Virginities

“Virginities.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Ed. David Wallace and Carolyn Dinshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 21-39. ISBN 0-521-79188 X, 0-521-79638-5 (pbk). Virginities Ruth Evans How do you know that someone is a virgin? This question is implicitly posed in the Nativity pageant of the N-town collection of Biblical drama, just after Mary has given birth. Salomé, one of the two midwives attendant on Mary, refuses to believe that the Virgin is still a virgin. The N-town Play, 2 Vols, Stephen Spector (ed.) EETS SS 11 (text) and 12 (apparatus) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The episode also appears in the Chester Nativity pageant: The Chester Mystery Cycle, R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills (eds.) EETS SS 3 and 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). References are to line numbers of the particular plays. She insists on ‘touching’ Mary’s body. Terrifyingly, her hand turns ‘ded and drye [withered] as claye [earth]’ (line 256). An angel appears, and orders her to touch Jesus’ swaddling-clothes. Frightened, Salomé obeys the angel and the hand is miraculously restored to health. But a number of questions are left unanswered. Since female roles were all played by men, the scene calls for some ingenuities of staging and suspension of audience disbelief. Readers today may wonder why Mary’s virginity, and medieval virginities in general, are invested with such powers of magic and danger. And what exactly does Salomé touch? Does she really touch inside Mary’s body? Surely (we think now) this is sacrilege—or bad taste? In the Chester version, the figure of Expositor steers the audience towards a general moral, ‘that unbeleeffe [lack of faith] is a fowle [evil] sinne’ (line 721), keeping the audience from pondering too closely the troubling complexities of Mary’s physiology. But the N-town pageant goes out of its way to emphasize physical ‘touch’. Zelomye, the other midwife, asks to ‘towch and fele’ Mary’s body to see if she needs medicine, and Mary invites her to ‘[t]ast [feel] with 3oure hand’ to find out if she is a ‘clene mayde and pure virgyn’ (lines 224-5). The Latin stage directions say that Zelomye ‘palpat … Beatam Virginem …’ [feels the Blessed Virgin]. Though the exact form of verification is unclear, Zelomye is satisfied: ‘Here opynly I fele and se: / A fayr chylde of a maydon is born’ (lines 228-9). But skeptical Salomé demands to ‘preve’ [test] Mary’s virginity by ‘hand towchynge’ (line 247). Mary assents: ‘Towch with 3oure hand and wele asay [find out]’ (line 251). She goes even further, inviting Salomé to ‘[w]ysely [with discretion] ransake [examine] and trye [find out] þe trewthe owth’ (line 252). ‘Ransake’ also suggests violence (MED: ‘to plunder, ransack, steal; to treat roughly, mistreat’), evoking the popular medieval image of Mary (and the consecrated virgin) as a ‘tower’ to be defended. And ‘ransake’ can also mean ‘to examine a wound’ (MED), a sense that presages the risen Christ’s invitation to Doubting Thomas to probe his wounds in the N-town Appearance to Thomas, an invitation that also plays on the binary of wholeness and incompleteness that marks Salomé’s testing: ‘Put þin [your] hool [whole] hand into my ryght syde’ (line 339). Yet the N-town stage direction only says that Salomé ‘tangit [touches]’ Mary, leaving the form of the touching inexplicit. Instead, the touch takes its place within a system of correspondences and resemblances: the touching of Jesus’ clothes (a detail not present in the Chester Nativity); Christ’s later injunction to Mary Magdalene not to touch, in The Appearance to Mary Magdalene: ‘Towche me not as 3ett [yet], Mary’ (line 42). Noli me tangere: the words that so dismay Margery Kempe when she has a vision of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden, for she cannot imagine herself being happy if Christ had spoken to her as he had to Mary, if he had refused her touch. The Book of Margery Kempe, Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (eds.) EETS OS 212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 197; The Book of Margery Kempe, Barry A. Windeatt (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 238. Virginity is a category that the Middle Ages found indispensable to think with: unsettling and yet enormously productive. Salomé’s faithless touch makes Mary’s virginity the locus of a number of broad and compelling concerns: the meaning of faith; how to show devotion; the limits of knowledge and of recognition. It is implied that Zelomye must have found some physical proof: the hymen perhaps? But how can Mary’s body offer irrefutable empirical proof of her virginity? Only Salomé’s shriveled hand can do that, ironically signifying the Virgin’s wholeness. Despite Salomé’s explorations, virginity can never be a sure thing. Faith and miracle plug the gap between suspicion and certain knowledge, but they only displace the questions onto other sites, other bodies, other texts. In Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw explores ‘contiguity and displacement’ as signs of what she calls the ‘the queer’: a disruptive excess that shakes the foundations of representation but which also makes connections, ‘knock[ing] signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange, working in this way to provoke perceptual shifts and subsequent corporeal response in those touched.’ Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 151. Whether or not we want to call Mary’s virginity queer, the N-town pageant articulates what is both disturbing and powerful about virginity: a state that refuses representation, whose ‘truth’ cannot be spoken by the body, yet which acts as a relay-point for faith, devotion, and knowledge. Although some famous men were virgins—Christ, St John the Evangelist, St Alexis—virginity and chastity are overwhelmingly viewed in the Middle Ages as female concerns. Why? Partly because of increased devotion to Mary and the rise of women in monasticism; partly because virginity was a precious object to be guarded by the senses and the feminine was synonymous with the sensual; partly for economic reasons: within medieval systems of inheritance and land tenure, the woman’s body is male property and the virgin wife guarantees the purity of the family line. Virginity’s yearning for purity owes a great deal to clerical anxieties about ritual pollution, anxieties that are linked to the misogynistic view of women—and women’s sexuality in particular—as dirt. Yet virginity in the Middle Ages cannot be reduced to fetish or abject ‘Thing’. Women of all estates and ages, lay and in orders, virgins or otherwise, appropriated its representations in bold and sometimes radical ways. The memory of virgins was everywhere in late-medieval English culture: in Biblical drama, in popular story-collections, in lyrics and poems, in sermons, in rules and treatises for enclosed women, in manuscript illuminations, in manuals of pastoral instruction to the laity, in court poetry, interspersed with romances in household miscellanies. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath could presume that her late-fourteenth-century audience were sufficiently familiar with the high value put on virginity for her to challenge that valuation. The virgin-martyr saints (Katherine, Margaret, Barbara, Cecilia, Lucy, Agnes, Agatha, Christine, Petronilla/Parnel, etc.) were widespread and multivalent cultural symbols, their stories recycled in various modes and genres over centuries; their names regularly given to children (generations of Paston women were called Agnes, Margaret and Elizabeth; Henry VI’s mother was called Katherine); their feast-days used as date-markers in the ‘kalendars’ of the Church year in medieval Primers; their images painted on the stained glass and rood screens of parish churches in East Anglia and Devon with money provided by the pious and prosperous laity. Katherine of Alexandria was the most popular, with Margaret of Antioch a close second. Their statues even flanked the image of Our Lady on the shrine at Walsingham. Medieval women used these virgin saints in highly personal ways. In a letter to her husband, John Paston I, in 1441, the young wife Margaret Paston, from a prominent bourgeois family in Norfolk, urges him to ‘wear the ring with the image of Saint Margaret that I sent you for a remembrance till ye come home.’ Norman Davis (ed.) The Paston Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5. As an object commemorating both a famous historical virgin-martyr and Margaret’s role as wife, the ring carries sexualized and collective memories that bind together husband and wife within their community. Margaret was the patron saint of childbirth because of her miraculous escape from the dragon’s belly, suggesting that medieval women read the virgin-martyr lives symbolically as well as literally. When Margery Kempe feels troubled because of her lack of virginity, Christ reassures her that she is numbered with the virgin martyrs: ‘Dowtyr, I be-hote [promise] þe [you] þe same grace þat I be-hyte [promised] Seynt Kateryne, Seynt Margarete, Seynt Barbara … in so mech þat [in that] what creatur in erth [if any creature on earth] vn-to þe Day of Dom [Judgement Day] aske þe [you] any bone [favour] & beleuyth þat God louyth þe [you] he xal [shall] haue hys bone or ellys [else] a better thyng.’ Meech and Allen, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 52; Windeatt, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 87. The miracle-working of the virgin saints was an ideal to aspire to—and even, sometimes, to surpass. Just as virginity belies a singular definition, so its literature resists easy categorization: the plural ‘virginities’ in my title signals the material’s heterogeneity. It has been traditional to trace a chronology within this long period from a ‘militant’ to a ‘bridal’ virginity, to use Sarah Salih’s terms: from the virgin as a virago—a woman acting like a man (ninth to eleventh centuries), to the feminized virgin (twelfth to fourteenth centuries): a romance heroine married to Christ. Sarah Salih, ‘Performing virginity: sex and violence in the Katherine Group,’ in Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (eds.) Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 95-112 (p. 99). But, as Salih points out, these narratives do not displace each other chronologically, but are the effects of spaces and places—and, I would add, of genres and audiences. The sheer variety of texts witnesses to the all-pervasiveness of virginity as a model for medieval women. It is central to the so-called Katherine Group of virgin-martyr lives and their associated texts, the Ancrene Wisse [Guide for Anchoresses] and the treatise Hali Meiðhad [Letter on Virginity] (both early thirteenth century), addressed in the first instance to three aristocratic enclosed women. For text and translation of Hali Meiðhad and of Parts 7 and 8 of Ancrene Wisse see Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds.) Medieval English Prose for Women, rev. edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and pp. 2-43 and pp. 110-149. Ancrene Wisse is translated in Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (trans.) Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1991), pp. 41-207. But there are numerous later treatises on virginity addressed to laypeople. Women of the seigneurial classes, lay and religious, consumed female virgin martyr hagiography, such as Lydgate’s Legend of Seynt Margarete (1415-26), or the Augustinian friar John Capgrave’s extraordinarily ambitious Life of Saint Katherine (c.1445), or lives in devotional miscellanies, such as Auchinleck (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1; c.1330-40), and orthodox sermon collections, such as John Mirk’s Festial. Seynt Margaret, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part 1, Henry Noble MacCracken (ed.) EETS ES 107 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. and Oxford University Press, 1911), pp. 173-92; John Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, Karen A. Winstead (ed.) TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999); John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, Theodor Erbe (ed.) EETS ES 96 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1905). The heretical Lollards (their name was first an abusive term), a socially-diverse group who broadly followed the radical tenets of John Wyclif (c. 1330-84), were opposed to lurid narratives, so the virgin-martyr lives are not included in the sermons on Saints’ Days in the standard Wycliffite sermon cycle. In the Second Nun’s Tale and Physician’s Tale Chaucer writes the passionate suffering of female virgins, although the latter is curiously unclassifiable: offered as an ‘historial [historical] thyng notable [famous]’ (VI, 155-6), it is neither passio nor hagiography. Virginity also enters medieval romances: Sir Eglamour of Artois has a chaste heroine, and Eglamour kills a dragon at Rome, which links his narrative to that of St Margaret (copies of both are in the Auchinleck manuscript). Sir Eglamour of Artois, F.E. Richardson (ed.) EETS OS 256 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). Medieval medical texts offer receipts for the reconstruction of the hymen that bear witness to a cultural preoccupation with the intact female body. Alexandra Barratt (ed.) Women’s Writing in Middle English (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 37-8; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘The Virgin’s Tale,’ in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (eds.) Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: the Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 165-194, p. 168. And The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1436) records in part the desires and struggles of its bourgeois East Anglian author to be a born-again virgin. Yet this obsession with virginity must be put into perspective. In the legendaries male saints outnumber female ones, and Mary Magdalene—who was not a virgin—is only second in popularity to Katherine of Alexandria. Despite the fact that a large number of the legends were written for or at the behest of women, women did not write them. But there are important exceptions, although they concern texts that were not written in English: Clemence of Barking’s twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Life of St Catherine, and Christine de Pisan’s Cité de Dames [Book of the City of Ladies] (1405), a third of which is devoted to virgins. The Life of Saint Catherine by Clemence of Barking, William MacBain (ed.) ANTS 18 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964); The Book of the City of Ladies, Earl Jeffrey Richards (trans.) (London: Pan, 1983). De Pisan’s work was popular with English women book collectors: Chaucer’s granddaughter, Alice, owned a copy and so probably did Cecily Neville, duchess of York (mother of Edward IV). Why virginity? In the traditional division of medieval women’s ‘estates’, virginity offers the greatest heavenly returns. To be a chaste wife is good, to be a chaste widow is better, but to be a virgin is best. As the author of Hali Meiðhad puts it: ‘For wedlac haueð hire frut þrittifald in heouene; widewehad, sixtifald; meiðhad wið hundretfald ouergeað baþe.’ [For marriage has its reward thirtyfold in heaven; widowhood, sixtyfold; virginity, with a hundredfold, surpasses both.] Millett and Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women, p. 20/19-21. These precise (and conventional) arithmetical ratios, as well as the female career-hierarchy that they support, owe their values to St Jerome. Virginity represents the closest thing on earth to prelapsarian purity. And not just for career virgins. Rather, virginity is a spectrum of ideals, one that includes the related category of chastity: a vanquishing of sexual temptation by the sexually active—a practice not synonymous with virginity but sometimes overlapping with it. Of þe Mirrour of Chastite (c.1380), part of a longer work known as Pore Caitif, addresses laymen and women, arguing that chastity brings them nearer to the angels: ‘gostly [spiritual] virtues ben aungels þinges, and principally chastite is aungels þinge. Be [Through] chastite men and wymmen ben lickened to aungels, whanne kynde [human nature] is ouercomen þoru3 [through] virtues.’ Sister Mary Brady, ‘The Pore Caitif: Edited from MS Harley 2336 with Introduction and Notes,’ PhD diss., Fordham University, 1954. I have edited this work’s treatise Of þe Mirrour of Chastite from Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 496, fos. 146v-164r (f. 158r). Virginity is by no means a flight from the tempestuous stirrings of the body: virginity’s value lies precisely in the fact that it inhabits the frail flesh but that its ‘wilful’ [willing, determined] subjects are engaged in a war against the flesh that they overcome through virtue. Of Maydenhede (c.1450) argues that the state of virginity is ‘so hi3e as þat þat nexte is God’ [so high that it is next to God], and because ‘harde þinge it is to make man or woman to life angelis life’, so Christ made for himself ‘a newe folke þat nexte hym schuld be as his moste loued seruauntes, þat as he was worschipid in heuene of [by] angelis, so þat he haue angelis, þat is clene [pure] maydens, to worschipe hym in erþe.’ British Library MS Arundel 286, fos 134v-148r (f. 138r). For an edition of this treatise, see Lorna R.L. Stevenson, Fifteenth-Century Chastity and Virginity: Texts, Contexts, Audiences, unpublished PhD thesis, Liverpool, 1992, pp. 367-397. I have edited the text myself from the manuscript. Virginity surpasses matrimony and widowhood because it overcomes both nature and the battle of temptation: as St Jerome says, to live in the flesh without the action that the nature of flesh asks is not earthly life but angel’s life and heavenly (f. 140v). Virginity is often represented as an immensely valuable possession. As the treatise Hali Meiðhad puts it, ‘Meiðhad [Virginity] is þet [that] tresor þet [which], beo hit eanes forloren [once it is lost], ne bið hit neauer ifunden [it will never be found again]’ (8/34-5). Hang on to your virginity, because you will never get it back. Virginity is famously described in Ancrene Wisse as ‘a precious liquor, a valuable liquid like balm, in a fragile vessel.’ The vessel represents ‘women’s flesh’ and the balm ‘is maidenhood held within it (or chaste purity once maidenhood is lost)’. And ‘this brittle vessel is nonetheless as brittle as any glass; for if it is once broken, it is never mended to the wholeness it had, any more than glass. But it breaks more easily than brittle glass does.’ Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 109. Yet this comparison struggles to maintain the distinction between inner and outer upon which its hierarchy of values depends: if virginity is an inner, spiritual quality and the outer vessel which contains it is women’s despised flesh, then virginity cannot exist without its corporeal container, its liquidity suggesting a problematic overflowing rather than the potential for containment. How can the container be broken without virginity also being broken? And where does that put ‘chaste purity’? Here the play of exteriority and interiority, far from confirming boundaries, confounds them. Small wonder, then, that Margery Kempe cannot understand why her desire to be a virgin is so misunderstood: non-virginity is supposedly irreversible, but you can—just about—become a virgin again, by willing yourself to live chastely. Wilful virgins Kempe certainly knew enough about the value of virginity to want to recast herself as a ‘wilful virgin’. I adapt this phrase from Pore Caitif’s Of the Mirrour of Chastite, which asserts that a souereyne vertu and quene of al vertues to be perfite is wilful [purposeful, done willingly] chastite, þe whiche is in þre wiles [desires]: þe vnweddid to kepe hem from alle lecherie in wille, worde and dede; þe weddid to kepe hem [themselves] chaste to her [their] / wifes wiþouten any auouterie [adultery] bodily eiþer gostly [in mind] in þe holy termes þat God him self haþ lette [prevented]. But as þe bri3t schynynge sonne passiþ [surpasses] in clerenesse [brightness] þe li3t of þe mone [moon] and þe sterres, so doþ clene virginite þese oþer two degrees. See n. 13 (fos. 151v-152r). ‘Clene virginite’ is the best, but ‘wilful chastite’ is highly esteemed, for the chaste spouse or the chaste person awaiting marriage. Kempe of course understands her desired brand of virginity not as a return to a state of bodily intactness but as the recuperation of a spiritual state that stands outside the temporality of virginity as we normally understand it. In its context in Pore Caitif, ‘wilful’ has a positive sense, ‘purposeful, done willingly’, but it can also mean, as it does today, ‘governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s way; obstinately self-willed or perverse’(OED). Although Kempe sees herself as a ‘purposeful’ virgin, her detractors see her as nothing if not perverse in her determination to achieve virginity, so much so that the Archbishop of York reads her wearing of white clothes as a sign of heresy. Meech and Allen, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 124; Windeatt, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 162. Just as the fundamental indeterminacy of virginity is not capable of being fully written in/on the body, so it is also marked by a strangely disjunctive temporality: one that Kempe exploits. Questions of temporality are of course linked to the body and its cycles of change and decay. But the temporality of virginity is something apart from this. On the one hand, virginity represents the fantasy of an escape from the human condition: from bodily change and pollution. But narratives of virginity (like Kempe’s) often fail to maintain this fantasy as bounded or fixed. The strange temporality of virginity shakes the foundations of linear chronology, calling into question the proprieties of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Medieval commentators insist that virginity is chiefly a spiritual state and a matter of will. But it has degrees: Of Maydenhede defines three ‘degrees’ of virgins—those who are pure in body but who like to talk about sex or indulge in ‘vnleful [unlawful] touchynge’; those who are pure in body and speech, but who do not intend to remain virgins for ever (the chaste pre-marrieds); and those ‘gostly [in spirit] maydens’ who are not corrupt in either word or will but who intend to live chaste for ever. See n. 14 (f. 135r). Of these three categories, the last are the best. Even if they are raped and no longer technically virgins, they will nevertheless get all the rewards of virginity if they resist their rapists: ‘þou3 þei þur3 strengþe be rauesched and defouled of wicked men a3eynes her wille … for ou3t þat wicked men wiþ hem done, noþinge þei losen of maydens mede 3if þei wiþstande wiþ her my3t and sufferen a3eynes her wille.’ [even if they are forcibly raped and defiled by wicked men against their will, … despite anything that wicked men do to them, they lose nothing of the reward of virginity if they resist with their power and endure it against their will] (fos. 137r-v) Bodily intactness is less important than the will to remain chaste. The virginal female subject wills her virginity, overturning the proprieties of linear chronology. Virginity disorganizes temporal sequence. Margery Kempe, mother of fourteen children, exploits the possibilities of the non-sequential temporality of virginity to remake herself as a virgin. Uncannily echoing the language of Of Maydenhede, Christ’s unorthodox words of reassurance to Kempe—unorthodox in that they implicitly deny that technical virgins are better—explicitly mention ‘will’: ‘“trow þow rygth wel [rest assured] þat I lofe wyfes also, and specyal [specially] þo wyfys [those wives] whech woldyn levyn chast [who would live chaste], 3yf [if] þei mygtyn haue her wyl, & don her besyness [do all they can] to plesyn me as þow dost [you do].”’ Meech and Allen, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 49; Windeatt, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 84. And Kempe has Christ say to her, immediately before he expresses his desire that she wear white clothes: ‘“I xal [shall] kepe þe [you] fro alle wykked mennys power. And, dowtyr, I sey to þe I wyl [that I want] þat þu were clothys of whyte [white clothes] & non oþer colowr, for þu xal ben arayd aftyr my wyl [for you shall dress according to my will].”’ (32 [67]) Kempe’s version of the ‘wilful virgin’ may not be exactly what the purveyors of pastoral teaching had in mind but it is—just about—compatible with it. Her Book reveals how one medieval woman attempts to live out the contradictory temporality of virginity, in which the apparently irreversible effects of sexual experience can be overridden by an effort of will. Despite the railings against her by the mayor of Leicester, by the English priest on her way to Rome, by the townspeople of Lynn, it is not Kempe that is incoherent in her desire to remake virginity, but the cultural meanings of virginity itself. Although it is ostensibly Mary’s virginity which supports the notion of prelapsarian purity, through the traditional exegesis of the virgin birth as a joyful reversal of the sin that Eve brought into the world, the purity signified by virginity may not be so much opposed to the dirt of women as to the dirt of sodomy. In the thirteenth-century Golden Legend (the source for the Salomé episode) we learn that on Christmas Eve ‘even the sodomites gave witness by being exterminated wherever they were in the world on that night, as Jerome says: “A light rose over them so bright that all who practiced this vice were wiped out; and Christ did this in order that no such uncleanness might be found in the nature he had assumed.”’ Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, William Granger Ryan (ed. and trans.) 