Saint Margaret – Taming the Dragon

Abstract

This chapter investigates the function of Saint Margaret’s visual imagery in relation to her written legenda, with a focus on its importance in childbirth rituals during the late medieval and early modern periods. Illuminating the discrepancy between visual and textual descriptions of the saint’s encounter with a dragon, the discussion presents the saint’s image as a continuation of this millennia-old motif of the woman and the dragon, and contends that images of Saint Margaret played a similar role to images of fertility demons. I further suggest that depicting the saint as collaborating with and taming the dragon offered guidance to women in surmounting the pains of labor, and was aimed at providing them with a sense of empowerment and control during childbirth.