no wurde she dede expresse […] Yet, of hyr wepyng by þe grethnesse, Of hyr herte she shewyd þe corage, As þow she had vsyd þis language: “O moste meke lord, wych knowyst al þinge, And art of hertys þe inward knoware, Wych, as it semyth by þi techynge, Desyryst not þe deth of a synnere But þat he be conuertyd & lyue lengere, Thou knowyst wele, lord, as I do wene, What my wepyng, my syhyng & my sorwe doth mene.” (LMM 5437–50, my emphasis)

This treatment of the Magdalene’s confession suppresses the potential heretical interpretation of the episode, and suggests that he, like Mirk, was somewhat uncomfortable in his portrayal of the controversial Magdalene and picked his words carefully when recounting episodes that could expose him to criticism, or that could lead his audience into error. In parallel with Mirk, Bokenham’s decision not to mention Wycliffism explicitly in his work may be explained

Medieval Women’s Writing, p. 90. On the influence of Wycliffism on Bokenham’s writings, see in particular Price, “Trumping Chaucer.” 94 Sanok, Her Life Historical, pp. 69–70. 95 Johnson, “Tales of a True Translator,” p. 105. 96 LMM 5143–5170. 97 See p. 111, n. 43. 93 Watt,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature by his tendency to omit discussion of complex theological or ecclesiastical matters that he considered were beyond the need and abilities of his primary audience, in line with the aforementioned “politics of infantilization” which Copeland traces in the years after Arundel’s 1409 Constitutions.98 Bokenham’s decision to respect his patroness’s desire for an apostolic Magdalene is therefore the more significant, indicating the great influence the commissioner of a work could have on its contents. His portrayal of the Magdalene parallels that of Mirk in many respects: the holy harlot represents femininity in different gendered roles, especially that of Sponsa Christi, which validate her authoritative voice. Where he differs from Mirk, however, is apparent in how he does not reduce the holy harlot’s preaching, choosing instead to emphasise her voice and authority, as well as linking his powerful saint with his influential patroness, suggesting he encouraged the latter to emulate the saint. Bokenham presents the Magdalene as a young lady from the landed gentry, who retains her beauty and desirability during the entirety of her life, even up to the day she dies (“beute,” LMM 5397, 5788, 6269). Her gendered identity is also stable throughout, as she adopts societal roles associated with the feminine – such as midwife, handmaiden, daughter, etc. – so that she comes to represent the entire spectrum that femininity could embrace, from low to high social status (as a handmaid and a romance lady), from the sinful woman and whore to saint, from young to old, from daughter to midwife. In this regard, the hagiographer establishes the Magdalene as the embodiment of womanhood in all of its facets, creating a portrait that would be utterly familiar to a range of his female readers, be it Lady Bourchier herself or one of her handmaidens. At the same time, Bokenham’s Magdalene is a preacher, and an emphatically female preacher, embodying to the letter Lady Bourchier’s request for an apostola. The hagiographer recounts, in opposition to his predecessor in the Festial, Christ’s commission of the Magdalene as apostolorum apostola (LMM 5720–3), and labels the holy harlot an apostoless no less than three times (LMM 6293, 6301, 6305).99 While the speech of Mirk’s Magdalene was qualified as preaching specifically when her voice was questioned, moreover, Bokenham recounts the same episodes but refers to her as teaching when such doubt is articulated, careful not to label her speech as preaching when it is under suspicion (LMM 5888 and 6005). In his threefold repetition of the charged term apostolesse in the span of fifteen lines, Bokenham illustrates his belief that the Magdalene possesses a strong right to authority, even as a female lay preacher. In addition to his use of such a loaded nomenclature, Bokenham retains for his lay female audience, who had explicitly expressed 98 99

See also Horobin, “Politics, Patronage, and Piety,” p. 938. See Winstead, “‘Englische Boke,’” p. 71, for a different reading of these mentions.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography a kinship with the holy harlot and may have aimed to imitate her, all of the Legenda’s mentions of the Magdalene’s preaching, even though Voragine’s work had probably been intended for a Latinate and clerical audience for whom such a representation would be relatively unproblematic.100 When the Latin source has Mary Magdalene preaching with her disciples (“cum suis discipulis predicantem,” LA 636), Bokenham adds that she was wont to do so: “Wyth hyr dyscyplys Mary þei fonde / Prechyng þe peple, as wone was she” (LMM 6132–3). When Jacobus mentions that she preaches (LA 631), Bokenham writes that she “prechyd” (LMM 5786) a “long sermoun” (LMM 5806).101 Bokenham’s use of such strong nomenclature as “predycacyoun” (LMM 5793), “doctryne” (LMM 5909), or “apostollesse” – all words that share a connotation of clerical authority – is matched by the freedom with which he ascribes no less than seventy lines of direct speech to his saint.102 This is incidentally paralleled in Bokenham’s translation of the Life of Mary of Egypt in the Abbotsford manuscript, where the poet does not hesitate to multiply the Egyptian’s direct speeches.103 Bokenham implicitly equates the Magdalene with Lady Bourchier, further exemplifying the latter’s power to alleviate the hagiographer’s potential uneasiness about representing a lay, female preacher as a proximate, even imitable, model. At the end of the prologue to the Lyf, Bokenham juxtaposes references to the Magdalene and the countess, blurring their identities together by referring to them both as “lady” in quick succession: “Also, lady, to þe humble entent / Of hym uouchesaf for to intende, / Wych at þe seyd ladyis comaundement / To translate hym bysyde þi legende” (LMM 5359–62). This unites Lady Bourchier with the lady of Magdalene Castle, so much so that it makes the holy harlot’s role open for imitation by a certain class of women. Bokenham in addition parallels the Magdalene’s authoritative stance in the Lyf with that of his patroness in the prolocutory. Here, Isabel Bourchier delivers Bokenham a “comaundement” (LMM 5084 and 5117), bidding him to write a life of the Magdalene, which he does “vp condycyoun” (LMM 5090) that he be able to go on pilgrimage first. Similarly, in the Lyf, the Magdalene issues a “comaunde” (LMM 5894) to the Marseilles couple to convert, and they accept “vp-on a condycyoun” (LMM 5895): Mary needs to prove the power of her words by miraculously rendering the barren queen pregnant. Bokenham and the king and queen then go on a pilgrimage, furthering the structural parallelism of the two passages. Both commands are made in the direct speech. Bokenham further talks about Lady Bourchier’s decision to pardon the author for his delay L. Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 74 and 85–6. 101 She is further referred to as preaching or teaching on lines 5786, 5793, 5806, 5886, 5888, 6011, and 6133. 102 LMM 5815–18, 5836–63, 5899–5900, 6214–17, 6221–7, 6232–48, and 6273–6. 103 See in particular fols 87v and 88r. 100 Sherry

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature in writing the life: “she me pardonyd” (LMM 5110), thereby “transferring the language of penance to a secular noblewoman.”104 Johnson has argued that, in so doing, Bokenham is “displaying his humility and her graciousness,”105 but this terminology could also signify another rapprochement with the holy harlot: both women have near-clerical authority, the first handing out pardons, the other preaching. With this second meaning in mind, we see how the hagiographer also takes pains to draw parallels between the authoritative voice of his two patronesses, “lady bowsere” (LMM 5004) and the “gracyous lady, Mary mawdelyn” (LMM 5351). Indeed, Bokenham portrays these women as actively shaping the narrative he recounts, Lady Bourchier in her command, and “Lady” Magdalene in Bokenham’s prayers to her and her agency in the present.106 In truth, Bokenham shows his subservience to both,107 increasing the Magdalene’s authority because of the countess’s authority over him and his works, and vice versa. The Magdalene is thus conceived as a mirror of Lady Bourchier, and her power over political and religious authorities reflects the complex crossing of social and clerical authority which Bokenham encountered as a clerical writer commissioned by a lay aristocratic patron. Holy harlots’ lives, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, are often used to reflect upon the relative authority of the laity and the clergy. The lives of Mary of Egypt, Thaïs, and Pelagia in the Abbotsford Legendary reflect Nancy Bradley Warren’s argument, in reference to the Legendys’ female saints as a whole, that “one of Bokenham’s techniques to ensure that masculine power prevails is to subordinate these disturbing women to male authority.”108 Indeed, Bokenham increases most of the harlot saints’ deference to male clerics in comparison to the Legenda aurea: Mary of Egypt tells Zosimus her life because she interprets what was an insistent request in the Legenda as a “commaundement” that she “nedis must obey”;109 Pelagia, who left unbeknownst of all men in the source, leaves here with “no man preuy to hyre entent but the bysshop,”110 something that reflects Bokenham’s wish to show the saint’s lay respect for the clergy: Nonnus knows of her move, and it is therefore implied he approves of it, or would have had the power to veto it; finally, the life of Thaïs reflects the already very harsh

104 Johnson, 105 Ibid.

“Tales of a True Translator,” p. 114.

106 Johnson

talks about Bokenham’s holy women as shaping the text, commenting that they are “effective auctores, or rather auctrices.” See ibid., p. 120. This point of view is contradicted by Catherine Sanok in Her Life Historical, pp. 50–82. 107 He translates the Lyf “to seruyn þe deuocyoun of my lady” (LMM 5250), Lady Bourchier, and counts himself among the Magdalene’s “seruauntys in erthe” (LMM 6307). 108 Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 148. 109 Respectively, fols 87v and 87r. 110 fol. 202r.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography treatment of the saint by Paphnutius, who shuts her up in a cell, tells her she is unworthy to even utter God’s name, and then orders her to get out of the cell when she wishes to remain.111 It is therefore a testimony of Isabel Bourchier’s influence that, in the Lyf of Marye Maudelyn, the hagiographer represents much more carefully, and in a much more egalitarian manner, the relative valence of social and clerical status, as well as that of gender. The Magdalene is presented on an equal or even superior footing with the apostles as their apostelesse, and her preaching and teaching voice is powerful, but she can still be entrusted by St Peter to Maximin when she leaves Jerusalem. In other words, just as the countess of Eu outranks Bokenham socially, but may defer to him in his quality as a cleric, so too is Mary Magdalene Maximin’s social and saintly superior, although she bows to him in his quality as cleric. This reflects the complex power dynamic between Bokenham and Lady Bourchier. One may even go further, and see the care with which the hagiographer articulates how mutually beneficial the relative authority of the lay Magdalene and the clerical elements in her life is, as a reflection of the relationship he wants to develop between Clare Priory and Richard, duke of York. Indeed, Cynthia Turner Camp has convincingly argued that the “prolocutorye”’s blatant praise for Richard of York does not reflect (as Delany had suggested) an early Yorkist backing but, rather, a tactful appeal for Richard’s increased patronage of Clare Priory upon his return from France in late 1444, early 1445, whereas the duke of York had before been a hereditary patron in name only.112 If one accepts this argument and my own premise of the relevance of Mary Magdalene as a representative for the laity as a whole, both male and female, the holy harlot may have been intended as a stand-in for Richard himself. The Magdalene’s power and influence over the clergy, counterbalanced as it is in the life by her respect for the Church, may in fact reflect Bokenham’s representation of an idealised relationship between the aristocracy and the clergy it patronises, or should patronise. The harlot saint’s authority is indeed particularly emphasised when she is seen providing food and housing for the newly arrived Christians in Marseilles, appearing in a vision to the Marseilles couple. This act effectively links her with patronage of the Church.113 Further, Bokenham connects the Magdalene who was “commyttyd” (LMM 5757) to Maximin by Peter, and the Marseilles king who does also “commytte” his wife and child to the holy harlot when they are imperilled. The poet parallels here the roles of Maximin and the Magdalene, who are both in charge of their fellow Christians’ survival. This parallelism is rendered stronger by the fact that both Christians are entrusted 111 fol.

202v. her “Bokenham and the House of York Revisited.” Delany develops her Yorkist argument throughout her Impolitic Bodies. Her conclusions have since been qualified. See notably Sanok, Her Life Historical, Chapter 3. 113 LMM 5819–79. 112 See

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature to Maximin or the Magdalene in the context of a perilous sea voyage. The relative authority of a Mary Magdalene or a Maximin is then depicted as different but equally important in fostering the well-being of the faithful, reflecting Bokenham’s model of an ideal collaboration between himself and Lady Bourchier, Clare Priory and Richard of York: the laity and the clergy working hand in hand towards a shared goal.114 We have therefore seen that, whether it be to please Isabel Bourchier or, through her, Richard of York, the Magdalene’s lay authority was conceived on a par with clerical authority. If the holy harlot is used as a model for the laity in general, this model is imbued with an authority that is emphatically gendered as feminine, an argument that will occupy most of the next chapter. The Magdalene’s authoritative stance while at the same time being categorised within gendered roles as midwife, handmaiden, or daughter demonstrates that one can gain authority through the performance of feminine roles. Another gendered role the holy harlot adopts, that of Bride of Christ, further anchors her authority in her femininity, at the same time as her bridal status makes her performance readily accessible to all: lay and clerical, male or female. Bokenham dramatically develops the Legenda’s account with episodes of the conflated saint from the Gospels, in order to put heavier emphasis upon the Magdalene’s loving relationship with the living Christ. The connection between the saint and Christ is summarised in the Legenda in less than thirty lines,115 whereas Bokenham dwells on the subject for more than three hundred (LMM 5411–732). As Simon Horobin notes, “while Bokenham’s work is principally a translation from Latin originals, he frequently adapted and expanded upon his sources to highlight particular aspects of his saints’ biographies that he evidently considered to be of relevance to his audience.”116 The holy harlot as Sponsa Christi constitutes just such an aspect. Bokenham, in ascribing Christ’s raising of Lazarus to his love for the Magdalene, emphasises the link between harlot and Sponsa by quoting the Song of Songs directly in Latin, the only Latin quote in a poem of more than 1,300 lines: “But in þis mater is no more to seyn / but þat swych merueyls loue kan do: / quia fortis ut mors est dileccio” (LMM 5651–3).117 A second episode of the Magdalene’s scriptural life, her search for Christ at the tomb, is strongly reminiscent of the Bride of the Song of Songs’ search for the Bridegroom at night. The connection between the two scriptural 114 Another

example of this complementary representation of lay and clerical pastoral care is the lexical parallelism between the Magdalene’s role as teacher of the queen and that of Peter with the king when each leads one half of the royal couple in a pilgrimage of Jerusalem: it was the “sam pylgrimage,” and each “authority” “lede” and “shewyd” his or her new convert the same things (LMM 6113–22). 115 LA 630–1. 116 Horobin, “Politics, Patronage, and Piety,” pp. 935–6. 117 “For love is as strong as death,” Cant. 8:6.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography episodes – Cant. 3:1–3 and Jn 11:11–18 – had been made since Origen, and a medieval audience would have picked up on it, as this pericope from the Song was usually read in church on the occasion of the Magdalene’s feast day.118 However, Bokenham reinforces this already existing parallelism, writing: “She al oonly þere dede abyde, / And in þe graue ful oftyn on euere syde / She lokyd besyly wyth a wepyng yhe / If hyr loue onywhere she myht aspye” (LMM 5706–9). This affective description of a Magdalene’s feverish search for “hyr loue” parallels the Song of Songs’ description of the Bride’s searching for the one whom her soul loves, “quem diligit anima mea.”119 The Magdalene’s Bridal status is again reinforced when Bokenham compares her loving relationship with Christ to a marriage: “See now þan how þis perfyth creature / Conioynyd was on-to hyr creatur, / Of trewe loue þorgh affeccyoun pure, /And eek he to hyr in syngulere amour”(LMM 5682–5, my italics). Conjoinen to or onto, according to the MED, signifies “joined or united with (sth. or sb.), joined in marriage.”120 In the lexical context related to love in this passage (“trewe loue,” “affeccyoun pure,” “syngulere amour”), a medieval audience would immediately interpret conjoinen in its meaning of uniting in marriage, or at least consider this meaning a possibility. Bokenham thus strongly and repeatedly associates the figure of Mary with that of the Sponsa Christi: as the latter, she is conioynyd on-to the Son of God, she seeks her lover when she cannot find him, and his own love for her is shown to be stronger than death, “quia fortis ut mors est dileccio.” Bokenham repeatedly qualifies Christ’s love for Mary as privileged, unique, and exceptional, thereby establishing, as Mirk had done before him, her loving relationship with Christ as the most exceptional and praiseworthy characteristic of her sanctity, something he will also establish as the basis for his validation of the saint’s exceptional authority as a preacher and teacher. Their love is “synguler” (LMM 5728), “pryuylegyd” (LMM 5727), and “superlatyue” (LMM 5593).121 This privileged intimacy, as in Mirk’s Festial, extends well after death: Christ loves her “both in hys lyuyng & in hys passyoun,” and “from deth to lyf aftyr hys resurreccyoun” (LMM 5729–30), while she follows him always, “both beforn & aftyr þe resurreccyoun” (LMM 5595). Bokenham strongly grounds this love in the biblical account, often reiterating his faithfulness to the Scriptures at the exact moment he makes mention of it, thereby insisting on the authority (and therefore on the legitimising value) that such scriptural witness provides.122 The uninterrupted intimacy and love serve to authorise the Magdalene’s preaching, as we have seen in Mirk’s Festial, but do 118 Naoë

Kukita Yoshikawa, “The Bride of Christ: The Iconography of Mary Magdalen and Cistercian Spirituality,” Poetica 47 (1997), pp. 33–47, at p. 36. 119 This phrase is repeated in Cant. 3:1, 3:2, 3:3, and 3:4. 120 MED s.v. “conjoinen.” 121 See also LMM 5508–9, 5536–7, 5584–93, 5712–13, and 6161–4. 122 LMM 5587–95 and 5725–30.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature so differently, first by putting emphasis on the notion that, as Bride of Christ, her love for Christ leads the latter to protect her often-transgressive voice and behaviour, and second by hinting that her constant presence at Christ’s side gives her the opportunity to listen to him and learn from him. As a result, she appears in this work as a fully formed, learned, disciple of Christ. The first of Bokenham’s “authorising strategies” becomes self-evident when he associates the Magdalene’s “affeccyoun” (LMM 5537) and constant presence at Christ’s side with the fact that Christ repeatedly excuses her transgressive behaviour: “Where-fore whan ony wythe hyr dede acuse, / Euere redy was cryst hyr to excuse” (LMM 5539–41). Due to the Gregorian conflation of several scriptural figures to make up the medieval Magdalene, a pattern emerged that saw the holy harlot repeatedly criticised in the Bible, only to be protected from blame by Christ. She incurs censure for her actions from Simon the Pharisee, because, as the sinner of the city, she dared touch Christ’s feet (Lk. 7:39); from her sister Martha, because, as Mary of Bethany, she failed to help her act as Christ’s host (Lk. 10:40); and finally, as an anonymous woman, from the apostles – in medieval legend, from Judas only – because of her supposed wastefulness when she anoints Jesus’s head with a precious ointment (Mk 14:4–9 and Matt. 26:6–13). The Legenda mentions this in passing,123 but Bokenham dramatically develops the episode in 150 lines of the poem,124 foregrounding the validation of the Magdalene’s actions by Christ during his life when he delivers two apologias in which he uses a developed legal terminology.125 In one of his speeches, Christ even goes so far as to ground her authority in an as-yet to be written gospel of Mark, thereby representing the Magdalene as an authoritative scriptural figure before the Gospel is even written down.126 Bokenham recognised the legitimising potential of these verses, as he deems it a “laud” and a “special commendacyoun” of the holy harlot (LMM 5688). The poet therefore anchors the validation of all of Mary Magdalene’s actions and speeches in the law, be it through legal vocabulary or by basing it on the Old and the New Law. In addition, Bokenham attempts to authorise his holy harlot’s preaching early on in the life on the basis of the Son’s defence of her in Bethany. Indeed, in his discussion of contemplation, he writes:

123 LA

630. LMM 5280–318, 5458–501, 5542–83, and 5654–82. He also rehearses the episode at Bethany on four separate occasions: LMM 5281, 5284, 5296, and 5304. 125 Christ for instance becomes “Maryis aduocat” against “hyr sustrys acusacyoun” (LMM 5556–60), and uses his “aduocacye” against Judas’s attacks (LMM 5669). 126 He refers to Mark 14:3–9: “Where-fore I wyl þat ye wel knowe, / Hereaftyr whan þe gospel shal be / Thorgh-owte þe werd by prechours sowe, / Than shal it be seyd in many a cuntre / That þis she dede in wurshype of me.” (LMM 5675–9). Bokenham’s mention of this scriptural passage is highly unusual, as it is not used elsewhere in medieval hagiographical writings on the Magdalene. 124 See

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography In þat also þat of inwarde contemplacyoun, The best part she ches in þis lyf here, To hyr longyth þe secunde interpretacyoun, Wych is to seyn “an illumynere,” Or “a yeuere of lyht,” in wurdys more clere; For in hyr contemplacyoun she took swych lyht Wyth wych many oon, as ye aftyr shul here, In goostly goodnesse she maad shyn bryht. (LMM 5303–10)

Bokenham here represents the Magdalene as a preacher whose familiarity with Christ facilitated her reception of lyht which she then distributed around her in her preaching. It is noteworthy that in opposition to the Legenda aurea, Bokenham does not represent the Magdalene as drinking avidly this light to then allow it to flow out abundantly to enlighten others,127 thereby refusing to portray the Magdalene as a passive vessel of grace.128 This leads us to the second authorising strategy Bokenham develops, that of linking her love for him with a readiness to listen to him, which enables the hagiographer to present Mary Magdalene as learning the Son’s doctrine instead of solely being divinely inspired in her preaching. Her affective love for Christ effectively leads her to be learned on the same level as the apostles. Indeed, Bokenham links the fact that her “affeccyoun” causes her to follow him everywhere “that where-euere he was she drew hym ny” (LMM 5537–8) with the consequence that she “lystnyd hys wurdys ful deuouthly” (LMM 5539), learning from him and them. Similarly, when recounting the alreadymentioned episode of Mary at the house in Bethany, Bokenham has Christ interpret Mary’s behaviour as that of a student: “But oon þing sykyr, Marthe, is necessary, / Wych Mary hath chosyn: to lestyn my lore, / Wych neuere shal fayle; wete weel þerefoor (LMM 5565–7, my emphasis). Bokenham emphasises the Magdalene’s awareness, as a disciple, of Christ’s teachings at other moments of the text. It is indeed through his teaching that she comes to grips with her sin and repents: “Compunct she was of our lord ihesu, / Wych þat lyuyd & tawt uertu, / Thorgh whos doctryne she was in entent / Of hir fore-lyf to makyn a-mendement” (LMM 5412–15, my emphasis). She further refers to his teachings in her inward confession (LMM 5446).129 This notion of the Magdalene’s contemplative intimacy with Christ as a privileged discipleship ibi hausit auide quod postmodum effudit abunde,” LA 628. throughout the Lyf, the Magdalene is described as having grace, not being full of grace. See for example LMM 5352, 5355, 5799, and 6101. The only passage where the holy harlot may be seen as containing grace is when she is described as “enflawmyd wyth goostly graas” (LMM 5658). This example is noted by Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 31–2. She however argues that Bokenham’s female saints are all portrayed as “vessels of divine grace or enclosed or empowered by the divine” (p. 31), a statement with which I disagree. 129 See also LMM 5539.

127 “Quia

128 Indeed,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature does not appear in the Legenda (or, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the corpus). It establishes the Magdalene as Christ’s truest follower, who chose the best part – his teachings – thereby using her affective piety and focus on the Son’s humanity, a feminine performance, to gain theological learning, and therefore gain a preaching authority that is on a par with that of the apostles. This careful portrayal of a Magdalene gaining masculine clerical powers through her performance of affective piety justifies Bokenham’s representation of a particularly authoritative harlot saint. The hagiographer roots the Magdalene’s authoritative voice and her independent behaviour in Christ’s defence of her and in her having learned from him as his disciple, both of which arise from her bridal, affective love for Christ.130 Bokenham accordingly leaves the door open for his audience, encouraged to model themselves on the Sponsa Christi model, to follow on the saint’s path. In other words, he presents affective piety as a gateway to greater authority, learning, and independence, for his aristocratic audience. Such an emphasis on Christ’s teachings, and on his conversion of the Magdalene through her learning of doctrine, which, as “an illumynere,” she is then able to pass on to make others “shyn bryht” (LMM 5506 and 5510), would seem to go against the grain of the already-mentioned argument championed by Winstead (and Price before her), that the Arundel legends reflected Bokenham’s attitude that conversion and Christian teaching were matters of blind faith.131 While Price has a point that Bokenham replaces, in the legend of St Katherine, his source’s portrayal of the saint’s persuasive speech to the fifty philosophers by articles of the Creed,132 I would argue on the basis of my findings that the Lyf of Marye Maudelyn already reflects some of Bokenham’s later, and bolder, representations of female teachers and preachers which populate the Abbotsford Legendary,133 due to the importance of his patroness and her request for a specifically apostolic Magdalene. Bokenham thus takes pains to portray the Magdalene’s relationship with Christ as a loving one, firmly anchoring this representation in the law in order to establish it as more authoritative. The poet insists on the continuity of this relationship, as well as on the privileged status of the Magdalene as Sponsa Christi, linking this representation with the constant validation of her behaviour by Christ during the latter’s life, as well as interpreting Mary’s intimacy with the Son as a sort of discipleship.

130 The

connection of affective piety with learning can be linked with some literary representations of the Virgin, who was sometimes thought to have imbibed wisdom when she suckled the Wisdom of God in the shape of the infant Christ. 131 See Price, “Trumping Chaucer,” and both Winstead’s “Englische Boke” and “Hagiography After Arundel.” 132 Price, “Trumping Chaucer,” pp. 160–2. 133 Winstead, “Hagiography After Arundel,” p. 78.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography It is now important to show how this representation actually authorises the Magdalene’s preaching specifically. The validation of the harlot saint’s voice that is brought on by this portrayal becomes at once apparent in the description of the Magdalene’s first sermon in Marseilles: Bokenham rehearses the Legenda’s connection between the saint’s mouth having kissed Christ’s feet with that same mouth’s eloquence in preaching, thus associating the Magdalene’s privileged physical intimacy with her authoritative preaching.134 However, while such close intimacy is a means for Jacobus de Voragine to represent the Magdalene’s mouth as a passive vessel that breathes (“spiraret”) the savour of God’s word, exhaling it back onto the Marseilles audience, Bokenham’s Magdalene gains from this affective touch a proficiency in showing the sweetness of God’s word: “no wundyr þow þat mowth sothly / Wych so feyr kyssys & so swete / So oftyn had bredyd & so deuothly / Vp-on cryst oure saluatourys feet, / Dyuers tymes whan she hym dede mete, / Past oþir swych grace had in fauour / Of goddys wurde to shewe þe sauour (LMM 5796–800). It is not only the Magdalene’s privileged physical closeness with Christ as his Bride which authorises her speech in Bokenham’s version: it is also the experiential, contemplative sapientia she gains from being close to him and listening to him that legitimates her actions. Bokenham’s insistence on the Magdalene as a contemplative at Christ’s side, and his connection of this meditative status with her preaching,135 can be linked with late medieval affective conceptions of lectio divina as lectio Domini: a contemplative reads Christ’s body as a book through meditation, in effect granting him a very authoritative experiential wisdom.136 Christ’s humanity as a book, and learning through meditation upon it, is for instance developed by Richard Rolle in his Meditations on the Passion: þy body is lyke a boke written al with rede ynke […] Now, swete Jhesu, graunt me to rede upon þy boke, and somewhate to undrestond þe swetnes of þat writynge, and to have likynge in studious abydynge of þat redynge.137

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that one of the very few variants which appears in the Abbotsford version of the life sees the Magdalene, instead of having “bredyd” (spread out) on Christ’s feet,138 has “prentyd” upon them, with the meaning of having imprinted, but also been written or drawn, or been committed to writing.139 This suggests a much more active and learned 134 LMM

5782–800, LA 631. notably LMM 5303–10 and my analysis of this passage above, p. 133. 136 On this, see Vincent Gillespie, Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 113–44, as well as pp. 210–76. 137 Hope Emily Allen, English Writings of Richard Rolle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 36. 138 MED s.v. “breden.” 139 fol. 138r, MED s.v. “prenten.” 135 See

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature process of having, through contact, been re-written or re-formed in the image of Christ, so that her lectio Domini would have re-created her as scribal copy of that same book, thereby gaining Christ-like status. Bokenham’s emphasis on the Magdalene’s “dysert wyse” (LMM 5784) and “eloquency” (LMM 5790) when she preaches, though borrowed from the Legenda, gains a new dimension due to the author’s earlier development of the Magdalene as Christ’s disciple: by listening to Christ as a contemplative, she becomes proficient in lectio Domini and does not exhale God’s word: she actively shows and demonstrates it. Bokenham not only portrays the Magdalene as preaching, but also emphasises her authority and femininity when she does so: her “plesaunth chere,” “beute,” and “feyr face” (LMM 5783–4) are important reasons the Marseilles audience listens to the holy harlot’s words, and her feminine seduction brings them a “uery delectacyoun” that keeps them spellbound. The Magdalene’s feminine enticements therefore increase the power and authority of her voice, reflecting the representation of Mary of Egypt’s use of her seductive wiles to teach Zosimus in the Anglo-Norman T Vie. While her preaching puts her on the same level of authority as Christ’s male disciples, it remains that it is different from that of the men in the life because of her gendered intimacy with Christ. She preaches in a feminine fashion which increases the power of persuasion her speech holds. At the same time as he represents her so, Bokenham attempts to defuse preemptively traditional arguments levelled at women’s speech for the sake of banning female preaching: namely their subject state vis-à-vis men, their lack of constancy, learning, wisdom, and strength, their connection with Eve and her bad advice, and finally their inherent seductiveness, which would ineluctably lead the men in their audience to lechery.140 We have seen how Bokenham responds to the first two charges: the Magdalene may be “in a subject state,” but she draws extensive authority from this; she is also learned enough, having been taught by Christ himself. Third, the holy harlot does not lack constancy or strength for public speaking, as Bokenham insists she is, after her conversion, “strenghthyd & made myhty” (LMM 5339),141 “parseueraunth” (LMM 5710), and preaches “most stedefastlye” (LMM 5786). Fourth, Bokenham is very careful dissociate the Magdalene from Eve, not even mentioning the first woman in his account of the Fall in the “Prolocutory,” a peculiar omission if there is one.142 Fifth, far from representing the seductive character of the Magdalene’s formerly sinful beauty as a hindrance Angels and Earthly Creatures, pp. 37–8. See Humbert of Romans, De eruditione praedicatorum, in B. Humberti de Romanis Opera de vita regulari, ed. Joachim Joseph Berthier, 2 vols (Rome: Marietti, 1888–9), vol. 2, pp. 373–484, at pp. 406–7. 141 She is also “streynghthyd” (LMM 5323), and Bokenham remarks “how stroung she wex & how myhty” (LMM 5343) she has become. 142 LMM 5175–89.

140 Waters,

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography to preaching, he presents it as an advantage that further increases the power of Mary’s words while disconnecting it from the seduction of rhetoric. He is careful to represent the holy harlot’s speech as plain and devoid of rhetorical conceits: she speaks “pleynly” (LMM 5889), and it is probably no coincidence that “Magdaleyn” (LMM 5254) is made to rhyme with “wurdys pleyn” (LMM 5252) at the end of the Prolocutory. Coletti, who parallels this rhyme with Bokenham’s rejection of the “subtyl conceytys” of “rethorycal speche” (LMM 5227 and 5239) in the Prolocutory, argues that “as the subject of the poet’s translation into ‘wurdys pleyne,’ the life of Mary Magdalene thus becomes a textual and symbolic agent of both rhetorical and moral correction.”143 Indeed, Bokenham defends the plain style advertised by Augustine on several occasions, although he often does not practise what he preaches.144 In this way, the hagiographer is attempting to dissociate his saint’s preaching from “rethorycal speche,” and thus from the belief that rhetoric was connected with feminine seduction.145 In presenting the Magdalene as speaking in plain words yet with seductive eloquence, Bokenham further authorises her speech. He is able to portray her enticing femininity in a positive light, increasing the power of her speech rather than rendering it suspicious. At the same time, he links his own enterprise as a hagiographer who avoids “rethorycal speche” with the Magdalene’s preaching, thus implicitly agreeing with Wycliffites that the preacher on whom one should model oneself is Mary Magdalene and her particularly feminine brand of preaching. Bokenham presents in the Lyf a particularly feminine and authoritative version of Mary Magdalene, one that would have pleased his primary audience, Lady Bourchier. I have argued that this portrayal of an authoritative, and yet enticing and feminine, holy harlot is remarkable, exemplifying the crucial importance that patronage and commissions had in medieval textual production. We have seen that other factors did come into play as well, such as Bokenham’s probable desire to court the patronage of Isabel Bourchier’s brother, Richard of York, something that might have led the hagiographer to emphasise the complex, but beneficial, power relationship between clergy and the laity in the Lyf. As in Wycliffite writings, therefore, the harlot saint comes to represent the ideal version of a religiously engaged laity, though in this case she is not seen replacing clerical authority, rather working harmoniously with it. This might also reflect a support of Archbishop Arundel’s political stance in the first part of the fifteenth century, a stance that was marked by a new portrayal of political and religious communities as being coterminous.146 Drama of Saints, p. 76. Bokenham’s style, see Delany, Impolitic Bodies, pp. 49–53. 145 Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 73–95. 146 Sanok, in her “Hagiography After Arundel,” argues the opposite, that the establishment by such as Lydgate, Capgrave, or Bokenham, of the aureate literary saint’s life was 143 Coletti, 144 On

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Nor should we discount, and for similar reasons, the significance of the social status of Bokenham’s patroness to his representation of an authoritative holy harlot, especially when his intended audience is compared to Mirk’s much humbler one. Bokenham’s aureate style necessarily addresses the aristocratic laity, while Mirk might have been reluctant to paint a particularly authoritative portrayal of the Magdalene for fear that his lower-class lay audience, and in particular his female lay audience, would attempt to imitate the harlot saint. Bokenham faces no such threat. Indeed, he wrote for an audience that already possessed some measure of authority as patrons of religious establishments and of the arts. These aristocratic women could emulate the Magdalene within their elite social milieu without running the risk of running afoul of the Church. There is also the context in which Bokenham wrote to be considered. Late medieval East Anglian society possessed a particularly developed feminine religious culture, a culture that certainly influenced Bokenham’s portrayal of Mary Magdalene. As Coletti has brilliantly shown, East Anglia was a region that at the time “privileged female communities and religious lifestyles and feminine forms of spiritual expression.”147 From its unparalleled connection with and valorisation of the works of Continental female mystics and holy women,148 to the “disproportionately large population of religious women in that region”149 and the diversity of religious vocations for East Anglian women (especially with regard to lay vowesses), to the sheer amount of mystical, devotional, and hagiographical works catering to or written by women in the area, East Anglia constituted a favourable place for the portrayal of a strong and authoritative holy harlot.150 It is perhaps no coincidence therefore that Mary Magdalene should have enjoyed an especially great popularity there.151 Bokenham’s Magdalene therefore needs to be understood as the result of complicated patronal, religious, political, literary, and regional influences, as well as the socio-economic background of the audience. The hagiographer parallels the holy harlot with his patroness, and uses this opportunity to reflect on wider societal concerns regarding the relative authority and power of the clergy and the aristocratic laity, at a time when clerical and lay authorities are divided and questioned, by Wycliffism on the one hand, and by the increasing meddling of politics into the religious realm in Arundel’s England. Mirk does not model his Magdalene on such an elite patroness, and therefore the tension actually a means on their part to present an alternative to the “increasing sponsorship of religion by the state” (p. 486). 147 Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 16. 148 Ibid., p. 46. 149 Ibid., p. 51. 150 See ibid., especially her “Introduction” and Chapters 2 and 3. 151 Ibid., p. 5. See also her Chapter 5, “Some East Anglian Magdalenes,” pp. 50–99.

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Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography between lay and clerical, female and male, are contoured in less careful and more binary ways in his account of her life. The next chapter, which will address the late fifteenth-century Digby play Mary Magdalene, should again be read in the light of its East Anglian context.

