Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc

Church History, March, 2005 by Robert J. Hauck

Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc. By Maud Burnett McInerney. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ix 250 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Virgins and martyrs are clearly people out of control--the virgin rejects the claims of family and society, the martyr the demands of the state. This study, focused on the female virgin martyr, argues that the struggle for control extends to the narrative or rhetoric surrounding the saint. In her survey of the virgin martyr ideal in the medieval West, McInerney argues that representations by male writers such as Ambrose seek to render the virgin martyr passive and silent, while texts by female authors, such as Hildegard of Bingen, rescue the virgin martyr from masculine silencing and explore possibilities for feminine agency and vitality. There are two rhetorics in these texts, says McInerney, one "to claim freedoms of various sorts for women in the name of virginity, and [one] to deny women such freedoms in the name of virginity" (8).

This book, part of Macmillan's New Middle Ages series, which presents transdisciplinary studies of medieval culture, pursues this argument primarily with a literary analysis of virgin martyr accounts beginning with Perpetua and Thecla in the second century (whom the author notes were neither both virgins and martyrs), through the patristic period with treatment of Ambrose, Jerome, and others, into the Middle Ages, with consideration of virgin martyr accounts by male writers such as Aldhelm and Wace, and female writers such as Hrotsvitha, Clemence, and Hildegard. The analysis climaxes with an epilogue on Joan of Arc and her relation to the virgin martyr tradition, as it is configured by both masculine and feminine writers.

In each period, McInerney finds two rhetorics around the virgin martyrs. While noting historical and cultural particularities, the author identifies a masculine rhetoric, which seeks to portray the martyr as an idealized figure of purity and to identify her virtue primarily as purity, passivity, silence, and obedience. Intimately connected to this rhetoric are masculine imagination of the virgin body and the implicit voyeurism of many of the accounts, which include the threat of rape and descriptions of the torture of the virgin. In the early church this is present in Tertullian's fear of virgin sexuality and his effort to restrict the place and influence of virgins, and Ambrose's portrayal of the virgin as perfectly passive and silent, vulnerable, and sacrificial. In the seventh century Aldhelm of Malmesbury's representation looks to Ambrose and pictures virgins as static, objective icons of passive suffering and absolute humility, devoid of wills of their own. This rhetoric is likewise present in the rise of vernacular saints' lives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Wace's life of St. Margaret presents a reprise of Ambrose's approach, with the reduction of Margaret to virginal intactness, passivity, and a voyeuristic account of her passion.

To this masculine rhetoric McInerney opposes female accounts from each period and finds female authors depicting the virgin martyrs in very different ways. She assumes that the author of the Thecla story is female and takes Thecla as representative of egalitarian alternatives in the early church for women, although Ambrose, Jerome, and others succeed in silencing this alternative for the virgin martyr. She compares the works of Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim to the Ambrosian narrative of Aldhelm and argues that her virgin martyrs are intelligent and active agents who make their own choices and powerfully resist the actions of unjust men. This literary representation, according to McInerney, may reflect the social conditions of the community at Gandersheim, where the abbesses and members are often noble and well-educated women, with considerable independence and political power: "for them, virginity is an entirely positive and genuinely powerful condition for women to inhabit, a presumptively authoritative political position from which to speak" (109). This positive appropriation of the virgin martyr continues in the work of Hildegard of Bingen. According to McInerney, Hildegard identifies the virgin with original, prelapsarian femininity. This embodied, virginal, but sexual femininity does not subvert the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but "reconfigures the female body as normative and authoritative rather than other and lacking authority" (141).

McInerney has provided a persuasive argument for the way the virgin martyr serves as a locus for representations of and by women, and the way in which male and female writers struggle for control of this figure. From Tertullian to Clemence the virgin martyr is a way to imagine and construct the female body and the martyr's experience. Especially valuable are her accounts of the constructions by Hrotsvitha, Clemence, and Hildegard, whose prose, poetry, and drama demonstrate the ways in which the virgin martyr can represent images of agency and theological significance, especially in the context of the female religious communities of the authors. There is, however, some methodological confusion here. Throughout the work the author says she wants to discover "real" women's lives or "real" virgins in the virgin martyr accounts. However, her most convincing argument is that these are highly constructed texts that bear the weight of social, theological, and gender expectations--the virgin body is written upon by both male and female writers, differently, but no less effectively. McInerny concludes by asserting that she has argued, "that the experiences of the legendary virgin often informed the lives of medieval women more or less directly, and especially the lives of those rare medieval women who wrote" (195). Rather, it seems clear that she has argued that those women who wrote shaped the virgin martyr narrative in a way that supported and authorized the development of their full potential as women in the world in which they lived. McInerney has demonstrated the remarkable degree to which they succeeded in this endeavor, and thus this book serves as a valuable contribution to the re-imagining of women and women's lives in the Middle Ages.