Flesh Made Word: Women’s Speech in Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends Brigit C. McGuire Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Brigit C. McGuire All Rights Reserved Flesh Made Word: Women’s Speech in Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends Brigit C. McGuire This study examines the relationship of women’s bodies to their speech in English virgin martyr legends of the tenth to fifteenth centuries. It identifies and traces a long tradition connecting women’s virginal bodies to powerful, fruitful speech that begins with late classical writers. This tradition gives rise to the eloquent virgin martyrs of Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, the Katherine Group, and Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale, and is one the fifteenth century mystic and contemplative Margery Kempe draws upon to authorize her unconventional performance of sanctity in her Book. Far from portraying them as a source of sin or pollution, English virgin martyr legends portray women’s bodies as enabling their speech by serving as a dwelling place for God’s Word, providing access to his revelation, and becoming the text the virgin martyr interprets for her audience in a lesson in spiritual reading practice. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………..ii Dedication…………………………………………………………….....iii Introduction……………………………………………………………....1 Chapter 1…………………………………….......…………………….....9 Embodied Speech and Teaching in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints Chapter 2……….……………………….……………………………...62 The Boundaries of the Body in the Katherine Group Chapter 3…….………………………….……………………………119 Scribe of Mary: Privacy and Preaching in the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale Chapter 4……….…..………………………………………………...162 Like a Virgin Martyr: Reading the Book of Margery Kempe as Virgin Martyr Legend Conclusion…………………………………………………………… 217 Bibliography…………….....………………………………………… .221 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All three of the original members of my committee have shaped this dissertation in unique and important ways. I am grateful to Susan Crane for her keen eye for organization and refusal to let a dangling modifier dangle; to Stacy Klein for telling me when I was insightful, but also for telling me I was just plain wrong; and to Patricia Dailey for guiding me to the big-picture insights with every chapter. The fourth chapter, on Margery Kempe, began in a seminar with Carolyn Dinshaw, whose deep familiarity with the literary and theological contexts for the Book has influenced my reading. And finally, I have relied on my colleagues in Columbia’s medievalist community for support both scholarly and social, but most of all on Sara Murphy, who keeps me sane, keeps me thinking, and always tells it like it is. ii DEDICATION To my father, who refused to let me give up, and made sure I didn’t have to, To my little family, Ricardo and Oliver, who provided a soft landing from the tower every day, And to my mother, who gave birth to this dissertation on the day she made a promise to buy her daughters “books where the hero is a girl.” iii INTRODUCTION In 415 A.D., Jerome pens a letter to Ctesiphon, who had asked Jerome for his opinion on some points of Pelagianism. In the course of that letter, between tracing the origins of Pelagianism and condemning it as heresy, Jerome criticizes “silly women laden with sins, carried about with every wind of doctrine, ever leaning and never able to come to knowledge of the truth.”1 Jerome follows his condemnation with a long list of women who have helped men to spread heresy: It was with the help of the harlot Helena that Simon Magus founded his sect. Bands of women accompanied Nicolas of Antioch that deviser of all uncleanness. Marcion sent a woman before him to Rome to prepare men's minds to fall into his snares. Apelles possessed in Philumena an associate in his false doctrines. Montanus, that mouthpiece of an unclean spirit, used two rich and high born ladies Prisca and Maximilla first to bribe and then to pervert many churches. (Letter 133, Paragraph 4) Jerome’s list of women heretics associates false teaching with sexual sin and pollution: Helena is a “harlot;” bands of women help spread “uncleanness.” And the Church Fathers’ association with women’s teaching with sexual sin is intact roughly 800 years later, when Thomas Aquinas levels as an objection against women teaching publicly: “this is not permitted to women . . . lest men’s minds be enticed to lust, for it is written ‘her conversation burneth as fire.’”2 Jerome and Aquinas’s quick leap from women’s public teaching to sexual temptation binds women’s bodies and their pedagogical speech, implying that the latter will always be contaminated by the dangerous seductiveness of the former. 1Jerome, “Letter to Ctesiphon” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6, ed. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893). Jerome is collocating 2 Timothy 4:3 and Ephesians 4:14. Ironically, the larger context of 2 Timothy 4:3 is condemning sinful men, for “ex his enim sunt qui penetrant domos et captivas ducunt mulierculas” – of these sort are they who creep into houses and lead captive silly women.” 2 The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Christian Classics, [1920], 198, Question 177, Article II, Objection 3. 