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CHAPTER 4 “SHE SHAL BYN ABYLL TO DYSTROYE HELLE” GENDER AND AUTHORITY IN THE DIGBY MARY MAGDALENE

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he late fifteenth-century Digby Mary Magdalene play assembles together, over more than 2,100 lines, many features of Magdalenian lives so as to become a form of anthology of all of Mary Magdalene’s pre-existing “storylines,” with an addition of traditional dramatic features taken from morality plays. In the Digby play, the Magdalene is flanked by her two siblings, Lazarus and Mary of Bethany. Her rich father, Cyrus, dies and leaves the castle of Magdala to his daughter. She is then tempted into sin by Lechery, with the help of Curiosity in quite a comic tavern scene, only to repent at Christ’s feet when the latter rids her of seven devils. Other traditional and less traditional episodes follow suit: the raising of Lazarus, the scene at the sepulchre on Easter Sunday (a conflation of Jn 20, Mk 16, and Matt. 28), the sea journey to Marseilles complete with a comical duo of sailor and boy, another comedic passage staging a pagan priest and his attendant, the Magdalene’s preaching and conversion of the Marseilles couple, her help in making the queen pregnant and in saving her when abandoned on an island, the king’s time in Rome with Peter, and finally the Marseilles couple’s eventual return. The Magdalene then leaves for the wilderness, where she is fed by angels several times a day and dies after having been given the last rites by a priest sent by Christ for this purpose. In the same way that the play is a melting-pot of all biblical and legendary accounts of the Magdalene, it also rehearses and brings together many features of the late medieval holy harlot teased out in the last two chapters. Most importantly among these is the representation of femininity as at once hierarchically lower and higher than masculinity, rather than being equal to it. Performing femininity leads to the worst sins, but is also at the root of the highest heavenly reward. The Digby play in addition stages the universality of the holy harlot model to represent Everyman. The author offers up the repentant prostitute and her particular brand of feminine performance as the model to imitate in 141

Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature order to reach salvation. This imitatio is of course easier to effect as a woman, but the playwright presents it as universal. The performance of the Digby holy harlot’s femininity is valued over that of masculinity as her gendered actions are shown to lead to an imitatio Christi, and ultimately to salvation. In other words, this play demonstrates that the frame of reference for Everyman in the later Middle Ages in England is gendered feminine: the main models are Eve and Mary, and mankind must evolve from one to the other in order to be saved. The holy harlot thus appears as the perfect model to represent every Christian, irrespective of their gender, since she is the only type of saint that effectively turns from Eve to become Mary-like. This is an evolution from the Old English hagiographical model of the holy harlot, one that presented salvation as a move from femininity – which was already a signifier of fallen humanity – to a queering of gender that expressed transcendence of the flesh. Here, the holy harlot’s femininity stands both for fallen humanity and for Christ-like perfection. The Digby author uses the repentant prostitute as a model of one’s rise from damnation to salvation by establishing the Magdalene’s femininity as both the cause of her downfall and the origin of her later sanctity and authority as a preacher. The Digby heroine embodies throughout the play several traits traditionally associated with the feminine in misogynistic writings: the ability to become a vessel, the tendency to be easily persuaded, and an inherent, unbridled, sexuality. In strategically rooting the holy harlot’s downfall and her accession to sainthood in her femininity, the dramatist mitigates the potentially negative assumptions a medieval audience would associate with it, by establishing different feminine tendencies as morally neutral: they can lead to the greatest sin as easily as they can elevate the Magdalene to sainthood, and they can even facilitate women’s access to a particularly female sanctity and authority. However, I shall demonstrate that this “holy harlotry” is a feminine performance that is available to all, be they male or female, lay or religious. Indeed, the Magdalene’s feminine performance is echoed in – and actually constitutes an imitation of – Christ’s own feminine attributes. The playwright uses gender to pit two different types of authority one against the other, valuing the feminine authority wielded by Christ and the Magdalene over the masculine power of the different male figures of the play (Cyrus, Herod, the Devil, or the pre-conversion king of Marseilles). I therefore adopt here a middle ground between those scholars who conceive of the Digby playwright as a sort of “proto-feminist” who effects in the Magdalene a “rebuttal of misogynistic stereotypes” by “ignoring or setting to one side the elements that might reflect badly on women,”1 and those who suggest the Magdalene is subjected 1

Susan Carter, “The Digby Mary Magdalen: Constructing the Apostola Apostolorum,” Studies in Philology 106 (2009), pp. 402–19, at p. 419, defines the Digby play as “protofeminist.” For the other quotations, see Joanne Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint: The Digby Play’s Mary Magdalene (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 2011), p. 45. See also Mimi Still Dixon,

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The Digby Mary Magdalene to the patriarchal hierarchy, a passively acquiescent figure constantly influenced by the play’s male protagonists.2 Rather, femininity in the Digby play is both negative and positive, both fallen and sublime. In a word, femininity is humanity in all of its ugliness and beauty. This is not the sole prerogative of the Magdalene but, rather, a feature of all later medieval lives of holy harlots: I will argue that the same multivalent portrayal of femininity can be observed in the late medieval lives of Mary of Egypt and Pelagia in the Vitas Patrum and the Gilte Legende. The harlot type of female saint thus arises as the model for humanity in the later medieval period, one that both women and men, clergy and laity, are encouraged to imitate in their quest for reward in the afterlife. We saw in Chapter 2 that some Anglo-Norman lives presented the holy harlot’s authority as stable throughout her life, mirroring the continuity of her feminine gender. In this way, such texts put to the forefront the great danger of an authoritative loose woman and the positive authority that a saintly woman could wield after repentance. Not so in the Digby Magdalene, in which the sinful harlot is more or less devoid of individual, charismatic authority throughout her life. Indeed, before her conversion, she does not possess the legitimising authority offered by Christ, the traditional authority figure within the play, and she is therefore quite harmless to others. It is only after her repentance that her obedience to Christ’s commands to preach and teach enables her to become authoritative. The playwright’s message here is ambiguous. On the one hand, her obedience to and faith in the Word make her all-powerful over the clergy, a portrayal which might reflect the playwright’s covert criticism of the religious establishment of his day, and provide fodder for Andrew Cole’s argument that Wycliffite concepts were seamlessly adopted into the mainstream in the late fourteenth century and in the fifteenth century.3 On the other hand, the Digby play values the Magdalene’s blind faith over intellection, something that would fit the post-Arundelian position of education as being “structured around conserving ignorance”4 already “‘Thys Body of Mary’: ‘Femynyte’ and ‘Inward mythe’ in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Mediaevalia 18 (1995), pp. 221–44; Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 154; Laura Severt King, “Sacred Eroticism, Rapturous Anguish: Christianity’s Penitent Prostitutes and the Vexation of Allegory, 1370–1608,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1993, pp. 1–2; and Susannah Milner, “Flesh and Food: The Function of Female Asceticism in the Digby ‘Mary Magdalene,’” Philological Quarterly 73 (1994), pp. 385–401. 2 Sarah Salih, “Staging Conversion: The Digby Saint Plays and The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–34, at p. 127. 3 Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 4 Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 123.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature discussed in the previous chapter. The playwright might be making a case for both notions simultaneously, criticising the clergy and foregrounding the need for blind faith. Whatever the case may be, the play takes advantage of the already noted radical potential held in holy harlot figures to open up social, political, or religious categories for re-examination, making use of the Magdalene’s femininity to suggest alternative models of power which can, but do not have to, be linked with the masculine, the powerful, and/or the clerical. The inclusion of a saint play when discussing gender performance is particularly appropriate. A medieval audience would have construed both drama and preaching as belonging to the same realm of “popular entertainment” outlined by Marianne Briscoe,5 and the recitation of saints’ legends influenced the development of medieval religious drama,6 so that the Digby play complements well our corpus of hagiographical sermons and legends. Holy harlots’ lives have been dramatised from very early on, a fact that further suggests that this type of saint lent itself especially well to being imitated, their lives enacted and presented as models. Indeed, Mary Magdalene features in the earliest liturgical music-drama in Europe, the Easter quem quaeritis trope, where she appears alongside the two other myrrhophores seeking Jesus at the tomb.7 Similarly, the first playwright whose name we know in medieval Western Europe and who happens to be a woman, Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, is known for her play Paphnutius, which dramatises the life of St Thaïs.8 The Magdalene went on to have a successful dramatic career, being one of the best-represented characters in medieval religious drama, notably due to her centrality in staged accounts of Christ’s life.9 Whereas the quem quaeritis trope was enacted within the church (for instance by monks in the Regularis Concordia or much later by the nuns of Barking Abbey under the direction of their abbess Dame Katharine Sutton), the Digby Magdalene play gives us a glimpse of the way the holy harlot was represented in a lay context. It was probably performed in the marketplace, potentially by townsmen, performers 5

6

7

8 9

See her “Preaching and Medieval English Drama,” in Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldeway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 150–72, at p. 154. Catherine E. Dunn, “The Saint’s Legend as Mimesis: Gallican Liturgy and Mediterranean Culture,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews 3 (1984), pp. 13–27. See Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 24, and Evelyne Pinto-Mathieu, Marie-Madeleine dans la littérature du Moyen Age (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997), pp. 189–279. For the Quem quaeritis trope in England, see Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 17–33. This work is edited in Die Werke der Hrotsvitha, ed. K.A. Barack (Nuremberg: Bauer und Raspe, 1858), pp. 239–69. For a list of Mary Magdalene’s appearances in medieval English mystery plays, see Helen M. Garth, Saint Mary Magdalen in Mediaeval Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), p. 13.

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The Digby Mary Magdalene (e.g. minstrels), itinerant friars, or a religious company, using place and scaffold staging.10 The play was probably composed in the late fifteenth century, although the only surviving manuscript, Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS Digby 133, is dated to the first quarter of the sixteenth century.11 This East Anglian play has been hailed as a “theatrical tour de force,” containing as it does “nearly every theatrical device known to the late medieval playwright.”12 The play’s sources are varied, borrowing freely from the New Testament, the Golden Legend, and the South English Legendary.13 Mary Magdalene is emphatically defined by her female gender throughout her life, from her young years as Cyrus’s noble daughter to her spell as a lecherous woman, to her representation as an elderly hermit. Her femininity is consistently connected with the desire that her body creates in men. When the Magdalene first appears on stage, beauty and femininity are the first attributes that introduce her to the audience: “Here is Mary, ful fayur and ful of femynyté” (DM 71).14 The term “femynyte” associates the Magdalene’s womanhood with courtly speech, as “the ideal of ‘femynyte’ is one of the most common compliments of courtly love lyrics.”15 Her suitor, Curiosity, similarly combines the vocabulary of courtly love with an insistence on his lady’s almost superlative femininity: “A, dere dewchesse, my daysyys iee! Splendaunt of colour, most of femynyté Your sofreyn colourrys set wyth synseryté.” (DM 515–17, my emphasis) “O, nedys I must, myn own lady! Your person, itt is so womanly.” (DM 524–5, my emphasis)

Mary Magdalene is a courtly lady, one whose femininity has negative connections with vanity, ostentation, and pride in clothing, when Curiosity refers to Clifford Davidson, The Saint Play in Medieval Europe (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1986), pp. 6 and 76. For the argument that the play was staged by a religious company, see Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby (eds), The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1983), pp. 54–5. 11 For the play’s date, see Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall (eds), The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, EETS o.s. 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. xxx and xl, and Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 36. For information about the manuscript’s provenance and composition, see Baker et al., Religious Plays, pp. ix–xv and xxx–xxxiii. 12 Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 2. Theresa Coletti, “The Design of the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene,” Studies in Philology 76 (1979), pp. 313–33, at p. 313. 13 Baker et al., Religious Plays, pp. xl–xliii. Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 4, also suggests Bokenham’s Lyf of Marye Maudelyn as a potential source. 14 The edition used here is Theresa Coletti (ed.), The Digby Mary Magdalene Play (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2018), hereafter DM. 15 Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 67. 10

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature her as being “splendavnt of colour” and wearing “sofreyn colourrys.”16 The repetition of “colour/colourrys” further evokes the colours of rhetoric, and links the Magdalene’s enticing outward appearance with the snares of rhetoric, repeating the traditional connection that was made in the medieval period between rhetoric and femininity in the potential both held to deceive.17 Coletti and others have noted that the parallelism between the two men’s speeches to the Magdalene taints Cyrus’s relationship with his daughters with ambiguity, suggesting “how courtly discourse elicits feminine vulnerability to masculine sexual overtures even as it promotes an idea of ‘femynyte’ as the embodied, coveted object of desire.”18 The Magdalene’s defining femininity is therefore strongly connected with the influence of courtly love lyrics and the romance genre on hagiography. When Mary lives in the desert for thirty years and is discovered by a priest, her gender and her name are never called into question, in contrast to the play’s sources, having been revealed to him in a vision (DM 2045–7). Mirroring the two pre-conversion scenes just mentioned, the dramatist associates here the saint’s performance of the female gender with a masculine, external desire: in the same way that she is the object of Cyrus’s ambiguous compliments and of Curiosity’s love, she is also defined here by the priest as “Crystys delecceon” (DM 2045), Christ’s beloved. For the author of the Digby play, then, it seems that femininity, or at least the harlot’s femininity, is irrevocably linked to masculine desire, be it ontologically human or divine. In other words, femininity cannot exist without the pressure of a desiring male gaze. One might even go so far as to ascribe to male desire the power to “engender” femininity. This happens in other late fifteenth-century lives of holy harlots. For instance, Bishop Nonnus expresses his delight and pleasure in seeing the pre-conversion Pelagia adorned in Caxton’s 1495 Vitas Patrum: “Truely I haue strongly delyted me. And her beaute hath merueyllously playsed me.”19 In the same collection, Zosimus similarly expresses his desire to see the post-conversion Mary of Egypt in terms that imply love-sickness: “Alle the yere syghed Zozimas. so moche desyre hadde he.”20 As in the Vitas Patrum, then, the Digby holy harlot’s gender and her female potential to arouse is pointedly demonstrated as stable throughout the play, and the dramatist uses this stability of gender to represent cultural stereotypes associated with “femynyte” as both the weakness at the origin of the harlot’s sin and the strength which will enable her to overcome it and become a saintly preacher, 16

Susan Eberly, “Margery Kempe, St. Mary Magdalene, and Patterns of Contemplation,” The Downside Review 368 (1989), pp. 209–23, at p. 213. 17 Claire Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 73–95. 18 Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 158, and King, “Sacred Eroticism,” pp. 164 and 178–83. 19 Caxton, Vitas Patrum (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1495), fol. lxiiv. 20 Ibid., fol. lxxv.

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The Digby Mary Magdalene creating an entirely feminine performance of Everyman’s sinful beginnings and quest for salvation. One such “feminine” trait is the portrayal of the Magdalene as a vessel. THE MAGDALENE AND THE VIRGIN AS VESSELS OF THE WORD The playwright links the Magdalene’s gender with a representation of her body as a vessel. This feminine ability to be a receptacle, irrespective of morals, sin, or grace, is a commonplace in medieval conceptions of women.21 Women’s perceived “permeability” made them choice subjects to communicate with the divine as mulieres sanctæ, mystics and prophets, a fact that empowered women’s voices to a certain extent. However, it was still the remit of the clergy to effect the discretio spirituum, having the final say on whether women’s visions were orthodox and from God, or heretical and from the devil.22 In parallel with women’s visionary “openness” and permeability, which could lead them to be hailed as holy women or deemed demonically possessed, the feminine ability to become a vessel in the Digby play holds the potential to be a symbol both of the greatest virtue as well as of the greatest sin. The dramatist makes a point from the start to link femininity with the potential of becoming a receptacle in the play’s portrayal of the Magdalene. When Cyrus introduces his daughters, he emphasises both their womanhood and their ability to be vessels by reiterating the word “ful(l)” in connection with them: To amyabyll douctors full brygth of ble; Ful gloryos to my syth an ful of delectacyon. Lazarus, my son in my resspeccyon, Here is Mary, ful fayur and ful of femynyté, And Martha, ful of beuté and of delycyté, Ful of womanly merrorys and of benygnyté. They haue fulfyllyd my hart wyth consolacyon. (DM 68–74, my emphasis)

“Ful(l)” may refer in this context to both the adjective meaning “filled to capacity” and the adverb signifying “very,” “completely, entirely, fully.”23 The alternance of these homophones reinforces the dramatist’s pointed insistence on a gendered representation of Mary and Martha’s bodies as containers: they are in effect “completely” full, a parallel that is only strengthened by the verb “fulfyllyd” on line 74. This vessel-like body is literally filled with sin before the harlot’s conversion. The dramatist indeed possesses the tools to actualise such a metaphor for 21

For women’s bodies as vessels, see Chapter 1, p. 32, n. 67. See Introduction, p. 15. 23 MED s.v. “ful, adj.,” and “ful, adv.” 22

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the play’s audience, staging the seven deadly sins besieging and entering Magdalene Castle, a locus that a medieval audience conversant with morality plays would have readily understood as representing Mary’s soul, in parallel with such religious drama as The Castle of Perseverance.24 The castle also signifies her body in medieval conception, as exemplified in Ancrene Wisse’s besieged cell, through the windows of which (the metaphorical eyes, ears, and mouth), the sins enter.25 Just as the gendered image of the cell in Ancrene Wisse, the Magdalene’s castle/body is female and thus permeable. The devil indeed implies as much when he commands the personified sins “To entyr hyr person be the labor of Lechery” (DM 432), a command followed by their siege of the Magdalene castle. The mention of “labor,” with its possible meaning of birthing labour,26 establishes the femininity of the Magdalene/castle as vessel. This portrayal of the holy harlot as a container of sins is therefore at once gendered feminine and universal, representing on the one hand the threat of sin to Everyman’s soul (just as in the Castle of Perseverance), but also signifying that the sinful body is gendered female.27 The stage directions indicate that the audience would have seen Lechery and the Bad Angel enter the Magdalene’s body/castle, and that all seven sins would have quite dramatically jumped out of her body at Christ’s absolution of her: “Wyth þis word seuyn dyllys xall dewoyde from þe woman, and the Bad Angyll entyr into hell wyth thondyr” (DM, s.d. at 690). How this was actually performed is still a point of scholarly disagreement, but the closest parallel to this scene, in a play from Mons (France), suggests it would have been quite impressive, as the latter has a devil being cast out from the Canaanite’s daughter by disappearing underneath the stage through a trapdoor with smoke and an explosion.28 Saint Play, p. 80; King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 174; Joanne Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 61, and her “‘Now is aloft þat late was ondyr!’, Enclosure, Liberation, and Spatial Semantics in the Digby Mary Magdalene Play,” in Mary Magdalene in Medieval Culture: Conflicted Roles, ed. Peter V. Loewen and Robin Waugh (New York; London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 247–57. On the history of the allegory, see Clifford Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life: Medieval Iconography and the Macro Morality Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1989), and Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). 25 Bella Millett (ed.), Ancrene Wisse, A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from other Manuscripts, EETS o.s. 325, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), part II. 26 Cf. MED s.v. “labour,” 4.b. 27 Sinning is also gendered female in the play: Lechery, the only female personified sin, is thought by Flesh to be the most likely to be able to enter the Magdalene’s body/castle: “Now ye, Lady Lechery … / Yow xal go desyyr servyse, and byn at hure atendavns, / For 3e xal sonest entyr, 3e beral of bewte!” (DM 422–5). On this, see also King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 174. 28 Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1998), p. 7. See also Meredith and Tailby The Staging of Religious Drama, p. 97 and Davidson, Saint Play, pp. 77–8.

24 Davidson,

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The Digby Mary Magdalene The Magdalene’s body is therefore a vessel literally full of sins before her conversion. This portrayal, with its attendant evocation of “labor” and her expelling the sins, already points to the positive aspect of this vessel-like ability post-conversion: the saint gains a procreative power that can be likened to that of the Virgin Mary. Mary’s body, rid of sins, is then primed to become a receptacle for God, so much so that the priest who discovers her in the wilderness tells her that she is figuratively pregnant with God because of her virtue: “Grett art thou wyth God for thi perfytnesse” (DM 2048). The dramatist is playing here on the double meaning of being “great with,” suggesting she is both great in God’s eyes and pregnant with God.29 This representation of the holy harlot as a generative vessel, especially before her conversion, is an unusual development at the end of the Middle Ages, since real-life prostitutes were often believed to be barren because of their profession, and this influenced the portrayal of saintly prostitutes in the medieval period.30 Notwithstanding this, the late Middle Ages holy harlots are often metaphorically or literally fertile before their conversion, in a nod to their assimilation with the Virgin Mary and her procreative powers. Suffice it to mention the life of St Pelagia in the Gilte Legende, which metaphorically presents the saint as “moder of wickednesse” instead of the source’s portrayal of her as a sea of iniquity, “pelagus iniquitatis.”31 Pelagia even literally becomes a mother in the Vitas Patrum, asking her own children to follow Nonnus to know where he lives, and commanding her son to go retrieve her riches from her home in order to dispose of them.32 After the Magdalene’s conversion in the Digby play, her ability to contain leads to her assimilation with the Virgin Mary. She says that God “fullfyllyt [her] wyth so gret feliceté” (DM 2036), and is further called by the king of Marseilles a “tabyrnakyll of the blyssyd Trenité” (DM 1941), in parallel with the Virgin whom Christ calls his “tapyrnakyll of grett nobyllnesse” (DM 1352). The Magdalene’s epithet as tabernacle of the Trinity is reminiscent of the late medieval “Shrine Madonnas” or vierges ouvrantes, sculptures representing the Virgin whose body opened like a tabernacle to unveil the Trinity

29

King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 212. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 82. See also Soraya Tremayne, Managing Reproductive Life: Cross-Cultural Themes in Sexuality and Fertility (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), pp. 94–9. Mary Magdalene nevertheless becomes a very popular saint in the context of childbirth because of the legendary addition to her vita of her role in the miraculous pregnancy of the Marseilles queen. 31 “Life of St Pelagia,” in the Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer, EETS o.s 328, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vol. 2, p. 745, line 45; LA 1034. 32 She has at least two children. See Caxton, Vitas Patrum, fols lxiir and lxiiiv. This also appears in the source, the Vie des anciens Pères, “Vie de Saincte Pelage” (Paris: Jean du Pré, 1486), unpaginated. 30

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature placed within.33 By associating the Magdalene with this concept, the Digby playwright effectively links her with the Virgin and emphasises both scriptural saints’ capacity to contain the divine. The Magdalene’s feminine ability to be a vessel thus shows her to be full of sins at the beginning of the play, but also enables her to be purified and re-virginised, so as to become assimilated with the purest and the most virginal of all women, the Virgin Mary. The flexibility of the holy harlot model already permitted its association with the Virgin Mary in most of the lives studied in previous chapters, but the Digby playwright conflates the two figures so seamlessly that scholars have long debated which, of the Magdalene or of the Virgin, is actually the subject of a specific speech.34 On my part, I argue that a medieval audience would simply have conceived of Mary Magdalene as both herself and the Virgin Mary, used as the audience was to interpret scriptural personae typographically, as “doubling” for several other scriptural figures. Indeed, with the Virgin Mary’s absence from the play – an unusual choice when staging Christ’s last weeks on earth – the playwright effectively uses the Magdalene as a stand-in for the Virgin, her affective femininity signifying her own fallen status and subsequent redemption as well as Mary’s virginal motherhood. The holy harlot is therefore a nexus of all things feminine, representing all types, scriptural figures, and concepts the playwright associates with the female gender. This assimilation first arises when Christ, immediately following a speech by the Magdalene, invokes a woman in a language highly reminiscent of the Song of Songs. This woman is clearly identified as his Virgin Mother only eight lines later, and then the Son mentions without a break his plans as they regard the Magdalene’s preaching in Marseilles. At the precise moment of this assimilation, Christ associates Mary with different containers, with places one can inhabit, and with her ability to contain the divine: O, the onclypsyd sonne, tempyll of Salamon! In the mone I restyd, that nevyr chonggyd goodnesse; In the shep of Noee, fles of Judeon. She was my tapyrnakyll of grett nobyllnesse; She was the paleys of Phebus brygthnesse; She was the vessell of puere clennesse, Wher my Godhed gaff my manhood myth: My blyssyd mother, of demure femynyté. (DM 1349–55, my italics)

On this, see Gudrun Radler, Die Schreinenmadonnen “vierges ouvrantes” (Frankfurt: Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, 1990). 34 See pp. 151–2. This conflation is best discussed in King, “Sacred Eroticism,” pp. 205–8. See also Coletti, Drama of Saints, pp. 151–4 and 172–6, and Newman, From Virile Woman, p. 177. 33

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The Digby Mary Magdalene As Laura King argues, this passage “celebrates Christ’s containment by a woman,”35 but this woman’s identity is purposely left ambiguous by the playwright, so that it is both Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. The Magdalene’s assimilation with the Virgin occurs at other moments of the play, for example when the harlot saint is addressed with Marian epithets,36 and when the king and queen give thanks for the queen’s survival. The king expresses gratitude for “that puer vergyn” (DM 1895),37 and the queen speaks in these terms: “REGINA. O virgo salutata, for ower savacyon! / O pulcra et casta, cum of nobyll alyauns! / O almyty maydyn, ower sowlys confortacyon! / O demur Mavdlyn, my bodyys sustynauns!” (DM 1899–1902). The association of “maydyn” with “Mavdlyn” effectively conflates the two scriptural women. The king, a few lines later, still ambiguously thanks “Mavdleyn and Ower Lady” (DM 1913), thereby hinting that the two figures were invoked at once by the queen in her speech. Mary Magdalene is both Madonna and whore in the play, being able to contain these two polar opposites of femininity within a single vessel-like body. The holy harlot is not only here emphatically feminine, she is used as a stand-in for women of every status, be they virginal or lecherous, sinful or virtuous. Her femininity links her to both Luxuria/ Lechery and the Virgin Mary, the only two other characters that are noted as possessing “femynyté” in the play: Lechery is “flowyr fayrest of femynyté” (DM 423), while the Virgin is “of demure femynyté” (DM 1356). For the playwright, then, femininity signifies both extremes, both Lechery and the Virgin, and the holy harlot acts as a bridging figure for women between these oppositions. The Magdalene’s assimilation with the Virgin Mary in her role as a nurturing, active vessel of the divine enables her to regain a figural virginity as maydyn and puer vergyn.38 The harlot’s reconstructed Marian virginity opens the gates of heaven to her: like the Virgin, she is lifted to heaven to the sound of “Asumpta est Maria in nubibus” (DM s.d. at 2030), “an antiphon for the Feast of the Assumption.”39 The superiority of her reconstructed virginity over true virginity is even implied: she is to be “inhansyd in heven above 35

King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 190. She is for instance “wythowtyn blame” (DM 1675), “O blyssyd Mary” (DM 1676), and the “flower of wommanned” (DM 1747). 37 Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 176. See also King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 206, who argues that this refers to the Magdalene. For the notion that it refers to the Virgin see, for instance, David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 745, and Baker et al., Religious Plays, p. 216. 38 On the notion that “virginity is gradable and negotiable,” see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Leslie Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 165–94, at pp. 167–8, and Newman, From Virile Woman, pp. 29–31. 39 Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 178; Bennett, “The Meaning,” pp. 45–6. It is also used in the N-town Assumption play. See JoAnna Dutka, Music in the English Mystery Plays, Early Drama, Art, and Music, ref. ser. 2 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1980), p. 20. 36

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature vergynnys” (DM 2022).40 While this may arguably represent the superiority of the Magdalene’s double crown – as both a virgin and a doctor due to her apostolate in Marseilles – over that of the singly crowned virgins, it is more probable that this portrayal should reflect the belief that the further one falls from grace, the bigger the reward, should one repent. This notion, contentious in the later medieval period, was, for instance, held by such mystics as Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich.41 The dramatist is particularly careful to connect the two scriptural Marys and their capacity to contain at moments where the question of authority is pressing, when the Magdalene’s voice especially needs validation. King rightly argues that Christ’s speech equating the two figures with vessels informs his decision to name the Magdalene a “holy apostylesse” (DM 1380), thus revealing the playwright’s connection between women’s preaching and their “capacity for inhabitation.”42 Indeed, this speech is crucial in terms of the holy harlot’s authority. Just before Christ enters on stage, the Magdalene is presented as an apostle. She is accompanied by “hyr dysypyll” (DM s.d. at 1336), and she reveals that she was with the apostles, her “brothyrn” (DM 1348), when they received the gift of tongues, thus establishing that she has as much right as the other disciples to preach and teach (DM 1344–8).43 This radical representation of a woman preaching is immediately supported by Christ’s speech. The female apostle’s authority is therefore authorised both by the traditional gift of tongues (Acts 2:4–8) and by her feminine/ Marian capacity to be full of grace. Another instance of this is particularly revealing: upon the royal couple’s arrival back in Marseilles, they discover the Magdalene preaching that “paupertas est donum dei” (DM 1930). Here again, the playwright draws “an implicit analogy between the Virgin’s bearing of Christ and Mary Magdalene’s bearing of the word,”44 having the king address the repentant harlot in the following words: “heyll be thou, Mary, ower Lord is wyth thee! / […] / Heyll, tabyrnakyll of þe blyssyd Trenité!” (DM 1939–41). Not only is the Magdalene, like the Virgin, the tabernacle of the Trinity, but the king also addresses her as he would the Mother of God, in the words of the Hail Mary, which the medieval audience would readily identify.45 Further, the audience would be prompted, upon hearing the beginning of the prayer, On this, see also Coletti, Drama of Saints, pp. 178–9. On this notion and its connection with the holy harlots, see Chapter 5, pp. 200 ff. 42 King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 190. 43 On the Magdalene being present at Pentecost, see Chapter 3, p. 108, and on Margery Kempe imitating the Magdalene’s pentecostal gift, see Chapter 5, pp. 213–14. 44 Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 175. 45 The Hail Mary was one of three prayers one had to learn by heart in the later medieval period, alongside the Apostles’ Creed and the Pater Noster. See, for instance, Nicholas Orme, “Lay Literacy in England, 1100–1300,” in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 35–56, at p. 56. 40 41

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The Digby Mary Magdalene to supply the missing words between “Heyll be þou, Mary” and “Ower Lord is with the”: “full of grace.” This obvious omission effectively emphasises the part of the prayer left out, a part that parallels the king’s assertion that the Magdalene is a “tabyrnakyll of þe blyssyd Trenité.” This verbal echo further connects the two Marys, preaching, and being a vessel. The Digby poet therefore assimilates the two most popular scriptural women by equating their very feminine role as vessels. The conflation of the two saints on such a basis is not new. Indeed, the “Second Eve” paradigm, which was rendered popular by Augustine, interprets both New Testament Marys as having redeemed Eve’s actions: “Quia per sexum femineum cecidit homo, per sexum femineum reparatus est homo, quia uirgo christum pepererat, femina resurrexisse nuntiabat.”46 Both women redeem their gender through their ability as vessels to bring forth the Word, the Virgin by giving birth to it, and the Magdalene by preaching the Word, announcing Christ’s Resurrection. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the eleventh- and twelfth-century rise of a more emotional devotion to the human Christ caused the Magdalene and the Virgin Mary to be elected as the two archetypes of this feminised piety that privileged a very sensual, affective, and participatory devotion to Christ’s humanity.47 Both women were valued for their feminine roles in Christ’s life: the Virgin because she gave birth to him and nurtured him, the Magdalene because she hosted him in Bethany and took care of his body by washing him, anointing him, and finally mourning him. This nurturing care for the body, and the tears shed by the Magdalene at the tomb, represent the “female biological and social roles” that are nurturing and mourning,48 so that, in the later medieval period, both Marys represent the hope of gaining a privileged relationship with Christ by fulfilling traditional female roles. They symbolise the authority one can gain through the performance of particularly feminine roles. Through his representation of the Magdalene as a vessel and the association of the saint with the Virgin, the playwright indeed authorises the holy harlot’s preaching by painting a very feminised portrayal of an activity mostly reserved to men and the clergy: preaching as gestating and giving birth to the Word. As Jacob Bennett notes, the fact that the Magdalene’s first sermon in the play is based 46

“Because man’s fall was caused by the female sex, man’s restoration was accomplished through the female sex: a virgin gave birth to Christ and a woman announced he had risen.” Augustine, Sermo 232, in Suzanne Poque (ed. and trans.), Augustin d’Hippone. Sermons pour la Pâques (Sources Chrétiennes 116) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1966), p. 262. My translation. On this tradition, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 239–44. 47 On this, see in particular pp. 61–3. 48 Dixon, “‘Thys Body of Mary,’” p. 225. On the notion that women are providers of food, while men eat it, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 190–1.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature on Genesis 1 “consolidates her associations with creation, generation, birth and new life.”49 Being a vessel, a role which might be construed as passive and potentially demeaning, is here valued and presented in the guise of its essentially feminine and procreative aspect. It is formulated as the key to gaining extensive authority. While in the earlier Anglo-Norman and Middle English lives of holy harlots the Magdalene paradoxically became a “powerful woman” skilled in the “manly arts of preaching and conversion” by drawing authority from her very sensual, feminine, and privileged relationship with Christ, she does so here through the equally feminine concept of being a receptacle.50 This in turn suggests the possibility that all women could legitimise their voice through their own femininity, either by establishing for themselves an intimate and tactile connection with Christ by way of their visionary experience (as we will see Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe do in Chapter 5) or by becoming vessels for God’s Word. Active, procreative vessels. At the same time, this portrayal of a female preacher enacting this traditionally masculine action by a performance of femininity suggests that the ideal preacher is gendered female, in line with Wycliffite representations of the Magdalene as the model for their true man. One may therefore argue that this portrayal went mainstream in fifteenth-century England, and was in turn adopted by the Digby playwright. This particular development also stems from an affective conception which is best illustrated in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermones super cantica canticorum, where the abbot or preacher is seen suckling and nourishing his congregation: Vide autem quomodo illa aliud cupit, et aliud accipit: et nitenti ad contemplationis quietem labor praedicationis imponitur; et sitienti sponsi praesentiam, filiorum sponsi pariendorum, alendorumque sollicitudo injungitur. Neque nunc tantum accidit illi hoc; […] ut ex hoc se intelligeret matrem, atque ad dandum lac parvulis, nutriendumque filios revocari. […] Docemur ex hoc sane, intermittenda plerumque dulcia oscula propter lactantia ubera.51 Jacob Bennett, “The Meaning of the Digby ‘Mary Magdalen,’” Studies in Philology 101 (2004), p. 46. 50 Claire Sponsler, “Drama and Piety: Margery Kempe,” in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 129–43, at p. 136. See also Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the Later Middle Ages (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), p. 180. 51 “Take note however that she [the bride] yearns for one thing and receives another. In spite of her longing for the repose of contemplation she is burdened with the task of preaching; and despite her desire to bask in the bridegroom’s presence she is entrusted with cares of begetting and rearing children. […] From this she understands she is a mother, that her duty is to suckle her babes, to provide food for her children. […] We learn from this that only too often we must interrupt the sweet kisses to feed the needy with the milk of doctrine.” See on this passage, and on the notion of God and abbot as mother, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 110–69. 49

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The Digby Mary Magdalene Bernard’s conception of the abbot performing his duties best by performing femininity can be paralleled in our text, where the Digby playwright represents the holy harlot’s particular brand of feminine qualities as a model for men and women to imitate in order to gain saintly authority and attain salvation. Indeed, Bernard equates his own masculine and clerical preaching with the particularly feminine function of nurture. In so doing, he uproots this feminine role from its biological essentialism: everybody can perform femininity, and it is a model well worth following. Although the Digby poet anchors the Magdalene’s feminine authority in her womanly shape and her assimilation with the Virgin Mary, we will see that the play also dissociates biological sex from gender, demonstrating how femininity can be performed within the play by men and women alike, and offering up such performance as the model to be followed. A similar representation is featured in the Vitas Patrum life of Mary of Egypt, where a slight modification of the French Vie des Pères source suggests that the Middle English version considers being a vessel of grace as an important aspect of the priesthood, rather than as an alternative, more feminine perhaps, performance of sanctity. During the traditional blessing contest between Zosimus and Mary, Zosimus argues for Mary’s higher status in these words: “Truely my frende thou art full of the grace of god. For thou knoweste myn name and myne offyce. The spyrytuell grace is not gyuen oonly for the order of dygnytee of Preesthode, but by the good werkes that the persone dooth.”52

In opposition, the French contrasts the two terms: “la grace espirituelle ne se donne pas pour l ordre ou dignite de prestrie, mais pour les bonnes operacions que fait la personne.”53 Caxton’s Vitas Patrum presents the feminine containment of grace as a shared feature between the priesthood and female mystical access to the divine, instead of opposing one to the other as in the French. Further, by claiming that being a vessel of “spyrytuell grace” is not “oonly” the remit of the priest, it implies that it is an important aspect of priesthood, and connects performing priestly duties with performing femininity as a vessel of grace. The holy harlot’s feminine brand of preaching as God’s vessel presents both a validating model for other women to have their voices heard and an ideal of preaching that values femininity over masculinity. The repentant saint’s evolution from containing sin to becoming a vessel of grace has consequences that are at once universal and concern more particularly women. Indeed, women who may, like Margery Kempe for instance, have lamented their lost

52 53

“Life of Mary of Egypt,” in Vitas Patrum, fol. lxviiv. My emphasis. “Vie de sainte marie egytienne,” in Vie des Pères, unpaginated.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature virginity,54 could see in an imitation of the holy harlot model the opportunity to rise higher even than virgins in the heavenly hierarchy by following its move from the fallen Eve to the Blessed Mary. In the holy harlot type, they could conceive their active sexual life and potential motherhood as a starting point that did not hinder them to turn to God and become like the Virgin, in fact as an original sinful state that would indeed privilege them in becoming the latter. At the same time, the universality of the move from sin to virtue, represented as it is in the Digby play in a format reminiscent of the morality play, encourages every Christian to identify with the Magdalene’s plight and to see her as a model for their own salvation. THE MAGDALENE AND FEMININE PERSUASION The Magdalene in the Digby play is endowed with another trait that is presented as morally “neutral” and was believed, in the Middle Ages and beyond, to be particularly feminine: a readiness to be convinced,55 something we have already seen was used as a positive concept by Wycliffites when they identified the Magdalene as a model of the ideal preacher.56 Virginia Burrus connects both notions of seductiveness and seducibility with femininity.57 The fact that women could easily be swayed held both negative and positive connotations in the medieval period. The popular illustration of the ill effects of such female tractability was the serpent’s successful persuasion of Eve, causing no less than the fall of mankind; yet, a woman’s compliance to a husband’s or a father’s will was greatly praised, an ideal reproduced for instance in the figure of Griselda in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale.” In the Middle Ages women were thought to be at once very easily convinced and very wilful, both crafty and strong minded. However, James Blythe argues that this “contradiction is only apparent; the unifying point is that women are incomplete in another way – their moral sense is also stunted. This renders them amoral and unprincipled, as well as unable to correctly evaluate the moral or rational content of an argument. The same woman can be deadly at one time and an easy prey at another.”58 Joanne Findon’s argument that the Digby playwright is championing the Magdalene’s strong will does not therefore See, for instance, Book 1, chapters 50 and 52 of The Book of Margery Kempe, in Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), and Chapter 5, pp. 208 ff. 55 Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 126–52. 56 See Chapter 3, pp. 104–10. 57 See her The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 131. 58 See his “Women in the Military: Scholastic Arguments and Medieval Images of Female Warriors,” History of Political Thought 22 (2001), pp. 242–69, at p. 264. 54

