Abstract
On the first weekend in September, the small Burgundian village of Alise-Ste-Reine venerates its patron saint by presenting the Martyrdom of Saint Reine. You can, if you like, attend Mass on the Saturday evening, and then follow a torch-lit procession of costumed figures to the outdoor Théâtre des Roches to see the first performance of the Martyrdom, but the real celebration begins on Sunday morning at a place in the valley known as the Three Elm Trees, even though the three trees that presently grow there are chestnuts. From this point, a colorful procession begins to wind up the hillside to the theater. The Roman soldiers, red-cloaked and glittering with armor, take the lead on horseback. They are followed by virtually the entire population of the town, costumed as Gallo-Romans, and grouped around a series of tableaux vivants. There are four dumbshow Reines in addition to the one who will act in the Martyrdom, each accompanied by a crowd of other girls of the same age, all wearing appropriately symbolic colors. The four-year-old Reine comes first, dressed in white and walking between her parents at the head of a crowd of other tiny children, boys as well as girls, whose parents sometimes have to carry them up the steep road. Next comes Reine the shepherdess, also dressed in white and carrying distaff and spindle, with a following of other twelve-year olds. The fifteen-year-old Reine is cloaked in blue, and known as Reine méditante; she paces along with her eyes lifted to heaven.
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Notes
Jean-Baptiste Étourneau, Le martyre de Sainte Reine (1878) cited in André Godin, “La dramaturgie de sainte Reine” in Reine au Mont Auxois: Le culte et le pèlerinage de sainte Reine des origines à nos jours, ed. Philippe Boutry and Dominique Julia (Dijon: Cerf, 1997), p. 234.
The most significant is a metal plate with a fish upon it, dated to the late fourth or early fifth century. The word REGINA is roughly scratched upon the back. Joël Le Gall, “Un service eucharistique du IVe siècle à Alésia” in Mélanges Carcopino, Mélanges d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et d’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1966), pp. 613–28.
As Karen A. Winstead notes in Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) one result of this is “the widespread assumption…that virgin martyr legends as a genre express a more or less constant paradigm of sainthood” (p. 4).
John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 4.
R. H. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See especially chapter 2, “‘Devil’s Gateway’ and ‘Bride of Christ’” and chapter 3, “The Poetics of Virginity.”
Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 4. Christine de Pizan was not, as Bloch claims, the first to mount a “sustained attempt to counter the pernicious effects of misogyny” (p. 3). Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim developed a coherent critique of misogyny five hundred years earlier; see Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 200.
See Carolyn Dinshaw’s discussion in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 15–17.
Levi-Strauss, “The Principle of Reciprocity” in Elementary Structures of Kinship (Oxford: Beacon, 1969), p. 496.
Hali Meidhad, ed. and trans. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 33.
E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 7–9.
For many critics, this antifeminist and heterosexist impulse remains the defining feature of virgin martyr stories. See e.g. Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000), especially the final chapter; and Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady As Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), especially “Femininity Circumscribed.”
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge: New York, 1993), p. 231. Another point of contact between queer identity and virgin identity lies in the creation of same-sex communities bound together by a shared desire; as Frederick S. Roden notes, “virginal purity, in devotion to the ambigendered body of Christ…may be read as a profoundly queer choice for religious”; “Two ‘Sisters in Wisdom’: Hildegard of Bingen, Christina Rossetti, and Feminist Theology” in Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays, ed. Maud Burnett McInerney (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), p. 235. See also Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) on queer heterosexuality (pp. 12–13) and on Robert Gluck reading Margery Kempe (pp. 165–72).
On reduced opportunities for religious women in the later Middle Ages, see R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1970; rpt. 1988), pp. 312–18; Margaret Wade Labarge, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life (Boston: Beacon, 1986), pp. 208–16; Alexandra Barrett, Women’s Writing in Middle English (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 2–5.
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© 2003 Maud Burnett McInerney
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McInerney, M.B. (2003). Introduction: Genuine Devotion, Imaginary Bodies. In: Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06451-6_1
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