Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature: Authority, Exemplarity and Femininity, by Juliette Vuille

Abstract

Juliette Vuille investigates the figure of the holy harlot in medieval English literature: those female saints who, following a sinful (read: sexual) youth, repent in favour of a particularly ascetic spirituality. Vuille’s ambitious project encompasses English literary history from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and considers works in three of England’s vernacular languages: Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman. She argues that the holy harlot offers a ‘much more inclusive and overarching presentation of femininity’, one that allows womanhood to symbolise both the best and worst in humanity (p. 223). Medieval English literature constructs the holy harlot with such capaciousness, she contends, that she comes to represent Everyman, a symbol of humanity writ large as both fallen and redeemed. The first chapter investigates the earliest Old English lives of holy harlots from the ninth and tenth centuries. Vuille posits that pre-Conquest England provided particularly fertile ground for lives of holy harlots to flourish, given the multiplicity of non-traditional paths for women to religious life, and the pre-existing literary traditions for heroic women. She argues that, contrary to their Latin sources, these Old English texts represent the holy harlot’s conversion to sanctity as a queer transcending of gender, allowing any reader to ‘move beyond trajectories set by one’s gender’ (p. 56). These queer possibilities were closed off, however, after the Norman Conquest, as Vuille discusses in her second chapter. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Vuille contends, hagiography had been deeply affected by the rises of romance and affective piety. As both harlot and lady of romance, the saint could therefore represent the worst and best of femininity, transforming from prostitute into bride of Christ. Rather than transcend femininity, the harlot saint embraced it, thereby aligning herself fully with Christ’s feminised humanity. In her third chapter, Vuille demonstrates how the lives of holy harlots changed following the advent of Wycliffism. In response to Mary Magdalene’s prominence in the Wycliffite defence of lay preaching, she argues, John Mirk wrote a version of the Magdalene’s life that minimised her radical preaching, while Osbern Bokenham, more sheltered by the influence of his powerful patroness, instead presented a Magdalene who retained her persuasive speech but worked in harmony with clerical authority. The multivalent possibilities of the holy harlot come into full bloom in Chapter Four’s discussion of the Digby Mary Magdalene. In rendering the Magdalene as simultaneously fallen and sanctified, Vuille argues that the play ‘stages the universality of the holy harlot mode to represent Everyman’ (p. 141). Vuille demonstrates the availability of that mode to women in particular in her final chapter, which focuses on how Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Barton took inspiration from Mary Magdalene in order to sanctify and justify their public spiritual lives.