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The Digby Mary Magdalene clash with Sarah Salih’s stance that the Magdalene is easily led and convinced by all of the play’s male authoritative figures.59 Both scholars simply noticed one side of the same “feminine” trait. In the Digby play, this performance of femininity is universalised and offered up as a model for Everyman to follow in the quest to salvation, but also specifically when one wants to preach, teach, or otherwise exercise any authoritative position. Through the holy harlot, femininity is therefore valued. The playwright goes further than the pattern of easy compliance that Salih remarks upon to highlight the fact that the Magdalene is easily persuaded. The play, for instance, multiplies interventions by a risen Christ from heaven to direct the Magdalene’s every move, in order to complete this iteration of masculine pressure and feminine deference.60 Similarly, in the hortulanus scene, the dramatist insists on the fact that the Magdalene, having been rebuked by Christ for trying to touch him, is immediately persuaded of his delicate ontological state and quickly accepts it, in opposition to the late medieval resistance to this perceived slight in the face of the Magdalene’s affective love for Christ.61 The harlot saint’s easy persuasion is, however, most markedly foregrounded when the Digby playwright adds two original episodes – a tavern scene and a conversion scene – and parallels them, in order to instantiate the Magdalene’s inability to effect a correct discretio spirituum, to distinguish on her own the difference between good and bad spirit, good and bad persuasion. The juxtaposition of scenes is a recurrent technique in medieval drama, which relies heavily on “visual hermeneutics,” whereby meaning is created through links with the broader visual language of late medieval iconography, as well as through recapitulation of scenes, further reinforced by actor doubling.62 The Digby playwright takes advantage of the natural parallelism between scenes of temptation and conversion, both of which, Virginia Burrus argues, stage a seduction.63 In the tavern scene, Curiosity’s temptation of the Magdalene is portrayed in the guise of a Communion where the taverner and Curiosity take on the Lady, Hero, Saint, esp. pp. 57 and 121, and Salih, “Staging Conversion,” p. 127. DM 1586–92 and DM 1349–71. 61 Juliette Vuille, “‘Towche Me Not’: Uneasiness in the Translation of the Noli Me Tangere Episode in the Late Medieval English Period,” in The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Âge, ed. Alessandra Petrina (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 213–23. 62 On “visual hermeneutics,” see Sarah Stanbury, “Space and Visual Hermeneutics in the Gawain-Poet,” The Chaucer Review 21 (1987), pp. 476–89. See also Pamela Sheingorn, “The Visual Language of Drama: Principles of Composition,” in Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. Marianne Briscoe and John Coldewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 174–91, esp. pp. 183–6, and Victor I. Scherb, “Worldly and Sacred Messenger in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” English Studies 73 (1992), pp. 1–9, at p. 1. On actor doubling, see Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 46–60. 63 Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints, pp. 133–4. 59 Findon, 60

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature role of Christ. This takes place in a tavern, a locus which was often conceived as the devil’s church, the tavern keeper being associated in medieval literature with the devil’s minister.64 The seduction takes the form of a perverted Holy Communion where the taverner, whom the Magdalene calls her “grom of blysse” (DM 489), gives her and Curiosity bread and wine: “Soppes in wynne” (DM 536), a simulacrum of the Eucharist. The Magdalene seems to interpret Curiosity as a type of Christ, behaving with him in the same way she is reputed to do with Christ in hagiography, following him and never leaving his side: “Thowe ye wyl go to the wordys eynd, / I wol nevyr from yow wynd, / To dye for your sake” (DM 544–6). The Magdalene was famous in medieval sermons and hymns for her bravery in following Christ wherever he went – as opposed to Peter’s threefold repudiation during the passion – and for her willingness to die for his sake.65 This episode exemplifies in Mary Magdalene the alliance of strong will with easy persuasion, which the Digby playwright presents as gendered feminine: she is willing to die for Curiosity’s sake, at the same time as she can be easily tempted to sin. The Digby scene involving the Good Angel’s persuasion of the Magdalene, in opposition to Curiosity’s temptation which was portrayed as a Communion, is conversely presented as a parallel of the Serpent’s temptation of Eve. The dramatist stages it in an “erbyre,” a garden, where the Magdalene is “tempted” by the Good Angel, according to her interpretation of events: “A, how þe speryt of goodnesse hat promtyt me þis tyde, / And temtyd me wyth tytyll of trew perfythnesse!” (DM 602–3, my emphasis). The alliterative emphasis put on “temtyd” calls attention to the playwright’s deliberate use of the term,66 rehearsed later on in the play by the Bad Angel (Malinus Spiritus): “The speryt of grace sore ded hyr smyth, / And temptyd so sore that ipocryte” (DM 733–4, my italics). The Magdalene’s naïve belief in the goodness of the angel for the simple reason that he tells her he is the “gost of goodnesse” (DM 601) should be read in the context of an apocryphal version of the temptation that had currency in the Middle Ages in England, where Satan appeared to Eve not as a serpent but as an angel of light.67 The playwright’s figurative representation of A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 62–5. See also Ralph Hanna III, “Brewing Trouble: On Literature and History – and Alewives,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: Minnesota University press, 1996), pp. 1–18, at pp. 11–12. 65 See, for instance, Mirk’s Festial, lines 44–50. For this motif in sermon literature, see Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, p. 89. For hymns, see Joseph Szöverffy, “Peccatrix quondam femina: a survey of the Mary Magdalen Hymns,” Traditio 19 (1963), pp. 79–146, at pp. 123–33. 66 This is also noted by Chester N. Scovillle, Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 38. 67 See Rosemary Woolf, Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature (London:

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The Digby Mary Magdalene the Magdalene as a Second, redemptive, Eve alongside the Virgin Mary, both bringing forth the Word, is therefore enacted on stage: the saint performs Eve’s temptation again, but in reverse and with a very different outcome. One may argue that, in so doing, the dramatist wanted to represent visually women’s redemptive role in Christian soteriology. However, if one accepts this scene as having an impact on the image of all women, one also has to generalise the fact that the Magdalene is as easily swayed to sin as she is to virtue, unable as she is to discern spirits. In that way, the reason behind woman’s redemption at the hands of the Magdalene is exactly the same as that behind her fall because of Eve: a feminine tendency to be easily seduced. The Digby dramatist does not refute here the misogynist topos of women’s openness to persuasion, removing instead to some extent its negative implications by showing that it can as often lead to grace as to sin. Indeed, the dramatist shows how the Magdalene’s readiness to be convinced – first to love Curiosity, and then to love Christ – facilitates her becoming a saint. This is apparent in the playwright’s treatment of two other parallel scenes, which could again have been performed in the same area, furthering visually the connection: Lechery’s visit to Magdalene Castle and Christ’s visit to Simon the Leper’s house. In the first case, the Magdalene’s “seducibility” leads her to welcome Lechery without reservation into her castle/ soul and to embrace her speech so entirely that it leaves her wide open for Curiosity’s advances, which some critics have otherwise deemed unconvincing – I would argue designedly so in order to emphasise the Magdalene’s compliance.68 In the second scene, Simon the Leper, being a man, is not as open to persuasion, and although he invites Christ into his house, he is not convinced, or “tempted” by Christ: he doubts the latter’s ability to discern the Magdalene’s sinful nature, and is rebuked by Christ for his lack of faith. Mary’s openness to persuasion in this way marks her as belonging to the privileged few that Christ defines at the end of this scene as those that “at alle tyme / That sen me nat, and have me in credens” (DM 699–700). Her credulity might have led to her fall, but at the same time it raises her above men like Simon or Thomas, because she is ready to believe. This pattern of persuasion is not specific to the Magdalene but, rather, common to all later medieval holy harlot lives. In the Vitas Patrum, for instance, the author multiplies scenes that stage the female saint’s suggestible character: Pelagia converts as soon as she hears Nonnus speak and crosses herself to ward off the devil as soon as Nonnus tells her to. This, and his ordering her to don his own clothes, are two actions that are traditionally enacted by the female Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 19–20. Bowers considers the temptation scene an “artistic failure.” See his “The Tavern Scene in the Middle English Digby play of Mary Magdalene,” in All These to Teach: Essays in Honor of C.A. Robertson, ed. Aubrey L. Williams Bryan (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965), pp. 15–32, at p. 15.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature saint without the need for male guidance.69 As with Mary Magdalene blindly following Christ’s commands, Pelagia allows her life to be guided by Nonnus. This feminine openness to persuasion is conceived as superior to the more dubitative stance that characterises male figures in the play and in later medieval holy harlot lives. However, it is not reserved to masculine characters: indeed, the sudden conversion of the Vitas Patrum Pelagia is paralleled in Nonnus’s immediate repentance upon seeing Pelagia decked out in fineries: both burst out weeping uncontrollably as soon as they encounter the other.70 This perceived characteristic of the feminine is therefore signposted as a model for Everyman to follow in order to become part of Christ’s chosen, of those who gave him “credens” although they did not see him. More than this, the Digby playwright makes use of the Magdalene figure to show how this feminine trait is the behaviour to adopt when performing acts and functions of authority, such as preaching, teaching, and criticising both religious and secular authorities.71 This is particularly apparent when the harlot saint receives her command from Christ to convert the Marseilles people. Sebastian Sobecki remarks that Christ’s request is “virtually identical to that of God in the Book of Jonah” (Jonah 1:1–3), but that the saint’s easy acceptance to preach puts her in stark, and positive, contrast to Jonah’s shirking of his apostolic responsibilities.72 In this way, the Magdalene’s feminine facility to be persuaded is highlighted from the first as a valuable trait in performing pastoral duties. This, as we have seen in Chapter 3, can be associated with the Wycliffite view that the Magdalene is particularly well suited to announce the Resurrection because “wymmen ben freele as water and taken sunnere prynte of bileve.”73 The Magdalene’s easy persuasion enables the playwright to make a sweeping comment on the best way to go about one’s apostolic duties: with a particularly feminine performance that involves a mixture of unquestioning faith and intractability in the face of adversity. Again, the text demonstrates the holy harlot’s radical potential to develop daring concepts, as the Magdalene’s performance of femininity is used to open up clerical and pastoral categories for re-examination, in line with Wycliffite conceptions of the ideal preacher who should speak out, even if not sanctioned to do so by the Church. We will indeed shortly see that this is coupled in this text and others with a certain amount of anti-clericalism. At the same time, this model advocates for a didactic method that would privilege simple pastoral content over elaborate “Lyfe of saynt Pelage,” Vitas Patrum, fols lxiiv–lxiiiv. Ibid., fol. lxiir–v. 71 Scherb, “Worldly and Sacred Messenger,” p. 6, and Staging Faith, pp. 181–2. 72 Sebastian I. Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), p. 122. 73 Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon (eds), English Wycliffite Sermons, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–6), vol. 3, Sermo 65, p. 199, Chapter 3, pp. 104–5.

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The Digby Mary Magdalene form, perhaps reflecting the already-mentioned infantilising stance of the post-Arundelian pastoral care. The Digby playwright suggests on a few occasions that the Magdalene’s voice in her preaching and teaching is more efficacious than Peter’s in the conversion of the kingly couple, his clerical role being often treated as a required, if less important, afterthought. In opposition to most versions of the Magdalene’s life, the king and queen’s journey to seek Peter is not undertaken because the still-doubtful king wants a more authoritative, male, and clerical figure to confirm the saint’s speech. Instead, it is the Magdalene herself who enjoins him to embark on this journey (DM 1678–80). When the king arrives in Rome, Peter expresses the desire to teach him about Christianity, but, in a comic twist, the king retorts that the Magdalene has already taught him all there is to know on the subject, and that he needs him only for the functional sacrament of baptism: Petyr. O, blyssyd be the tyme þat ye are falle to grace, And ye wyll kepe yower beleve aftyr my techeyng, And alle-only forsake the fynd Satyrnas, The commaundmenttys of God to have in kepyng. Rex. Forsoth, I beleve in the Father, that is of all wyldyng, And in the Son, Jhesu Cryst, Also in the Holy Gost, hys grace to us spredyng; I beleve in Crystys deth and hys uprysyng. Petyr. Syr, than whatt axke ye? Rex. Holy father, baptym, for charyté (DM 1827–36, my emphasis).

Peter’s sacramental authority is therefore recognised by the Magdalene as a crucial step in the king’s conversion, but her lay preaching is sufficient to teach him all that is needful. As Katherine Jansen points out, authority within the Church in the Middle Ages is either institutional or visionary, and emerges as a gendered issue incarnated in the figures of Mary Magdalene, whose authority as a laywoman derives from a direct link with the divine, and Peter, whose traditional authority stems from the Church.74 Here, the Magdalene’s female and lay authority is placed on a par with Peter’s institutional function, each being complementary of the other. The queen’s baptism, which takes place in a vision when she is left for dead on an island, further underlines the collaboration between clergy and laity, Peter and Mary Magdalene, which the Digby playwright is championing. The queen tells the king: “I am baptysyd, as ye are, be Maryus gyddauns, / Of Sent Petyrys holy hand” (DM 1905–6), presenting her conversion as the result of the collaboration between lay and religious authorities. As in Bokenham’s Lyf, then, the playwright is using the holy harlot to represent lay and religious authorities working hand in hand.

74 Jansen,

The Making of the Magdalen, p. 45.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Even more than collaboration, the Digby play uses its female lay preacher to criticise both the clergy and secular authorities, in line with the harlot saint’s use by Wycliffite preachers but also with the way other female religious and mystics, such as Margery Kempe, Catherine of Siena, or Bridget of Sweden become critical of the clergy. Catherine of Siena and Bridget indeed controversially weighed in on clerical affairs in the context of the Avignon papacy. Whenever the Digby play presents the masculine clerical and secular authorities as somehow lacking, it allows the humble and easily persuaded Magdalene to swoop in and not only preach, but also chastise the secular and sacred authorities of Marseilles, the king and the pagan priest. Although both of these figures represent a pagan traditional authority, and the king’s role sometimes recalls that of the pagan suitor or tyrant in virgin martyr lives,75 the pagan priest and his boy have often been seen by scholars as constituting a parody of the Christian clergy, so that the Magdalene’s preaching, teaching, and overall authority is shown to contrast starkly with that of a failing clergy. The pagan priest and his boy, Hawkyn, “perform a grotesque, implicitly blasphemous parody of church customs,”76 in which Hawkyn delivers a “Leccyo mahowndys” (DM 1186) in nonsensical Latin while the priest offers his congregation “grett pardon” (DM 1206) and “benesown” (DM 1208), holding up “Mahowndys own nekke bon” as one of the church’s “relykys brygth” (DM 1232–3). The Magdalene’s public speech recalls and ridicules that of the pagan priest and his boy (DM 1180–1209). Victor Scherb has shown the contrast between the grotesque preaching of the boy, his ludicrous use of Latinate sounding words such as “fartum cardiculorum” (DM 1191) and “werwolfforum” (DM 1193), and Mary’s correct use of macaronic utterances in her preaching, wherein she translates and explains for her audience most of her Latin words into English.77 The Magdalene’s use of Latin, a language associated with masculinity and the clergy,78 furthers the anti-clerical dialogue of the play Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 5; Scherb, “Blasphemy and the Grotesque in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Studies in Philology 96 (1999), pp. 225–40, at pp. 238–9; Joanne Findon, “Mary Magdalene as New Custance? ‘The Woman Cast Adrift’ in the Digby Mary Magdalene Play,” English Studies in Canada 32 (2006), pp. 25–50, at p. 40. 76 Scherb, “Blasphemy and the Grotesque,” p. 232. 77 Ibid., pp. 225–40. See also Matthew Boyd Goldie, “Audiences for Language-Play in Middle English Drama,” in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove, and Compton Reeves (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 177–216, at pp. 199–202, and Carter, “Apostola Apostolorum,” p. 412. 78 In the Digby Magdalene, apart from short hymns sung by women, Latin is employed only by male authority figures such as the philosophers (DM 175–6 and 184–5), Christ (DM 691), and the priest’s boy (DM 1186–97). For the traditional association of Latin with masculinity while the vernacular is linked with women, see Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 8; Rita Copeland, “Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and the Lollard Heresy Trials,” in Representing Women: Law, Literature, 75

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The Digby Mary Magdalene by setting her in opposition to Hawkyn’s opaque doggerel. Due to the text’s dramatic form, not only does the play’s audience “hear [the Magdalene’s] voice much more forcefully than in any of its sources,”79 but the playwright also makes a lot of space for the saint’s demonstration of wise preaching, giving her two long sermons (DM 1481–525 and 1923–38) which have her translate and interpret the Vulgate in plain speech, very much in line with the English Wycliffite Sermons. Indeed, her two sermons are closely based on biblical texts, the first on the opening of John’s Gospel, “In principio erat uerbum” (DM 1483) and the second on the theme of “paupertas est donum Dei” (DM 1930), which paraphrases and translates from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3).80 The playwright seems intent on emphasising the clarity of the saint’s speech and her correct use of Latin. It also appears that, in comparison to the pagan Hawkyn, whose “pseudo-religion represents sterility,” Mary Magdalene’s sermon, especially her account of the creation, effectively announces the fertility that Mary Magdalene will bring to the kingdom.81 As Scherb notes, Mary Magdalene’s speech is “spiritually potent.”82 In this way, the harlot saint’s preaching transpires as a model of pastoral care, imbued with simplicity, vernaculareity, and creative power. These attributes are all associated with the feminine and performed by a woman, whereas overly complicated speech, obscure Latin, and sterility are strongly connoted as masculine. The Magdalene’s authoritative speech is not focused on recounting events of Christ’s life that she herself witnessed. We will see in Chapter 5 that the Magdalene’s physical presence at some of the most important events of Christ’s life is an element that brings much authority to the later medieval mystics who emulate her. Not so here, where her role as apostolorum apostola is justified by her easy persuasion, the playwright insisting on the fact that she announces the Resurrection only because she was repeatedly ordered to do so. Indeed, the Magdalene is told to go and announce that Christ has risen on no less than three separate occasions: once by the angels at the tomb, and twice by Christ himself: “Go, sey to hys dysypyllys and to Petur he shall apere” (DM 1026, corresponding to Mk 16:7), “Butt go sey to my brotheryn I wyll pretende / To stey to my Father in hevnly towyrs” (DM 1076–7, paralleling Jn 20:17), and “Goo ye to my brethryn, and sey to hem ther, / that they procede

and Feminism, ed. Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 253–86; Julia Bolton Holloway, “Crosses and Boxes: Latin and Vernacular,” in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 58–87. 79 Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 112. 80 Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 135. 81 Clifford Davidson, “Violence and the Saint Play,” Studies in Philology 98 (2001), pp. 292–314, at p. 304. 82 Scherb, “Blasphemy and the Grotesque,” p. 226.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature and go into Gallelye (DM 1121, mirroring Matt. 28:10). The dramatist thus “includes all the other variant gospels in order to amplify Mary’s role as a nuntia, here bringing Christ’s message to the small group of his apostles and disciples.”83 In so doing, the playwright effectively draws attention to the Magdalene’s feminine obedience as the root cause of her authority, rather than her privileged connection with Christ. The play further strongly contrasts the saint’s eager preaching with the disciples’ hesitation to even leave the house in the days immediately following Christ’s death. Women’s “natural” obedience and persuasion therefore enables the Magdalene to turn the tables on the male apostles and clergy, permitting her to deliver such powerful sermons as a “holy apostylesse” (DM 1380) that the Marseilles temple’s heathen idols are destroyed. The preacher’s power is not anchored here in the person’s traditional or institutional authority as a licensed preacher. Rather, it is the preacher’s ability to perform femininity – through blind faith, the ability to nurture and care for the flock, etc. – which elevates her above her peers. The holy harlot’s gender is used once again to develop radical ideas, here specifically the qualities a preacher should possess. These qualities reflect the mainstream acceptance in the late fifteenth century of the ideal preacher presented by Wycliffite reformists a century before, one that was already based on a feminine performance, and more precisely on a feminine performance by a harlot saint. The repentant prostitute’s flexibility as a model in terms of persuasion and temptation constitutes her as the chosen vessel for this representation and revalorisation of feminine performance over the masculine in the later medieval period. Implied here is that anyone, male or female, lay or clerical, can adopt the holy harlot’s feminine performance, and gain authority through behaviour that is traditionally associated with the female gender. This feminine, holy harlot type of performance, which involves a mixture of blind faith and dogged intractability in the face of adversity, is used in this play to criticise the clergy, but also perhaps to suggest a reform of the latter, encouraging it to adopt a similar behaviour as the Magdalene. This is not unique to the Digby Magdalene, as it appears as a feature of all later medieval lives of repentant prostitutes. The reflection on the clergy and what it can learn from these unusual women is “built in,” as it were, in most of these saints’ lives: Zosimus is encouraged to reform himself and his monastery in light of his meeting with Mary of Egypt, and Nonnus becomes aware of his own failings when spying Pelagia’s careful pleasing of her earthly lovers. However, one episode in the Vitas Patrum “Lyfe of sainte Pelage” is particularly relevant. Indeed, in true “feminine” fashion, Pelagia, whose blind faith enabled her to convert very suddenly, is then characterised by her intractability in her desire to be baptised by Nonnus, and so to become espoused by Christ. The Vitas Patrum and its French source, however, add an obstacle to her baptism: “the 83

Scherb, “Worldly and Sacred Messengers,” p. 6.

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The Digby Mary Magdalene holy Decretes ben suche. that a publike and comin synful woman oughte not be baptysed / Yf she gyue not pledge neuer to retorne to her synne.”84 Instead of offering such a pledge, however, Pelagia threatens Nonnus in the most violent fashion, cursing him to get all of her sins, become pagan, and be damned, should he not grant her her wish. At the same time, she couches that curse as a humble request: “I praye humbly to the god that my synnes & wyckydnesse be to the Imputed. yf thou dyfferre to baptyse me.”85 She is then obeyed by Nonnus, in front of all the city’s bishops. The holy harlot’s humility and “easy persuasion turned iron will,” then, grants her tremendous authority, an authority that questions religious decrees and introduces a certain flexibility into them. The harlot saint never offers a pledge but, rather, suggests it is the clergy that should relax their rules to be more inclusive. This episode is very evocative at a time when those considered heretics were required to recant their mistaken beliefs and swear an oath to that effect.86 Pelagia, like Mary Magdalene, presents a feminine performance as idealised, as a performance of authority, and as one that offers reformist avenues in the mainstream of hagiographical discourse. In the same way that the Digby Magdalene’s humility and faith enables her to gain an authoritative stance that parallels Peter’s traditional authority and surpasses that of the heathen clerics, she also manages to impose her will on the secular authority of Marseilles’ king. In contrast with all of the earlier versions of her life, the Magdalene’s intrusion into the king and queen of Marseilles’ bedchamber is not her decision, but is commanded by Christ, who asks two angels to “lede hyr to the prynssys chambyr” (DM 1591). Her obedience to Christ’s command is further evoked by the angels’ bidding her to don a “mentyll of whyte” (DM 1604), which she revealingly interprets as a “tokenyng of mekenesse” (DM 1607). In a sense, the holy harlot’s docility in putting on white clothing reinforces the link the dramatist creates between her performance of femininity and her ability to regain virginal purity, as white clothing usually denoted chastity and virginity in the medieval period and beyond.87 Similarly, correctly interpreting Christ’s words in this way roots her authority to expound the Scriptures in such a feminine performance. The saint goes on to reinforce her feminine compliance by saying: “Now, gracyus Lord, I woll natt wond, / Yower preseptt to obbey wyth lowlynesse” (DM 1608–9). The Magdalene is then able to chide the king, calling him a “froward kyng, trobelows and wood” (DM 1610), and later on commands him to go on pilgrimage to Rome, remaining as the town’s ruler in the interim of his “Lyfe of sainte Pelage,” Vitas Patrum, fol. lxiiv. Ibid. 86 Jonathan Michael Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 176. 87 See, notably, Mary C. Erler, “Margery Kempe’s White Clothes,” Medium Aevum 62 (1993), pp. 78–83, and Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 217–24. 84 85

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature return (DM 1687–92). The Magdalene can then be said to be all-powerful in Marseilles: not only does she manage by her authoritative speech to oust the priest and Hawkyn from their official religious role, but she also stands in for the secular power by ruling the city in the king’s absence. This type of feminine secular power was not uncommon from the Norman Conquest onward, when wives ruled the household and made crucial decisions when their husbands were away. The most well-known example of this is of course Margaret Paston, who was left in charge of her husband’s estate and even had to suffer through attacks and a siege during his absence. In parallel with the Magdalene, Paston’s role as a secular leader enables her to gain an authority that is explicitly gendered feminine: while the Magdalene is an “apostylesse” in the Digby play and, earlier, for Isabel Bourchier, Margaret refers to herself as a “captenesse,” two apparent neologisms in the vernacular at the time of their utterance.88 In the addition of a feminine suffix, both terms call attention to the fact that the source word is originally designed and mostly used to encompass only masculine referents. These neologisms point to the inadequacy of a phallogocentric language to represent a type of authority and power that is intrinsically gendered as feminine.89 In line with the French theorists of the écriture féminine school, Margaret Paston and the Digby playwright attempt here to create a language that expresses the feminine as vying for authority and power with the masculine. That this portrayal in turn empowers other women’s voices becomes apparent when considering Laura King’s remark that after the Magdalene’s nocturnal visit the queen gains in authority, speaking almost as often as her husband and making use of Latin on several occasions,90 a fact that demonstrates the strong legitimising value of the Magdalene for women’s speech. Latin, the language usually associated with masculinity, and in particular the male clergy, is therefore used correctly by two women, the Magdalene and the queen, while the priest and Hawkyn misuse it. The dramatist does not, however, escape misogynist discourse: the play presents feminine characteristics only as having the potential to be both positive and negative. Findon finds that the Digby play effects a “valorisation of women’s voices” in that “Mary Magdalene, the heart of the play, is never ridiculed or made a figure of fun herself, and neither is the queen of Marseilles. 88

Letter from Margaret Paston to John Paston I, 10 May 1465. Norman Davis (ed.), Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971–6), vol. 1, no. 180. On Paston’s use of the word, see Valerie Creelman, “Margaret Paston’s Use of Captenesse,” Notes and Queries 55 (2008), pp. 275–7, and her paper, “Exploring Margaret Paston’s Use of Captenesse,” paper presented at the 15th International Congress of the European Middle Ages, Leeds, July 2009. 89 On phallogocentrism, see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 90 On the repartition of speeches, see King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 200. For her use of Latin, see in particular DM 1895–1910.

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The Digby Mary Magdalene Women are treated with respect by the playwright.”91 Yet the husband takes a jab at all women when the queen expresses her valid desire to be baptised alongside the king, to which her husband responds “Alas! þe wyttys of wommen, how þey byn wylld!” (DM 1701). While this scornful remark might be interpreted as criticism of the yet-pagan king and of his spiritual blindness, I would rather conceive it as the poet’s attempt at comic relief by using a lieu commun of misogyny, paralleling, for instance, the portrayal of Noah’s wife in the York play of The Flood.92 The Magdalene’s voice as well as her criticism of both religious and secular male authorities is therefore strongly empowered by her complete and unquestioning faith in Christ. In this context, it is particularly fitting that the devil should refer to her as a “soveryn servant” (DM 556): through a sort of inverted misogyny the Magdalene’s feminine “weakness” in being open to persuasion and in her subservience to Christ leads her to tower over the play’s male characters.93 Of course, the devil is calling the harlot his “soveryn servant,” but since she does not change before or after her conversion, this epithet can as easily apply to her sovereign service to Christ.94 The hagiographer uses the holy harlot’s openness to persuasion, to both temptation and conversion, to represent a model for secular and clerical authority that is characterised by a performance of femininity. THE SEXUAL MAGDALENE The Digby playwright endows his Magdalene with a last feminine attribute before her conversion that heralds her later authoritative sanctity: a tendency to lustfulness and unbridled sexuality. This “feminine trait” is often rehearsed in medieval misogynist texts. Blamires sums up this medieval bias well: associated, perhaps, with the clerical suspicion of the female body’s power to provoke sexual arousal was a deep-seated male apprehension about, or inferiority complex about, the female capacity for extended sexual activity. Not only did women excite men to sinful thoughts; women were actually

Lady, Hero, Saint, pp. 45 and 155. See the Fishers and Mariners’ play The Flood in The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, ed. Richard Beadle, EETS S.S. 23, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), vol. 1, pp. 45–54. 93 On this, see Coletti, Drama of Saints, pp. 5, 13, and 130–3. See also Milner, “Flesh and Food,” pp. 385–401, and Scherb, Staging Faith, p. 238. 94 This can be paralleled with Pelagia’s portrayal in the Vitas Patrum as exchanging her servitude to the devil for one to God: she converts “notwytstondyng that she neuer hadde serued god. but alle onlely the worlde.” “Lyfe of saynt Pelage,” Vitas Patrum, fol. lxiiir. 91 Findon,

92

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature held to be more lustful creatures by nature. From here it was a short step to the equation, woman equals lust.95

That the Digby playwright conceives lust as feminine is clear, if only because Lechery is the only personified vice in the play that is gendered female. Before her conversion, the harlot’s sensuality is often interpreted as licentiousness, although it already heralds the harlot’s eventual transformation into a Bride of Christ. Later on, her sensuality as a Bride hearkens back to her pre-conversion harlotry without it appearing to be problematic for the Digby playwright. The latter reproduces Bernard’s portrayal of the Bride as a harlot saint turning from her earthly lovers to her heavenly lord, further demonstrating the universal appeal of the holy harlot model. This of course is not unique to the Digby Mary Magdalene: it happens in all later medieval holy harlot lives, most obviously in the lives of Pelagia, where Nonnus explicitly parallels the actress’s behaviour toward her earthly lovers with his own regrets at not taking as much pains for his heavenly spouse. The Gilte Legende, echoing the Legenda aurea, has Nonnus lament: “God wol bring þis woman in iugement ayenst ys, for as moche as she doeth grete [besinesse] in peyntyng hire for to plese worldly louers, and we forslouthe þe tyme for to plese þe heuenly spouse.”96 This offers up an imitation of feminine sexuality as conducive both to sin and to the highest status in heaven as God’s spouse. This passage universalises the performance of femininity as a model for Everyman: Nonnus, the other bishops, and the Christian audience to the life, all should imitate Pelagia’s enticing performance of her sexuality, with a twist. The importance of the saint’s (sex)-appeal through her rich adornments as a model to imitate to reach salvation is further highlighted in the Vitas Patrum, where Pelagia’s tomb is “ryche,” “garnysshid with gold and precyous stones.”97 This echoes the rich jewels her sinful self wore, as we are told that before her conversion “vppon her was seen noo thynge but golde and syluer and ryche pyerrerye.”98 The holy harlot’s enticements are to be reproduced, therefore, to woo the Bridegroom: they represent pride and ostentation, lechery and sin, but also come to stand as signifiers of her sanctity after the harlot’s death, adorning her tomb. Similarly, the Digby play consistently connects its heroine’s femininity with her male relationships. After the Magdalene’s conversion, she is quite openly presented as Christ’s Bride: Christ deems her “Mary my lover” (DM 1587) Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt, and C.W. Marx (eds), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 5. 96 “Life of St Pelagia,” Gilte Legende, p. 745, lines 24–5. LA 1033–4. 97 “Lyfe of Saincte Pelage,” Vitas Patrum, fol. lxvv. The universality of this model is further emphasised in the prologue to the “Lyfe”: “Amonge you that woll knowe. that god oure maker woll not lese a Cristen man, how grete a synnar that he be, herke, and ofte rede the lyfe of saynt Pelage,” fol. lxvr. 98 Ibid., fol. lxiiv. 95

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The Digby Mary Magdalene and the “partenyr of my blysse” (DM 704). She also is his “wel-belovyd frynd” (DM 2004), while she conceives herself as his “lovyr” (DM 1068). However, she is strongly associated with the feminine figure of the Bride of Christ even before her conversion.99 It is no coincidence that the Magdalene’s first words on stage echo the Song of Songs and already establish the saint’s “potential to assume the role of the Bride of Christ the Bridegroom”:100 “Thatt God of pes and pryncypall counsell, / More swetter is thi name than hony be kynd!” (DM 93–4). This passage does not solely recall several verses of the Song of Songs which make mention of honey and where the Bridegroom’s name is “oleum effusum,”101 but echoes more specifically a popular passage in Bernard’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, on the sweetness of the name of God, which is as honey in the mouth: “Si disputes aut conferas, non sapit mihi, nisi sonuerit ibi Jesus. Jesus mel in ore, in aure melos, in corde jubilus.”102 This is the “first of many allusions in the play to the Song of Songs and its doublevoiced discourse of love as both erotic and spiritual.”103 At the same time, the allusion to Bernard of Clairvaux’s own interpretation of the Song already hints at the fact that this feminine performance is to be conceived as a universal model for salvation in line with the latter’s portrayal of the holy harlot model discussed in Chapter 2.104 In order to show the continuity between the Magdalene’s early life of sexual sin and her later position as Bride of Christ, and hence the interchangeability of her love for her earthly lovers with her love for Christ, the Digby playwright again employs the technique of juxtaposing two scenes which echo each other at the same time as they both constitute nods to the Song of Songs. In the first scene, the Magdalene is seen waiting for her lovers in an “erbyr” (DM 568), a strong echo to the Shulamite waiting for her Bridegroom in a garden (Cant. 1:2–4).105 In the second, she mistakes Christ for a gardener while looking for him at the sepulchre. The Magdalene’s search for Christ at the tomb was so often paralleled with the Bride’s search for the Bridegroom (Cant. 3:1–3) that this pericope was usually read on the occasion of the Magdalene’s feast day.106 99

On this, see also King, “Sacred Eroticism,” p. 12. Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 58. 101 “Like oil poured out,” Cant. 1:3. Honey is referred to in Cant. 4:11 and 5:1. 102 “If you converse or argue, I will not savour it if the name of Jesus does not resound here. Jesus is honey in the mouth, music in the ear, a song in the heart.” My translation. Jean Leclercq et al. (eds), Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 vols (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77), vol. 1, Sermo 15. On the sweetness of God’s name, see Mary J. Carruthers, “Sweetness,” Speculum 81 (2006), pp. 99–113. 103 Findon, Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 58. 104 See pp. 60–6. 105 See Salih, “Staging Conversion,” p. 127. 106 Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “The Bride of Christ: The Iconography of Mary Magdalen and Cistercian Spirituality,” Poetica 47 (1997), pp. 33–47, at p. 36, and Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993), p. 66. 100 Findon,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature The playwright’s choice to have Christ in this scene confirm to the Magdalene that indeed he is a gardener – “Mannys hart is my gardyn here” (DM 1084) – further connects the scene with Bernard, as this interpretation is drawn from his Commentary on the Song of Songs.107 Both scenes are therefore linked together through Bernardine echoes to the Song, imbuing the Magdalene’s lust for her lovers and her desire to find Christ with a similar veneer of bridal sensuality. The evocation of garden and gardener further connects the two scenes, as does the Magdalene’s mention of balsam and kisses on both occasions.108 In portraying the saint’s early sinful love as a reflection of her later saintly love, the Digby playwright also infuses the Magdalene’s later relationship with Christ with an implicit sexuality.109 In many ways, then, the Magdalene’s lustful behaviour remains a constant throughout her life: her misguided love for her “valentynys” (DM 564) is replaced by a monogamous love for Christ, in the same way that her delight in the tavern scene for bread and wine already heralds her later devotion for the Eucharist. The unbridled sexuality that was so often considered in the medieval period as being a feminine attribute again privileges the holy harlot, enabling her to move seamlessly from a life of sin to a saint’s life as a Bride of Christ. Her inclination to sensual love does not just privilege her, it becomes an essential component of her sanctity. In the Digby play, then, the holy harlot stands as Everywoman, whose “femynyte” in being a vessel, in being easily convinced or in being prone to sexual sin, can lead her to become the most sinful but also the most authoritative and saintly: her femininity brings her to the lowest lecherous behaviour but also raises her above others to be conflated with the Virgin Mary. As such, the Magdalene in the Digby play becomes a figure which could enable a feminine audience to reconcile the ideal of the Blessed Mary’s virginal maternity with women’s own experience in the real world: she exemplifies the attainability of sainthood and authority through femininity rather than in spite of it, and we will see in Chapter 5 that medieval women did in fact use holy harlots, Mary Magdalene chief among them, as authorising precedents for their sanctity and visionary experience. Coletti has amply shown how the representation of the Digby heroine was probably influenced by contemporary East Anglian women,110 and such an empowering portrayal of femininity may suggest a greater feminine influence in the shaping of the Magdalene in the is also noted by Marjorie M. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen’s Origins and Metamorphoses (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), p. 123. 108 See DM 569–71 and 1068–73. This strengthens the scenes’ association with the Song of Songs. See, for instance, Cant. 1:1, “osculetur me osculo oris sui,” “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” while aromatic herbs and perfumes appear repeatedly in the Song. 109 Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth, p. 125, also makes this claim. 110 Coletti compares the Magdalene with late medieval vowesses. See her Drama of Saints, pp. 51–4. 107 This