1 Aquinas’s and Jerome’s writings are representative of a long tradition of medieval clerical writings portraying women’s bodies as dangerous, polluting, and in need of strict enclosure, and therefore particularly unsuited for public teaching or preaching. Yet roughly contemporaneous tradition had produced hagiography in which female virgin martyrs defend their faith before pagan persecutors in highly public preaching roles. This is a tradition in which a virgin responds to her persecutor’s request for her silence by asserting that “the living God’s words [can] not be stopped or silenced”—and she speaks them.3 It is one in which a virgin martyr’s prayers bring down rain that quenches the fire surrounding her, after which she praises the Lord “with the loudest of voices.”4 This is a tradition that portrays women’s bodies as generative of learned, divinely-inspired speech through a mystical marriage to Christ though which the virgin body gives birth to words in a symbolic mirror of the Marian birth of the Word. It coexists uneasily with the medieval misogynist tradition associating women’s speech with dangerous bodily pollution. The critical response to this seeming contradiction has been to minimize the importance of the women’s public teaching in medieval saints’ lives, particularly when it comes to the question of their exemplarity for female readers. On the question of the exemplarity of the militant virgin of the Katherine Group for anchoresses, for example, critics tend to downplay the saint’s public speaking in favor of the virgins’ steadfast response to adversity, and her role as the author of private prayer, as the primary locus of her exemplarity.5 This critical thread accepts the hagiographic hermeneutic of the Church Fathers 3Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Walter Skeat (EETS and Oxford University Press, 1881), Lucy, ll. 70 – 75. 4 þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne (London: EETS, 1961), l. 672. 5 Gail Ashton writes that the virgin martyr finds authorization as a model of prayer, which “posits woman as a vessel containing the power of the divine. Woman acts as intercessor.” Similarly, Karen Winstead argues that the exemplarity of these tales is to be found in “the long prayers that would have been appropriate for religious 2 themselves, who responded to the proliferation of virgin martyr hagiography by cautioning that female saint was to be venerated, but not imitated—certainly not when it came to her outspoken public speaking. Alternatively, critics have attempted to reconcile the misogynist and hagiographic traditions by reading saints’ lives as themselves misogynist—as seeking to torture a dangerous female body into submission. In other words, these critics argue, virgin martyr hagiography dramatizes the transformation of a dangerous, polluting female body into something less “dangerous,” because purely spiritual.6 However, the representation of female virginity in late classical to late medieval theology provides a corrective to both of these approaches. This tradition portrays the female body as generative of divinely-inspired and theologically-correct speech. By foreclosing the possibility of an earthly bridegroom, the virgin creates space within herself for the Bridegroom Christ. Her intimacy with him gives her special access to his words and provides protection from the supposedly inevitable bodily and spiritual rupture that attends any act of women’s preaching. The chapters that follow read this tradition “back” into virgin martyr hagiography. Inspired by Anne Clark Bartlett’s characterization of saints’ lives as “heteroglossic—sites of competing genres, registers, and traditions,” they seek to uncover an alternative reading of virgin martyrology that emphasizes the potential of the female body as generative of learned women, especially anchoresses,” theorizing that “their thirteenth-century hagiographers may have chosen to translate the lives of Margaret, Katherine, and Juliana precisely because their legends pay special attention to the saints’ activities in prison—praying, being comforted by angels, and combating demons.” See Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint. (London: Routledge, 2000), 106. and Karen Winstead, “Saintly Exemplarity,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 337. 6 For examples of this argument see Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, “Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.1 (1998): 35 – 36; Helene Scheck, Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture (Albany: Suny Press, 2008), 87; and Andrew P. Scheil, “Bodies and Boundaries in the Life of St Mary of Egypt,” Neophilologus 84.1 (Jan 2000). 137-156. 3 speech.7 Performing this reading of virgin martyr legends clarifies the role they play in medieval women’s self-authorization as preachers. It reads the virgin martyr’s public preaching as absolutely crucial to her exemplarity for women, and women’s bodies as sources of learning rather than corruption. My first three chapters show how virgin martyr legends articulate this tradition of female virginity by representing women’s virgin bodies as generative of learned speech. These lives—Aelfric’s legends of Agnes, Agatha, Lucy, and Cecilia; Judith, Juliana, and Margaret in the twelfth-century Katherine Group, and Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale— provide examples of women who occupy preaching roles and successfully negotiate the attendant public scrutiny of their bodies. In my last chapter, I turn from lives written about women by men, to a life written by a woman—the autobiographical Book of Margery Kempe. Although my decision to conclude my project with a text so different in form and content from the earlier lives I study may at first seem counter-intuitive, it enables me to demonstrate the vital role that virgin martyr legends play in medieval women’s understanding of their bodies’ relationship to their sanctity and vocation. The first chapter, “Embodied Speech and Learning in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints” places Aelfric of Eynsham’s tenth-century Lives of female virgin martyrs Agnes, Agatha, Lucy, and Cecilia in the context of late patristic writings on virginity and Aelfric’s homilies on the relationship of the body to Christian learning and revelation. Attentiveness to these contexts challenges a critical consensus that the female body in Aelfric’s Lives teaches only by transcending itself. Aelfric inherits a late patristic conception of female virginity as productive of divine speech and revelation; his homilies uphold the role of the body in 7 Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 145. 4