2 Vols (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), I.41. So the cleanness of (Christ’s) virginity wards off sodomy and heresy, those notorious bedfellows, suggesting that we might need to rethink the special value of virginity for (heterosexual) men and women, turning our attention instead to virginity’s role in the disruptive discourses of same-sex desire. Clean and pure The N-town Christ, unlike all other newborns, ‘nedyth [needs] no waschinge’ (line 230), for Mary’s body is so utterly clean. The obsession with virgin cleanness is graphically presented through its opposite in a much earlier piece of reportage: the mid-twelfth-century story of the Nun of Watton, reviled by her fellow nuns when she becomes pregnant. Ælred of Rievaulx, ‘The Nun of Watton,’ Patrologia Latina 195: 780-96, trans. John Boswell, in The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), pp. 452-458. Safely delivered (in both senses) of her illegitimate child (she gives birth but the child is miraculously taken away in a vision by the very Bishop who had originally committed her to life in the monastery), she is subjected to a humiliating body-search by her prison guards who believe she has murdered the baby: They felt her belly: such slenderness had replaced the swelling that you would have thought her back was stuck to her front. They squeezed her breasts but elicited no liquid from them. Not sparing her, they pressed harder, but expressed nothing. They ran their fingers over every joint, exploring everything, but found no sign of childbirth, no indication even of pregnancy. They called the others, and they all found the same thing: everything restored, everything proper, everything beautiful (p. 457). In this ruthless exacting of the signs of purity we see the obverse of Salomé’s testing of Mary—the kind of fate that Mary, as the mother of a child born out of an adulterous (so to speak) relationship, might have been subjected to, had she not been the mother of Christ. Ironically, it is Mary who so often in English vernacular narratives presides over the miraculous spiriting away of the illegitimate children of consecrated virgins and the restoration of their virginal bodies, as in the widespread story of the pregnant abbess that circulated in Latin and Middle English from the twelfth-century: a version of this ‘miracle of the Virgin’ appears in the popular fifteenth-century Alphabet of Tales. An Alphabet of Tales, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, EETS OS 126-127 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1904). Furthermore, some of the tortures inflicted on the hapless Nun of Watton by her fellow-nuns uncannily resemble those by which—as we shall see—the virgin martyr is tested by pagans (stripped, whipped, thrown in prison, fettered with heavy chains, starved, verbally abused, beaten) (454). But where the virgin-martyr triumphs, the Nun of Watton is abjected. The frenzy with which her fellow-nuns set about disciplining her body into virginal channels suggests something of the force that virginity as an ideal exerted on this particular medieval community of nuns—or perhaps more accurately on its clerical author, Ælred, and on Gilbert, the father of the convent—and also something of the misery brought about when individual medieval women failed to take or live up to virginity as their ideal. The Nun of Watton’s newly-purified, non-pregnant body occupies no space: it was as if ‘her back was stuck to her front.’ But such is the force of the ideology of virginity that this curiously diminished and organless body is described as ‘proper’ and ‘beautiful’. Mary’s Virginity Mary’s virginal body is often figured as a sacred, enclosed and inviolate space: the porta clausa (locked door) in Ezekiel’s vision of the new temple (Ezekiel 44.1-2), a ‘fountain sealed’, a ‘spring shut up’. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1990), p. 73. Lydgate’s poem ‘To Mary, the Queen of Heaven’ speaks of her as ‘Hool & vnbroken by virgynal clennesse’, and praises ‘The cristal cloistre of thy virginyte’. MacCracken, Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pp. 284-287, lines 12 and 20. Devotion to Mary reached unprecedented heights of intensity by the fifteenth century. Books of Hours, especially popular amongst the devout laity in this century, prescribed a semi-liturgical devotional routine based on the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, a routine that included the recitation of multiple Ave Marias and prayers to the Virgin, based on that laid out in the Ancrene Wisse. Hoccleve’s Legend of the Virgin, a poem once attributed to Chaucer, alludes to the spatial symbolism of wholeness signified by Mary’s body. Thomas Hoccleve, Legend of the Virgin and her Sleeveless Garment, Arthur Beatty (ed.) The Chaucer Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1902). Mary, wearing a sleeveless dress, appears to a monk in France, asking him to rectify her dishabille by trebling the number of Ave Marias he repeats, and by adding a Pater Noster to every tenth Ave. This he faithfully does; in the next vision Mary’s garment has sleeves. Eventually the monk is made Abbott. In this miracle of sartorial completeness, social degree as well as piety is at stake: since Mary is Queen of Heaven, she must be dressed royally. Servants would often sew a garment’s detachable sleeves into the bodice in the process of dressing a lady: because Mary is metaphorically ‘clothed’ in the prayers of the faithful, her ‘servants’ must appropriately complete her dressing. Because faith restores Mary’s wholeness, the tale parallels Salomé’s physical testing. Mary’s body hovers between the fullness of virginity and the incompleteness signaled by her clothing, its contradictions marking yet another paradox of virginity: a wholeness that wards off lack but which simultaneously conceals an anxiety about lack. The numerous lyrics that extravagantly praise the Virgin, with their elaborate litanies of Aves, sorrows and joys, seem designed to freeze Mary and to multiply her, Warhol-like, in a series of repeated but ever-so-slightly varied images. They present a Virgin who defends against temporality and change—sometimes bathetically, as when Lydgate claims she will ‘vs diffende [defend us] with hir mylk virgynal.’ ‘To Mary, the Queen of Heaven,’ in MacCracken, Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pp. 284-287, line 71. But the fifteenth-century Sloane lyric ‘I singe of a maiden’ is exceptional in acknowledging the play of the eternal and the temporal in Mary and her history, enacted through its use of alternating tenses in each stanza. Pared down to its essentials, the incarnation becomes nothing more than the secret visiting of the beloved by her divine lover in human guise: He cam also stille to his moderes bour as silently As dew in April that falleth on the flour. John Burrow (ed.), English Verse 1300-1500 (London: Longman, 1977), p. 301 (British Library, MS Sloane 2593). But this is nonetheless queer: after all, this is mother and son; and the surprise reversal of the second line—in which the maiden ‘chese’ (chose) the ‘King of alle kinges’ to be her son—further confounds temporality. And the metaphors of the Old Testament prophecies of the virgin birth (Judges 6.36-40, Ps 71.6, Deut 32.2, Isa 45.8) are treated not as events to come but as events that have already happened and are still happening. The virgin birth represents a disjunctive coexistence of temporalities and sexualities that belies the singularity (‘a maiden that is makeless’; ‘was never non but she’) and rigid hierarchies of inner and outer with which Mary’s virginity is usually invested. Virgin-power? Increased devotion to the cult of Mary is paralleled by a burgeoning interest in the vitae of the virgin-martyr saints, especially those of Katherine and Margaret. In these narratives, a beautiful, virtuous Christian virgin has her faith tested by pagan adversaries: tortured, imprisoned, her flesh stripped, her body dismembered, her breasts torn off, boiling oil poured over her, the virgin remains miraculously alive, her narrative of survival the very revelation of her true (Christian) self: unchangeable, indestructible, incorruptible. Her pagan opponents are converted or destroyed. How can we understand these often sensationalist stories? Their heroines have either been seen as victims, bearers of medieval culture’s misogynistic fear of the female body, or as triumphant and autonomous protofeminist subjects—like the various incarnations of Katherine, proving her ‘clergie’ [scholarship] before fifty learned men, or Chaucer’s St Cecilia, answering the tyrannical prefect Almachius with absolute poise, and still teaching the faith after her throat has been sliced through: models of intelligence, learning, and fortitude. But it is too reductive to read this material as either affirming or denying the ‘power’ conferred by virginity, whatever that might be. The Katherine Group’s St. Juliana is tortured first by her father, then by Eleusius, and then by the devil Belial, in a manner that seems designed to exact from her body some sort of ‘truth’ about women. Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, S.T.R.O. d’Ardenne (ed.) EETS OS 248 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); trans. Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, pp. 306-21. But she survives even being broken upon the wheel, emerging ‘ase fischhal as þah ha nefde nohwer hurtes ife let’ (p. 53/lines 570-71) [as whole as a fish, as though she had never felt injury anywhere (p. 317)], the fish image suggesting perhaps the teasingly non-human nature of her resistance. These repeated tortures suggest that the texts stage gender as fluid and performative: not as an essence but as a continual acting out of female sexual and social identity. The versions vary enormously in length, genre and detail. Capgrave’s little-studied Katherine is almost novelistic in impulse, rivaling Chaucer’s Troilus in design, length and psychological motivation. See n. 8. And paratextual material (prologues, dedications, moralisations, ballades) positions the versions in widely divergent ways. The vitae offer virginity as fantasy of a wholeness that binds together late-medieval Christian communities, one that bears comparison with that other broad signifier of the wholeness and inviolacy of the Christian faith: the Eucharist. Indeed, the lives of Katherine, Margaret, Juliana, Christine, Dorothy, et al are strikingly similar to those of the popular anti-Semitic host-desecration narratives, circulating at the same time and often in the same collections. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 40-69. In the best-known of these narratives, the so-called Paris version, a Jew obtains the host and tests its much-vaunted properties by subjecting it to abuse and torture: striking it, piercing it until it bleeds, burning and boiling it. The host’s miraculous intactness brings about the conversion of onlooking Jews. The frequent etymologizing of Margaret’s name invokes the symbolism of the eucharistic wafer: in Osbern Bokenham’s prologue to his legend of Margaret (1443-47), her Latin name (margarita, ‘pearl’) signifies that she is ‘whyht, lytyl, and eek verteuous.’ Osbern Bokenham, Vita S. Margaretae, in Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Mary S. Serjeantson (ed.) EETS OS 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 7-38, line 251. What pleasures did women derive from these narratives? One fifteenth-century anthology for devout laywomen, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, intersperses legends of Katherine and Margaret with various Middle English romances, suggesting that women readers liked romancing their virgin-martyrs, liked the foreign, the supernatural, the marvelous. But as Diane Elam argues, romance is self-divided, a category that can unsettle by muddling classificatory and aesthetic boundaries. Diane Elam, Romancing the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 17. Perhaps their appeal lies in their social narratives: their espousing of a woman’s right to choose her marriage partner, and their explicit challenge to family values. Christina of Markyate, when challenged on behalf of her parents by the prior Fredebertus to defend her refusal to marry her suitor Burthred (‘“Nor should you think that only virgins are saved: for whilst many virgins perish, many mothers of families are saved, as we well know”’), convincingly and disarmingly refutes him: “if many mothers of families are saved, which you likewise say, and it is true, certainly virgins are saved more easily.”’ The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-Century Recluse, C.H. Talbot (ed. and trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959, repr. 1987), pp. 61, 63. Because the vitae focus in varying degrees on the dismemberment and mutilation of female bodies, they seem pornographic. But before we dismiss pornographic readings as reductive, anachronistic, or antifeminist, it is crucial to recognize that medieval women readers could accept these narratives simultaneously as ‘pornographic’ and as warnings to readers about the dangers of sexuality. Furthermore, the ‘pornographic’ scenes in these narratives are more nuanced than is generally recognized, to the extent that they position their audiences (inside and outside the text) as powerless and yet complicit, and that they speak of a female enjoyment that cannot be fully represented. Various versions of Margaret’s legend, for example, stage the spectator’s impotence within the text: in the Katherine Group version, Margaret’s beatings are witnessed by a helpless heathen audience who ‘remden of reowðe [wept for compassion] ant meanden þes meiden [pitied this maiden], ant summe of ham [them] seiden: “Margarete, Margarete, meide swa muche wurð 3ef þu wel waldest [maiden who might be worth so much if you wanted to be], wa is us [we are sorry] þet we seoð þi softe leofliche lich [lovely body] toluken se ladliche [so cruelly torn to pieces]!”’ Seinte Margarete, in Millett and Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women, pp. 44-85 (p. 52/26-29). As Slavoj Žižek suggests, the (male) observer is represented as passive and impotent because ‘his desire is split, divided between fascination with enjoyment and repulsion at it; or—to put it another way—because his yearning to rescue the woman from her torturer is hindered by the implicit knowledge that the victim is enjoying her suffering.’ Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 75. Margaret’s ecstasies indeed suggest this disturbing feminine enjoyment, provoking ambivalent reactions for its onlookers within a complex dialectic of gaze and power. Not being seen Seeing is indeed at the heart of it. ‘[L]ove your windows as little as you possibly can,’ the author of Ancrene Wisse warns his early thirteenth-century audience of anchoresses. Watson and Savage, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 66. To see was to risk being seen. And to be lusted after was a fate worse than death, as Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale suggests. Virginia gets her head chopped off by her father for nothing more than getting in the sightlines of the ‘false juge’ Apius (VI, 154). Because the woman is held responsible for arousing the male gazer, she must be punished for his improper arousal. Because male desire is troublesome, men make her guilty for their guilt. But what if the virgin returns the gaze? These texts may evoke the substance of Freud’s 1917 essay on virginity, namely that ‘with the taboo of virginity primitive man is defending himself against a correctly sensed, although psychical, danger’, that of an ‘archaic reaction of hostility’ that will be unleashed by the woman towards the man for deflowering her. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ (1918 [1917]), in On Sexuality: Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, Vol. 8, The Pelican Freud Library, James Strachey (trans.), Angela Richards (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 261-283 (pp. 274, 282). The castrating power of virgins may be implied in the name of St. Petronilla’s unsuccessful suitor: in Lydgate’s retelling, ‘Erle Flaccus’ [flabby, not stiff]. The Legende of St Petronilla, in MacCracken, Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pp. 154-9, line 75. Medieval virginity treatises often reinforce the warning not to look by reference to the Old Testament exemplum of Dyna, the daughter of Lya, who goes out to visit the women of her land and is seen by the prince’s son Sychym, who rapes her. The Ancrene Wisse provides one of the best-known instances. In a late fourteenth-century recension (c.1380-c.1400) of the Ancrene Wisse in the ‘Vernon’ manuscript, the author underlines the meaning of the exemplum: ‘And al þe euel of Dyna þat I speek er [before] of [about], al com not forþi þat [because] þe wommon lokede folyliche [foolishly] vppon men, ac þorw þat heo schewede hire [showed herself] in monnes ei3e sihte [before the sight of men], and duden [behaved] wherþorw [in such a way that] heo [she] mouhten [could] fallen in synne.’ The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: The ‘Vernon’ Text, Arne Zittersten and Bernhard Diensberg (eds.) EETS OS 310 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 22. Dyna’s ‘sin’, then, is not that she cast desiring glances upon men, but that she made herself an object of desire. But medieval authors did not always distinguish between the sin of looking and the sin of being looked at. Pore Caitif’s Of þe Mirrour of Chastite bids its unnamed addressee to ‘kepe wel þi si3t [guard well your sight] for it is þe messanger of þi soule, be it clene eiþer ellis [whether it be pure or otherwise]. Dyna, for [because] she vnwarly [incautiously] lokid, leste [lost] þe floure [precious thing] of her maydenhode.’ See n. 13 (fos. 147r-v). Dyna loses her virginity through heedless looking. But ‘vnwarly’ can also mean ‘innocently’. The virgin is caught in a double bind: whichever way the gaze travels, there is no such thing as an innocent look. But this idea is not central to most of the vernacular virgin-martyr lives of the period: Almachius’s gaze on Cecilia, Olibrius’s on Margaret, Maxentius’s on Katherine, in the various Middle English retellings of their vitae, are indeed sexualized gazes, but their narrative purpose is to get the virgin noticed so that she can defend her Christianity. The virgin-martyr may (eventually) get her head chopped off, but these narratives simply do not obey the logic of desire suggested by the Dyna exemplum, whereby the looked-at virgin is as guilty as the looker. Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, then, is something of an anomaly. At first glance, it certainly reads like a text-book case of the logic of desire. In this tale of patriarchal wrangling over a virgin’s body, Apius plans to enlist the help of the low-born ‘cherl’ Claudius to outwit Virginia’s father and gain possession of her. Effectively despoiled by Apius’s glance, the hapless Virginia is given two choices by her father: ‘outher [either] deeth or shame, / That thou most suffre’ (VI, 214-5), and since ‘shame’ is the worst, he tells her he must ‘smyten of [smite off] thyn [your] heed’ (VI, 226). But this only shows to what extent Virginia’s virginity is valued by her father (as representative of patriarchal culture), that is, as long as nobody else sees it and it remains his exclusive property. Moreover, Virginia does not authorize the meanings of her narrative as the female virgin martyrs do. Katherine, Margaret, Cecilia meet the male tyrant’s lustful gaze with defiance: they answer back. Nor is it always the category of the body that is at stake in the look upon the virgin. In Mirk’s retelling of St Margaret, for example, Olibrius wants to know if she is ‘gentyll’ [noble]—for then he will marry her—or ‘þrale’ [slave], for then he will take her as his ‘leman’ [mistress]. Erbe, Mirk’s Festial, p. 200. Social class here, like virginity, is not ‘visible’ and cannot be read on the body. Similarly, in Bokenham’s St Margaret, there is concern for social status: the tyrants always ask some version of Olibrius’ question: ‘Sey me, damysel, of what kyn thou art / And whethyr thou be bonde [a serf] or ellys fre [noble]’—and this question mobilizes the opposition between pagan (and secular) and Christian values, since the heroine always responds that she is no slave but a Christian, bringing two different codes (one religious, one to do with social degree) into collision. Serjeantson, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, pp. 14-15, lines 512-3. The tyrant expects an answer to do with social degree, because he is thinking of her status as a worldly object of desire; but the virgin seizes this opportunity to exploit analogical thinking: non-Christians, however noble, are slaves, and only Christians are truly ‘fre’ [noble]. In the Physician’s Tale, Apius tells his fall-guy, the ‘cherl’ Claudius, that if he reveals Apius’ plot he will ‘lese his heed’ (VI, 145). Churls lose their heads if they betray their lords; virgins lose their (maiden)heads if they are seen. Anxiety about virginity in the Physician’s Tale is also a displacement of anxiety about social mobility. English virginities? Earlier I claimed that the memory of virgins and virginities was everywhere in medieval English culture. The Middle Ages was fundamentally a ‘memorial culture’, in which memory was a sacred, affective and living presence. But there is an important sense in which the vitae of the female virgin martyrs served as versions of what Pierre Nora calls ‘memory-places’ [lieux de mémoire], subject to the injunction to remember. ‘Between memory and history,’ in Pierre Nora (ed.) Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 1-20. For Nora, the memorial impulse is tied up with the desire to remember the nation. Virginities were symbolic memory-places upon which the emerging nation of ‘England’ was fastened. Lydgate writes a Valentine poem to the Virgin Mary in which he invokes Mary for nationalist and royalist purposes, beseeching her to show grace to Henry VI and his mother Katherine and ‘þeyre noble bloode’. John Lydgate, ‘A Valentine to Her that Excelleth All,’ in MacCracken, Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pp. 304-310 (line 137). And in 1501, at a civic triumph in London to celebrate the marriage of Henry VII’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, to Katharine of Aragon, symbols of Englishness (Lancastrian roses; lions rampant holding metal plates with the arms of England painted on them) are juxtaposed with a representation of the royal wife’s virgin-martyr namesake: ‘a faire yong lady with a wheel in hir hand in liknes of Seint Kateryne,’ with many virgins about her. The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, Gordon Kipling (ed.) EETS OS 296 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Jocelyn Wogan-Browne observes that in the fifteenth-century vernacular Life of Edith of Wilton, a virgin saint, Edith’s post-mortem wholeness is contrasted with images of menstruating Jews, arguing that ‘the long-expelled Jewish nation of England becomes an upturned and feminized anti-body to Edith’s monastic and national purity.’ ‘Outdoing the daughters of Syon?: Edith of Wilton and the representation of female community in fifteenth-century England,’ in Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds.) New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and their Impact, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 393-409, pp. 402-3. In Lydgate’s fifteenth-century lyric ‘Ave Regina Celorum’, Mary’s chaste self is asked to intercede for England: ‘That no perylous plage of pestilence, / …. / Entyr in Englond …!’. MacCracken, Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pp. 291-2, lines 13-15. This sounds like a staking out of the nationalistic ground that Elizabeth I will later occupy. But the issues are complex: as Helen Hackett argues, ‘Celebration of [Elizabeth’s] virginity was less an attempt to replicate the cult of the Virgin than an effort to turn to nationalistic use enduring superstitions which associated the virgin female body with purity and the sexually active female body with pollution and mortality.’ Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 240. The memory of virgin martyrs persisted into the Reformation. Elizabeth Barton, the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’ (1506-1534), a former servant who modeled herself explicitly on Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena and became a Benedictine nun at the convent of St Sepulchre’s in Canterbury, contributed to resistance to the Reformation. Diane Watt, ‘Of the seed of Abraham: Elizabeth Barton, the “Holy Maid of Kent”,’ in Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 51-80. And although Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) has no Margaret or Juliana, John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happening in the Church, with a Vniuersall history of the same [Foxe’s Book of Martyrs] [1563], 3 vols, 4th edition (London: John Daye, 1583). it does have Katherine. Foxe regards her legend as a farrago of ‘incredible’ and ‘impudent’ fictions, accusing hagiographers generally of having ‘mingle mangled their stories and liues’ (I, 95), but he nevertheless imagines an audience that desires to hear her story. And he imposes Katherine’s narrative upon his Protestant female martyrs. A certain Elizabeth Young, arrested for smuggling books from the continent and examined on thirteen different occasions (nine of which Foxe transcribes), disputed with learned doctors, so impressing her interrogators that one exclaimed, ‘Twenty pounds, it is a man in woman’s clothes! twenty pounds it is a man!’ Watt, Secretaries of God, p. 116. If virginity has ceased to be what is at stake in this account, we can nevertheless recognize here a continuity with the cross-gendering of the medieval virgins: their power to unsettle and confound social and sexual expectations. 1 27