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The Digby Mary Magdalene Digby play than only an indirect one: women may have played a role in the patronage of this work. The precedent for East Anglian noble women patrons requesting works featuring the Magdalene, such as Isabel Bourchier, lends weight to this theory.111 Furthermore, the Digby playwright makes use of the holy harlot and her performance of femininity to point to a path to salvation that both men and women in his audience could follow, in line with Bernard’s own use of the Magdalene as a universal model. The holy harlot’s example demonstrates how one does not need to “erase” one’s sin, or change one’s behaviour, in order to reach heaven. One only needs to redirect it to a more virtuous pursuit: lust, when it is for Christ, helps one become a Bride, in the same way that gluttony can be turned into ruminating over the Scriptures. Salvation is presented by the Digby author as a goal that one can reach through a performance of femininity, by imitating the holy harlot model. This gendered behaviour might offer women an easier path to salvation, but, as becomes evident when reading Bernard’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, performing femininity, for instance as a Bride or as an abbot mother nurturing one’s congregation, would not have been conceived as problematic or in any way “genderbending” for a medieval audience. It will shortly become apparent that the Magdalene’s performance of femininity can actually be linked with an imitatio Christi whereby Christ himself is shown to act in ways traditionally conceived as belonging to the female gender. While the playwright does not, then, oppose misogynistic beliefs that held women as a rule to be lecherous, open to persuasion or mere vessels, the Digby play presents all of these perceived feminine attributes as flexible and multivalent. Each can be turned around and become the formative trait of a particularly feminine strain of sanctity, one available to everybody. In this way, the playwright does not claim equality between feminine and masculine performance. Rather, the holy harlot’s actions in the Digby play show that femininity is at once valued higher and lower than masculinity. I have now reviewed three feminine attributes that are ascribed to the Magdalene throughout the play, and which make her a model for Everyman, and most particularly for Everywoman, to imitate in the quest for salvation. It is also important, however, to take into consideration two traits that are associated with femininity, one which the harlot saint holds before her conversion, and one after, something that helps the Digby author to establish each stage, from sinfulness to holiness, as feminine, though this time as differently feminine. Before her conversion, the playwright insists on the Magdalene’s fickle nature, her inconstancy. This is a concept which can be linked with women’s perceived tendency to be easily persuaded. According to 111 For

East Anglian women’s commissioning of different portrayals of the Magdalene, in literature, painting or sculpture, see Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 255, n. 90. See also Chapter 5, p. 184.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature Blamires, “the Middle Ages inherited opinions alleging feminine weakness, changeability, instability, that had acquired categorical, near-instinctual status over an immense period.”112 The association of the sinful Magdalene with fickleness is, for example, apparent in the Good Angel’s remonstration in the garden, where he seems to be accusing not only the Magdalene but all women of being changeable: ““Woman, woman, why art thou so onstabyll? / […] / Why art thou agens God so veryabyll? / […] / leve thi werkys vayn and veryabyll.’” (DM 589–95). This appears also in the Gilte Legende “Life of Pelagia,” where the latter is introduced as the epitome of feminine sin, being “right faire of body, noble of cloþing, veyn and variable of corage and vnchast of here bodi.”113 This tendency is reversed after the holy harlot’s conversion. For Lazarus in the Digby play, the harlot’s repentance from sin also entails her relinquishing fickleness: “Wheyl that I leffe, I wyl serve hym with honour, / That ye have forsakyn synne and varyawns” (DM 766–7). Christ styles her “my wel-belovyd frynd wythowt varyouns” (DM 2004), and she repeats the term to define the constancy of her gratitude for God: “O good Lord, I thank thee withowt veryawns!” (DM 2097). In this way, Mary’s femininity before her conversion is associated with a negative – and misogynistic – portrayal of womanhood. This negative performance of femininity is not, however, reserved to women: it is used by the playwright to signify the fallen status of those who are not converted, as opposed to the saved. Indeed, this feminine trait is transferred to the heathen audience of the Magdalene’s preaching in Marseilles, irrespective of gender: “O dere fryndys, be in hart stabyll, / And think how dere Cryst hathe yow bowth. Agens God be nothyng vereabyll” (DM 1923–5, my emphasis). The Digby playwright presents the Magdalene’s pre-conversion behaviour in parallel with the heathen laity, thereby further establishing the Magdalene as Everyman, and her conversion story as exemplary. The dramatist makes use of the Magdalene to develop a complex representation of gender. While conceiving the Magdalene’s femininity according to a biological, two-sex framework which sees being a vessel, being easily persuaded, and fleshliness as particularly feminine attributes, those attributes can be performed both positively and negatively by the Magdalene’s audience in Marseilles, and thus, one surmises, by the Digby Mary Magdalene’s audience as well. Femininity therefore becomes a signifier for humanity, a concept that had some currency in the late medieval period, according to Caroline Walker Bynum:

The Case for Women, p. 126. For Mary Magdalene’s instability pre-conversion, and her subsequent portrayal as particularly “stable,” see Salih, “Staging Conversion,” p. 125. 113 Gilte Legende, p. 744, lines 2–3. 112 Blamires,

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The Digby Mary Magdalene from Hildegard of Bingen and Elizabeth of Schönau to Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich, women theologians in the later Middle Ages used woman to symbolize humanity. […] To Hildegard of Bingen, Christ’s humanity was to Christ’s divinity as woman is to man, and mulier represented humankind, fallen in Eve, restored in ecclesia and Maria.114

As a figure of both Eve and Mary, the Magdalene truly becomes a figure of Everyman’s hope for redemption. The misogynist attributes of the holy harlot before her conversion, which turn into positives after her repentance, actually become concepts applicable to the whole of humanity. This universalisation of the Magdalenian figure and of her feminine qualities not only happens before her conversion, when she is inconstant. It also takes place after the conversion, when the Magdalene is shown to perform a much more positive articulation of the female gender.115 This, in turn, will be shown by the dramatist to be the path men and women should take in their journey to redemption, through a performance of feminine gendered actions and a particularly feminine brand of authority. On the basis of Caroline Walker Bynum’s contention that late medieval feminine piety revolved around food,116 Milner posits that Mary Magdalene’s performance of sanctity in the second part of the play revolves around a “socially appropriate behaviour for women, such as caring for the bodies of others, feeding others, and suppressing the appetites of her body for the purpose of spiritual growth.”117 Milner shows that the Magdalene enacts a performance of the female gender as it was conceived in the late medieval period when she wants to take care of Christ’s body at Simon’s house and at the tomb, or when she nurtures the queen of Marseilles and her child for two years, miracles normally associated with virgin martyrs rather than with repentant harlots. The Magdalene then spends her eremitic life eating nothing but manna and the Eucharist,118 a behaviour again strongly associated with women – and especially female mystics – in the later medieval period.119 Finally, when the Magdalene calls Christ her “repast contemplatyf ” (DM 680), she echoes a particularly feminine understanding of “God as food.”120 In this way, Mary Magdalene’s performance of sanctity is utterly feminine, and echoes female performances of sainthood and mysticism contemporaneous with the Digby Magdalene. The parallelism between the Digby play and late medieval female devotion and religious life has already been noted, Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 264. “Flesh and Food,” pp. 385–401. 116 Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 117 Milner, “Flesh and Food,” p. 387. 118 Ibid., pp. 385–95. This is also remarked upon by Coletti, “The Design,” p. 317. 119 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 186. 120 Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 67. 114 Walker

115 Milner,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature and the influence medieval women had on the portrayal of the Magdalene will be dealt with further in the following chapter. The Magdalene’s sanctity is therefore a feminine performance, but one that also in turn demonstrates the centrality of the holy harlot type in portrayals of female sanctity and feminine-inflected devotional practices. Indeed, food is of utmost importance in a majority of holy harlot lives, apart from that of Afra: Mary of Egypt and the Madgalene fast for forty-seven years, the first usually eating only three loaves of bread, herbs, and then lentils and the Eucharist brought by Zosimus during that time, while the Magdalene consumes only manna. Thaïs and Pelagia, on their part, perform feats of extreme fasting in their cells. In the Digby play, Mary Magdalene embodies a distinctly female, holy harlot type of religious piety, and represents a relatable model for contemporary women to reach sainthood through the gendered performance of the repentant prostitute model.121 As Milner argues, “by privileging the everyday activities of women as acts of religious significance, the Digby Mary Magdalene dramatist elevates feminine experience in the search of salvation […]. For women, the representation of Mary in the Digby play must have carried an especially powerful message.”122 As in the case of the harlot saint’s feminine preaching being conceived as a generative, nurturing activity that echoes the representation of Christ and of abbots as mothers notably delineated by Walker Bynum,123 the Magdalene’s feminine association with food can be linked to an imitation of a man: Christ. When the saint takes care of both the queen and her infant’s bodies and nourishes them, she parallels Christ’s threefold intervention for her own survival, interventions that are absent from the sources (DM 1586–93). The risen Christ is also explicitly shown ordaining for the Magdalene’s food in the wilderness, another innovation on the part of the Digby playwright: he orders angels to feed her manna (DM 2003–10) and finally arranges for her to receive the Eucharist, his “body in forme of bred” (DM 2079). Christ’s feminine role as a provider of food for the Magdalene is then mirrored in the Magdalene’s actions toward the kingly couple: just as Christ is the Magdalene’s “repast contemplatyf ” (DM 679), she becomes the couple’s “repast contemplatyff ” (DM 1940).124 This epithet not only defines both figures as food providers, but also effectively associates them with the Eucharist, with eating the divine, which the Magdalene as a vessel is able to contain. Such a feminine portrayal of God as food but also as nurturer would not have been particularly surprising in the later medieval period. This representation of Christ enables the Magdalene to effect an imitatio Christi without having to perform a male gender: as a woman, she is able to be both Bride Drama of Saints, p. 53. “Flesh and Food,” p. 398. 123 See Chapter 2, pp. 64–5 and p. 80. 124 Coletti, “The Design,” p. 323. 121 Coletti, 122 Milner,

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The Digby Mary Magdalene and Bridegroom: as a vessel, she can contain the divine while at the same time being Christ’s lover. She comes to be associated both with Christ and with Christ’s Mother, because Christ takes on the nurturing role of a mother himself. The Magdalene’s imitatio Christi is not confined to her involvement with food. The Digby playwright hints that she shares the same soteriological role as Christ when, even before her conversion, she claims to Curiosity that she will “dye for your sake” (DM 546),125 echoing Christ’s willingness to do just that for humanity’s salvation. Similarly, the World ascribes to her instead of Christ the power of harrowing hell: “Sertenly, serys, I yow tell, / Yf she in vertu stylle may dwelle, / She shal byn abyll to dystroye helle” (DM 418–20). When she becomes a preacher, she is again paralleled with Christ. Scherb notes that Mary’s preaching of “in principio erat verbum” when she first addresses the kingly couple of Marseilles “in effect identifies her words with the divine logos.”126 Her speech, in its power to destroy the idols, is as performative as that of the Word in Creation. Like Christ, she is followed by disciples when she preaches,127 a parallel that might have been highlighted in performance through visual hermeneutics. Similarly, the parallelism between the king and queen’s conversion at the Magdalene’s hands and her own repentance at Simon’s house could have been emphasised in performance. Scherb remarks that “Christ himself appears onstage for only a small fraction of the play. His message, conveyed though preachers like Peter and Mary, must bear the evangelical burden.”128 In this way, the Magdalene, as Christ’s vessel, gains the considerable authority of becoming the Son of God’s mouthpiece on earth and stands in his place. The Magdalene therefore does not need to relinquish her gender in order to imitate Christ: her gender facilitates her identification with him. Furthermore, as Milner points out, the feminine nurturing role that both Christ and the Magdalene embody is in direct opposition at the beginning of the play with the male, fallen, and tyrannical authority of the Emperor (DM 1–48, 114–39), Cyrus (DM 49–113), Herod (DM 140–228), Pilate (229–63), the devil, and the king of Marseilles (DM 925–62).129 These characters misuse food, as they all organise feasts to foreground their worldly power without feasting on the Eucharist, the only food deemed acceptable within the play, according to Milner. Their feasts set the scene for the rest of the play, “establishing in this way a background of patriarchy against which the Magdalene, with her femininity, will stand more brilliantly.”130 Each earthly ruler starts out his speech with a boast of his all-encompassing power – an assertion Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 70, also remarks on this passage. “Blasphemy and the Grotesque,” p. 238. 127 DM s.d. at 868 and 1335. 128 Scherb, “Worldly and Sacred Messenger,” p. 8. 129 Milner, “Flesh and Food,” pp. 385–401. 130 Carter, “Apostola Apostolorum,” p. 409. 125 Findon, 126 Scherb,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature which becomes comical as each new tyrant boasts of the same thing, thereby cancelling out each other’s claims – and ends by ordering wine and spices to be served as a token of this worldly power (DM 46, 112, and 962). This masculine use of food is connoted negatively, whereas the Magdalene and Christ’s particularly feminine relationship with food is seen in a positive light, and their power ridicules the masculine claim to authority which the tyrants attempt to establish at the beginning of the play. It is telling that “this sequence of boasting scenes eventually highlights two individuals who are targeted by the tyrants of this world: the prophesied child Jesus, and the young woman Mary Magdalene – both unlikely candidates for worldly influence.”131 In the context of the biblical beatitude that “the meek shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5), the Digby play presents the Magdalene, the “weak” and fallible woman, as its most powerful entity alongside the weak-yet-omnipotent Christ. The Digby dramatist establishes as virtuous a more “feminine” style of government based on humility, obedience to God’s higher authority, and nurturing, presenting instead masculine rule as tyrannical and preposterous. It becomes therefore clear that although it is a woman, the Magdalene, who is portrayed as a vessel, as easily persuaded, and as a sexual being who is inconstant before her repentance, but performs afterwards a particularly feminine brand of sanctity, such notions apply in the dramatist’s mind to Everyman in the quest to reach salvation. Femininity, like humanity, has become morally neutral in the play, as feminine traits can lead to both sin and sainthood, while the masculinity portrayed by the tyrants, the shipman, the priest, or their boys provides comic relief in the play but is never positive. The perverted, sterile, and sometimes violent masculine sexuality expressed by Cyrus for his daughters,132 or by the shipman and the priest’s boys, can never be redeemed.133 It is put in strong contrast to the harlot’s positive feminine sexuality turned spiritual. While the traditional link between feminine sexuality and lust is never negated, the harlot’s gendered sexuality is also connected to fertility, nurturing, the womb-like ability to become a vessel, and bridal imagery. Everyman is encouraged to perform this form of femininity. I put forward in the Introduction the notion that authority in the Middle Ages pertains to a masculine domain because “the one-sex paradigm devalues women through its claim of female inversion and defection from a masculine norm and the two-sex model through its privileging of male difference.”134 Not so in the Digby play, where the female particularities and differences of Lady, Hero, Saint, p. 19. this, see pp. 146–7; Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 158; and King, “Sacred Eroticism,” pp. 178–83. 133 Carter, “Apostola Apostolorum,” p. 410. 134 See Introduction, p. 14. The quote is taken from Lynda L. Coon, “Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages,” Gender and History 20 (2008), pp. 463–86, at p. 471. See also Coon, “Gender and the Body, c. 600–1100,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity 131 Findon, 132 On

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The Digby Mary Magdalene the holy harlot are instead privileged, appearing as a culmination of trends we can already trace from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, notably in the use of the repentant prostitute by Bernard of Clairvaux and the Wycliffites. Simone de Beauvoir argues in Le deuxième sexe that the male gender is conflated with the universal person under the general heading of “Man,” and that female gender is marked only in relation to it as the Other.135 On the contrary, Woman takes on a universal meaning in this play, leaving Man as the defining other. The Digby Magdalene therefore represents a very interesting development of the morality play, to which it is heavily indebted. Instead of centring on a masculine Everyman or mankind, the playwright represents humanity as female, and the path to salvation as a feminine performance of the holy harlot type, a saint whose femininity we have seen encompasses all aspects of her gender. This makes her particularly relatable, as her femininity is malleable and can be made to represent damnation and salvation, Eve and Mary, all at once. This portrayal resonates even more strongly because, as Meredith and Tailby postulate, the actors for this play were probably men,136 presumably “a religious company, perhaps one of the groups of friars who, we know, did perform plays on occasion.”137 Christ is not the only one, then, to be male and to be performing a female gender. The celibate priest would cross-dress and act as a female whore, only then to transform into a Bride of Christ and a “mother” of God, but one whose feminine performance ultimately constitutes an imitation of Christ.138 The male actor would eventually help to establish such feminine performance as hierarchically higher to the representation of clerical masculinity in the play. This fact strengthens the notion that the Magdalene’s femininity represents the path to salvation for Everyman as well as Everywoman. However, having a male cleric act out the role of Mary Magdalene might also justify, or legitimise, her representation as particularly authoritative, preaching and expounding the Scriptures in Latin for the audience. If it is a man who plays a woman that crosses gender boundaries, is it really transgressive? I believe it is not so much transgressive as it is a way to reflect upon the artificiality of perceived “feminine” attributes or “masculine” 3: 600–1100, ed. Thomas F.Y. Noble and Julia M.H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 433–52. 135 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), esp. the introduction, pp. xxxvi–lv. First published in French in 1949. 136 Coletti, The Digby Mary Magdalene, “Introduction,” https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/ text/coletti-the-digby-mary-magdalene-introduction. 137 See also Baker et al., Religious Plays, p. xlviii; Meredith and Tailby (eds), The Staging of Religious Drama, pp. 54–5. There is very scattered evidence of women acting on the Continent. See Meredith and Tailby (eds), The Staging of Religious Drama, p. 55. Davidson evokes one case in England. See his Saint Play, p. 69. 138 For the carnivalesque nature of cross-dressing monks in the scarlet of the prostitute in some plays of the twelfth century, see Holloway, “Crosses and Boxes,” p. 74.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature stereotypes, and the fact that these can be interchangeably inscribed onto bodies that are socially perceived as biologically male or female. This very much appears as a medieval counterpart to Judith Butler’s conception of contemporary drag, which, “in imitating gender, […] implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself.”139 Notwithstanding this, Mary Magdalene and Christ are shown to perform acts and gestures that are feminine and conceived as superior to the masculine behaviour of most male protagonists in the Digby play. This tendency also translates in male saints’ lives, as scholars have underlined a trend since the twelfth century for male saints to be “feminised” in the process of their sanctification. Odgen argues that the late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Vie de Saint Gilles feminises its saint, notably through a highly feminine depiction of his wounds paralleling that of Christ, thereby hinting at “the complexity of hagiographic genders.”140 Robert Mills, for his part, notes the feminisation and possible queering of iconographical representations of male martyrs, while Samantha Riches contends that, in art, St George is not so much feminised as “demasculinised” in order to portray him as a virgin.141 As Walker Bynum remarks, then, “in the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, in contrast to the early Middle Ages, positive female figures and feminine metaphors took a significant place in spirituality alongside both positive male figures and misogynist images of women.”142 The originality of the Digby playwright lies in being able to present a model of femininity that resonates with both misogynist discourse and positive images of women in order to reflect on issues that ultimately have little to do with gender, such as the Church, preaching, or the right path to salvation. As Gaunt insightfully argues, gender is often metaphorical in saints’ lives, and “femininity for hagiographers is never straightforward; it can connote virtue, purity, weakness, passivity or carnality depending on the situation.”143 The unique status of the repentant harlot in the later medieval period, however, permits her to embody femininity in all of its aspects, be they negative or positive, and for that reason she comes to figure Everywoman, a sort of nexus of all things Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 187. V. Odgen, “The Centrality of Margins: Medieval French Genders and Genres Reconfigured,” French Forum 30 (2005), pp. 1–23, at p. 13. 141 Robert Mills, “Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me!: Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13 (2001), pp. 1–37; Samantha Riches, “St George as a Male Virgin Martyr,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 65–85. See also Evelyn Vitz, “Gender and Martyrdom,” Medievalia et Humanistica 26 (1999), pp. 79–99, at pp. 90–1, and Walker-Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 102 and 278. 142 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 152. 143 Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 233. 139 Judith 140 Amy

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The Digby Mary Magdalene feminine, and ultimately all things human. The Marseilles couple imitates the Magdalene in the same way that the Vitas Patrum Zosimus and his cohort of monks adopt the Egyptian’s behaviour, or the Gilte Legende Nonnus regrets his inability to emulate Pelagia. All the repentant harlots share this late medieval portrayal as models for Everyman, which explains their popularity in the later medieval period, and the influence they had on late medieval and early modern women such as Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Elizabeth Barton, women whose imitation of the holy harlot figure, especially that of Mary Magdalene, will be investigated in the following chapter.

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CHAPTER 5 ADMIRANDA ET IMITANDA? EMULATION OF THE HOLY HARLOT TYPE BY LATE MEDIEVAL FEMALE MYSTICS

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he first four chapters of this book have established the malleability of the holy harlot type as a model for Everyman, an example of multivalent femininity that lent itself particularly well for use in expressing reformist and radical religious concepts. The repentant harlot provided Bernard of Clairvaux with an overarching model for his articulation of the Soul’s ascension from sin to salvation. The harlot saint was constituted as the ideal preacher and “true man” by Wycliffites. While one of the main arguments of this monograph is that the flexibility of the repentant prostitute model indeed permitted its universal adoption as a model for imitation, especially for reformist ideas, it was still more relevant for women, especially those who sought non-traditional paths to a religious life, sometimes after having lived in and for the world. This last chapter reveals that women did indeed make use of the holy harlot model (particularly Mary Magdalene), but also that they did so to break new ground, to support their right to publicise their own voices and their sometimes dissenting beliefs. Female mystics in the later medieval period imitated harlot saints to break away from tradition, to do new things, discuss original concepts and find a new way to exist and thrive as religious women; women whose authority was respected, at least by some, because of their use of the holy harlot model. This survey of female visionaries will span from the twelfth-century mystic Christina of Markyate to the early sixteenthcentury so-called Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, by way of the two late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Imitation of well-established and authoritative models for the purpose of gaining in legitimacy is an instinctive and natural process. Hagiographic archetypes are some of the most potentially disruptive models to emulate. They enjoy great authority and prestige because they are anchored in a distant and sacred past, but continue to live on in popular cults and legends, 181

Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature providing them with an immediacy that renders them difficult to control.1 This leads medieval preachers and churchmen to agree that saints’ lives were to be admired, but not imitated: admiranda, sed non imitanda,2 and this especially for women emulating female saints.3 Virgin martyrs such as Katherine of Alexandria or Cecilia were popular models for female mystics who, like their saintly predecessors, were seeking to breach traditional gender boundaries in order to preach or otherwise publicise their thoughts and visions. Indeed, much has been written about the strategies of imitation of virgin martyrs deployed by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.4 On the other hand, the imitation of the holy harlot by these mystics has not garnered as much scholarly interest, whereas this archetype is much more attainable than that of the virgin martyr at the same time that it offers accrued freedom for women and an increased legitimation of transgressive behaviour. As already mentioned in the previous chapters, while virgin martyrs present a single point in the spectrum of feminine experience – the young, virginal, and constant saint – the holy harlot covers the entirety of said spectrum: from sinful to saintly, young to old, virginal to aged, by way of nurturing, Marian-like motherhood. In imitating this model, women of the world could aspire to regaining their virginal purity, and become Christ’s brides.5 More generally, they could also hope to change by imitating the holy harlot, to turn 1 2

3

4

5

Bruce C. Brasington, “Non imitanda set veneranda: The Dilemma of Sacred Precedent in Twelfth-Century Canon Law,” Viator 23 (1992), pp. 135–52, at pp. 142–3. Ibid., p. 140. On the “dangers” of imitating female saints, particularly virgin martyrs, see notably Alcuin Blamires, “Women Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saints’ Lives,” Viator 26 (1995), pp. 135–52; Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), esp. pp. 1–23; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991), pp. 314–32; and Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 112–41. See, on Julian and Cecilia, Susan K. Hagen “St. Cecilia and St. John of Beverly: Julian of Norwich’s Early Model and Late Affirmation,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 91–114, at pp. 91–2. For Margery’s imitation of virgin martyrs, see Sanok, Her Life Historical, pp. 132–40; Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 195–201; Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “Veneration of Virgin Martyrs in Margery Kempe’s Meditation: Influence of the Sarum Liturgy and Hagiography,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 177–95. Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 12, and Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 177–8.

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics from a state of sinfulness to one of particular election in heaven. Indeed, repentant prostitutes do not fit into the traditional structure of women’s saintly vocations, which tended, according to Caroline Walker Bynum, to be well-established from childhood.6 Like male saints, holy harlots experience in their lives a reversal, a conversion. The unique status of holy harlots’ lives as a feminine conversion narrative cannot be overemphasised: it would have offered a rare model for women religious in general, who would often have had to marry and beget children before they could even consider a religious career, but most particularly for mystics, whose first visionary experience necessarily caused a definite change in their lives. Like the holy harlots, female visionaries would have had a “before” and an “after” in the structure of their lives. In emulating a harlot saint, mystics could leave behind a life of sin and gain privileged access to the divine. Several of the mystics discussed in this chapter use the holy harlot’s ability to transgress as part of their validation technique. Margery Kempe models her itinerant preaching and travelling on the harlot saints’ flouting of the traditionally gendered partition of space.7 Kempe, Christina of Markyate, and Julian of Norwich adopt the harlot saints’ affective ability to turn their sin of the flesh to an affective bond with Christ that is still rooted in physicality, enabling them to touch and fondle Christ or to see him in bodily visions. This transgressive touch of the divine is presented as a metaphor for the visionary experience as a whole, and the repentant prostitute is set as its most validating precedent. Further, some of our mystics take their cue from the holy harlots’ nonconforming behaviour by flouting convention even in their imitation of the most popular of these saints, Mary Magdalene. Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Barton, for instance, seize on the affective, physical love between Christ and Mary Magdalene, refuse its Bernardine elevation as spiritual love, and instead try to rival and surpass the physicality of the saint’s privileged relationship with the Son so as to become more Magdalenian than the Magdalene, attempting to replace her in Christ’s affections, but also in that of their audience, thereby gaining great authority: they become experts on the Magdalene, visionaries who would have acted better than her, loved Christ more. In addition to all of this, an imitation of the holy harlot figure increases the legitimacy of the laywoman’s voice. Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, and Pelagia are limited neither geographically nor diachronically by their Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), esp. pp. 151–2 and 177–9. On the conversion scenes and gender in both the Digby Magdalene and the Book of Margery Kempe, see Sarah Salih, “Staging Conversion,” pp. 121–34. 7 On female gender and space in the Middle Ages, see notably Sarah Salih, “At Home; Out of the House,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 124–40. 6

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature gender: they are free to teach and preach without being hindered by restrictions from patriarchal society, and they are not punished for their actions, being rather sought after for their learning and advice. That such a portrayal, especially that of the apostolic Magdalene, was of importance in the legitimisation of women’s voices is evident, for instance as we have seen in Henry of Ghent’s Summa quaestionum ordinarium,8 or in his contemporary Robert de Sorbonne’s defence of women’s speech: “Magdalena predicatrix fuit apostolis resurrectionis dominice. Ideo non debet homo negligere verba mulieris.”9 It is no surprise, then, that women themselves adopted the Magdalene and the type of the holy harlot as a validating precedent for their authority: the very rare manuscript representations of Mary Magdalene preaching the Resurrection to the apostles appear in a majority of cases in manuscripts commissioned by, or intended for, powerful women.10 Similarly, noblewomen such as Judith of Flanders, Margaret of York, Lady Scrope, and potentially Anne Harling, chose to commission iconographical representations of themselves as the Magdalene,11 replicating iconographically what Isabel Bourchier desired textually from Bokenham: to be offered the example of an authoritative woman in their image.12 In this way, “although preachers and hagiographers offered the model of the apostolic Magdalene for admiration rather than imitation, evidence suggests that women were not always aware of or did not always heed this learned distinction.”13 Demonstrating that female mystics chose to imitate the holy harlot type and to garner authority from such an emulation is an enterprise that is 8

See Chapter 3, p. 108. “The Magdalene preached the Resurrection to the apostles on Easter Sunday. For this reason, one must not disregard women’s speech.” My translation. Robert of Sorbonne in Paris, BN MS Lat. 15971, fol. 69v, cited in Nicole Bériou, “La Madeleine dans les sermons parisiens du XIIIe siècle,” MEFRM 104 (1992), pp. 269–340, at p. 279, n. 33. On the Magdalene being used to defend women’s preaching in scholastic debates, see Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 192–6. 10 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, pp. 265–8. Three out of the five manuscripts Jansen lists can be linked to aristocratic or saintly women, such as the St Albans Psalter, commissioned with Christina of Markyate in mind and discussed below, the Ingeborg Psalter, which belonged to Queen Ingeborg, wife of Philip Augustus, and finally the Queen Mary Psalter, which was in all probability intended for the use of Queen Isabella, wife of Edward II of England. 11 On Judith of Flanders, see Veronica Ortenberg, “Le culte de sainte Marie Madeleine dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne,” MEFRM 104 (1992), pp. 13–35, at p. 33. On other women’s assimilation with the Magdalene figure, see Coletti, Drama of Saints, pp. 73–4, 128–9, and 255, n. 90. On Continental women’s imitation of the Magdalene, see Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, pp. 270–84. 12 Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 139. 13 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, p. 284. 9

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics fraught with methodological considerations, due to the difficulty to access female mystics’ own portrayal of themselves in writing.14 The literacy of all of the women discussed in this chapter, apart perhaps from that of Julian of Norwich, is still a subject of contention among scholars. Margery Kempe might have been illiterate, and Elizabeth Barton probably was. More generally, women’s aims and voices during the period under scrutiny were in any case more often than not mediated by male clerics, be they the mystics’ confessors, biographers, or amanuenses.15 Christina of Markyate’s emulation of the holy harlot type is thus accessible to us only through an unfinished Vita penned by an anonymous St Albans monk and the St Albans Psalter, a beautifully illuminated manuscript which was probably intended for her use only after a good portion of it had already been produced.16 Lastly, Elizabeth Barton’s prophecies and already “male-mediated” writings have not come down to us, as her condemnation for heresy and treason led to the censorship of her visions. Only hostile witnesses to Barton’s prophecies survive. It is thus impossible to assess these women’s strategies of authorisation without having to take into account the sometimes competing aims of those who wrote for, about, or against them. One solution to this methodological impasse is to present these women’s writings as the product of collaboration between female author and male writer(s),17 and to put it in perspective: medieval texts are always mediated productions, always in some way collaborative. One may think, for instance, of Isabel Bourchier’s commission of the “Lyf of Marye Maudelyn” by Bokenham: should one not think too of the end result as the collaboration of male author and female patron?18 In addition, the male clerics or scribes who intervene in the lives would represent an important influence on the On this issue, see notably Diane Watt, in her Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 7–18. 15 For a strong argument that Julian of Norwich may have used a secretary, see Felicity Riddy, “Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization,” in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), pp. 101–24. 16 On this, see Jane Geddes, “The St Albans Psalter, The Abbot and the Anchoress,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 197–216. The Vita of Christina of Markyate was written c. 1140–50 by a monk of St Albans who probably knew Christina well. See Rachel M. Koopmans, “The Conclusion of Christina of Markyate’s Vita,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), pp. 663–98, and Magdalena Carrasco, “The Imagery of the Magdalene in Christina of Markyate’s Psalter,” Gesta 38 (1999), pp. 67–80, at p. 68. 17 On this, see in particular John Coakley, “Women’s Textual Authority and the Collaboration of Clerics,” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–c.1500, ed. Alastair J. Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 83–104. See also Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing, and (though for an earlier period) her Women, Writing, and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 18 Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing, pp. 81–9. 14

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature mystics regardless of their intervention in the writing process itself. They constitute part of the religious and literary context that shaped the visionaries’ own interpretation of themselves as mystics and saintly women, and perhaps our scholarly reluctance to conceive of Margery Kempe’s Book as reflecting Margery’s conception of the world has more to do with our internalised bias about medieval women’s voices than anything else. Thus, provided one always keeps in mind the limitations of the texts as mediated witnesses, it is still possible to draw conclusions with regard to the validation strategies of female visionaries. CHRISTINA OF MARKYATE Diane Watt, Katie Bugyis, and Magdalena Carrasco have suggested that the twelfth-century mystic, recluse, and later prioress Christina of Markyate emulated specific holy harlots. For Watt, Christina’s Vita depicts her imitating Mary of Egypt and her brand of amicitia with Zosimus in her relationship with the hermit Roger.19 For Bugyis it is Mary Magdalene’s transgressive touching of Christ which provides a model for Christina in the St Albans Psalter.20 For Carrasco, it is, rather, the Magdalene’s role as witness which she adopts there.21 Although Christina was a virgin, her long life as well as its eremitic, contemplative, and mystical bent all contribute to her particular brand of sanctity being modelled on that of the holy harlot type, most particularly Mary Magdalene. Further, like the Magdalene, Thaïs, Pelagia, or Mary of Egypt, Christina is a teacher of important religious men, and occupies a position of spiritual authority over them. Emulating holy harlotry permits Christina to garner authority for her lifestyle and visions. The St Albans Psalter is a manuscript at least partially overhauled with Christina in mind, intended to represent her as a “woman of great spiritual authority.”22 That holy harlots played a part in the establishment of this authority is evident when one considers that the Psalter actually contains the first extant manuscript illumination of Mary Magdalene as apostolorum apostola, a scene that will always remain rare in iconography, and which Writing Religious Women, pp. 64–7. Katie Bugyis, “Tange Me: The Transgressive Touches of Christina of Markyate and Mary Magdalene,” paper presented at the 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 2011. 21 Carrasco, “The Imagery,” pp. 67–80. 22 Bugyis, “Tange Me.” On the Psalter and Christina, see Jane Geddes, “The Abbot and the Anchoress,” and her The St. Albans Psalter, a Book for Christina of Markyate (London: British Library, 2005); Geddes, “The Debate: Developing Theories and Observations about the Psalter,” www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/essays/debate. shtml; Charles H. Talbot (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 25–7. Hereafter Vita, followed by page number. 19 Watt, 20

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics is for instance not reproduced in the Shaftesbury Psalter, although that manuscript otherwise copies the St Albans miniatures that precede and follow it (Figure 2).23 This suggests that the aim of the St Albans apostolorum apostola scene was intended to echo and legitimise Christina’s own authority as a religious leader, a preacher, and a prioress. Christina’s role as the senior female administrator of her congregation is therefore represented in light of the Magdalene’s role as Christ’s spokesperson and representative on earth. Bugyis remarks that the two Psalter initials depicting Christina herself represent her as the only character among a company – of monks in one image and of nuns in another – to break the frame and reach out, nearly touching Christ and the Trinity with her hand (Figure 3). She connects this gesture with the absence, within the illuminator’s Resurrection cycle, of the very popular noli me tangere scene in which Christ refuses the Magdalene’s touch,24 arguing that the producers of the Psalter wished in this way to represent “Mary and even Christina herself, not simply as models of female intercession or affective piety, but dramatically, and quite radically as preachers of the good news of Christ’s Resurrection and as ones worthy to touch his risen body.”25 Bugyis thus connects uninterrupted, transgressive, and affective physical touch of the divine with a form of legitimisation of preaching. We have seen elsewhere that late medieval writers sometimes had difficulty accepting the noli me tangere, conceiving it as a rebuke of the Magdalene’s affective love.26 Christina’s outreaching hand on pages 285 and 403 parallels the gesture, on page 51, of the Magdalene’s own preaching hand reaching out to the apostles when she announces the Resurrection. Christina’s transgressive reaching for Christ and for the Trinity in the Psalter is therefore authorised by an iconographical imitation of the Magdalene’s own sanctioned intimacy with Christ.27 Christina of Markyate is seen here emulating the holy harlot’s bridal intimacy with the divine in order to anchor in this validating precedent her own visionary authority. Yet it is not solely the omission of the noli me tangere, presupposing the continuity of the Magdalene’s physical intimacy with Christ, which provides a precedent for Christina’s authority in the St Albans Psalter.

Michael Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190: A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 3 (London: Harvey Miller, 1975), pp. 105–6. 24 Bugyis, “Tange me.” 25 Ibid. 26 On this, see Chapter 3, pp. 116 and 157, and Juliette Vuille, “‘Towche Me Not”: Uneasiness in the Translation of the Noli Me Tangere Episode in the Late Medieval English Period,’ The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age, ed. Alessandra Petrina (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 213–23. 27 Bugyis, “Tange me.” 23 Claus

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Figure 2. Mary Magdalene preaching the Resurrection to the apostles, St Albans Psalter, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St.God. 1, p. 51.

Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics It is also the validation of the Magdalene’s own authoritative speech by her status as a witness on which Christina’s own authority is implicitly modelled and in turn validated. Indeed, the Magdalene’s preaching to the apostles is legitimised by her presence at the Sepulchre with the two other Marys in the facing-page illumination that precedes it. In this image, the three Marys see the open tomb and the angel announcing the Resurrection. The Magdalene’s legitimacy as a preacher of the Resurrection is thus rooted in her having witnessed this scene on Easter Sunday. This, according to Carrasco, parallels other Figure 3. Christina of Markyate acting moments of the iconographical as an intermediary between God and cycle of the manuscript, where the St Albans monks. St Albans Psalter, “the theme of witness, by sight, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St.God. 1, touch, or by a dream or spiritual 28 p. 285. vision, is of central concern.” In associating the holy harlot and the saintly visionary, the St Albans Psalter illuminator equates Christina’s mystical visions with the Magdalene’s physical sight, ascribing to them the same direct access to the divine, and thus proving their genuine character. Both Christina and the Magdalene act as mouthpieces of God’s presence for their community, a community made up of St Albans monks, of nuns, or of apostles. In this way, the authorising model for Christina in the St Albans illumination cycle is not one of virginity, as one might have expected. Instead, it is the holy harlot and her repentance (p. 36), affective presence at the deposition (p. 47), at the tomb (p. 50), and her preaching the Resurrection (p. 51), which are left, right, and centre, and literally frame the passion sequence. The focus is therefore on penitence, affective devotion, and authority through transgressive touch and witnessing, all concepts which are embodied by the holy harlot in the Psalter. As in literary iterations of almost all of our holy harlots’ lives, though, the harlot saint’s affective piety links her with the Virgin Mary, and with virginity as well. Indeed, from the Passion onward, the Virgin 28

Carrasco, “The Imagery,” pp. 67–80.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature and the Magdalene are connected in that the former is wearing a purple cloak over a red dress (pp. 47–8 and 54–5), while the latter adopts a purple dress and a red cloak (pp. 47 and 50–1). In each of these scenes, the women are crucial as witnesses to central soteriological events: the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost. In this way, the Alexis master, who produced this miniature cycle, offered an image of femininity at the centre of all of these events, one that aligns the repentant holy harlot with the virginal mother, an apt precedent for Christina who similarly cumulates roles as a recluse, an authority over the monks of St Albans and her flock, a virgin, and an abbess. The malleability of the holy harlot trope permits and validates such a multivalent and multifunctional portrayal of femininity. The use of the holy harlot type as an authorising tool for Christina’s preaching and visionary experience is not limited to the St Albans Psalter; the saintly mystic’s biographer also employs this technique in her Vita. The author’s association of Christina with different types of saints, especially St Cecilia and other virgin martyrs, has already been commented upon,29 but none has noticed his assimilation of Christina with all holy harlots,30 something that becomes very quickly evident upon reading her Vita. This parallelism serves three distinct, if related, purposes: providing validating precedents for Christina’s complex brand of sanctity, for her amicitia with different male figures, and to establish her in a position of authority. Indeed, although Christina proffers a vow of virginity, she chooses to remain and live in the world and accepts marriage, decisions her hagiographer is sometimes at pains to explain.31 The trajectory of her life then owes more to that of the holy harlot than the virgin martyr or even the Virgin Mary herself, although Christina has a particular devotion for her. Rather, like a harlot saint, her story is one of conversion, of evolution from a life in the world to one of asceticism and suffering, from one of sexual temptation to the bridal embrace of Christ. Hers is a long life, defined by the same geographical freedom and interaction with prominent male clerical figures as repentant prostitutes. Throughout her Vita one recognises episodes inspired by the lives of Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, Thaïs, and Mary of Egypt.

