“A certaine whorish brauery”: Silenced Women in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Abstract

This paper proposes an exploration of the medieval aspects of the early modern period with a particular focus on the lives of medieval female saints and the relevance of the accounts of their martyrdoms to early Shakespearean tragedy. The most distinguished hagiography collection in the Middle Ages (in Continental Europe and in England alike) was the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), which reflected the spiritual, religious, socio-political, and cultural landscape of medieval Europe. It remained influential in the sixteenth century, and various elements of it seeped into Protestant martyrologies like John Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes (Book of Martyrs) and John Bale’s 1546 account of Anne Askew’s interrogation and execution (The first examinacio[n] of Anne Askewe latelye martired in Smythfelde—The Examinations). I offer an interdisciplinary discussion of the impact of medieval hagiographies in early modern England, a subject frequently overlooked by scholars of Renaissance studies. The focus falls on the saints in The Golden Legend who represent a strong female voice and who are silenced violently. I also examine pre-and post-Reformation voyeuristic tendencies in (for instance) Foxe’s and Bale’s accounts and in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.