The Great Whore in the illustrated Apocalypse cycles

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how the imagery of the Whore of Babylon developed from the symbolic personification of a city to a type of evil female, in response to theological and social pressures. In accommodating the iconography of the Harlot to the requirements of the exegesis, the designers of the text may have found in the Apocalyptic Whore, a suitable scapegoat for the seductive aspect of Eve which could not be readily accented, because of the acceptance of the figure of Eve as standing for all of womankind. But the personification of Babylon needed no such redress, for the textual description could lend itself to a straightforward identity with a woman of evil intent. The paper concentrates on the thirteenth and fourteenth century English Apocalypses because here the artist's design had to be acceptable to a new lay readership of aristocratic women. Many of the great illustrated cycles were designed especially for women whose sensibilities must have influenced the iconography of the Whore, particularly in those periods in which the reader was able to meditate upon the text/image in the relative privacy of her own chamber, without the interpretative intermediary of a chaplain. The choice of images will reveal something of the prevailing attitudes to female authority and the manipulation of the stereotypes to signal negative values without prejudice to the readership of the women owners of the illustrated Apocalypse texts.