29 See,

for instance, Stephanie Hollis and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “St. Albans and Women’s Monasticism: Lives and their Foundations in Christina’s World,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 25–52, at pp. 36–9, and Fanous’s article in the same volume: “Christina of Markyate and the Double Crown,” pp. 53–78. See also Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical, pp. 117–22, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991), pp. 314–32. 30 Watt offers a passing remark on Christina’s resemblance with Mary of Egypt in Medieval Women’s Writing, pp. 64–7, and Carrasco comments on a few parallel passages between the vita and lives of the Magdalene in her “The Imagery.” 31 Talbot, The Life of Christina, pp. 40–1.

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics Her life in the world already bears signs of “holy harlotry.” An early episode, for example, clearly echoes an event found in the life of Thaïs. Ralph, the future bishop of Durham, propositions Christina, who, fearful to refuse him, answers in these words: “Dimitte me. ut eam hostium obserare. Quia licet minime Deum metuimus. saltem homines opere tali ne superveniant vereri debemus” (Vita 42).32 This echoes – and turns on its head – the most striking passage of the life of Thaïs, when, having accepted Paphnutius’s advances and having led him to different rooms as he requests a more private one, claiming to be afraid of being seen, she tells him that “est quidem, sed si homines vereris, nec in isto exteriori cubiculo ullus ingreditus; si vero Deum, nullus est locus qui divinitatis ejus oculis abscondatur.”33 In the first passage, Christina argues one should fear the judgement of men even if one does not fear God. In the second, Thaïs tells Paphnutius he should not fear men, but God. Both episodes demonstrate the wisdom of these women, even as they are still part of the world, and show them besting a male cleric: Christina bolts the door from the outside to leave Ralph alone in the room, and Thaïs understands and opposes earthly and heavenly judgement even in her sinful state. The parallel between the two episodes is clear and reinforces Christina’s authority over the clergy. From that moment on, Christina’s associations with holy harlots abound. She changes her name from Theodora to Christina in the same way Margaret becomes Pelagia and Mary Magdalene loses her name. Such a shift in denomination expresses a change in identity, a conversion from being a woman of the world to one devoted to God (and to imitatio Christi). Like harlot saints, she undergoes a dramatic conversion to become a Bride of Christ and imitate the Son in a particularly feminine performance: she is Christina, a feminine iteration of Christ like Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt before her. Her early life in the world, as is the case for holy harlots, is marked by transgression of both societal and religious norms. Christina’s refusal to consummate her marriage leads her to be ostracised by her parents and society at large, and causes the incomprehension of the clergy. Like the holy harlot, she refuses easy categorisation as a woman, transgressing recognisable feminine statuses to become both a wife and a virgin. Like them, her conversion and subsequent holy life is defined by a geographical freedom that sees her wandering from place to place.34 She imitates Pelagia by eventually cross-dressing to flee her 32

“Allow me to bolt the door: for even if we have no fear of God, at least we should take precautions that no man should catch us in this act.” 33 “There is one [more private room], but if it is men you fear, no one enters in this exterior bedroom; if however it is God [you fear], there is no place that is hidden from the eyes of his divinity.” My translation. Vitae Patrum, BHL 8012, PL 73, 661–2, at 661a. 34 “Ambulabat quo volebat illo die ab aliis incustodita” (Vita 88). “She wandered that day where she liked, free from the vigilance of the others.” Her desire for freedom, “libertas,” is reiterated time and again during that period of her life.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature previous life for one of asceticism.35 Like her, she is assailed by a devil when living with a woman, and like Thaïs she is then imprisoned in a tiny cell (by the hermit Roger), being forced into extreme asceticism that would mark her body for life.36 Like Mary of Egypt, she is guided by the Virgin Mary,37 and undergoes similar punishing episodes of exposure to the cold and the blistering heat.38 Christina’s long and repeated struggles against sexual temptation are also very much reminiscent of repentant prostitutes’ lives, and the ascetic means she employs to quieten her unruly flesh echo that of Mary of Egypt.39 Christina, for example, subjects her body to “protracta ieiunia. modicus cibus isque crudarum herbarum. potus aque ad mensuram. noctes insomnes. severa verbera.”40 Mary of Egypt also flees to the wilderness to abate her lust and exposes her body to cold and heat as well as to extreme fasting (eating raw herbs) when suffering pangs of sexual temptation.41 It therefore becomes apparent that the life of Christina of Markyate owes much more to the model of the holy harlot than to that of the virgin martyr, notably because the model is so flexible, enabling the hagiographer to portray his transgressive Christina as a saint, complete with conversion narrative, asceticism, geographical freedom, and temptations of the flesh. While Kathryn Kelsey Staples and Ruth Mazo Karras have argued that Christina’s sexual temptation was atypical in virgin saints’ lives before the twelfth century, when growing concerns about the fraternisation between men and women religious led to virgin martyrs struggling against lust,42 one can argue that such a development is new only for virginal saints’ lives, and may have arisen from the influence of the holy harlot model on the latter. Conversely, it may be that the increase in popularity of repentant prostitutes such as Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, and Thaïs at approximately the same period arose because their amicitia with male hermits and clerics paralleled real-life interactions between male and female religious, and provided an authorising precedent for them. Indeed, it is in her relationships with male clerics and hermits that Christina most resembles a harlot saint. Watt has argued that Chrisina’s relationship with the hermit Roger should be paralleled with that between Mary of Egypt Vita 91–3; cf. Réfections A’ and B, cited in Chapter 1, pp. 27–30. Vita 102–4; cf. BHL 8012, PL 73, 661–2, at 661c–2a. 37 Vita 79. 38 Ibid., 55 and 103–5. 39 Ibid., 114–18. 40 “Long fastings, little food, and that only of raw herbs, a measure of water to drink, nights spent without sleep, harsh scourgings.” Ibid. 114–15. 41 Vita 117; cf. the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt, ed. Hugh Magennis, An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-text Translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), lines 616–73. She eats “wyrtum,” roots / herbs, on line 664. 42 Kathryn K. Staples and Ruth M. Karras, “Christina’s Tempting: Sexual Desire and Women’s Sanctity,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Fanous and Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 184–96. 35 36

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics and Zosimus, but that the “greater anxiety about the sexual element” inherent in Roger and Christina’s relationship leads the hagiographer to reject this too daring association: “the virgin must not be conflated with the reformed harlot.”43 On my part, I would argue the opposite: that Christina’s hagiographer is indeed pointing to the amicitia of reformed prostitutes as precedent to validate Christina’s male friendships to present them as not only proper, but also a mark of her sanctity, as an element constitutive of it. The fact that the model used for his virginal saint is one of a former sexual sinner does not seem to pose a problem for the Vita’s author. We have already seen how Roger’s seemingly heartless treatment of Christina, locking her in a tiny cell and causing her to develop chronic pains for the rest of her life, could be paralleled with Paphnutius’s cruel imprisonment of Thaïs. However, it is not only Roger who resembles the old wise male friends of holy harlots. Christina’s first friend, Sueno, weeps as another Nonnus or Zosimus when his encounter with Christina leads him to reassess his own life.44 Her relationship with Geoffrey, the abbot of St Albans, is also to be paralleled with Mary of Egypt’s amicitia with Zosimus. Christina, like the Egyptian, has miraculous knowledge of goings on at the monastery, and advises the abbot on his conduct and that of his monastery.45 Like her, she knows in advance when her friend will be ill, and how that will impact his coming to meet her.46 Instead of casting doubt on the appropriateness of the saint’s relationships with male clerics, the precedent of the holy harlot validates them. Indeed, it is not the parallelism of Christina’s love for Roger with Mary of Egypt and Zosimus’s relationship which casts doubt on whether their relationship is chaste; it is, rather, her living with him for four years that is suggestive of inadequacy. At the same time, even the secrecy of their relationship during that time finds a validating precedent in the life of Mary of Egypt, as the latter requires Zosimus to keep mum about her until her death. Through the association of Christina with holy harlots, then, it is not only her particular brand of sanctity which is authorised, but also her relationships with male clerics and her authority over them that finds validation. This may seem a paradox, but imitating a repentant harlot gives cachet to Christina’s unconventional relationships with men. Christina finds most backing for her fledgling saintly authority in emulating Mary Magdalene and her continuous contact with the divine. More precisely, she imitates a feminine figure of affective devotion which in the Vita conflates the Virgin Mary and the Magdalene, mirroring in this way the St Albans Psalter’s cycle of miniatures. The assimilation of the two Marys is most obvious in an episode where a woman of great authority, “magne auctoritatis Medieval Women’s Writing, p. 67. She discusses the parallel on pp. 64–7. Vita 58. 45 Ibid., 134–6. 46 Ibid., 146. 43

44

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature matronam,” appears in a dream in Christina’s chamber when the saint is in a sick bed, takes out a small box of ointments, “pixide,” and is told by all present that she should not waste it on Christina, as she is too far gone.47 This apparition is then identified as the Virgin Mary, but Christina here obviously also figures Christ being ministered to by Mary Magdalene in Mk 14:4–9 and Matt. 26:6–13, when she anoints him with her box of ointments and is called wasteful by the apostles. The Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene are thus assimilated into one single figure of affective devotion for Christ, and it is this woman, explicitly a woman of “great authority,” that Christina emulates, managing in this way to imitate the holy harlot type without needing to relinquish her virginity in the process. Just before this passage, a lecherous cleric takes to parading in front of her naked, and the intervention of Mary Magdalene and others causes him to stop, but leaves Christina with fleshly temptations.48 She is, however, cured of them in a vision by emulating this conflated figure: […] procumbens in oracione. Flendo. Gemendo. Rogabat ab infestacione liberari. […] Ipse namque in forma parvuli venit inter brachia probate sibi sponse. Et per integrum diem mansit cum illa. Non modo sensibilis. Se eciam visibilis. Accipiens itaque virgo puerum in manibus: gracias agens astrinxit sibi ad pectus. […] Ex tunc ille libidinis ardor ita extinctus defecit. (Vita 116–19)49

Christina here positions herself in the same manner as the Magdalene in her role as the anonymous sinner of the city (Lk. 7:37), kneeling, weeping, and lamenting her temptation. The two women’s infestatio, “possession,” is relieved by close physical contact with Christ, whom both women take in their hands, but it is the Christ child that Christina holds, in the manner of the Virgin Mary. It is this privileged intimacy with Christ, on the model of the Virgin/ Mary Magdalene, which creates Christina as a saint whose visions are authoritative. This importance is clearly apparent when the biographer insists that Christina not only felt the Christ-child, but also saw him. The accumulation of two different senses gives greater credibility to her vision. As in the St Albans Psalter, it is in paralleling the Magdalene’s intimacy and transgressive touch that Christina gains in authority and sanctity. Another passage is worth mentioning in light of this. Near the end of the Vita, the hagiographer explicitly parallels Christina’s sister Margaret and Vita, 124–5. Ibid., 116. 49 “She knelt in prayer, weeping, and lamenting, and begging to be freed from temptation. […] In the guise of a small child He came to the arms of his sorely tried spouse and remained with her a whole day, not only being felt but also seen. So the maiden took Him in her hands, gave thanks, and pressed Him to her bosom. […] From that moment the fire of lust was so completely extinguished that never afterwards could it be revived.” 47 48

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics herself with Martha and Mary of Bethany (“ut aliam Mariam. Aliam videres et Martham”),50 another Gregorian incarnation of the Magdalene. Christina and Margaret reprise the biblical scene of Luke 10:38–42, receiving a mysterious pilgrim whom Christina recognises as Christ in the same way the Magdalene’s affective searching for Jesus on Easter Sunday enables her to identify the gardener as the Son. Christina here emulates the holy harlot’s visionary clarity and insight, which brings great authority to her words, just as her imitation of Mary of Egypt’s preternatural knowledge when confronted by reforms in St Albans’s monastery allows for her advice to be heeded. Magdalena Carrasco argues that the Magdalene is offered up by both the Vita’s hagiographer and the Psalter illuminator as a prescriptive model to Christina, “instructing her in the behavior considered appropriate to her role and status,” and serving to “subordinate female viewers by underscoring the themes of humility and personal devotion to Christ.”51 The evidence instead points to an innovative use of both her and all holy harlots as precedents and parallels for the twelfth-century mystic, validating the most problematic aspects of Christina’s life for her to be considered a saint, for instance her freedom of movement, her life in the world, her marriage, or her living with Roger for four years. Such an imitation is more liberating than subordinating, and the Magdalene’s own assimilation with the Virgin Mary enables Christina to become a “magne auctoritatis matronam” as a holy harlot, while still retaining her virginity. Whereas Christina’s imitatio of the holy harlot may well have been tailored only for her by the Alexis Master and by her biographer, the centrality of this component in Christina’s authorisation as a mystic, a preacher, and a prioress, suggests that it was considered a recognisable legitimising trope for a twelfth-century mystic, even a virginal one, a trope that might well have been adopted by Christina herself. JULIAN OF NORWICH In parallel with Christina’s portrayal in the Psalter and the Vita, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343– after 1416) emulates Mary Magdalene’s direct access to Christ and her role as a first-hand witness to the Son of God’s life in order to present her visionary experiences as authoritative, and to legitimise her publication of them in her texts. At the same time, like Christina’s validation of a sanctity that deviates from the gendered norms with the precedent of holy harlots, Julian uses Mary Magdalene in particular to justify some of the most transgressive and theologically daring aspects of her doctrine. Julian of Norwich was a visionary and anchoress at the Church of St Julian of Norwich. She fell critically ill when she was about thirty years old, in 1373, 50

51

Vita 182–3. Carrasco, “The Imagery,” pp. 68 and 70.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature probably before becoming an anchoress. She may have been a laywoman or a nun, perhaps at the Benedictine convent of Carrow.52 On her sickbed, she experienced a series of sixteen visions, which she transcribed into a short text. Sometime after receiving further visionary insight in 1388 and 1393, she wrote a longer text, which takes up and develops her first visions and the theological reflections that arose from them. Scholars disagree on the dating of the Short and the Long Text. She may have written them quite quickly after each of her visionary experiences (respectively in the 1370s and 1390s), but Nicholas Watson makes a good case for her having written the Short Text in the 1380s, and the Long Text much later and over a much longer period, nearly up until her death, which happened after 1416.53 As a woman writing in the middle of the Wycliffite controversy in East Anglia, Julian must have been especially aware of her need to present her visions prescriptively as orthodox when she decided to have them written down. Indeed, the simple fact of recording her visionary experience exposes her theology to outside interpretation and criticism. The authority required by Julian to write a book containing theological concepts and accounts of visionary experiences is very similar to her preaching,54 and although Julian has often been associated with female visionaries writing on the Continent – such as Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth of Shönau, or Bridget of Sweden – visionary experience was not as common and as widely accepted in England as it was for these mystics, requiring her to be especially careful to find adequate legitimacy for her visions.55 Further, unlike many Continental female visionaries’ writing, Julian’s showings do not contain a commission to write (that is to say, a visionary request, from God, to have her visions written down). Julian therefore needs to find ways to support the orthodoxy and the heavenly origin of her visions, as well as her decision to render them public. This validation she finds by making few, but strategic, references to Mary Magdalene, putting her entire visionary experience under her authorising aegis, and taking special care to refer to the harlot saint when her theology is at its most controversial. For Julian as a laywoman, see Benedicta Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kevin Leech and Benedicta Ward (Oxford: SLG Press, 1988), pp. 11–34. For Julian as a nun, see Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (eds), The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 4–6. This will be the edition referred to in this present study. The Short Text (ST) and the Long Text (LT) will be distinguished, followed by chapter and line number. 53 Nicholas Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 637–83. 54 Alison Torn, “Margery Kempe: Madwoman or Mystic – a Narrative Approach to the Representation of Madness and Mysticism in Medieval England,” in Narratives and Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. David Robinson et al. (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 2008), pp. 79–89, at p. 82. 55 Watson, “The Composition,” pp. 646–8. 52

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics Even though Julian modifies the way she authorises her visionary experience from the Short to the Long Text, the figure of the Magdalene appears prominently in both, demonstrating the versatility of the holy harlot as an authorising figure. Indeed, in the Short Text Julian portrays herself as an uneducated, weak woman whose privileged access to God’s teachings – as opposed to the Mary Magdalene in the Digby Play56 – enables her in turn to teach. In the Long Text, she removes any mention of her gender and forgoes most of the Short Text’s defensive remarks apologising for her role as a female writer or reasserting her adherence to the teachings of the Church. While some have argued that these modifications showed that Julian was less anxious about the precariousness of her position as a female visionary and writer in the Long Text,57 I would instead suggest that they are symptomatic of a change in the mystic’s gendering of her authorising technique. In the Long Text, she makes much more extensive use of intellectual visions, which according to Augustine were infallible,58 but were usually wielded by male mystics.59 This might have led her to cut references to her gender and to present her text as a more “masculine” theological enterprise, complete with a newly added table of contents.60 Mary Magdalene is mentioned only twice in each text, but it is every time at strategic points of the narrative: at the beginning of her texts, to place her writings under the validating auspices of the saint, and when her theological doctrine is at its most controversial. Further, Julian emulates the Magdalene’s particular intimacy and physical proximity with Christ in order to reinforce the authority of her beliefs, establishing the holy harlot as a model for Julian’s apophatic encounters with the divine. Mary Magdalene is the first saint to be mentioned in Julian’s work, within the first lines of the first chapters of each version. At the beginning of the Short Text, Julian mentions two female saints as authoritative precedents she wishes to emulate: Mary Magdalene, with whom she wishes to be at the Passion, and St Cecilia, whose three wounds she desires for herself. Although neither saint is mentioned in her quality of public speaker, it is no coincidence 56

See Chapter 4, pp. 163–4. On this, see for instance Edmund Colledge and James Walsh’s introduction to their edition of the texts, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 59–67, and Barry Windeatt, “Julian of Norwich and Her Audience,” The Review of English Studies 28 (1977), pp. 1–17, esp. pp. 3–5. 58 “Intellectualis autem visio non fallitur.” Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, 12.14. 29. 59 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 310–12. 60 If, as Colledge and Walsh argue, the first chapter of the Long Text is authorial. See their A Book of Showings, vol. 2, notes to chapter 1, pp. 281–4. This position is refuted by Watson, “The Composition,” p. 676. 57

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature that Julian should preface her own attempt at publicising her voice with two of the most reputed female holy preachers in the medieval period.61 While Cecilia disappears from the Long Text,62 the Magdalene retains her authoritative position in Julian’s modified system of authorisation, exemplifying her crucial importance for Julian, and further demonstrating the holy harlot type’s gendered flexibility as a model (for both female “weak woman” legitimisation and male “theological,” “intellectual” authorisation).63 As a matter of fact, Julian anchors the whole of her mystical experience on Mary Magdalene, rooting her own visions of the passion, which will occupy most of the texts, in an imitation of the Magdalene’s actual physical presence at the crucifixion: Methought I woulde have ben that time with Mary Magdaleyne and with other that were Christus lovers, that I might have seen bodily the passion that our lord suffered for me, that I might have suffered with him as other did that loved him. And therfore I desired a bodely sight […] (LT 2, lines 5–10, my emphasis)

Julian insists here that she desires a bodily sight of the passion, as opposed to the two other types of visions she is privy to, spiritual and intellectual visions: “all this was shewde by thre partes: that is to sey, by bodily sight, and by worde formede in my understonding, and by gostely sight” (LT 9, lines 24–5). This tripartite tropology is strongly reminiscent of Augustine’s threefold classification of visions, which she probably knew.64 The lowest kind of vision, the corporeal or bodily vision, is the actual physical vision of the eyes, the spiritual or ghostly vision is the vision through which one experiences something in one’s mind as though it were present, only inferior in kind to the third type of vision, the intellectual vision, an interpretation given by God “of the meaning of the images of corporeal things in the spiritus, if they are signs of something else.” 65 Julian uses intellectual visions in order to make sense of her bodily sight. She establishes the latter as a starting point for her visions, and equates the authority of her own physical vision of the Passion with the Magdalene’s Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 24. 62 Susan K. Hagen interprets this suppression as a symptom of Julian’s increased confidence in her visions. Hagen, “St. Cecilia and St. John of Beverly: Julian of Norwich’s Early Model and Late Affirmation,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 91–114, at pp. 91–2. 63 This is also noted by Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), esp. p. 146. 64 See Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, liber duodecimus, especially Chapters 6 and 7, PL 34, 245–486. On Julian’s knowledge of Augustine’s differentiation, see Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion, p. 22. 65 See on this Karin Schlapbach, “Intellectual Vision in Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12 or: Seeing the Hidden Meaning of Images,” in Studia Patristica XLIII, ed. Frances Young et al. (Louvain: Peeters, 2006), pp. 239–45, at p. 241. 61

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics actual corporeal presence at the same event. She therefore garners the same legitimacy as a physical witness to the passion as the Magdalene. In this way, her account of the passion is validated as truthful and authoritative, and this in turn establishes the truthfulness and authority of the entirety of her visionary experience. Further, the crisis between Julian’s initial bodily sight and the deeper intellectual understanding of her visions is modelled on the Magdalene’s noli me tangere scene. According to Vincent Gillespie, the passage from corporeal to intellectual vision takes place in Julian’s second revelation, when she sees the changing colour of Christ’s face on the cross:66 This saw I bodely, swemly, and darkely, and I desired mor bodely light to have seen more clerly. And I was answered in my reason: “If God will shew thee more, he shal be thy light. Thee nedeth none but him.” For I saw him and sought him. For we be now so blinde and so unwise that we can never seke God till what time that he of his goodnes sheweth him to us. And whan we see ought of him graciously, then are we stered by the same grace to seke with great desire to see him more blissefully. And thus I saw him and sought him, and I had him and wanted him. (LT 10, lines 8–15)

Julian longing and mourning for an illumination resonates with the Magdalene’s anguished search of Christ at the tomb. Both women are blind until the time God shows himself to them – in the Magdalene’s case, when he calls her Mary, allowing her thus to recognise him in the garb of the gardener. Both are linked with the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, lamenting and seeking their Bridegroom and, upon seeing him, holding him and being unable to let him go (Cant. 3:1–4).67 Indeed, both have trouble distancing themselves from the bodily to reach a spiritual understanding of what they are seeing. Like the Magdalene, the last lines of the previous quote show Julian insisting on her desire for more contact with God once he has revealed himself. Later on, during the eighth revelation, she again reproduces this difficulty in moving her understanding from one rooted in Christ, and the bodily, to one of spiritual, intellectual vision of the godhead. In chapter 19, she refuses to look upward to heaven to see God, preferring the vision of Christ crucified on earth, which she chooses as her heaven: Than had I a profer in my reason, as it had ben frendely, saide to me “Loke uppe to heven to his father.” And than sawe I wele, with the faith that I felt, that ther was nothing betwene the crosse and heven that might have dissesede me, and either me behoved to loke uppe or elles to answere. I answered inwardly with alle the might of my soule, and said: “Nay, I may Vincent Gillespie, Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 296. 67 This passage, as we have seen, was connected since Origen with the Magdalene’s search for Christ at the tomb. 66

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature not! For thou art my heven.” […] For I wist wele that he that bounde me so sore, he shuld unbind me whan he wolde. (LT 19, lines 4–8)

Liz McAvoy also remarks on the similarities of this scene with the noli me tangere episode,68 and the reference to binding and unbinding further echoes the Magdalene through the scene of the raising of Lazarus, whose tied hands and feet are unbound by Christ, figuring the resurrection he owes to the Magdalene’s weeping, which in turn moves Christ to tears and to effect this miracle (Jn 11:1–45). The holy harlot thus serves as an authorising precedent for the whole of Julian’s visionary experience. Not only is the mystic’s bodily sight modelled on the repentant saint’s physical presence at the crucifixion, but the passage from corporeal to intellectual vision is also paralleled with the harlot saint’s own crisis of understanding the divine, and reflects a similar attachment to the physical and tangible, to a direct connection with the human Christ rather than to an elevation to contemplate the divine. Julian’s imitation of the saint truly lends credibility to the whole construct of her visions. The second time Julian of Norwich mentions Mary Magdalene’s name in the Short and the Long Text it is to validate one of the most problematic aspects of her theology: a tendency to Universalism.69 The doubt in the reality of God’s ultimate damnation of a part of mankind was quite common among late medieval mystics, due to their affective belief in a boundlessly charitable and forgiving God.70 Julian of Norwich struggles with this notion, aware of its heretical content, but manages to evade the question, explaining that although she believes in the Church’s teachings about purgatory and hell, she herself did not see any of it in her visions, and the only person she knows to be damned is the devil himself.71 She resolves the apparent contradiction between her oftenrehearsed belief that “alle manner thing shall be wele” (LT 32, lines 13–14) and the teachings of the Church on damnation by envisioning a mysterious “gret deed” performed by God at the last Judgement, “by which deed he shalle make all thing wele” (LT 32, lines 28–9). A by-product of this is Julian’s belief that sin is to the ultimate glory of the sinner, especially developed in the Long Text. This belief is best exemplified by the parable of the Lord and his Servant who falls and is better rewarded by his lord than if he had not, because of the pain incurred by his fall (LT 51). Julian deploys the Magdalene and other repentant saints in order to support this problematic belief: Authority and the Female Body, p. 136. Richard Harries, “On the Brink of Universalism,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), pp. 41–60. 70 See Newman, From Virile Woman, p. 123–33, for a discussion of late medieval mystics leaning towards Universalism. 71 LT 9, lines 16–21, and 33, lines 1–8. See notably Diane Watt, “Saint Julian of the Apocalypse,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 64–74, at p. 70. 68 McAvoy, 69

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics Also God shewed that sinne shalle be no shame, but wurshipe to man. […] For in this sight my understanding was lifted up into heven, and then God brought merely to my minde David and other in the olde lawe with him, without nomber. And in the new lawe he brought to my minde furst Magdaleyne, Peter and Paule, Thomas of Inde, Sent John of Beverly, and other, also without nomber: how they be knowen in the church on erth with ther sinnes, and it is to them no shame, but alle is turned them to worshippe. (LT 38, lines 1–15, my emphasis)

Julian of Norwich therefore recognises as a validating authority the example of the repentant harlot for the questionable orthodoxy of her visions. More than this, she increases the importance of the Magdalene in her validation of this doctrine by placing her first among all saintly sinners and adding “furst” in front of her name in the Long Text, therefore making the Magdalene more central to her legitimisation programme as she grows more anxious about the reception of her writings.72 In using the Magdalene to support her potentially heretical belief in Universalism, Julian is not alone. She follows in this Marguerite Porete, who also deploys the harlot saint to defend a similar belief in her Mirouer des Simples Ames Anienties: “Icy monstre a l’exemple de la Magdelene et des sains que l’Ame n’a nulle honte de ses pechez.”73 Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt are also mentioned in the early sixteenth century by William Bonde, a brother of Syon Monastery, to support the notion that a repentant sinner is particularly dear to God: Why thynkest thou. that our most marcyfull sauiour Jesu dyd chuse to his singular famylyarite. Mathew. Peter. Paule. Zache. mari Magdalen and mary the Egipcian / 7 the thefe and blasphemar that honge on his right syde. wyth inumerable mo grete syners. that now byn holy saintes in heuen. but only that thou shuldest neuer despayre.74

The redemption of sins seems then to go hand in hand with an intimacy with Christ, so much so that such an intimacy is created ex nihilo for Mary of Egypt, who was believed to have lived several centuries after Christ had died. This may explain to some extent the popularity of holy harlots for visionaries, who may have wanted to emulate the privileged intimacy that repentant

Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 446, n. 14, impute this change to a respect of chronology, but they do also acknowledge that it is then illogical that Peter and Paul be kept together. 73 Giovanna Fozzer et al. (eds), Margherita Porete, Lo Specchio Delle Anime Semplici (Milano: Ed. Paoline, 1994), ch. 76, p. 320. 74 John E.B. Mayer (ed.), The English Works of John Fisher, EETS e.s. 27 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1876), pp. 114–15, cited in Marie Collins, “Will and the Penitents: ‘Piers Plowman’ B X 420–35,” Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985), pp. 290–308, at p. 297. 72

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature prostitutes enjoyed with Christ by the simple virtue of their having sinned: even Christina, a virgin, could wish to imitate a former prostitute. It is indeed the Magdalene’s unique familiarity with Christ that Julian emulates: “And full greatly was I astonned, for wonder and marvayle that I had, that he that is so reverent and so dreadful will be so homely with a sinful creature liveing in this wretched flesh” (LT 4, lines 14–16). Julian’s mention of her sinfulness, and of Christ’s familiarity with her, finds numerous echoes in passages referring to the Magdalene. As a second Magdalene, as a sinner who yet has the privilege to be “homely” with Christ, the mystic implies that although her inherent sinfulness could cast doubt on the validity of her visions, the Magdalene was privileged in the same way, and therefore the authority of her visions is not impaired but, rather, further validated by her sins. Julian’s Magdalenian intimacy with Christ provides the mystic with great authority for her visions. Indeed, like the Magdalene, she communicates with the Son of God directly, without any “meane” or intermediaries (LT 4, line 5). As Gillespie notes, “the stress on the lack of intermediaries between Christ and Julian emphasises that Christ is not obeying the conventions of passion meditation, nor is he communicating through the codified decorums by which signification is usually controlled in human rhetoric.”75 This direct contact with Christ allows her, in parallel with the Magdalene in the Digby play, to become the intermediary between God and the religious community, to become a preacher and teacher through the learning she gained from her privileged access to the divine: “Alle that I say of me, I mene in the person of alle my evencristen, for I am lerned in the gostely shewing of our lord God that he meneth so” (LT 8, lines 31–2). It is then clear that Julian of Norwich aligns herself with the Magdalene to profit from a similar intimacy with Christ, as a sinner turned into one of God’s elect. In addition, Julian develops a central aspect of her theology – God’s familiarity with mankind – by way of her emulation of the Magdalene. While she had often put emphasis on God’s “homeliness” with men at the beginning of the Long Text,76 she develops this topic further near the end (chapters 76–7). In chapter 77, Julian again links this concept of “homeliness” with the Magdalene, in a passage worth reproducing at length: Than is this the remedy: that we be aknowen of oure wrechednes and fle to oure lorde. For ever the more neder that we be, the more spedfulle it is to us to touch him. […] Flee we to oure lorde, and we shall be comforted. Touch we him, and we shalle be made clene. Cleve we to him, and we shalle be seker and safe from alle manner of perilles. For oure curtese lorde wille that we be

Looking in Holy Books, p. 287. Spearing, “Introduction,” in Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, Introduction and Notes to the translation by A.C. Spearing, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin, 1998), p. xix.

75 Gillespie, 76 A.C.

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics as homely with him as hart may thinke or soule may desyer. But be we ware that we take not so rechelously this homelyhed for to leve curtesye. For oure lorde himselfe is soveryn homelyhed, and so homely as he is, as curtesse he is. (LT 77, lines 11–45, my emphasis)

In this passage, Julian constructs a theology of penance through close intimacy with God on the model of the Magdalene, Christianity’s first penitent, who sinned and was “made clene” after touching Christ’s feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee. Like the repentant saint, a sinner should flee to the Lord, touch him, and so be made clean. Julian’s use of the Magdalene figure as a tool for her authorisation is therefore omnipresent throughout her work, if mention of the saint’s name itself is scant. MARGERY KEMPE Julian of Norwich made comparatively little use of the figure of the holy harlot when set against Margery Kempe’s all-encompassing imitatio of the type of the repentant saint.77 Indeed, Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century East Anglian mystic and mother of fourteen, is arguably the medieval visionary who moulded herself most extensively as a holy harlot, and more particularly as a new Magdalene, in order to gain legitimacy for her actions and her visions. Margery authored in collaboration with two amanuenses The Book of Margery Kempe, a treatise that recounts her life, visions, and miracles. Margery emulates holy harlots with two conflicting, though sometimes intertwined, aims. On the one hand, she seeks in the precedent of the repentant prostitute to gain legitimacy for posterity as a saint in her own right, for instance by structuring her Book as one would a life of a holy harlot. On the other, she presents the most controversial, and sometimes dangerous, aspects of her own behaviour – her excessive weeping, her travels, and her preaching – as part of her imitatio of Mary Magdalene more particularly, so as to authorise them in the eyes of her contemporaries. This double agenda complicates Margery’s complex imitative process. The mimetic nature of the Book of Margery Kempe has been extensively remarked upon, and Margery’s tendency to emulate a various array of saints, from the “universal” virgin martyrs Katherine of Alexandria and Margaret to near-contemporary holy mystics such as Bridget of Sweden or Mary of Oignies, is well documented.78 While some argue that “no one female saint 77

An earlier version of this portion of the chapter was published as an article, with the title “I wolde I wer as worthy to ben sekyr of thy lofe as Mary Mawdelyn was”: The Magdalene as an Authorizing Tool in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Mary Magdalene in Medieval Culture: Conflicted Roles, ed. Peter Loewen and Robin Waugh (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 242–70. 78 On Kempe’s imitation of virgin martyrs, see in particular Sanok, Her Life Historical,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature provided the blueprint for St. Margery,”79 the preponderance of the holy harlot type as Margery’s ultimate model in order to garner legitimacy as a mystic and a saint is revealed when the chief holy harlot, Mary Magdalene, is the only saint to appear in each of Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa’s three categories of holy women that Kempe emulates: the category of virgin martyr and/or sponsa Christi represented by Katherine of Alexandria, Margaret of Antioch, Barbara and Mary Magdalen; the repentant sinner who went through spiritual conversion, such as Mary Magdalen, Mary of Egypt, Peter and Paul; and those who pursued an evangelistic calling, such as Mary Magdalen, Peter and Paul.80

Although several critics have investigated Margery’s imitatio Magdalenæ, none has considered the holy harlot type as a whole, and they have either erred in finding the source of this influence in the Digby Mary Magdalene, which postdates the Book by at least three decades,81 or have contented themselves with pinpointing topical similarities between the saint’s life and that of the mystic, focusing primarily on Margery’s visions of the passion or on the period after Margery’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem.82 A short survey of the Book of Margery Kempe, however, is enough to convince that Kempe’s imitation pp. 132–40; Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 195–201; Yoshikawa, “Veneration of Virgin Martyrs,” pp. 177–95. On her imitation of female mystics, see Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. lviii–lix and notes to the text; Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England 3, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984), pp. 150–68, and Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996). See also Samuel B. Fanous, “Biblical and Hagiographical Imitatio in the Book of Margery Kempe,” unpublished DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1998. 79 Katherine J. Lewis, “Margery Kempe and Saint Making in Later Medieval England,” in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 195–216, at p. 196. See also Timea Szell, “From Woe to Weal and Weal to Woe: Notes on the Structure of The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 73–91, at p. 83. 80 Yoshikawa, “Veneration of Virgin Martyrs,” p. 179. 81 Suzanne L. Craymer, “Margery Kempe’s Imitation of Mary Magdalene and the ‘Digby Plays,’” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1999), pp. 173–81. Sarah Salih, in her “Staging Conversion: The Digby Saint Plays and The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–34, uses the Digby play as an analogue rather than a source. The Digby Magdalene was probably written down in the 1490s. See Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall (eds), The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, EETS o.s. 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. lx. 82 On this, see Susan Eberly, “Margery Kempe, St. Mary Magdalene, and Patterns of Contemplation,” The Downside Review 368 (1989), pp. 209–23, and Carolyn Coulson,

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics of the repentant saint is multifaceted and can be observed throughout the mystic’s work. Indeed, Kempe and her amanuenses fashion the events of the mystic’s life in the Book so as to parallel the structure and the main elements of the life of a holy harlot, using the latter, and especially Mary Magdalene, as a legitimising precedent for Margery’s bid for recognition as a holy woman by both her contemporaries and posterity. The life of Margery Kempe begins in the mode of a life of a holy harlot. The Book is introduced as being specifically tailored for sinners, “for synful wrecchys,” and Margery is the “synful caytyf ” being held up as “exampyl and instruccyon” for the boundless nature of God’s grace (BMK 1).83 This finds many a parallel in holy harlots’ lives, notably the beginning of the life of Mary Magdalene in the Festial – intended as a “myrroure to alle synful to schewon how alle þat wolden levon hur synne and done penaunce for hur trespace” (Festial 184) – or that of Pelagia in the Vitas Patrum, intended as an example that “god oure maker woll not lese a Cristen man how grete a synnar that he be.”84 Like the lives of holy harlots, the Book presents the life of a sinner for other sinners to meditate upon and to repent: God, for instance, tells her that “any creatur in erthe, haf he be nevyr so horrybyl a synner, he thar nevyr fallyn in dispeyr yyf he wyl takyn exampil of thy levyng and werkyn sumwhat theraftyr as he may do” (BMK 183). Like a repentant prostitute, Margery’s story is one of conversion, describing how God “meved and stered a synful caytyf unto hys love (BMK 1).85 We have seen how the harlot saint’s life was structured as a conversion narrative, in opposition to the life trajectory of other female saints, usually characterised by continuity.86 Margery’s pre-conversion sinfulness also parallels that of her holy harlot precedents, being defined by the sins of pride, pomp, and lechery, present in almost all holy harlots’ lives.87 Mary Magdalene, for instance, is said in the Early South English Legendary to have thought of “nought bot al of hire pruyde” and “to walke aboute to don hire flechses wille” (ESEL 49 and 51). Similarly, Margery’s early life is characterised by pride and pomp: “sche wold not leeuyn hir pride ne hir “Mysticism, Meditation and Identification in the Book of Margery Kempe,” Essays in Medieval Studies 12 (1995), pp. 69–79. 83 The edition of The Book of Margery Kempe used here is that of Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (eds), The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), hereafter BMK. All further reference to The Book will be to this edition, by page number. 84 Susan Powell, John Mirk’s Festial, EETS o.s. 334, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–10), vol. 1, p. 184; Caxton, Vitas Patrum (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1495), fol. lxir. 85 See also Sanok, Her Life Historical, p. 127, and Salih, “Staging Conversion,” p. 122. 86 See p. 183. 87 See, for instance, the lives of Mary of Egypt, Mary Magdalene, and Pelagia in the Legenda Aurea, ed. Maggioni, who all share these three sins: pp. 374–5 (Mary of Egypt), p. 629 (Mary Magdalene), and p. 1033 (Pelagia).

