Abstract
The ubiquity of the Virgin Mary in medieval religious culture would seem to suggest the constant presence or awareness of mothers in its literature. The near-total absence, then, of both the Virgin Mary and mortal mothers in many female saints’ lives is palpable. Instead, the genre offers several examples of women whose mothers are noticeably absent and who themselves die and are resurrected quite young, only to exhibit nurturing, maternal-like behavior themselves. The gendered treatment and involuntary nature of their postmortem status is common to otherwise dissimilar texts—in this study, the twelfth-century vita of the Welsh saint Wenefrid, the thirteenth-century vita of the Flemish saint Christina mirabilis, and the fourteenth-century Anglo-French vita of Mary Magdalene. After exiting the known world, all remain involuntarily tied to that world as protectors, filling maternal roles in their communities despite the lack of maternal models in their own lives. Their postmortem condition carries a gendered expectation of permanent nurturing and intercession: they experience resurrection as an obligation to devote themselves to others, and death as an invitation to continue that self-denial indefinitely as they intercede upon request. The expectation of continued protection is rooted in their female bodies: their former status as women, however problematic or inaccurate, not only grants them power they did not have in life, but also an obligation to remain in the role of protector.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to former students for helping me think through early forms of these ideas in my seminar on liminality taught at Ouachita Baptist University in Spring 2012. I am also grateful to Sarah Stark, with whom I first presented an early draft of this project alongside her work on Mélusine at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
For a modern English translation of the thirteenth-century Latin vita of Christina, see Thomas de Cantimpré (1999). A Middle English edition of Douce 114 appears in Jennifer Brown (2008). The vita of Wenefride appears in several sources, including the recent edition by James Gregory (2016), and appears as late as the early seventeenth century. The vita of Mary Magdalene cited here appears in Nicolas Bozon (1947).
- 5.
Although to a modern reader, their origins may not seem diverse at all: they are all, even in later manifestations, authored by male monastics.
- 6.
The foundational, nearly comprehensive text in this field is Caroline Walker Bynum (1987). The comparatively extensive bibliography of studies of late-medieval English mystics such as Margery Kempe might mislead nonspecialists to believe that religious England women didn’t realize they had bodies until the fifteenth century.
- 7.
See note 2 above for two anthologies of Marian literature.
- 8.
This is why Margery Kempe, for example, as a postpartum would-be saint, is so problematic at the beginning of her Boke: she cannot be controlled, and thus orthodox, until she is chaste.
- 9.
This Marian observation is part of Kristeva’s larger argument that abjection, or rejection and exclusion of the mother figure, allows individuals to form their identities and, on a larger scale, cultures to come into being.
- 10.
Each of the women in these narratives is resurrected from a ‘first’ death; Christina is resurrected from her first two deaths.
- 11.
This summary is based on later English versions of the tale. Welsh versions differ somewhat in the details; for example, Wenefride does not officially found a convent, though her example does persuade several other young women to take the veil. Several medieval manuscripts include Wenefride’s life, including the twelfth-century Latin version in Bodleian Library, Misc. Laud, MS 114, and British Library MS Lansdowne 436 (see note 4). See also M.J.C. Lowry (1983). Further, Ralph Buckland (1886) included Wenefride in his Lives of Women Saints in the early seventeenth century, by which time many young English Catholic women in continental convents were likely missing their own mothers.
- 12.
Most virgin martyrs’ vitae do not even mention mothers, who are presumed dead, although Margaret of Antioch’s vita explains that Margaret is raised by a foster mother who later visits her in prison.
- 13.
In some versions it is a companion of Cradoc who beheads Wenefride. See, for example, Gregory’s translation in n. 4 above.
- 14.
The Middle English cited here is from Brown’s edition of Bodleian Library Douce 114, a fifteenth-century manuscript; continental Latin texts of the vita date to the thirteenth century. The modern English of King’s edition is almost interchangeable with the Middle English version; I cite from King only when Middle English might be distracting to the modern reader.
- 15.
My discussion here is rooted in Bozon’s fourteenth-century version of the Magdalene vita. In many versions, the woman’s husband is described as the (Saracen) Prince of Marseilles. The 1260 Golden Legend version of the vita includes the anecdote, depicting the woman as a scold and including several misogynist editorial comments; see Jacobus de Voragine (1993). The version found in the Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108 as part of the South English Legendary devotes roughly half of the entire vita to the story of the prince and his wife (lines 227–526 of a 643-line poem). The anecdote is missing from Speculum Sacerdotale, another medieval collection of liturgical texts, although that of the woman who gave birth at sea and was rescued by the Magdalene is present. For an edition of the Middle English texts, see Sherry Reames (2003).
- 16.
The fertility miracle is closely tied to their idolatrous belief, as the couple asks ‘if they might through [their idols] have a child’// ‘si pussent par els [lur maumez] enfant aver’ (line 153).
- 17.
When the prince asks the Magdalene for his wife back, she arises and announces that the Magdalene led her to visit all the places he had been (lines 283–286).
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Long, M.B. (2017). Saintly Protection: The Postmortem ‘Mothers’ of Medieval Hagiography. In: Åström, B. (eds) The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49037-3_3
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