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature pompows aray” (BMK 9). Further, the Book’s peculiar emphasis on Margery’s sexual sin appears to be an attempt to parallel repentant saints. The mystic indeed ascribes particular importance to her failure to withstand the sexual temptation of a fellow parishioner who propositions her before church, only to rebuke her when she accepts his advances.88 Margery’s decision to recount such a humiliating incident, and insist upon it, suggests a strong desire on the mystic’s part to be associated with lechery and therefore with repentant prostitutes before her conversion.89 In parallel with the Magdalene in the Digby play, Margery’s sin causes her to be possessed by devils, becoming figuratively pregnant with them: she is “wondyrlye vexid & labowryd with spyritys” (BMK 7), only to undergo, like her predecessor, a radical conversion at the hands of Christ, who forgives her sins after a silent confession and exorcises her demons. After their conversion, Margery and holy harlots distribute their wealth and live in relative poverty, relying upon the charity of others for their sustenance when they travel. Indeed, the distribution of ill-gotten wealth is an important feature of many lives of Mary Magdalene, Thaïs, and Pelagia, as is begging for one’s sustenance, evident in lives of Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene. In parallel with these saints, Margery has to resort to begging in Rome after she divests herself of all of her money.90 Like Christina and repentant harlots, Margery benefits from an impressive geographical freedom, as she travels all over England and the Continent. While few holy harlots are provided with post-death miracles, Mary Magdalene is, and Margery is shown to gain similar intercessory powers as her. These concern sinners in general, and lechers, lepers, and prisoners in particular, all of which can be linked back to holy harlots’ sinfulness, lechery, and their paradoxical freedom of movement, or conversely their enclosure in cells.91 Indeed, leprosy was linked with lechery.92 To illustrate Kempe’s own BMK I, chapter 4. On Margery’s insistence on her sexual sin, see Liz H. McAvoy, “Virgin, Mother, Whore: The Spiritual Sexuality of Margery Kempe,” in Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah M. Chewning (London: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 121–40, as well as her Authority and the Female Body, pp. 121–2. On the emphasis put on this passage, see Samuel Fanous, “Measuring the Pilgrim’s Progress: Internal Emphases in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 157–76, at pp. 162–4. 90 BMK 92. 91 On the Magdalene’s intercessory powers for sinners, see Coletti, Drama of Saints, pp. 174–5; on her specialised intercession for prisoners, see LA 641 and Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, pp. 43–4. For Margery, see in particular BMK 26. Her interest in lechers, lepers, and prisoners is apparent when God thanks her for her specific prayers for them (BMK 204). See also the prayer at the end of the Book, BMK 250–1. 92 Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 88

89

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics power of intercession for lepers and lechers, one has only to look at her role in the conversion and repentance of her son, a lecher, who, through her prayers, contracts a sickness resembling leprosy and is later cured once he has repented his sinful ways, again through her intercessory powers.93 In addition, both women were particularly in demand under certain circumstances. Both Mary and Margery miraculously survive a difficult sea journey in an uncontrollable boat,94 and are called upon when in dire straits at sea.95 Further, and in opposition to Margaret, who is sometimes seen as the precedent for Margery’s intercessory powers in childbirth,96 both women share a power to protect the mother after the birth of the child rather than during the birth as Margaret is wont to do. The Magdalene heals and nurtures the princess of Marseilles and her child for two years when they are left for dead on an isolated rock at sea, while Margery, who is often courted in her role as godmother, cures a woman who had become mad after childbirth.97 Finally, The Book of Margery Kempe concludes in a way reminiscent of a life of Mary of Egypt, approached by Zosimus who is usually led there by providence, and asked to teach him through the narrative of her life. At the end of the Book (book II, chapter 10), Margery is approached by a young man, “mevyd thorw the Holy Gost,” who plans on becoming a priest. He begs her to expose to him her secrets. She recounts her sinfulness and God’s grace evidenced through her – she explains how “she had many tymys offendyd hys goodnes,” and tells of “the gret excellent charite of hir redemptowr.” She then enters a church with the intent of obtaining pardon and meets with the man who was responsible for her during her journey to the coast with her daughter-in-law, like Mary Magdalene does with Maximus at the end of her life. This is where the story ends. Although the context of the episodes differs, their parallelism and their relative position at the end of each narrative are revealing. The Book of Margery Kempe thus seems designed to imitate hagiographical accounts of holy harlots’ lives, at the expense of chronology. This, like Christina’s imitatio of repentant prostitutes, helps along her selfportrayal as an unusual saint,98 one whose life starts like them, in the world,

93 94

95 96

97 98

pp. 117–24. No less than sixty-nine leprosaria were dedicated to Mary Magdalene in England before the early fourteenth century. It was probably at a hospital dedicated to the Magdalene at Gaywood, near King’s Lynn, that Margery Kempe kissed several lepers, an episode recounted in Book I, chapter 74. See Rawcliffe, Leprosy, p. 129. BMK 221–3. LA 631; BMK 229. LA 633–4 and 640; BMK 95–6. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 64–5. LA 633–4. For another miracle involving childbirth, see ibid. 640, BMK 94 and 177–8. On Margery’s desire to become a saint, and on the fact that The Book of Margery Kempe may have been intended as a testimony of her holiness, see notably Lewis, “Margery Kempe and Saint Making,” pp. 195–203.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature and whose later freedom of movement and interaction with male religious finds a validating precedent in the harlot saint. Most importantly for Margery, her imitation of the holy harlot’s life trajectory from sexual sin to bridal privilege allows her to claim an honorary virginity and an elevated spot in Christ’s affections as his Sponsa, even though she lost her virginity.99 Margery’s non-virginal status was a constant source of anxiety for her, not least because virginity was, according to Yoshikawa, “the crucial issue for bride mysticism.”100 Christ, however, reassures Margery that she is loved despite this as his Sponsa, explicitly linking her with Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt when so doing: “dowtyr I lofe þe as wel as any mayden in þe world. Þer may no man let me to lofe whom I wele & as mech as I wyl, for lofe, dowtyr, qwenchith al synne. […]. Have 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 sinful I make rytful.” (BMK 49)

Holy harlots therefore permit an alternative route to becoming a Sponsa Christi: their affective devotion, their “lofe” which “qwenchith al synne” and which Margery emulates. Indeed, Margery duly expresses her desire to parallel the Magdalene, the Saviour’s “trewe lover” (BMK 174), in her privileged and loving relationship with Him: “‘A, blysful Lord,’ seyd sche, ‘I wolde I wer as worthy to ben sekyr of thy lofe as Mary Mawdelyn was,’ Þan seyd owr Lord, ‘Trewly, dowtyr, I loue þe as wel, & þe same pes þat I ȝaf to hir þe same pes I ȝeue to þe.’” (BMK 176). She is then assured by Christ that she is loved as well as the repentant saint, but not content to be on a par with the most popular of holy harlots, it soon becomes apparent that Margery attempts to vie with and surpass the Magdalene in her affective love for Christ, trying to set herself up as more Magdalenian than the Magdalene in her access to Christ’s body. This helps her in her self-portrayal as even more privileged than the holy harlot type. Her envy of Mary Magdalene’s physical closeness to Jesus at the deposition is evident: And þan þe creatur thowt sche herd Mary Mawdelyn seyn to owr Lady: “I pray ȝow, Lady, ȝyf me leue to handelyn & kissyn hys feet, for at þes get I grace.” Anon owr Lady ȝaf leue to hir […]. And anon Mary Mawdelyn toke owr Lordys feet […]. And þe sayd creatur thowt þat sche ran evyr to 99

Theresa Coletti explicitly makes the link between Margery’s honorary virginity and her imitatio of Mary Magdalene. See her Drama of Saints, p. 178. For Margery Kempe as honorary virgin, see Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 180–94 and Sandra J. McEntire, “The Journey into Selfhood: Margery Kempe and Feminine Spirituality,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 51–69, at p. 61. 100 Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Margery Kempe’s Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Literature, Liturgy and Iconography (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 95.

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics & fro, as it had be a woman wythowtyn reson, gretly desyryng to an had þe precyows body be hirself alone. (BMK 193–4)

Margery’s competition with the Magdalene for the love of Christ leads her to stage herself alongside the Virgin Mary when Christ, in a popular non-scriptural episode, appears to his mother before visiting the Magdalene at the tomb.101 In so doing, Margery establishes herself in the Magdalene’s stead as the first witness to the Resurrection, a fact that is often given as an example of Christ’s special love for the harlot saint.102 In substituting herself for the saint, Margery manages to present herself as even more loved, more of a Bride, and thus more authoritative, than the repentant saint. While Christina and Julian strove to equal the holy harlots’ authority and their intimacy with Christ, Margery attempts to present her visionary experience of the Passion, and therefore her right to publish them in words and in writing, as superseding Mary Magdalene’s presence on Easter Sunday. Late medieval uneasiness with the noli me tangere notwithstanding, Margery accepts the fact that this episode indeed took place, but attempts to position herself as superior to the Magdalene in terms of loving Christ, as she expresses her disbelief at the Magdalene’s joy after being so rejected: she herself loves Christ too much, and would therefore never have accepted this slight with anything but great mourning: Owr Lord seyd to hir, “Towche me not.” Þan þe creatur thowt þat Mary Mawdelyn seyd to owr Lord, “A, Lord, I se wel ȝe wil not þat I be so homly with ȝow as I haue ben aforn,” […]. And þan the creatur thowt þat Mary went forth wyth gret joye, & þat was gret merueyl to hir þat Mary enioyid, for ȝyf owr Lord had seyd to hir as he dede to Mary, hir thowt sche cowde neuyr a ben mery. Þat was whan sche wolde a kissyd hys feet & he seyd, “Towche me not.” The creatur had so gret swem & hevynes in þat worde that euyr whan sche herd it in any sermown, as sche dede many tymys, sche wept, sorwyd, & cryid as sche xulde a deyd, for lofe & desir þat sche had to ben wyth owr Lord. (BMK 197)

Theresa Coletti and Carolyn Dinshaw have criticised Margery for her inability to understand “the deeper spiritual implications of the noli me tangere,” which led her to “pursue an utterly tactile religious epistemology.”103 However, while 101 BMK

196–7. This episode originated in the second century AD, but became popular only in the late medieval period. For a survey of this motif, see Stephen J. Shoemaker, “A Case of Mistaken Identity? Naming the Gnostic Mary,” in Which Mary? The Marys of Early Christian Tradition, ed. Stanley Jones (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), pp. 24–30. 102 See, notably, Festial 185. 103 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 162–3; Coletti, Drama of Saints, p. 84. For a different interpretation of this reaction to the noli me tangere, linked with

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature medieval scholars and the clergy may have condemned too literal and physical an interpretation of the intimacy between Christ and mankind, it was accepted and even favoured by visionaries and by much of the population at large. Indeed, this incomprehension of the Magdalene’s joy at her rejection has the same origin as Julian of Norwich’s difficulty to move from beholding the Son to contemplating the Father, or Christina of Markyate’s transgressive touch, both having sought to anchor their visionary experience in the emulation of the holy harlot’s unmediated, uninterrupted access to Christ. This incomprehension is therefore for Margery a testimony of the superiority of her love for Christ over that of the Magdalene, implying that she deserves more love from him in return. She further evidences her superiority to the Magdalene when, just a few chapters after her vision of the noli me tangere, she is herself allowed to fondle the toes of the risen Christ,104 or when she notes that Jesus tells her: “þerfor þu mayst boldly take me in þe armys of þi sowle & kyssen my mowth, myn hed, & my fete as sweetly as thow wylt.”105 Christ makes readily available to her touch the two specific parts of his body that the repentant saint had famously touched and kissed: his head (Matt. 26:7, Mk 14:3) and his feet (Lk. 7:38, Jn 12:3), this passage being reminiscent of Bernard of Clairvaux’s representation of the Bride of Christ’s movement from kissing the Bridegroom’s feet to kissing/anointing his head. Christ’s permissive stance appears here in stark contrast to his rejection of the Magdalene. As a saint, therefore, Margery emulates the holy harlot’s life. As a visionary, she surpasses the Magdalene in her access to Christ and her love for him. According to Liz Herbert McAvoy, this competition with the universal saint is “entirely typical” of her imitative process, and “constitutes another strategy used by her to achieve authority in the Book.”106 Margery’s self-portrayal as a “new and improved” Magdalene constitutes an important method for the mystic to present her peculiar behaviour as authoritative and legitimate, and this not only for posterity, but also for her contemporaries. To emulate and compete with a particularly affective Magdalene meant a great potential for authorisation on the part of Margery: we have seen, for instance, how the holy harlot’s privileged access to Christ was rehearsed in later medieval lives, like that of Bokenham, to explain Christ’s defence of some of her transgressive societal behaviour, whether it be her inaction at Martha’s house in Bethany, her touching of Christ’s feet at Simon’s house, or her potentially wasteful anointing of his head. In reproducing this intimacy, and attempting to replace the Magdalene in Christ’s affections, Margery finds authorisation for flouting,

mendicant teachings, see Audrey Walton, “The Mendicant Margery: Margery Kempe, Mary Magdalene, and the Noli Me Tangere,” Mystics Quarterly 35 (2009), pp. 1–29. 104 BMK 208. 105 BMK 90. 106 McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 46.

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics time and again, social and religious conventions, in parallel with the transgressive and divisive figure of the holy harlot. The authorisation of Margery’s mystical experience and the protection from blame that she draws from her imitatio Magdalenæ indeed lead her to resort to the Magdalene as an authorising precedent for the most litigious aspects of her behaviour. One of the actions in question is Margery’s constant, boisterous, and very public weeping. Her gift of tears is presented in the Book in parallel to that bestowed upon the Magdalene:107 Than owyr Lady spak to hir sowle on þis maner, seying, “[…] my derworthy dowtyr, be not aschamyd of hym þat is þi God, […], no mor þan I was whan I saw hym hangyn on þe Cros, my swete Sone, Ihesu, for to cryen and to wepyn or þe peyn of my swete Sone, Ihesu Crist; ne Mary Mawdelyn was not aschamyd to cryen and wepyn for my Sonys lofe.” (BMK 73)

The mystic further connects her gratia lacrimarum with the Magdalenian precedent by way of verbal echoes. For instance, Jerome comforts her about her excessive weeping, telling her: “dowtyr, drede þe nowt, for it is a synguler & a specyal ȝyft þat God hath ȝovyn þe – a welle of teerys, þe whech xal neuyr man take fro þe” (BMK 99). Jerome echoes several passages of Scripture here, linking Margery’s tears with Mary Magdalene as Mary of Bethany, who chose “the best part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Lk. 10:42), and the three Marys on Easter Sunday – among whom Mary Magdalene traditionally appears – who are told by angels not to fear (Mk 16:6; Matt. 28:5). Elsewhere in the text, Christ rehearses his words to the Magdalene when he addresses Margery: “Dowtyr, why wepyst þow so sor? […] I, þe same God, forȝefe þe þi synnes to þe vtterest point” (BMK 16). This phrasing is reminiscent of Christ asking the Magdalene, “Woman, why weepest thou?” (Jn 20:15) when he discovers her crying at the sepulchre. This connection is particularly clear, as the original scriptural scene is rehearsed twice quasi-verbatim in the Book.108 Christ’s forgiveness of Margery’s sins in this passage is further reminiscent of his absolution of the Magdalene at the house of Simon the Leper – “thy sins are forgiven” (Lk. 7:48) – especially because neither woman confesses her sins aloud to him. The importance of the Magdalene and of her silent confession as a precedent is even more crucial when one considers that the entirety of Margery’s visionary experience was triggered by her inability to confess “a thyng in conscyens” (BMK 3) – probably a heretical belief, something that would be supported by the priest’s reluctance to let Margery Kempe finish her confession.109 The Magdalene, so often used by Wycliffites to validate their On Margery’s weeping as an imitatio Magdalenæ, see Eberly, “Patterns of Contemplation,” pp. 209–23. For the contention that Margery Kempe imitates in her tears both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, see McAvoy, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 105–26. 108 See BMK 75 and 197. 109 My thanks to Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Sarah Salih for this suggestion. 107

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature unmediated access to forgiveness, is therefore also central for Margery’s own special relationship with Christ which enables her not to confess aloud to a priest, but also provides a backing precedent for her gift of tears. Moreover, Margery repeatedly classifies her tears into a threefold taxonomy of “terys of compu[n]ccyon, devocyon, and compassyon” (BMK 31) that is firmly associated with Mary Magdalene in the Middle Ages, as Susan Eberly shows.110 The Magdalene was indeed reputed to have wept tears of compunction for her own sins, tears of compassion at the death of Lazarus and Christ, and tears of devotion for the Risen Christ.111 In The Privity of the Passion, for instance, it is said that “the fete that scho weschede before with teres of compunncione, aftyrwardez scho weschede theme wele better with teres of devocyone and bitter compassione.”112 Margery’s insistence throughout the Book on this taxonomy establishes her gift of tears as an imitatio of the repentant saint. She especially favours mention of this threefold gift when she needs to validate the orthodoxy of her devotion, for instance when she seeks the support of Julian of Norwich, that of a papal legate, or that of her audience or reader when she is slandered in church by the friar in Lynn.113 Julian of Norwich, the only woman from whom Margery asks for the validation of her tears and visions, is the only addressee who identifies her attempted imitatio correctly and recognises it as a valid authorising model for the discretio spirituum, repeating the three types of tears in her answer to Kempe: What creatur that hath thes tokenys, he muste stedfastlych belevyn that the Holy Gost dwellyth in hys sowle, and mech mor, whan God visyteth a creatur wyth terys of contrisyon, devosyon er compassyon, he may and owyth to levyn that the Holy Gost is in hys sowle. (BMK 42–3)

The only person to accept Margery’s imitation of the Magdalene’s gift of tears is thus a mystic who herself used the repentant saint for authorisation. The recognition of the Magdalenian figure as a valid precedent for Margery’s behaviour therefore appears to be gendered in the text, a woman being the only one to accept it. In addition to presenting her public displays of emotion as an imitation of the Magdalene, Margery attempts to model on the holy harlot another 110 See

Eberly, “Patterns of Contemplation,” pp. 209–23. different sermons for the Magdalene’s feast day that discuss one or more types of tears shed by Mary Magdalene, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, “Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995), pp. 1–25. See in particular Jacobus de Voragine, sermon 267, in Sermones Quadragesimales, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzo, 2005), p. 393. 112 Carl Horstmann (ed.), Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church, and His Followers, 2 vols (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1895), vol. 1, p. 210. 113 BMK 42, 63, and 152. 111 On

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics aspect of her behaviour that might be controversial for her contemporaries: her itinerant preaching and teaching. When she is accused of preaching at the court of the archbishop of York, Margery claims that: “I preche not, ser, I come in no pulpytt. I vse but comownycacyon & good wordys, & þat wil I do whil I leue” (BMK 126). Although Margery carefully crafts an acceptable nomenclature in order to refer to her public speaking,114 her vision of St Paul encouraging her to “boldly spekyn” in Christ’s name and apologising for the fact that she had “suffyrd mech tribulacyon for cawse of hys wrytyng” (BMK 160) – presumably referring to Paul’s injunction against women teaching or preaching in public (1 Tim. 2:8; 1 Cor. 14:34) – suggests that Margery indeed consciously preached throughout her life. A strong argument in that direction is that, when brought up on charges of heresy in Lincoln, she defends herself by quoting Christ’s advice to his disciples when he envisages their being brought to justice by pagans in the course of their apostolic duties.115 Although Margery does not call it so, then, she does indeed preach. Margery echoes in her preaching the freedom of movement that holy harlots display when they teach. While several critics have convincingly argued that the virgin martyrs Katherine of Alexandria, Margaret of Antioch, and Cecilia were models for Margery’s teaching,116 only Audrey Walton has linked it with Mary Magdalene.117 Margery’s public ministry is not limited, as that of the aforementioned virgin martyrs, to one specific locale and time. Rather, mirroring the Magdalene’s apostolate in Jerusalem,118 Marseilles, and Aix-en-Provence, Margery’s numerous pilgrimages offer her the opportunity to teach both men and women publicly wherever she goes. In Canterbury, she rehearses “a story of scriptur” (BMK 13) to a monk. In London, many people gather to hear “hir dalyawns & hir comunycacyon” (BMK 37), and in Middleburg, Zeeland, she goes “to sportyn hir in þe felde & men of hir owyn nacyon with hire, þe which sche informyd in þe lawys of God as wel as sche cowde” (BMK 101).119 Further, Margery is the recipient not only of the Magdalene’s gift of tears, but also of her gift of tongues, further authorising her teaching and preaching, both orally and with the written word. Her Book is after all in many ways 114 On

the importance of terminology in the authorisation of women’s public speech, see Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, “Preface: Authority and Definition,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xiv. 115 BMK 135, in reference to Matt. 10:19 and Mk 13:11. 116 Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 195–201 and Sanok, Her Life Historical, pp. 132–40. 117 A notable exception to this is Walton, “The Mendicant Margery,” pp. 14–18. 118 The Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalene presents her as preaching during Christ’s life in Jerusalem in addition to her role as apostolorum apostola in the same city. See ESEL 158–62. 119 On Margery’s use of the term “lawys of God” to refer to preaching, see Walton, “The Mendicant Margery,” pp. 3–4.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature the written testimony of her oral teachings.120 As we have seen in the Digby Magdalene, the repentant harlot was sometimes reputed, in the later medieval period, to have been with the apostles when they received the Holy Ghost (Acts 2:4–8).121 Margery Kempe also possesses the “ȝyft of þe Holy Gost” (BMK 135) and displays a gift of tongues, for instance when she cannot find any English speaker willing to confess her in Rome.122 Indeed, both Margery and a “Duche preste” (BMK 84) who speaks only German receive the gift of xenoglossia, so as to be able to communicate (BMK 82–3). This Pentecostal gift is then witnessed at a dinner by an assembly of clerics, who marvel that “he vndirstod what sche seyde & sche vndirstod what he seyd, & he code vndirstonde non oþer Englysch-man” (BMK 98). Yet another xenoglossic miracle, this time concerning the written word, furthers the connection between Margery’s gift of tongues and her imitation of the Magdalene. The mystic establishes in the proem to her Book the justification for the writing down of her life. When her amanuensis is unable to read the initial manuscript version of her biography, probably begun by her son and written in an unreadable script that mixed German and English, Margery prays to God that he should be able to read it, and immediately the priest “be-gan to redyn þis booke, & it was mych more esy, as hym thowt, þan it was be-forn-tym” (BMK 5). This miracle of translation validates Margery’s literary enterprise. She connects this event, and therefore the writing of her Book, with the precedent of the Magdalene. She tells us that the scribe, immediately after this episode, “gan to wryten in þe ȝer of owr Lord a m. cccc. Xxxvj on þe day next aftyr Mary Maudelyn aftyr þe informacyon of þis creatur” (BMK 6). The day after Mary Magdalene’s festival is the feast for Bridget of Sweden, another important influence on Margery’s life.123 The choice to place the writing of her life under the auspices of both saints, with the Magdalene in a more explicit manner, underlines the importance of the harlot saint in Margery’s attempt to imbue her Book with legitimacy. In this way, not only does “Margery choose […] to ground her entire narrative in the authority offered by this former prostitute and saint,”124 but she also presents herself as a second Magdalene preaching through the written word, see Gillespie, Looking in Holy Books, pp. 38–40 and 183–4. See also Torn, “Margery Kempe,” p. 82. 121 See DM 1343–4, and Chapter 4, p. 108. 122 On Margery Kempe and xenoglossia, see Christine F. Cooper-Rompato, The Gift of Tongues: Women’s Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 104–42, and her “Miraculous Translation in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Studies in Philology 101 (2004), pp. 270–98; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 111. 123 On this influence, see notably Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 168–79, and Dickman, “Continental Tradition,” pp. 150–68. 124 McAvoy, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 120. 120 On

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics whose emulation of the saint’s Pentecostal inspiration by the Holy Ghost legitimises her preaching, while her paralleling of the Magdalene’s xenoglossia authorises her written word. Margery, however, insists on the fact that her attempts at imitatio Mariæ Magdalenæ repeatedly fail when her lay and clerical contemporaries are confronted with it. Indeed, we have seen that Julian of Norwich is the only one to accept Margery’s Magdalenian taxonomy of her gift of tears, and her itinerant preaching leads to her repeated imprisonment as well as to accusations of being a heretic and a Lollard.125 Although Margery should be protected from blame by way of her imitatio, she shows that her imitative performance more often than not encounters social censure. While Catherine Sanok posits that Margery’s modelling on the Magdalene is unacceptable to her contemporaries because this precedent is set too far in the past and arises from a vernacular tradition instead of Latin clerical culture,126 I maintain that Margery actually emphasises moments when her imitation is rejected. She does so to further her assimilation with the holy harlot whose behaviour, like hers, was repeatedly criticised. I argue that what some scholars have identified as Margery’s performance of a “martyrdom by slander”127 very much arises from her imitatio Mariæ Magdalenæ, with the purpose of gaining in reputation as a saint. Indeed, like the Magdalene and other holy harlots, Margery presents herself as a holy woman at odds with her own time, criticised and rejected by her society for her often very publicly transgressive behaviour, only to be protected time and again by Christ. Margery, for instance, emulates the holy harlot when she is repeatedly accused of being a promiscuous woman, echoing Simon the Pharisee’s accusation against Mary Magdalene.128 In addition, Margery is on two occasions the victim of censure that is precisely phrased to parallel her predicament with that of the Magdalene. When she is accused of heresy and of preaching by Henry Bowet, archbishop of York, he questions her: “why wepist þu so, woman?” (BMK 125). Another time, annoyed at Margery’s excessive weeping, a priest asks Margery: “why wepist so?” (BMK 174). Such phrases clearly mirror John 20:15, “Woman, why weepest thou?” not only reinforcing Margery’s identification with the harlot saint but also criticising her accusers’ failure to recognise the authorising power of an imitatio to which they actively contribute. Margery probably exaggerated in her Book the adversity she encountered in order to further her representation as a holy harlot: the social ostracism that she recounts in the Book is difficult to realign with her admission in 1438 to Lynn’s most 125 BMK

27–9, 65–6, 116–17, 122–37. Her Life Historical, pp. 116–32. 127 Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 47. See also Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 212. 128 On Margery being accused of promiscuity, see McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, pp. 108–12. This also echoes the suspicions around Christina of Markyate’s chastity. For this, see pp. 192–3. 126 Sanok,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature important civic organisation, the Guild of Trinity,129 or, indeed, with the many instances of acceptance and support in the Book, instances which are often less foregrounded than moments of rejection. Margery’s imitation of holy harlots is therefore comprehensive: she models her Book on the structure and events of the lives of holy harlots, competes with the Magdalene so well that she surpasses her in her physical and affective intimacy with Christ, and parallels her tears and her preaching with that of the repentant prostitute. Margery anchors her mystical and saintly authority in the repentant saint, associating both her preaching and the writing of her life with the Magdalene. At the same time, she grounds any rejection of her charismatic authority on an imitatio Mariæ Magdalenæ, using the censorship and suspicion she sometimes encountered in her life to increase her authority for posterity. Kempe even attempts to become the Magdalene in her vision and surpass her in her relationship with Christ. As I will show, this gambit is mirrored in Elizabeth Barton’s use of the Magdalene. Barton does not solely try to surpass the Magdalene in her relationship with Christ, but also in her authority: while Kempe is still, to borrow Diane Watt’s expression, the “secretary of God,”130 in having her visions written down, Barton has the Magdalene become her own secretary and handmaiden instead. ELIZABETH BARTON Elizabeth Barton (1506–34), a nun and mystic sometimes referred to as “The Holy Maid of Kent,” was very creative in her use of Mary Magdalene as a validating figure for her visions. Barton was a servant in the parish of Aldington in Kent. When she was aged nineteen, a serious illness spelled the beginning of her visionary experience in the form of conversations with God, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and angels. A commission appointed by the then archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, was sent to evaluate her visions according to the doctrine of discretio spirituum. She so convinced Doctor Bocking, the head of the committee responsible for assessing her visions, that he became her confessor. She then took the veil at the Benedictine convent of the St Sepulchre near Canterbury. Around that time the contents of her visions, formerly revolving around a reaffirmation of basic orthodox Catholic beliefs, took a turn for the political in the context of Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon.131

Dissenting Fictions, pp. 76–7. Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). 131 Diane Watt, “Reconstructing the Word: The Political Prophecies of Elizabeth Barton (1506–1534),” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997), pp. 136–63, at p. 140. 129 Staley, 130 Diane

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics Elizabeth Barton attacked the king’s divorce through her prophecies.132 The king then took extreme measures to silence her: she was imprisoned at the Tower of London in 1533, condemned for heresy and treason by an Act of Attainder in 1534, and hanged on 20 April 1534 alongside some of her followers, becoming in the process the first martyr of the English Reformation. Barton was very popular from the early days of her visions,133 and was very influential even up until her tragic demise, gathering an important following and prominent connections in both the religious and secular worlds. Indeed, she not only visited the king on three separate occasions and earned a recommendation from Archbishop Warham, but she also met with two papal legates, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and the marchioness of Exeter.134 Elizabeth Barton is presented in both her trial and the Sermon Against the Holy Maid of Kent as a leading figure of the conservative Catholic movement opposed to the king’s divorce: according to these sources, Barton was the influence behind the pope’s ultimate condemnation of the divorce, and both Archbishop Warham and Cardinal Wolsey’s change of heart on the subject.135 Although these biased sources may have used her as a scapegoat, it remains that she symbolised in many ways the conservative Catholic Church and the faction opposed to the king’s divorce and the new religious order. This is further supported by the fact that the date of her execution, 20 April 1534, corresponds to the day the Londoners had to take the Oath of Succession.136 In many ways, Elizabeth Barton’s importance in the political and religious context of her day and her subsequent

132 L.E.

Whatmore, “The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents, delivered at Paul’s Cross, November the 23rd, 1533, and at Canterbury, December the 7th,” English Historical Review 58 (1943), pp. 463–75, at p. 467. See also James Gairdner et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London: Longman, Green Longman & Roberts, 1886), vol. 6, November 1533, 11–20, n. 1419, www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=846, or the Act of Attainder against Elizabeth Barton and her followers, Alexander Luders et al. (eds), Statutes of the Realm: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the Third… From Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, 11 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1810–1828), vol. 3, p. 446. 133 William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent: Conteining the Description … of that Shyre (London: Bollifant, 1596), pp. 151–2; Luders, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, p. 447. 134 For her visits with the king, see Sharon L. Jansen, Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms of Henry VIII (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 48, and Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, vol. 6, November 1533, 21–5, n. 5. For Warham’s letter of recommendation, and her meetings with different influential people of the day, see Jansen, Dangerous Talk, pp. 45–8. On her secret meeting with the Marchioness, see Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vol. 6, November 1533, 21–5, n. 1464–5. 135 Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vol. 6, November 1533, 11–20, n. 1445, and Whatmore, “The Sermon,” p. 467. 136 Gairdner, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, pp. 471–4.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature disappearance into obscurity recall the lives of the sante vive, or “living saints,” who were so popular in Italy from the mid-1450s to approximately 1530, and who were often instrumental in the power struggles between Italian city-states, becoming court prophets whose rise and fall depended on that of the prince to whom they were linked.137 Barton’s popularity and influence may also be deduced from the violence of the censorship directed against her before and after her death. This censorship was so successful that, to date, only hostile witnesses to Barton’s prophecies survive.138 One can discern only with relative difficulty if the prophecies Barton purportedly received, and the actions she allegedly carried out, were her own, or if they were attributed to her in hindsight by her biased accusers. Furthermore, it is not easy to determine whether the emphasis put on some prophecies or visions of the Maid in the sources reflects their actual importance for Barton, or whether these visions are put forward as most controversial by her accusers so as to strip Barton of her credibility and present her as a heretic and a traitor. The Holy Maid of Kent, then, appears to have been a very influential and authoritative woman, in whom many believed, and who presented such a threat to Henry VIII that he took special care to suppress her prophecies. Living and prophesying at a time of particular religious and political upheaval, Barton thus needed an efficient way of authorising her visions, something that she did by presenting herself as a passive vessel for God’s message and by the validating power of her miracles.139 The most important source of legitimacy for Barton, however, arises from her inventive use of the saints she sees in her visions, especially St Mary Magdalene, with whom she repeatedly interacts. The Magdalene appears as a logical authorising figure for Barton. Indeed, it has now become apparent that the holy harlot lends particular legitimacy to mystics’ visions and visionaries’ desire to publish these orally or through the written word, and Elizabeth Barton is reputed to have been an active preacher during her life.140 Further, the type of the holy harlot also constitutes a much parallel between the sante vive and Elizabeth Barton has hitherto gone unnoticed and would merit further scrutiny. On the sante vive, see Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive: Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ‘400 et ‘500 (Turin: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1990). See also her “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 219–303. 138 Only a single fragment of Edward Bocking’s Latin Great Book survives. It is edited in John R. McKee, Dame Elizabeth Barton, O.S.B., The Holy Maid of Kent (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1925), pp. 60–3. 139 For Elizabeth as a passive vessel, see Watt, “Reconstructing the Word,” p. 145. With regard to her miracles, Lambarde remarks that “this divination and foretelling, was the first matter that moved her hearers to admiration.” See his A Perambulation, p. 149. 140 She is described as a preacher in 1531 by William Tyndale. He is a very early witness, though perhaps not the most reliable, since he left England in 1524. It is however probable that he simply conveyed a fact that was common knowledge. See his An 137 The

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics safer example of criticism of male authority, be it secular or religious, than the virgin martyr. A repentant prostitute can criticise male clerics without having to die in the process as a virgin martyr (one thinks of Mary of Egypt and Pelagia). A harlot saint can even chastise kings with impunity, like the Magdalene does when she criticises the king of Marseilles’s failure to provide food for her and her Christian followers in Marseilles. This of course provides a precious precedent for Elizabeth Barton when she opposes Henry VIII; especially as the Magdalene shows the prince the error of his heathen ways and converts him to Catholicism, in the same way the Holy Maid sets out to lead the king back into the fold of Catholicism, away from what she believed was a dangerous and heretical path.141 The Magdalene seems, then, a natural choice for Barton to use as a validating figure, and, indeed, in the comparatively scant information on Barton’s visions that can be drawn from the biased sources at hand, the Magdalene is well represented, her communications with the nun having seemingly constituted an important reason for her increasing popularity among the laity and the religious authorities. The Magdalene is said to “often appere to the seid Elizabeth and revele to her many revelacions.”142 She conveys to her specific messages comforting her in her sanctity and her power as an intercessor: Item, it is written in the said great book143 that Mary Magdalene said to the said nun: “It hath pleased my Lord God that, through your petition, ye have by the mercy of my said Lord saved the soul of him which was sometime my servant from eternal damnation, that he should have gone unto, if ye had not helped him with such pains as ye have taken; and now he is in eternal joy and everlasting salvation.”144

Not only does Barton use the figure of the Magdalene in this passage to lend authority to her own intercessory powers, she also positions herself as an even more powerful intercessor than the repentant saint herself. Indeed, although the man saved from damnation is Mary Magdalene’s particular “servant,” it is the Maid’s intercession, not that of the saint, that moved God. Margery Kempe attempted to replace the Magdalene as intercessor. Here, Elizabeth not only Answere Unto Sir Thomas Mores (Antwerp: Symon Cock, 1531), fol. 57r. Several other sources state that others preached, or intended to preach, her visions. See Whatmore, “The Sermon,” pp. 467–9, Luders, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, pp. 449–50, and Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vol. 7, January 1534, 11–15, n. 72. 141 Andrew Hope makes much the same connection between mystic and saint. See his “Martyrs of the Marsh: Elizabeth Barton, Joan Bocher and Trajectories of Martyrdom in Reformation Kent,” in Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c. 1400–1640, ed. Robert Lutton and Elisabeth Salter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 41–58, at p. 43. 142 Luders, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, p. 448. 143 Bocking’s lost Great Book. 144 Whatmore, “The Sermon,” p. 470.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature manages this very same feat, but has the Magdalene herself confirm the Maid’s superiority over her. A little later in the Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent, Dr Capon refers to a letter that the Magdalene allegedly wrote on behalf of Elizabeth, in the tradition of the immensely popular Himmelsbrief, the “celestial letter.”145 This letter is illuminated in gold with the words “Jhesus Maria”146 and is dispatched to a widow in London with instructions to buy some church ornaments with gold hidden away by the latter’s late husband.147 The Magdalene again appears here to be exchanging roles with Barton: Item, it is written in the great book in the end, of a certain letter written by Mary Magdalene’s hand (as is feigned) and delivered to a widow in London, […]. Also to prove the evident falsehood of this nun concerning her revelations, you shall understand that she feigned (as it is written in the said great book) that Mary Magdalene wrote this letter in heaven in the nun’s name, and that she, feigning herself to be the nun’s maid, delivered the same to a widow in London.148

Barton presents herself as the one whose visionary insights are written down by Mary Magdalene, who becomes the mystic’s scribe. Instead of Barton being the recipient of the Magdalene’s revelations, the Magdalene becomes the recipient of Barton’s vision, writes it down, and acts as her maid, running the errand of bringing the letter to its rightful recipient. Barton, who had begun her life as a maid, turns the tables on the Magdalene and becomes her social superior. As Barton paradoxically manages to gain authority in presenting herself as a weak and passive vessel for the Word of God, she increases, in the same manner, the authority of her visions by humbling in comparison to her the very saint who lends her authority. Himmelsbriefe were particularly popular tools to legitimise different endeavours, such as the First and Fourth Crusades, or the sanctity of other sante vive.149 The written word, particularly illuminated with gold, conveyed great authority to Barton, especially at a time when print was taking over. It is no surprise, then, that the letter had an important influence on the people’s faith in Barton’s communications with Heaven: it figures prominently in the

145 Gabor

Klaniczay and Ildiko Kristof, “Ecritures saintes et pactes diaboliques. Les usages religieux de l’écrit (Moyen Âge et Temps Modernes),” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 56 (2001), pp. 947–80, at p. 967; Francesco Zambon, “La Lettre de Petrus et le motif de la ‘Lettre tombée du ciel’ dans la littérature gnostique et apocryphe,” Senefiance 11 (1982), pp. 371–83. 146 Whatmore, “The Sermon,” p. 471. 147 Ibid., p. 470. 148 Ibid., pp. 470–1. 149 See, for instance, Magdalena of Freiburg (c. 1407–85) and her use of the topos, discussed in Klaniczay and Kristof, “Ecritures saintes,” p. 968.

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Emulation by Late Medieval Female Mystics texts – it is mentioned in four separate sources,150 and the mystic’s accusers took special care to reject its authenticity. Dr Capon, for instance, explains: For by much inquisition Mary Magdalene is found out, and is turned into a monk of St. Augustine’s in Canterbury, named Hawkhurst! Who hath confessed the writing thereof, and the limning of these golden words, Jhesus Maria, which be written about the letter. Which letter was kept by Dr. Bocking as a solemn relic here at Canterbury.151

The comical juxtaposition of the letter’s supposed author, the Magdalene, with the actual scribe, a monk of Canterbury, is aimed at deflating the increase in Elizabeth Barton’s credibility that such a letter would have brought her. The Magdalene constituted, then, an important authorising figure for the Nun of Kent, one that even her political enemies recognised and felt the need to ridicule. While Margery Kempe took pains to disclose her detractors’ failure to accept her emulation of the holy harlot, and used such portrayal to accrue her saintly status, Elizabeth Barton’s imitation of the saint is acknowledged by her accusers, and its authorising power is recognised. It is clear that the holy harlot was a particularly popular type of saint for female mystics to emulate in the later medieval period, one that was flexible and versatile enough to be used by women of different social, religious, and marital or sexual status. Indeed, Christina is a married virgin, Julian an anchoress, Margery married and a mother, and Elizabeth a nun. This confirms the notion developed in the preceding chapters that the type of the holy harlot comes to represent femininity as a whole. Emulating repentant prostitutes, for instance Christina of Markyate or Margery Kempe, enables them to present their performance of sanctity in all of its complexity. Instead of equating their mysticism or sanctity as being rooted in an essentialising feminine status as virgins or mothers, imitating the holy harlot allows for a performance of femininity that does not reduce it to sexual status. It may seem paradoxical that this should be the case, as the holy harlot is indeed defined by her sexual sin, but we have seen that this is also a state that evolves, and that is left behind by holy harlots and mystics alike: the harlot saint model permits a varied performance of femininity, in constant mutation. One can link one’s motherhood, virginity, or sexual sin, with the repentant harlot type. It also enables the bypassing of virginity for access to heavenly bridal status, as the repentant sinner’s connection with affective piety is conceived as higher than virtue or virginity. More than this, the repentant harlot’s sin and penance leads her to be conflated with the Virgin Mary, creating a figure representing “The Sermon,” pp. 470–1, Wright, Suppression of the Monasteries, 14, in Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vol. 6, November 1533, pp. 21–25, n. 1466, Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vol. 7, January 1534, n. 72. It also appears in the Act of Attainder. See Luders, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, p. 448. 151 Whatmore, “The Sermon,” p. 471. 150 Whatmore,

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature affective feminine power, a logically attractive model for women to emulate. However, the notion of the heightened intimacy with Christ that is brought about by sin and repentance is not necessarily feminine: while Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene are evoked, Peter, Paul, or Thomas are also mentioned by the different mystics. Yet, whereas there is a wide array of male, formerly sinful figures one can choose from, the only feminine saintly model on offer is the repentant harlot. In addition to this, the precedent of the harlot saint allows for freedoms, notably in the interaction with male clerics, but also in terms of geographical liberties, or in permitting the public performance of feminine authority, without the punishment of martyrdom. The holy harlot type therefore offers a validating precedent for a wide range of socially and religiously transgressive behaviours for women, such as preaching (orally or through the written word), moving up in the world (for instance for Elizabeth Barton), living with men for Christina of Markyate, Universalism for Julian of Norwich and Marguerite Porete, for Margery Kempe’s gift of tears, or even Elizabeth Barton’s political resistance as a sante vive. In other words, a significant amount of female mystics’ beliefs and behaviours that do not correspond to the mainstream can be supported by the repentant prostitute, Mary Magdalene chief among them. However, the radical potential of the repentant saint to question gender boundaries and break new ground would not survive the Reformation. In many ways, the holy harlot and the multifaceted and variegated model of femininity it offered was a specifically medieval construct. With the advent of the early modern period, reformists and transgressive women alike would need to seek elsewhere for a backing precedent as the universal valuation of femininity, notably through the representation of the holy harlot, disappears.

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CONCLUSION: HOLY OR HARLOT? THE EARLY MODERN DEMISE OF THE SAINTLY PROSTITUTE

H

oly harlots are, by the very paradox their name seems to represent, very malleable figures. They were used as models and invested with meaning by various groups and people in the medieval period, whether by reformists, women, the Church, the laity, or Everyman in general. Almost cipher-like, their multivalence is comparable to the ancient Roman lupa – simultaneously she-wolf, nourishing mother, and whore – a figure whose complexity permitted her to be used by numerous political, social, and religious entities, with various agendas.1 I have shown the central importance of holy harlots in our understanding of the wider significance of femininity in the medieval period, especially in its intersections with sexuality, holiness, and authority. For women, this hagiographical model permits a much more inclusive and overarching representation of femininity when compared to the figure of the virgin martyr or that of the holy mother. From Eve to Mary and all iterations of women in between, the harlot saint is so versatile that she provides the blueprint for the lives of two diametrically different mystics: Margery Kempe, a laywoman and a mother, and Christina of Markyate, a virgin and female religious. All of the mystics and saints we have encountered in the previous chapter found the holy harlot, and Mary Magdalene in particular, a worthy model for emulation because she represents their life journey as women in all of its complexity and paradoxes, rather than a static picture of timeless femininity. More than this, the harlot saint is a model of femininity that is inextricably linked with authority. This may be explained to a certain degree by the fact that she is a public, and influential, woman even before her conversion. Throughout the Middle Ages she leads and “converts” men to sin even before her repentance, so much so that in the later medieval period she does not need to change her behaviour with her repentance, her negative influence 1

See the excellent study by Cristina Mazzoni, She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature pre-conversion simply gathering a positive meaning later on in her life. In this way, unlike a virginal Katherine or Margaret whose enticing sexuality before they become public saints serves only to attract the unwanted attentions of a suitor, Mary of Egypt, Thaïs, or Pelagia already live a life in the public eye as harlots before they become holy and turn their sensuality – we have seen most importantly from the twelfth century onward – into their later sanctity as Brides of Christ. There are other reasons for their continued authoritative position, and for their roles as preachers and teachers. First, they do not die when they are twelve, like most virgin martyrs, so that they can be called “Mother,” and their advanced age in the later part of their lives brings them respect and authority. Second, and relatedly, they have lived in the world as former sinners and can speak of it by virtue of this experience. Third, it is this very sinful past which links them with affective piety and the Virgin Mary, so that by the end of the medieval period they come to represent the highest election in heaven. Like Julian of Norwich’s parable of the servant and the lord, they have fallen, and are therefore cherished most particularly by the Lord. As experienced, enticing women who have lived in the world, their fallen status means that they always possess a certain extent of charismatic authority alongside the traditional authority they get in their affective connection with Christ. However, it has become apparent that Old English texts often made more of the first type of validation, while later hagiography privileged their affective intimacy with the Son as the origin of their authority and their right to advise, teach, and preach. The multivalence and flexibility of the holy harlot model therefore explains the saint’s authority as well as her popularity among women, who may see in her worldliness a reflection of themselves. Contemporary scholars have failed to understand the popularity of this model for women. Why, they have asked, would anyone want to imitate a saint who had been a prostitute? This line of interrogation has less to do with medieval bias than with our inherited assumptions about how long the stigma left by past sexual sin endures. The fact that many female aristocrats such as Isabel Bourchier and several mystics, even virginal ones like Christina of Markyate, chose to model themselves on the holy harlot tells us that these women’s pasts as prostitutes did not have a lasting or deleterious effect on their perceived sanctity in this period. I have argued that the holy harlot offers a more inclusive portrayal of womanhood in the Middle Ages than any other type of female saint. What, then, can the harlot saint tell us about this complex concept that is femininity, and how it intersects with sanctity? In early medieval England the saint’s femininity is equated with fallen humanity: to become a saint, the woman has to rise above this, but instead of the usual scholarly conception that rising above one’s femininity means gender inversion and performing masculinity, the Old English lives of holy harlots have demonstrated to us that this rather means queering one’s gender, that is to say, rising above gender altogether, above gender binarism, to become simply a saint whose gender 224

Conclusion is not an issue, a characteristic, anymore. I linked this process of sanctification through queering with a similar development in female heroes, who, I argue, also rise above gender differences to become heroes. This realisation suggests that femininity was already used as a metaphor for humanity in general in pre-Conquest England. Later on, and while femininity is still very much connected with sinful humanity, it also comes to represent the highest election in heaven, or, in other words, humanity redeemed. Performing a “holy harlot type” of femininity can thus lead to the worst sin, but also to one’s assimilation with the Virgin Mary through affective piety and the figure of the Bride of Christ. The harlot saint’s femininity, and femininity in general, then, stands at both extremes of the spectrum of valuation. The appearance of the association of a “holy harlot type” of femininity with humanity in early medieval England means that this concept, already established for the later medieval period (most notably by Caroline Walker Bynum), appeared much earlier than previously thought.2 The harlot saint provides a metaphor for mankind’s move from sin to salvation in the queering of her gender before the Conquest, and in her unchanging feminine performance in later texts. The late medieval holy harlot exemplifies the reversal of Beauvoir’s notion that male signifies mankind and female the Other: for the Digby playwright, for instance, the repentant prostitute is Everyman and Christ, while male protagonists are the fallen Other. This has wide implications for the valuation of the particular brand of femininity represented by the holy harlot. Indeed, while the performance of femininity through virginity and motherhood are praised in the later medieval period, it is, rather, the model of the sexual sinner – the repentant lecher who turns to God – that is presented for emulation, portrayed for women and men alike as permitting to be “inhansyd in heven above vergynnys” (DM 2022). This model is freeing for women who had lost their virginity and procreated but still wished to reach an especially high rank in heaven. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, the holy harlot is also universally accepted by men as a type of saint available for imitation, which tells us that men could perform feminine lechery unproblematically in the medieval period – indeed this performance could even be a stepping stone in their quest for salvation, a performance perhaps akin to men’s performance of femininity as Brides of Christ. The harlot saint is also a liberating model in a different way. Because of her malleability as a symbol, she stands for reform, transgression, and resistance to the mainstream. In Old English texts, she represents alternative paths to salvation and offers a charismatic counterpart to the clergy’s traditional authority. In the later medieval period, her lives and the writings of those who propose to emulate her present her as a champion of the laity and 2

For the later medieval conception of femininity as humanity, notably Christ’s humanity, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 151–78.

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature women, advocating for affective piety, lay or female preaching, Wycliffism, Universalism, and both criticism and reform of the clergy. Her authority turns traditional, now backed by Christ in her feminine role as his Bride, and the holy harlot is used to articulate these new ideas and concepts. Although this monograph has engaged with the legacy of a relatively small group of female saints, therefore, the issues explored here are far ranging: the harlot saint represents femininity and humanity, and is accepted by the mainstream at the same time as she is used as a vector of change. While the holy harlot is a versatile type of saint and a model for Everyman, her popularity is nevertheless circumscribed within a specific period: the end of the Middle Ages sounds the death knell for the popularity of harlot saints. Indeed, the alliance of holiness and harlotry which made the repentant prostitute so appealing in the Middle Ages ceases to be acceptable in the early modern period, when changing conceptions of femininity make such an association impossible. But was there really a crisis in the representation of femininity at the dawn of the early modern period? In her seminal essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Joan Kelly conceptualised a tightening, a “contraction of social and personal options” in the early modern period, while she conceives the medieval period allowed for the “expression of sexual love by women” and of their “sexual and affective rights.”3 Although scholars have since offered much-needed nuances to this sweeping portrayal,4 most still agree, alongside Susan Amussen and David Underdown, that an ideal of social order gained ground in the early modern period, something that led to renewed emphasis being put on clearly defined roles for women in religion, marriage, and reproduction, as Amussen and Underdown have notably shown.5 This can be seen in the humanist interest in the Querelle des Femmes and in the witch trials, but also in the demise of the medieval holy harlot as a universal figure for sin and salvation, lechery and holiness. The conflation of saint and harlot into one woman was no longer acceptable in the new social order. She must necessarily be one thing or another, so much so that the story of Thaïs, which for instance resurfaces in Erasmus’s colloquy Adolescentis et scorti, “The Young Man and the Harlot,”6 strips her of her sanctity and 3 In Women,

History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 19–50, at pp. 20 and 22. 4 See notably Judith M. Bennett, “Medieval Woman, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identitites, and Writing, ed. David Aers, (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 47–75; David Cressy, “Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996), pp. 438–65; 5 See most recently Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown, Gender, Culture, and Politics in England, 1560–1640: Turning the World Upside Down (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 6 See The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Craig. R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), vol. 39: Colloquies, pp. 381–9.

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Conclusion “simplifies” her as the whore Lucretia. Lucretia does not experience any repentance for her life and appears to agree unwillingly to the young man’s request that she leave her brothel. Her role in the colloquy seems to be that of a much-needed bawdy comic relief to the young man Sophronius’s sometimes convoluted rhetoric, as her coarse humour allows her to pun on the name for penis and on Rome as the Lutheran “Babylonian Whore.” The immensely popular Magdalene follows the same path, though perhaps with more resistance, a testament to her importance as a medieval symbol for Everyman’s repentance and salvation. When Louise de Savoie, mother of François I, requests (as many powerful women before her had done) a life of the Magdalene from François du Moulin de Rochefort in 1516, the latter is puzzled, when doing some preliminary research for his new saint’s life, by the Gregorian conflation of three scriptural women – Mary of Bethany, the anonymous sinner of the city who washes Christ’s feet with her tears, and Mary Magdalene – into one Magdalenian figure. He therefore asks his former master, the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, to study the matter further. Unable to reconcile Mary Magdalene’s sinful past and lost virginity with her privileged intimacy with Christ, Lefèvre cannot understand how a former prostitute could have been allowed such unlimited access to Christ. In other words, the change in historical context renders completely aberrant the late medieval notion that the holy harlot was particularly beloved of Christ because she was so sinful.7 Lefèvre identifies Pope Gregory the Great’s conflation as the origin of the medieval harlot saint construct, and proceeds to differentiate in his treatise De Maria Magdalena et triduo Christi disceptatio (1517) between three scriptural Mary Magdalenes: the sinner of the City from Luke 7:37, Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha, and Mary Magdalene who followed and ministered to Christ in his itinerant preaching. The first is the only true former harlot Magdalene: he considers Mary of Bethany a holy virgin and the Magdalene who ministered to Christ either a matron or a widow, as, Lefèvre reflects, virgins customarily stayed at home, while married women could travel more honourably.8 This tripartite division, between virgin, harlot, and widow/mother, demonstrates on the one hand how all of these feminine sexual statuses were conflated in the figure of the holy harlot in the medieval period, but also signifies the inconceivability of such feminine multivalence in the early modern period.9 Lefèvre’s reflections on whether his deconstruction of the Gregorian conflation will impact on the saint’s 7

See Chapter 5, pp. 202–3. De Maria Magdalena et triduo Christi disceptationes, in Sheila M. Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre D’Etaples and the Three Maries Debates (Geneva: Droz, 2009), pp. 164–7 and 184–7. 9 Larissa Juliet Taylor reaches a similar conclusion in her “Apostle to the Apostles: The Complexity of Medieval Preaching about Mary Magdalene,” in Mary Magdalene in Medieval Culture: Conflicted Roles, ed. P. Loewen and R. Waugh (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 33–50. 8

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature popularity are worth quoting at length here, as they reveal that he connects this partition with a clearer classification of women according to their sexual status as virgins, sinners, and matrons: At dices, si populus non scandalizabitur, attamen si tres ponantur, eius deuotio minuetur. Immo crescet. Et peccatores, cum viri tum mulieres, ad Peccatricem recurrent, vt illis exoret peccatorum suorum veniam. Et piae matronae CHRISTVM deuotione sequentes, et membris eius per opera misericordiae ministrantes, ad Mariam Magdalenam quae a Galilaea seuqebatur dominum, ei de facultatibus suis ministrans. Sanctae vero virgines quae interno puritatis hospitio IHESVM recipiunt, atque ad pedes eius suauissima verborum ipsius contemplatione pascuntur, ad Mariam Marthae sororem, virginem, CHRISTI hospitam. Non enim vnquam legitur Martha habuisse virum, tanto minus Maria soror eius, natu minor.10

Lefèvre shows here that his separation of Mary Magdalene into three distinct figures presupposes a partitioning of the harlot saint’s following: each new figure will appeal to a different “type” of person, and only one, the sinner of the city, will appeal to men and women alike, provided they are sinners. These three Marys therefore do not share the universal appeal of the holy harlot: the virgin will not pray or attempt to emulate the same figure as the virtuous matron or the sinner. Lefèvre’s deconstruction of the Magdalenian conflation sparked a heated debate, inspiring a dozen tracts in 1518–19 and another four in the 1520s and involving the leading theologians of the day.11 The backlash to Lefèvre’s views was swift: the Paris faculty of theology condemned him in 1521, and he escaped an accusation of heresy only because he had the royal family’s protection. The extremity of this response reflects how ingrained the holy harlot – and her particular mix of lechery and sanctity – was in the popular imaginaire. While Lefèvre claimed that his effort to separate the sinful 10

“But, you will say, even if the people will not be scandalised, yet if it is suggested that there are three women, the people’s devotion will be diminished. On the contrary, it will increase. And sinners, both men and women, will resort to the sinful woman, so that she can obtain by her prayers pardon for their sins. And righteous matrons, following CHRIST in devotion and ministering to his members by works of charity, will resort to Mary Magdalen who followed the Lord from Galilee, ministering to him from her own resources. But holy virgins, who receive JESUS with the inward hospitality of purity, and are nourished at his feet by the sweetest contemplation of his words, will resort to Mary the sister of Martha, a virgin, the hostess of CHRIST. For we do not read anywhere that Martha had a husband; much less her sister Mary, who was younger. De Maria Magdalena, ed. Porrer, The Three Maries Debates, pp. 166–7. 11 See Auself Hufstader, “Lefèvre d’Etaples and the Magdalen,” Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969), pp. 31–60, at p. 31. The theologians involved in the debate included Jean Lefèvre d’Etaples, Josse Clichtove, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, Noel Bédier, soon to be dean of the faculty of theology of the University of Paris, Marc de Grandval, Augustinian canon of St Victor, and Erasmus.

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Conclusion Magdalene from the Magdalene as Christ’s lover would increase the saint’s dignity and popularity,12 he effectively stripped her of the very qualities that made her popular in the first place. The holy harlot model which had been used in the medieval period to represent radical and reformist ideas therefore came to be associated in the sixteenth century with a hearkening back to the medieval period and to conservative and Catholic values opposed to the Reform. This model is defeated by the advent of Protestantism. The association of “disorderly” women, especially whores, with recusant Catholics has been well documented by Frances Dolan,13 and it is clear that John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, chancellor of Cambridge University, and a staunch defender of Catholicism, identified Lefèvre’s attack on the Magdalenian conflation as a threat to the integrity of the medieval Church as a whole.14 This led him to publish three influential treatises criticising Lefèvre’s position in 1519.15 Fisher’s championing of the Gregorian conflation and his protection of Elizabeth Barton were probably both rooted in the same origin, a fidelity to the theology and hermeneutic traditions of the late Middle Ages.16 That the repentant saint and the mystic were intimately linked is witnessed by the fact that Fisher actually consulted Barton on the question of the three Magdalenes.17 Clearly, Fisher still thought about the debate long after he had stopped publishing on the matter, suggesting the importance of the question in this transitional period.18 Fisher’s coming to Barton with questions on the nature of the Magdalenian conflation also reveals that the Holy Maid of Kent was indeed successful in the validation of her voice through her emulation of the harlot saint, so successful that she managed to become an authority on the saint herself in a scholarly De Maria Magdalena, ed. Porrer, The Three Maries Debates, pp. 166–7. In her Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 14 See esp. Fisher, Libri tres, fol. IIIv, cited and translated in Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre D’Etaples, p. 105. 15 He publishes De unica Magdalena, Libri tres, and Confutatio secundae disceptationis per Jacobum Fabrum Stapulensem against Lefèvre. He pens Eversio munitionis against Josse Clichtove. 16 Eamon Duffy, “The Spirituality of John Fisher,” in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 205–32, at p. 211. Fisher was actually included in the 1534 Act of Attainder against Elizabeth Barton. He was attainted on suspicion of treason. His goods were confiscated at the same time as the mystic, and he was executed for treason in 1535. Luders, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, pp. 450–1. 17 He is at least accused to do so by Cromwell: Fisher is “communing with her and sending [his] chaplain to her with idle questions, as of the three Mary Magdalenes.” Gairdner, Letters and Papers, vol. 7, February, 26–8, n. 238. 18 These exchanges happened between 1525 (Barton’s first visionary experience) and 1534 (her death). 12

13

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Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature debate on the Scriptures, a debate in which women would not normally take part. Barton’s imitation of the saint therefore imbued her with tremendous authority from the point of view of such as Dr Capon or Bishop Fisher, but it suggests that Barton’s accusers may have emphasised the mystic’s connection with the saint in order to condemn both in one fell swoop, as representatives of a now obsolete conception of religious femininity.19 Elizabeth Barton was thus very successful indeed in her validation of her voice through the holy harlot. Like her, the type of the harlot saint symbolised late medieval popular Catholicism, and those championing one or the other did so in order to express their attachment to it and reticence toward Reformation and Renaissance. In many ways, this monograph has traced, through the development of the holy harlot, that of the medieval Church as a whole: from an early medieval English focus on eremitism, to an emphasis on affective, sometimes transgressive, access to the divine, to the downfall of a construct which had become too multivalent and too paradoxical to be left to develop further. It is perhaps ironic that the holy harlot, one of the earliest and most important figures used by Wycliffites to promote their proto-protestant vision of the “true” preacher, was to become synonymous with the Catholic faith, only to be defeated by the advent of Protestantism.

19

For a related argument, see Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 225.

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APPENDIX

VERNACULAR LIVES OF HOLY HARLOTS IN MEDIEVAL INSULAR HAGIOGRAPHY

This appendix lists the extant vernacular lives of holy harlots originating in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. These are divided into five categories, depending on whether they were written in Old English, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, Middle Welsh, or Irish. Some information about the texts has been supplied, and, where possible, the date, author, and source(s) are listed. The most recent edition of each saint’s life has also been added, alongside that of its Latin or vernacular source if available. A. OLD ENGLISH B. 1–3. Lives of Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, and Afra of Augsburg in the Old English Martyrology Late ninth century Short prose accounts drawn from diverse source material. Edition: Christine Rauer, The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013). B. 4. Pseudo-Ælfrician Life of Mary of Egypt Late tenth century This version is a close prose translation of a ninth-century Latin version by a deacon named Paul, itself a close translation from the early seventh-century Greek version reputedly authored by Sophronius. Edition: Hugh Magennis (ed.), Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt, An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-text Translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002). Edition of the closest source: the Cotton-Corpus Legendary version of the vita of Mary of Egypt is edited by Magennis in the same volume. 231

Appendix A. ANGLO-NORMAN B. 5. Life of Thaïs, anonymous c. 1160–801 This verse life was authored by an anonymous Anglo-Norman author, “most likely an Austin canon,” who also wrote translations of the Vitas Patrum, the Libellus de Antichristo, and the Visio sancti Pauli apostoli “for the moral and spiritual edification of the Templars.”2 The life of St Thaïs is dedicated to, and was probably commissioned by, Henri d’Arci. Edition: R.C.D. Perman (ed.), “Henri d’Arci: The Shorter Works,” in Studies in Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewert, ed. E.A. Francis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 279–321. Edition of the Latin source: Ibid. B. 6. T Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne, anonymous Last quarter of the twelfth century Long verse life (1532 lines) in octosyllabic couplets, source unknown. Edition: Peter F. Dembowski (ed.), La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, versions en ancien et en moyen français (Geneva: Droz, 1977). B. 7. Life of Mary of Egypt from Agdar’s Gracial c. 1150–1200 This short verse life of Mary the Egyptian (140 lines) in octosyllabic couplets appears in Adgar’s Gracial, the first major translation of Marian devotional literature into the vernacular. Adgar cites his source as the work of “Mestre Albri.”3 This source was lost, but probably resembled William of Malmesbury’s treatment of the saint in his De laudibus et miraculis Sanctae Mariae.4 Edition: Peter F. Dembowski (ed.), La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, versions en ancien et en moyen français (Geneva: Droz, 1977). On the date, see Keith V. Sinclair, “The Translations of the Vitas patrum, Thaïs, Antichrist, and Vision de saint Paul made for Anglo-Norman Templars: Some Neglected Literary Considerations,” Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 741–62, at pp. 759–61. See also Paul Meyer, “Notice sur le manuscrit fr. 24862 de la Bibliothèque Nationale contenant divers ouvrages composés ou écrits en Angleterre,” Notices et Extraits 35 (1895), pp. 131–68, at pp. 147–51. 2 Sinclair, “The Translations,” p. 762. 3 Carl Ludwig Neuhaus (ed.), Adgar’s Marienlegenden: nach der Londoner Hs. Egerton 612 (Wiesbaden: M. Sändig, 1968), p. 9. 4 Hilding Kjellman (ed.), La deuxième collection anglo-normande des miracles de la sainte Vierge et son original latin (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1922), pp. xviii–xxv, and Jennifer Shea, “Adgar’s Gracial and Christian images of Jews in Twelfth-Century Vernacular Literature,” Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007), pp. 181–96, at p. 183. 1

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Appendix Edition of William of Malmesbury’s De laudibus et miraculis Sanctae Mariae, a close parallel to the lost source: Peter Noel Carter (ed.), “An Edition of William of Malmesbury’s Treatise on the Miracles of the Virgin Mary: with an Account of its Place in his Writings and in the Development of Mary Legends in the Twelfth Century,” unpublished DPhil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1960. B. 8. Romanz de sainte Marie Magdaleine, by Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie c. 1210–40 This version is an adaptation of the Postquam Dominus (BHL 5456) in octosyllabic couplets. Edition: Olivier Collet and Sylviane Messerli (eds), Vies médiévales de MarieMadeleine (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). B. 9. N Vie de Marie l’Egipciene, anonymous c. 1230–50 This is a verse life in octosyllabic couplets (404 lines), loosely based on the T Vie. It survives in a single manuscript, London, BL MS Old Royal 20 B XIV (end of the thirteenth century), which contains only Anglo-Norman material.5 It was authored by an anonymous Anglo-Norman hagiographer, probably an Englishman.6 Edition: Peter F. Dembowski (ed.), La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, versions en ancien et en moyen français (Geneva: Droz, 1977). B. 10. Vie la Marie Magdalene, by Nicolas Bozon c. 1300–50 This Vie is a close translation from the Legenda aurea in octosyllabic couplets. Edition: Olivier Collet and Sylviane Messerli (eds), Vies médiévales de MarieMadeleine (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). Edition of the Latin source: Giovanni P. Maggioni (ed.), Legenda aurea (Florence: Galluzzo, 1998). B. 11. Anglo-Norman verse Life of Mary Magdalene, anonymous, fragment c. 1300 This version is a fragmentary verse life in alexandrine monorhyme stanzas appearing in York, Minster Library and Archives MS XVI. K. 13, folio 135rv. No known source for the life has been identified. Deuxième collection, p. xvi. Peter F. Dembowski, La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne (Geneva: Droz, 1977), p. 18.

5 Kjellman, 6

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Appendix Edition: Olivier Collet and Sylviane Messerli (eds), Vies médiévales de MarieMadeleine (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). A. MIDDLE ENGLISH B. 12. Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalene Second half of the thirteenth century This poem, in stanzas with mid-rhymes, was written around the same time as Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, but is probably independent from it. Edition: Carl Horstmann (ed.), The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints, EETS o.s. 87 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1887–). B. 13–14. South English Legendary Lives of Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene c. 1270–85 These verse lives were written around the same time as Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, but are probably independent from it. The Life of Mary Magdalene is an extensive reworking of the Early South English Legendary life of the saint to fit the metrical form of the other Legendary lives. The life of Mary of Egypt is based on Paul the Deacon’s Latin life. Edition: Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill (eds), The South English Legendary, EETS o.s. 244, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). B. 15. Life of Thaïs in the Northern Homily Cycle Early fourteenth century This verse life was composed in a northern dialect at the beginning of the fourteenth century by an anonymous author, perhaps an Austin canon. The life of Thaïs illustrates John’s Gospel 3:16–21. It is a close translation of the sixth- or seventh-century Vita Thaisis. Edition: E. Gordon Whatley, with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch (eds), Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). Edition of the Latin source: PL 137: 661–2. B. 16. Life of Mary Magdalene in the Auchinleck manuscript Manuscript dated between 1331 and 1340 Long original verse life of Mary Magdalene. This version appears to be a very free adaptation of the Legenda Aurea. Edition: Carl Horstmann (ed.), Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden (Heilbronn: Henniger, 1878; Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 1969), pp. 163–70. 234

Appendix B. 17. Lost Chaucerian Life of Mary Magdalene Second half of the fourteenth century This lost version is mentioned by Chaucer as one of his early works in his Legend of Good Women: “He made also, goon ys a gret while, / Origenes upon the Maudeleyne.”7 Source: Pseudo-Origen’s De Maria Magdalena. A Latin edition and English translation based on the version probably closest to that Chaucer used is provided by Rodney K. Delasanta and Constance M. Rousseau in their “Chaucer’s ‘Orygenes Upon the Maudeleyne’: A Translation,” The Chaucer Review 30 (1996), pp. 319–42. B. 18. Life of Mary Magdalene in John Mirk’s Festial Late 1380s A prose adaptation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea in the Festial, a collection of seventy-four saints’ lives intended as preaching tools for a lay audience, or one of uneducated clergy. John Mirk was an Austin Canon from Lilleshall in Shropshire. Edition: Susan Powell (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial, EETS o.s. 334, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–10). B. 19. Life of Mary Magdalene in the Speculum Sacerdotale End of the fourteenth century, beginning of the fifteenth century This anonymous sermon collection contains a short prose life of Mary Magdalene based on Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea and Luke’s Gospel. Edition: Edward H. Weatherly (ed.), Speculum Sacerdotale, Edited from British Museum MS. Additional 36791, EETS o.s. 200 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936). B. 20–23. Lives of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Thaïs, and Pelagia in the Scottish Legendary c. 1385–1400 This is a verse translation of Jean de Vignay’s Légende Dorée (completed in 1267), itself closely based on Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea. The source for the life of Mary the Egyptian, however, is Paul the Deacon’s Latin translation from Sophronius.8 The collection survives in a single manuscript,

Larry Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Legend of Good Women, G, 427–8. On this lost version, see John P. McCall, “Chaucer and the Pseudo-Origen De Maria Magdalena: A Preliminary Study,” Speculum 46 (1971), pp. 491–509. 8 Anne M. Sargent, “The Penitent Prostitute: The Tradition and Evolution of the Life of 7

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Appendix Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.2.6.9 The prologue that prefaces the life of Mary Magdalene is original, and refers to David, the Magdalene, and Mary of Egypt in a list of other saintly sinners. Edition: W.M. Metcalfe (ed.), Legends of the Saints in the Scottish Dialect of the Fourteenth Century, Scottish Text Society 13, 18 (vol. 1), 23, 25 (vol. 2), 35, 37 (vol. 3), 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1888–96; New York: Johnson, 1968). Edition of the sources: Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (ed.), La légende dorée. édition critique dans la révision de 1476 par Jean Batallier d’après la traduction de Jean de Vignay (1333–1348) de la Legenda Aurea (c. 1261–1266), Textes de la Renaissance 19 (Paris: Champion, 1997). Paulus Diaconus, Vita sanctæ Mariæ Egyptiacæ, PL 73:680. B. 24. Life of Thaïs in Jacob’s Well First quarter of the fifteenth century Jacob’s Well is an anonymous English penitential treatise in ninety-five sermons. The legend of Thaïs is drawn from the early fourteenth-century Alphabetum Narrationum, a Latin compilation of more than eight hundred tales written by Arnold of Liège, a French Dominican friar, and probably completed by 1307.10 This version is in turn based on the Vita Thaisis appearing in the Vitas Patrum. Edition: Arthur Brandeis (ed.), Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, Edited from the Unique MS. About 1440 A. D. in Salisbury Cathedral (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1900), pp. 22–3. Edition of the source: Elisa Brilli et al. (eds), Arnoldus Leodiensis. Alphabetum Narrationum, CCCM 160 (Turhnout: Brepols, 2015). B. 25. Life of Thaïs in An Alphabet of Tales, anonymous Early fifteenth century The Alphabet of Tales is a translation of the early fourteenth-century Alphabetum Narrationum by Arnold of Liège. The life of Thaïs appears as a short prose passage in the third chapter. Edition: Mary Macleod Banks (ed.), Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon,

St. Mary the Egyptian,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977, pp. 250–2. 9 Simon Lavery, “The Story of Mary the Egyptian in Medieval England,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 113–48, at pp. 121–3. 10 On this, see Joan Young Gregg, “The Exempla of ‘Jacob’s Well’: A Study in the Transmission of Medieval Sermon Stories,” Traditio 33 (1977), pp. 359–80, at p. 370.

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Appendix from additional MS. Add. 25719 of the British Museum, 2 vols, EETS o.s. 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1904–5), vol. 1, pp. 2–4. Edition of the source: Elisa Brilli et al. (eds) Arnoldus Leodiensis. Alphabetum Narrationum, CCCM 160 (Turhnout: Brepols, 2015). B. 26–29. Lives of Mary of Egypt, Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, and Thais in the Gilte Legende 1438 The Gilte Legende is a close prose translation of Jean de Vignay’s Légende Dorée (completed in 1267), itself a faithful translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea.11 Edition: Richard Hamer, with the assistance of Vida Russell (eds), Gilte Legende, 3 vols, EETS o.s. 327–9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–12). Edition of the French source: Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (ed.), La légende dorée. édition critique dans la révision de 1476 par Jean Batallier d’après la traduction de Jean de Vignay (1333–1348) de la Legenda Aurea (c. 1261–1266), Textes de la Renaissance 19 (Paris: Champion, 1997). B. 30–33. Verse Lives of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt; Prose Lives of Pelagia and Thaïs in Osbern Bokenham’s translation of the Legenda Aurea 1440s–1450s The verse life of Mary Magdalene by Osbern Bokenham, Austin friar from Clare Priory in Suffolk, appears in a collection of fourteen female saints’ lives by Bokenham, commissioned by different East Anglian aristocratic women and compiled together by Thomas Burgh, probably to be given to Burgh’s sister’s convent. That life also appears in the so-called Abbotsford Legendary, a translation by Bokenham of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea with additional saints’ lives in the newly discovered (2004) Abbotsford manuscript, alongside a verse life of Mary of Egypt, and prose lives of Thaïs and Pelagia. Edition: The Life of Mary Magdalene is edited in Mary S. Serjeantson (ed.), Legendys of Hooly Wummen by Osbern Bokenham, EETS o.s. 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). The Abbotsford Legendary is edited in Simon Horobin, Osbern Bokenham, Lives of the Saints, EETS o.s. 356 (London: Oxford University Press, 2020). A digital copy of the manuscript is online: http://lib1.advocates.org.uk/legenda/.

11

On the life of Mary of Egypt and its relationship with its Old French source, see Simon Lavery, “Gilte Legende Version of the Legend of Mary of Egypt,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt, ed. Poppe and Ross, pp. 149–60.

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Appendix B. 34. Digby play Mary Magdalene, anonymous Late fifteenth century The Digby Mary Magdalene play is one of only three suviving saint plays in English, and appears in a single manuscript, Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS Digby 133, from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Its sources are varied, borrowing freely from the New Testament, the Legenda Aurea, and the South English Legendary. Edition: Th. Coletti (ed.), The Digby Mary Magdalene Play (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2018). B. 35–38. Lives of Mary of Egypt, Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, and Thaïs in William Caxton’s Golden Legend First printed by Caxton in 1483 This version was first translated by Caxton from a late redaction of Jean de Vignay’s Légende Dorée. He also drew from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea and the Gilte Legende. Caxton printed a second edition of the Golden Legend in 1487, which Wynkyn de Worde had reprinted five times by 1527.12 Edition: F. S. Ellis, The Golden Legend of Master William Caxton Done Anew, 3 vols (London: Hammersmith, 1892). The first volume of a new edition of the Golden Legend by Mayumi Taguchi, John Scahill, and Satoko Tokunaga is now available as EETS o.s. 355 (London: Oxford University Press, 2020). B. 39–40. Lives of Pelagia and Mary of Egypt in William Caxton’s Vitas Patrum First printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495 This collection is a close translation of the Old French Vie des Pères, printed in Lyon in 1486 by Nicolas Philippi and Jean du Pré.13 Edition of the Middle French source: Félix Lecoy (ed.), La vie des pères, 3 vols (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1988). B. 41. Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne Late fifteenth/early sixteenth century This text is a “verse critique” of Pseudo-Origen’s De Maria Magdalena, a homily dated to the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries.14 Edition: Bertha Skeat (ed.), Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne (Cambridge: Fabb and Tyler, 1897).

12

On this, see See Lavery, “The Story,” pp. 118–19. See Lavery, “The Story,” p. 119. 14 Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 218. 13

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Appendix Edition of the Latin source: William Meniman (ed.), Omelia Origenis de Beata Maria Magdalena (London: W. Faques, 1505?). A. MIDDLE WELSH B. 42. Life of Mary of Egypt, Mair o ‘r Aifft in the Miracles of the Blessed Mary, Gwyrthyeu e Wynvydedic Veir The earliest surviving manuscript dates from the mid-thirteenth century A prose life of Mary of Egypt in Middle Welsh, part of a collection of miracles of the Virgin Mary. The source has been identified as a Latin collection of Marian miracles found in Oxford, Balliol College MS 240. Edition of the Middle Welsh text and its Latin source: Ingo Mittendorf (ed.), “The Middle Welsh Mary of Egypt and the Latin Source of the Miracles of the Virgin Mary,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 205–36. B. 43. Life of Mary Magdalene, Buched Meir Vadlen The earliest surviving manuscript dates from the mid-fourteenth century The Buched Meir Vadlen is often accompanied in manuscript by the life of Martha, the Buched Martha (in eight of the twelve extant manuscripts containing the Buched Meir Vadlen). No specific source could be pinpointed, although Jane Cartwright has noted that it is often closer to Mirk’s Festial than to the Legenda aurea.15 Edition: D.J. Jones (ed.), “Buchedd Mair Fadlen a’r Legenda aurea,” Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 4 (1929), pp. 325–39. This edition is based on Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 225, a late sixteenth-/ early seventeenth-century manuscript. A. IRISH B. 44. Homily on Mary Magdalene, incomplete The manuscript dates from the fourteenth century An incomplete Irish homily on the Magdalene, in the fourteenth-century Dublin, Trinity College MS H. ii. 15a (MS 1316), fols 95–. No definite source could be identified, and no edition exists. Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 134–9, esp. p. 136.

15 Jane

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Appendix B. 45. Life of Mary of Egypt, “Beatha Mhuire Eigiptacdha” Second half of the fifteenth century This prose life of Mary of Egypt appears in London, BL MS Add. 30512. It is written by the well-known fifteenth-century scribe, translator, and author Uilliam Mac an Leagha.16 No definite source could be identified. Edition: A. Martin Freeman (ed.), “Beatha Mhuire Eigiptacdha,” Études Celtiques 1 (1936), pp. 78–113. B. 46. Life of Mary of Egypt, “Beatha Mhuire éigipti,” in the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum Manuscript dated between 1437 and 1440 This prose life of Mary of Egypt is based on Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea and appears in Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 0 48 ii, also referred to as the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum. Interestingly, Uilliam Mac an Leagha (who penned the “Beatha Mhuire Eigiptacdha” in London, BL MS add. 30512) copies an illuminated version of this text in Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS G 9.17. Edition: Diarmuid ó Laoghaire (ed.), “Beatha Eustasius agus Beatha Mhuire éigipti,” Celtica 21 (1990), pp. 489–511. B. 47. Life of Mary of Egypt in late Middle Irish in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 20978–9 Manuscript from the seventeenth century A prose version of Mary of Egypt without any known source. The manuscript is dated to the seventeenth century, but David Greene argues that it should “probably [be] assigned to the late Middle Irish period.”18 It is not edited. For Mac an Leagha as an author, see Canice Mooney, The Church in Gaelic Ireland: Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries, vol. 2.5 of A New History of Catholicism (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1969), pp. 34–5. For information about Mac an Leagha, see Bianca Ross, Bildungsidol – Ritter – Held: Herkules bei William Caxton und Uilliam Mac an Lega (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1989), pp. 37–41. 17 On this, see Bianca Ross, “Uiliam Mac an Leagha’s Versions of the Story of Mary of Egypt,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt, ed. Poppe and Ross, pp. 259–78. 18 David Greene, “Ná léig mo mhealladh, a Mhuire,” Scottish Gaelic Studies 9 (1961–62), pp. 105–15, at p. 112.

16

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269

INDEX

Page numbers in bold type refer to illustrations and their captions actress  4, 24, 25, 168 see also Pelagia Adgar  Gracial  70 n. 52, 232 Adolescentis et scorti (Erasmus) 226–7 Ælfric  39, 49 see also Old English Life of Mary of Egypt Ælred of Rievaulx  60 Æthelmær 39 Ætheltryth (St, founder and abbess of Ely) 37 Æthelweard 39 Æthelwold  Benedictional 37 Afra of Augsburg  and her legend in the Middle Ages  5, 6, 9 in the Old English Martyrology 19, 23, 36–8, 56, 81, 231 popularity of  19 as a virgin martyr  5–6, 23, 36–7 see also holy harlots affective piety  2, 9, 11, 16, 59, 60–6, 81–3, 91–7, 101, 104, 105, 114–16, 131, 133–5, 150, 153–5, 157, 183, 187–9, 194–5, 200, 208, 210, 216, 221–2, 224–6, 230 Alexis Master  190, 195 Alphabetum Narrationum (Arnold of Liège)  236, 237 amicitia  75, 86, 186, 190, 192–3, 222 An Alphabet of Tales 236–7

Ancrene Wisse  66, 148 Anselm of Canterbury  60 Anthony (St and hermit)  43, 44 see also Vita of St Anthony apostolorum apostola  see Mary Magdalene Arnold of Liège  Alphabetum Narrationum  236, 237 Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury  124, 126, 137, 138, 143, 161 asceticism  1, 5, 6, 9, 11, 16, 42, 65, 69, 73, 80, 81, 113, 173–4, 190, 192 Auchinleck manuscript  see manuscripts Augustine of Hippo  63, 83, 153 De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim  197, 198 Augustinian order  101, 232, 234, 235, 237 Avignon Papacy  162 Barbara (St)  204 Barking Abbey  144 Barton, Elizabeth  and imitation of holy harlots  17, 179, 181, 183, 185, 216–21, 229, 230 attempts to surpass the Magdalene 219–21 as an expert on Mary Magdalene 229–30 Beatha Mhuire Eigiptacdha 240 Beatha Mhuire éigipti 240

271

Index Beauvoir, Simone de  52, 177, 224 Bede, the Venerable, 31–2, 54, 105 Benedictine Reform  57 Bernard of Clairvaux  2, 16, 60–6, 79, 80, 94, 99, 154, 155, 177, 181, 183, 210 De diligendo Deo 61 and his imitation of the holy harlot type  62–6, 155 Sermones super cantica canticorum  60–6, 154, 155, 168–71, 210 Beowulf 54 Bible  Old Testament  Genesis 1  154 Song of Solomon  16, 26–7, 34–5, 44, 63, 77–8, 81–2, 85, 131, 150, 169–71, 199 see also Bride of Christ New Testament  Matthew  47, 61–2, 132, 141, 163, 164, 176, 194, 210, 211 Mark  132, 141, 163, 210, 211 Luke  3, 94, 109, 132, 157, 194, 210, 211, 235 John  3, 35, 84, 104–5, 131, 141, 163, 175, 200, 210, 211, 215, 234 1 Corinthians  7–8, 14 n. 54, 107, 213 Galatians 34 1 Timothy  7–8, 107, 213 Revelation  25, 44, 72 Bocking, Edward (Dr)  216, 218, 221 Bokenham, Osbern  Abbotsford Legendary  101, 120, 121, 124, 127, 128, 134, 135, 237 Legendys of Hooly Wummen 120, 121, 124, 134 Lyf of Marye Maudelyn  17, 101, 102, 110, 120–38, 145 n. 13, 161, 184, 185, 210, 237 Bonde, William  201 Bourchier, Isabel, Countess of Eu  16, 120–2, 124, 126–30, 137, 166, 171, 184, 185, 224 Bowet, Henry (archbishop of York) 215

Bozon, Nicolas  Vie la Marie Magdalene 233 Bride of Christ  16, 26–7, 29, 34–6, 44, 59, 61–6, 68, 77–83, 85, 92–7, 104, 113–19, 130–2, 134–5, 154, 168–71, 174–5, 177, 208–10, 224, 225 see also affective piety Bridget of Sweden  162, 196, 203, 214 Brunton, Thomas (bishop of Rochester) 110 Brut, Walter  107–9 Buched Meir Vadlen 239 Burgh, Thomas  120, 237 Bury, John  123 Butler, Judith  12, 178 Capgrave, John  120, 123, 124 Capon, John (Dr)  220, 221, 230 caritas  33, 35 Carrow (convent)  196 Castle of Perseverance 148 Cathar heresy  107, 108 Catherine of Alexandria  8, 134, 182, 203, 204, 213, 216, 224 Catherine of Siena  162, 173 Caxton Golden Legend 238 Vitas Patrum  232, 236, 238 Life of Pelagia in  143, 146, 149, 159–60, 164–5, 167 n. 94, 168, 205, 236, 238 Life of Mary of Egypt in  143, 155, 179, 236, 238 Cecilia (St)  8, 182, 190, 197, 198, 213 Chaucer, Geoffrey  lost life of the Magdalene  120 n. 70, 124 n. 90, 235 Griselda in  156 Christina of Markyate  and imitation of holy harlots  17, 35, 45, 154, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186–95, 202, 206–7, 209, 210, 215, 221–4 to validate amicitia with men  186, 192–3, 222 to validate authority/ preaching 186–91

272

Index to validate unconventional sanctity  186, 187, 189–92, 222 and virginity  189, 190, 193–4, 202 Cistercian order  60, 61, 64–6 popularity of the holy harlot among  64–6, 99 Clare priory  101, 129, 130, 237 coenobitism  38, 40, 43, 45, 53, 82 confession  25–6, 63, 77–8, 87, 95 silent  102, 104, 109–10, 112–13, 125, 133, 206, 211, 212 Cotton-Corpus Legendaries  see manuscripts Courtenay, Gertrude (Marchioness of Exeter) 217 cross-dressing  see transvestism Crusades  98–100, 220 Cynewulf 54 devil  27, 29, 32, 36, 44, 47, 81, 85–6, 92, 94, 141, 142, 147, 148, 158–9, 167, 175, 192, 200, 206 Digby Mary Magdalene  17, 139, 141–79, 197, 202, 204, 206, 214, 225, 238 discretio spirituum  15, 147, 157, 159, 216 Dominic of Evesham  67 double monasteries  22–3, 37, 54–5 Ealdhild (Widsith) 54 Eanflæd (abbess of Whitby)  54 Early South English Legendary 59, 87–100, 101, 113, 114, 117, 119, 205, 234 Mary Magdalene in  87–100, 205 East Anglia  102, 123, 138–9, 170–1, 196, 203, 37 Elene  9, 20, 28, 30, 42 Elizabeth of Schönau  173, 196 enclosure  5, 26, 129, 148, 192–3, 206 English Wycliffite Sermons  105, 109, 163 Erasmus  228 n. 11 Adolescentis et scorti 226–7 eremitism  1, 38, 40, 52, 53, 65, 186, 230 ermine 73–4

Eucharist  39, 56, 64, 78–80, 87, 107, 109–10, 157–8, 170, 173–5 Eve  14, 25–6, 31, 41, 92, 136, 142, 153, 156, 158–9, 173, 177, 223 female authority  see under holy harlots: female authority and female preaching female body  medieval conceptions of  12–14, 15, 32, 41, 81 see also under holy harlots and the body female heroism (and sanctity) in Old English texts as queer  19, 28–30, 42–4, 224 female mystics  2, 17, 102, 138, 173, 181–222 see also Christina of Markyate, Elizabeth Barton, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe female patronage  16, 120, 121–2, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 137, 166, 171, 184, 185, 224 female preaching  see under holy harlots: female preaching and female authority femininity  association of rhetorical prowess with  71, 72, 91–3, 136–7, 146 medieval conceptions of  12–14, 41, 55–6, 64, 71, 141–71 see also gender and under holy harlots and their femininity Fisher, John (bishop of Rochester)  217, 228 n. 11, 229–30 fourth Lateran Council (1215)  87, 96 Francis of Assisi  60 Franciscan order  60, 64 gender  definition 12–14 and gender binarism  2–3, 12, 14, 19–21, 42, 55–6, 60 inversion of  55–6 as symbolic  38, 40, 56 and becoming male in Latin vitae  20–2, 27–30, 33, 40, 42

273

Index transcendence of  16, 20, 28–9, 33–4, 56–7 see also femininity and queerness Geoffrey, abbot of St Albans  193 George (St)  178 gift of tears  211–15, 222 Gilte Legende  143, 237 Life of Pelagia in  149, 168, 172 Golden Legend see Caxton Goscelin of St Bertin  60 vita of St Edith  35 Gregory the Great  31–2, 34 Gregorian conflation of Mary Magdalene  3, 47, 94, 116, 132, 195, 227, 229 Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie  Romanz de sainte Marie Magdaleine  93 n. 144, 233 Guthlac 43 Gwyrthyeu e Wynvydedic Veir 239

and anti-clericalism  109–10, 160–2 and asceticism  1, 42, 65, 73, 81, 113, 173–4, 190, 191–2 and the body  disappearance of  26, 32–3, 51 exposure of  69, 72, 73–8, 148–9 as a Bride of Christ  16, 26–7, 34–6, 59, 61–6, 68, 77–83, 85, 92–7, 104, 113–19, 130–2, 134–5, 154, 168–71, 174–5, 177, 183, 187, 191, 193–5, 208–10, 225 as a bridging figure  3, 7, 8, 62–3, 67, 69, 74, 83, 141–3, 150–1, 153 in calendars  22 n. 10, 38 as a category of saint  5–8 and transvestism  4, 6, 22, 27–30, 46, 177, 191–2 demise in Early Modern England  11, 17, 222, 226–30 and enclosure  26, 192–3, 206 and female authority  2, 7–8, 14–16, 29–30, 35–6, 40, 45–6, 60, 70–2, 80, 92–100, 113–20, 122–4, 126–37, 152–6, 160–6, 175, 182–4, 196–8, 202, 223, 224, 226 to be admired, not imitated 111–20 as bridal discipleship  132–7 to be emulated  121–2, 126–30, 134, 136–8, 144, 157, 159–67, 181–222 as charismatic (Weber)  2, 29–30, 35–6, 52–5, 60, 117, 225 as dangerous pre-conversion  70–2, 88, 91–2, 97, 113, 171–2 as framed by traditionally authoritative figures  2, 60, 68, 72, 83, 85–7, 88, 92–8, 113–19, 143, 224, 226 as near-clerical  83–4, 93–6, 127–8, 131–7 as opposed to or questioning male clerical authority  46, 160–6, 175–8, 191, 225 as complementary to it  52–3, 57, 87, 128–30, 137, 160–6

hagiography  romance genre’s influence on  57, 59, 66–76, 87–91, 98–9 see also under holy harlots as romance heroines  Harling, Anne  184 hawthorn 73–4 Henri d’Arci  232 Henry VIII  216, 217, 218, 219 Henry of Ghent Summa quaestionum ordinarium  108, 184 Herod  142, 175 heroic poetry (Old English)  28–30 Hild (St, founder of Whitby)  54 Hildegard of Bingen  79, 173, 196 Himmelsbrief 220–1 Holofernes 28 holy harlots  in the Abbotsford Legendary  121, 127, 128, 134 and affective piety  2, 9, 11, 16, 59, 60–6, 68, 77–83, 91–3, 101, 104–5, 114–16, 133–5, 150, 153–5, 157, 183, 187–9, 191, 193–5, 200, 208, 210, 221–2, 224–6, 230

274

Index and female preaching  2–4, 7–8, 14–15, 35–6, 41, 42–3, 45, 68, 71, 92–8, 104–10, 115–20, 122–4, 126–37, 152–3, 160–6, 175, 183–4, 186–8, 190–1, 196, 202, 224 as feminine and unchanging throughout her life  16, 34, 59, 67–69, 72–4, 80, 83, 87–8, 91, 93, 113–14, 126, 141–3, 145–6, 167, 169–70, 223 and their femininity as connected with being a vessel/ container  32, 118–19, 133, 135, 142, 147–56, 172, 176 as connected with inconstancy 171–3 as connected with persuasion  70, 87, 92–3, 105–6, 136, 142, 156–67, 171, 172, 176 as connected with sexuality  142, 167–71, 172, 206, 221 as a model for the clergy  141–4, 153–5, 159 as multi-dimensional  2, 6, 9, 16, 17, 21, 22, 34, 36, 53–6, 59, 67–8, 73–4, 77, 80, 83, 87–8, 91, 93, 113–14, 126, 141–79, 181–4, 187, 189–95, 197, 221, 223, 227–9 as representing femininity as a whole  60, 66, 57, 59, 66, 67–9, 141–71, 221 as representing humanity  2, 56, 63–4, 141–3, 147–8, 153–6, 225 as revalorising femininity  60, 63–4, 104–10, 141–71, 225 as sinful  7, 14–15, 20, 25–6, 31, 32–3, 41, 44, 45, 51, 52, 56, 70–1, 73–5, 91–2, 113, 147–9, 167–76, 182–3, 191, 202, 205–8, 222–5, 228 as a figure of the Catholic Church  3, 80, 178, 223, 229–30 as a figure of Everyman / Christian soul   9, 17, 21, 32, 36, 60, 62, 63, 80, 83, 85, 141–71, 181, 225

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as a figure of lay devotion  8, 52, 55, 60 as a figure of the (true) preacher  16, 102, 104–10, 159–6, 181, 183–4, 186–8, 190–1 and food  81, 85, 173–6 and geographical freedom  8, 85, 91, 183–4, 190, 191, 192, 195, 206, 208, 213, 222 as heroic  28–30, 42–4, 224 and imitatio Christi  26–7, 72, 80, 83, 95, 135–6, 142–3, 171, 173–6, 177, 191, 225 imitation of  by Bernard of Clairvaux  62–6, 181 by female mystics  2–3, 17, 181–222 by Wycliffe and the Wycliffites  3, 101, 103–10, 181, 226, 230 by women  9, 11, 37, 127, 166, 181–222, 226 as mediatrix  79, 83, 85, 116, 119, 141–3 as a mixed hagiographical model  6, 21, 36, 46, 56 and patronage  16, 101, 120, 121–2, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 137, 166, 171, 184, 185, 224 popularity of  8–11, 19, 23–4, 63–5, 121, 192, 228 and pregnancy and childbirth  32, 149–56, 163, 174–6, 182, 206, 207 as queer post-conversion  16, 20–3, 24, 26–30, 33–6, 38, 42, 44–50, 55, 56, 60, 72, 224 radical potential of  3, 102, 144, 160, 164, 181, 183–4, 222, 225, 229 as relatable for all  21, 32, 36–8, 44, 46–7, 56, 59, 62, 83, 85, 121, 128–30, 137, 141–3, 145–7, 148, 153, 155–7, 168–73, 176, 177, 181, 223, 225 as relatable for the laity  21, 36–8, 44, 55–6, 105, 121, 128–30, 141–3, 145–7, 223, 225–6 as relatable for women  21, 30, 31, 36–8, 44, 46, 56, 63, 83,

Index 121, 122, 141–2, 145–7, 148, 153, 155–6, 166, 170–1, 174, 181–222, 223, 225, 226 as representing the woman of good advice 53–6 as representing those on the margins  17, 101–2, 103–10, 181–3 as representing non-traditional paths to salvation  8, 16, 21, 30, 36–8, 40, 44, 52, 55–7, 60, 181–3, 189–95, 207–8, 221, 222, 225 as revirginised  37, 48, 56, 59, 62, 63, 74, 81–3, 108, 150–3, 155–6, 165, 182, 193–5, 221 as rhetorically adept / seductive  70–2, 92–3, 136–7, 146 as romance heroines  67–9, 72–6, 87–92, 113, 126, 145–6 as titillating  33, 41, 43, 48–52, 65, 69–72, 74–8, 88, 92–3, 136–7, 145–6, 206 as transgressive  7, 85, 91, 101–2, 110, 181, 183–4, 187–8, 191, 192, 194, 209–10, 225, 230 and the Virgin Mary  4, 39, 48, 53–4, 59, 62, 63–5, 82–3, 85, 149–56, 159, 170, 177, 182, 189, 192–4, 221–2, 223, 224–5 see also Afra, Mary of Egypt, Mary, niece of Abraham, Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, Raab, and Thaïs Holy Maid of Kent  see Barton, Elizabeth holy mothers  3, 6, 7, 223 Homily on Mary Magdalene in Irish 239 Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim  144 Humbert of Romans  14–15 imitatio Christi  by performing femininity  60, 64, 72–3, 80–1, 83, 91, 93–7, 142–3, 191, 225 by holy harlots  26, 47–8, 72–3, 80–1, 83, 95, 142–3, 171, 173–6, 177

Ingeborg of Denmark (Queen of France, wife of Philip II Augustus)  184 n. 10 Innocent III  112 n. 47 Isabella of France (Queen of England, wife of Edward II)  184 n. 10 Jacob’s Well Life of Thaïs in  236 Jacobus de Voragine  Legenda aurea  89, 90, 92, 93, 101, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 127, 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 149, 168, 205 n. 87, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples  227–9 De Maria Magdalena et triduo Christi disceptatio 227 Jean de Vignay  Légende Dorée  235, 236, 237 Jerome  20, 30, 211 and becoming male  13, 34, 60 Life of Paul the First Hermit  21, 43, 46, 53 and women as lustful  41 Johannes de Caulibus  Meditationes vitae Christi  112 n. 47, 116 John the Baptist  47 John of Beverly  201 John the Evangelist  87, 113, 115 John of Fécamp  60 Judith  9, 20, 28, 30, 42–3, 54 Judith of Flanders  ix, 10–11, 184 Julian of Norwich  173, 210 and imitation of holy harlots  17, 152, 154, 179, 181, 182, 183, 185, 195–203, 209, 212, 215, 221, 222, 224 to validate writings  195–8, 202 to validate important / problematic concepts  195, 197, 200–3 through emulation of affective closeness with Christ  195, 197–200, 203 Juliana (Cynewulf)  9, 54 Katherine of Aragon  216

276

Index Kempe, Margery  123 and imitation of holy harlots  17, 62, 154, 155, 156, 162, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 203–16, 219, 221, 222, 223 in hagiographical structure  203, 205–8, 216 and imitation of Mary Magdalene  203, 204–16 competition with the Magdalene  208–10, 216, 219 to gain authority as a preacher  203, 208–10, 212–15, 216 to regain virginal status  208–10 to validate controversial behaviour  203, 211–16, 222 and xenoglossia  213–14 and Julian of Norwich  212, 215 Kristeva, Julia  30 Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne 238 Lazarus  90, 109, 115, 130, 141, 147, 172, 200, 212 lechery/Lechery  6, 7, 31, 41, 69, 148, 151, 159, 167–72, 176, 206, 225 as a metaphor for sin in general  63, 70, 167–72 Legenda aurea see Jacobus de Voragine Life of Mary Magdalene (Anglo-Norman life c. 1300, fragment)  233 Life of Paul the First Hermit  21, 43, 46, 53 Life of Thaïs (12th century AngloNorman life)  232 Life of Thaïs in the Northern Homily Cycle 234 Lollardy  see Wycliffism Love, Nicholas  Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ  109, 112 n. 47, 116 Lucretia  see Thaïs lupa 223 Lydgate, John  120, 124 Magdalen College, Oxford  110 Mair o ‘r Aifft 239 manuscripts 

277

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 225  239 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 20978–9 240 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 9 (Cotton-Corpus Legendary)  38, 231 Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.2.6 (Scottish Legendary) 235–6 Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 9 1695 (Ingeborg Psalter)  184 n. 10 Dublin, National Library of Ireland MS G 9  240 Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 0 48 ii  240 Dublin, Trinity College MS H. ii. 15a 239 Edinburgh, Advocates Library Abbotsford MS B 3 (Abbotsford Legendary)  120, 121, 124, 127, 128, 134, 135, 237 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck manuscript) 234 Hildesheim, Dombibliothek MS St.God. 1 (St Albans Psalter)  ix, 184 n. 10, 185, 186–90, 193, 194, 195 London, British Library MS Add 30512 240 London, British Library MS Add 49598 (Æthelwold’s Benedictional) 37 London, British Library MS Arundel 327  120, 121, 124, 134 London, British Library MS Cotton Julius E vii  39, 41 London, British Library MS Cotton Nero E.I. (Cotton-Corpus Legendary)  38, 231 London, British Library MS Lansdowne 383 (Shaftesbury Psalter) 187 London, British Library MS Old Royal 20 B  233

Index London, British Library MS Otho B x 41 London, British Library MS Royal 2 B. vii (Queen Mary Psalter)  184 n. 10 New York, Morgan Library & Museum MS M.709  ix, 10–11 Oxford, Balliol College MS 240  239 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 243  104, 105 n. 9 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 579 (Leofric Missal)  22 n. 10 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 133  145, 238 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108  88 n. 127, 89, 96 Salisbury, Cathedral Library MS 150 (Salisbury Psalter)  22 n. 10 York, Minster Library and Archives MS XVI. K. 13  233 Margaret of Antioch (St)  203, 204, 207, 213, 224 Margaret of York  122, 184 Marseilles  91–3, 96–100, 135, 141–2, 150, 152, 162, 164–6, 172, 213, 219 king and queen of  91–3, 96–100, 113, 116–17, 127, 129, 135, 141–2, 150, 152, 161, 162, 164–6, 172, 173, 175, 179, 207, 219 Martha of Bethany  94, 108, 115, 132, 147, 194–5, 210, 227, 228, 239 Mary of Bethany  3, 26, 94, 108, 132, 133, 141, 153, 194–5, 210, 211, 227 Mary of Egypt  1, 6, 11, 31, 164, 174, 183, 186, 201, 219, 224, 234, 235 in the Abbotsford Legendary  121, 127, 128 as a Bride  44, 48, 77–83 in the Book of Margery Kempe 204, 206, 207, 208 in Caxton’s Vitas Patrum  143, 146, 155, 179, 236, 238 in Caxton’s Golden Legend 238 Christina of Markyate’s imitation of  186, 190, 191–3, 195

and clerical authority  52, 84, 87 and feminine authority  8, 41, 42–3, 51–5, 68, 70–2, 83–7, 219, 222 in the Gilte Legende 237 and her legend in the Middle Ages  4, 9 and the Life of Paul the First Hermit  21, 43, 46, 53 as mediatrix  79, 83, 85 as an object of Zosimus’s queer desire 48–52 in the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt  19, 21, 34, 38–57, 231 as queer  21, 38, 42, 44–50, 72 in the T Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne  59, 66–87, 91, 92, 93, 97, 136, 232, 233 as a teacher and advisor  41, 42–3, 52–5, 68, 76, 86–7, 92, 97, 136, 207, 224 in the Vie des Pères 155 and the Virgin Mary  4, 39, 48, 53–4, 63, 65, 66–7, 82–3, 96 see also holy harlots Mary Magdalene  in the Abbotsford Legendary  135 as apostolorum apostola  3–4, 35–6, 104, 105, 106, 108, 117, 122, 126, 163, 184, 186–7, 209, 213 as a Bride of Christ  34–5, 80, 92–7, 113–19, 130–2, 135, 154, 168–71, 174–5, 177, 191, 224 Christina of Markyate’s imitation of  186, 187–9, 190, 191, 193–5 in the Digby Mary Magdalene 17, 139, 141–79, 197, 202, 204, 206, 214, 225, 238 in the Early South English Legendary  59, 87–100, 101, 113, 114, 117, 119, 205, 234 and feminine authority  8, 35–6, 91–100, 115–20, 122–4, 126–37, 152–6, 160–6, 175, 181–9, 198, 202–3, 227 as important to dissenters / Wycliffites  102, 103–10, 211–12, 226

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Index in John Mirk’s Festial  16, 101, 111–20, 205, 235 Julian of Norwich’s imitation of 195–203 and her legend in the Middle Ages  3–4, 9, 31 and the noli me tangere  115–16, 157, 187, 199–200, 209–10 in Osbern Bokenham’s “Lyf of Marye Maudelyn”  17, 101, 102, 110, 120–38, 145 n. 13, 161, 184, 185, 210, 237 in the Old English Martyrology 19, 23, 30–6, 231 and possession  32, 94, 194, 206 as a preacher / teacher  92–3, 95–7, 102, 104–10, 122, 124, 126–8, 130–7, 141–6, 150, 152–7, 160–6, 172–8, 181–4, 187–9, 198, 202–3, 227 as queer  35–6 and the Three Maries debate  227–30 vita eremitica of  4, 31, 119 see also holy harlots Mary, niece of Abraham  5 Mary of Oignies  203 Mary, Virgin  1, 9, 17, 54, 63, 64, 82–3, 142, 147, 153, 159, 175, 189, 190, 193–5, 208, 209, 216, 224 and Mary of Egypt  4, 39, 47, 48, 82, 85, 96 in the Benedictional of Æthelwold  37 see also under holy harlots and the Virgin Mary Maximus/Maximin  91, 96, 117, 119, 129, 130, 207 miles Christi 28–9 Mirk, John  Festial  16, 101, 111–20, 205, 235 Instructions for Parish Priests 111 Manuale Sacerdotis 111 More, Thomas  217 N Vie de Marie l’Egypciene  67 n. 36, 70 n. 52, 84, 233 nakedness  36–7, 39, 46, 75–8 Neville, Cecily  121 Nonnus, Bishop  4, 25–9, 128, 146, 149,

169, 159–60, 164–5, 168, 179, 193 see also Pelagia Norman Conquest  9, 166 Northern Homily Cycle 234 Odo of Cluny  1 n. 1, 112 n. 47 Old English Life of Mary of Egypt 16, 19, 38–57, 231 Old English Martyrology  16, 19, 22–38, 231 Afra in  36–8 and female authorship  9, 22–3 and female audience  23–4, 31 Mary of Egypt in  38–57 Mary Magdalene in  30–6 Pelagia in  21–2, 24–30, 32, 36, 42, 44 translation practice in  27–33 Origen  34, 131 see also Pseudo-Origen, De Maria Magdalena Overing, Gillian  20 Paul (apostle)  7–8, 34, 107, 109, 201, 204, 213, 222 Paul the Deacon (presumed author of Latin Life of Mary of Egypt)  38, 231, 234, 235, 236 Paul the first hermit  21, 43, 46, 53 Paphnutius  5, 129, 144, 191, 193 see also Thaïs Paston, Margaret  166 Pelagia  in the Abbotsford Legendary  121, 128 in the Book of Margery Kempe 206 as a cross-dressing saint  4, 6, 21–2, 24, 27–30 in Caxton’s Vitas Patrum  143, 146, 149, 159–60, 164–5, 167 n. 94, 168, 205, 236, 238 Christina of Markyate’s imitation of  186, 190–2 and geographical freedom  8, 26, 72 in the Gilte Legende  149, 168, 172 and imitatio Christi 26–7 and her legend in the Middle Ages  4–5, 9

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Index Meditations on the Passion 135 romance genre  and its influence on holy harlots’ lives  57, 59, 66–76, 87–91, 98–9 and romancisation of hagiography  57, 59, 66, 67–9, 87–8, 89–93, 98–100 Rutebeuf, La vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne  82 n. 109

as queer  24, 26–30 in the Old English Martyrology 19, 24–30, 231 in the Vie des Pères 164 see also holy harlots Pelagius  see Pelagia Peter (apostle)  95, 97, 106, 109, 116, 129, 141, 158, 161, 165, 175, 201, 204, 222 Peter and Paul  109, 201, 204, 222 Philip II of France (Philip Augustus) 99 Porete, Marguerite  152, 222 Mirouer des Simples Ames Anienties 201 Postquam Dominus (BHL 5456)  233 preaching  see female preaching prescient women  53–5 Pseudo-Ælfrician Life of Mary of Egypt  see Old English Life of Mary of Egypt Pseudo-Bonaventure  see Johannes de Caulibus pride  25, 145, 168, 205–6 Privity of the Passion 212 prostitute  3, 4, 5, 21, 29, 36, 39, 67, 81, 118, 149, 177, 229 see also holy harlot Pseudo-Origen De Maria Magdalena  235, 238–9 Quaestio Utrum liceat mulieribus docere viros publice congregatos 108 queerness  2, 13, 20–3, 34–5, 38, 42, 44–50, 56, 60, 72 quem quaeritis 144 Querelle des Femmes 226 Raab 110 Ralph, bishop of Durham  191 Réfection A’  24, 26, 29 Réfection B  24, 26, 29 Register of Bishop Trefnant  107, 109 Richard I of England (Lionheart)  99 Richard, duke of York  121, 129 Roger (hermit in Christina of Markyate’s Vita)  186, 192, 193, 195 Rolle, Richard  110

sante vive  218, 220, 222 Scottish Legendary  Lives of holy harlots in  235 Scrope, Mary  184 Sermon Against the Holy Maid of Kent  217, 220 Shaftesbury Psalter  see manuscripts Simon (Leper/Pharisee)  62, 80, 91, 112, 115, 125, 132, 159, 173, 175, 203, 210, 211, 215 Song of Songs  see under Bible Sophronius  ancient Greek Life of Mary of Egypt  231, 235 in Erasmus’s Adolescentis et scorti 227 South English Legendary  88–9, 145, 234, 238 see also Early South English Legendary Speculum Sacerdotale Life of Mary Magdalene in  235 Sponsa Christi  see Bride of Christ St Albans (monastery)  185, 189, 190, 193, 195 St Albans Psalter  see manuscripts Sueno (friend to Christina of Markyate) 193 Sutton, Katharine  144 T Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne  59, 66–87, 91, 93, 136, 232, 233 Anglo-Norman origin of  66–7 Thaïs  1, 144, 174, 224 in the Abbotsford Legendary  121, 127–8 in the Book of Margery Kempe 206 Christina of Markyate’s imitation of  186, 190–1, 192, 193

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Index and geographical freedom  8 in Hrotsvitha’s Paphnutius 144 and her legend in the Middle Ages  5, 6, 8, 9 as Lucretia in Erasmus’s Adolescentis et scorti 226–7 Northern Homily Cycle life of  234 twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Life of Thaïs 232 see also holy harlots Thomas (apostle)  159, 201, 222 Trefnant, John, Bishop of Hereford  see Register of Bishop Trefnant transubstantiation  79, 84, 87, 111 transvestism  4, 6, 22, 27–30, 46, 177, 191–2 Universalism  200, 226 vanity 145 Venus  5, 36 vernacularity 11 Vestal virgins  36 Vézelay 99–100 Vie de Saint Gilles 178 virago  13, 60 virgin martyrs  3, 6, 7, 37, 69, 182–3, 190, 192, 219, 223 virginity  physical vs spiritual virginity  37, 63 as queer  13–14 see also under holy harlots as revirginised visionaries  see female mystics Vitae of the Desert Fathers  43–4, 46, 49, 53 Vita of Christina of Markyate  see Christina of Markyate Vita of Mary of Egypt by Paul the Deacon  38, 231 Vita of St Anthony (Athanasius)  44

Vita of St Edith  35 Vitas Patrum see Caxton vowesses  22–3, 31 Waldensians  107, 108 Warham, William (archbishop of Canterbury)  216, 217 Waynflete, William  110 Wealhtheow 54 Weber, Max  15–16 White, William and Joan  123 Widsith 54 William of Malmesbury  De laudibus et miraculis Sanctae Mariae  67, 232–3 Whitby (double monastery)  54 Whore of Babylon  25 Wolsey, Thomas  217 Woman of Samaria  26 The Wooing of our Lord 66 Wycliffe, John  101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110 De Civili Dominio 106 De Eucharistia et Poenitentia Sive de Confessione 109 Wycliffism  101, 102, 111–12, 123, 124, 125, 154, 196 and holy harlots  3, 16, 103–10, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118, 137, 138, 143, 154, 156, 160–4, 177, 181, 211–12, 226, 230 Wycliffite Glossed Gospels 104 xenoglossia 213–14 York cycle of plays  The Flood 167 Zosimus  4, 38–57, 164, 186, 192–3, 207 see also Mary of Egypt

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