St. Ethelflaida Lecture, 2012.

Marriage-resister of the 11th and 12th centuries

Since the whole topic of marriage and its meanings, particularly in relationship to Christianity, is so much up for grabs at the moment, I thought this might be a good time to go and attempt to revisit a subject that has engaged me for some time now and explore another period of significant change in the understanding of marriage the 11th and 12th centuries in Europe, and look at how that impacted on women.

Before I begin though it seems proper to clarify that I am not a theologian (except in the sense that we all are) and I am not a historian either. I am a writer. This means that the connections I am looking for and at are not “academic” or causal; they are cultural, suggestive, imaginative and – perhaps above all – narrative. I am going to tell you some stories and what I make of them. This does not mean that they are less true (or more true) than other ways of looking at things – it does mean though that they are subjective, and they come through the subjectivity of a woman who has been

(in alphabetical order) a Christian, a feminist and a writer for forty years – and a writer who has focussed particularly on myth and folk-lore and fairy stories (as well as on God.) You have been warned!

The second half of the first millennium CE was a time of great turmoil for what is now Europe. The

Roman Empire fragmented and collapsed. In 410 Rome was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric ending very nearly 1000 years of unbroken dominance. It had no real successor in Western Europe as wave upon wave of new inhabitants poured in from the North E: Angles and Saxons and Jutes and

Goths and and general purpose “Norsemen” – essentially pagan and with a totally different model of governance and culture. The Eastern Empire centred in Byzantium came under threat from the south east where Islam was expanding rapidly and effectively. In the early 8th C. African Moslems captured most of what is now Spain and Portugal. The Christian Church, which had – surprisingly perhaps – inherited something of the mantle of Rome in terms of both law and learning, was under great pressure. By 1000 however it had basically re-converted northern Europe, had begun the re- conquest of Iberia and was entering a period of relative stability: not so much peace, but internal wars between peoples all playing by approximately the same rules.

This led to sufficient space time and prosperity for academics to return to focus on serious theology.

This was to see its full flowering in the 13th century with the establishment of the Dominicans in

1216 and the work, particularly, of (1225-1274); but obviously this did not spring suddenly from nowhere at all. One of the principle areas of energetic development was in

Sacramental Theology. This began with attempts to explain the nature of the Mass: what are called the “Eucharistic polemics” of the 10th and 11th century – trying to work out (without the help of

Aquinas’ Aristotelian vocabulary) what was happening in or to the elements during consecration.

Because travel within Europe was now much easier than it had been and therefore much more communication between various scholars in religious houses and the emergent “universities” there was some hope of universal agreement and therefore an increasing militancy about heresy – this sharpened minds if nothing else. Inevitably then, the subject opened up a wider discussion about the sacraments – and the 11th and 12th centuries saw an extraordinary – and mostly rather lovely – development in Sacramental Theology more widely, in both the theory as it were and the ritual practice. What developed was a clearer – and more mystical, more spiritual – understanding of the sacraments and of the necessary role of the Church’s authority in their validity. The fly in ointment was marriage.

There are both theological and historical reasons why marriage created difficulties in this Church centred theological endeavour.

Theologically the other six sacraments (just to remind ourselves: Eucharist, , confirmation, reconciliation, ordination and unction ()) were exclusively and specifically Christian – and by a fairly small stretch for the mediaeval narrative approach to scripture could be seen as having been instituted – even invented or created – by Jesus himself and witnessed to by the . Marriage was quite different – anyone could see that it figured in the Old Testament, that it existed in various forms in the alarming pagan cultures that had barely been disposed of and had virtually no role at all in the Gospels. The two domestic households Jesus was close to – his own and the household of

Martha, Mary and Lazarus in Bethany were demonstrably not “proper” marriages. Attempts were made to link the sacrament to the miracle at the Wedding feast in Cana – as some fundamentalist hermeneutic does to-day – but it really was not satisfactory, because the couple never appear in

John’s account and because Jesus was clearly there as guest not host. You could argue that Jesus approved of weddings, but not that he instituted them in any sacramental way.

Historically the early church had been luke-warm, at best, about marriage. Virginity was greatly to be preferred; being married to a pagan was no bar to the faith; despite Paul’s ecstatic imagery of the

Bridegroom and the Church, in practice all he does is mutter a bit scathingly about it being slightly better to marry than to get distracted by lust; and by and large during the Roman period the Church had treated marriage as the business of the Roman State, or contract law and social good order. Of course as a Christian you should keep promises you had made; you should be chaste and faithful within marriage and treat your spouse with love and respect – but those sorts of moral requirements do not in and of themselves amount to a “sacrament” or anything like one. There were no set rites for marriages and although by the 4th century it was normal to have a marriage blessed by a priest, this was not required nor seen as any part of the marriage’s validity. (Bear in mind that blessing things was a much more usual practice than now) and in fact the Western Church recognized as valid marriages contracted without a priest or any witnesses until 1907.

So although by 1000 it was clear that many people did see marriage as a “holy estate” it remained a matter of good order, and – especially in those areas where women had chattel status at law – the good order had more to do with the families as a whole than with the couple and their sacred bond.

Marriages were arranged by fathers, not by couples (which is why children could be betrothed at birth, especially if it furthered peace between states and made individual families of power and wealth more secure.)

On the other hand the early church had defended the goodness of marriage against the Gnostics and

Antinomians and Augustine had referred to marriage as sacramental – he used the word

“sacramentum” explicitly: he distinguished three “goods” in marriage: fidelity, which is more than sexual; offspring, which "entails the acceptance of children in love, their nurturance in affection, and their upbringing in the Christian religion; and sacrament, in that its indissolubility is a sign of the eternal unity of the blessed.”

Nonetheless it was not until this renewal and development of sacramental understanding in the 11th and 12th centuries that the matter seems to have become pressing. And in fact the first official declaration that marriage was a sacrament did not occur until 1184 at the Council of Verona.

However there were still problematic issues involved. If marriage was to be a sacrament it had to be as far as possible aligned with the other sacraments: it needed an outward and visible sign or “mark” and because it existed in a “natural” as well as a supernatural form the sign had to be “natural” too.

The sign of marriage became the vows that the couple took + sexual consummation. And this meant that the role of the priest was tricky, since he could neither take the vows (only witness them) nor be implicated in the sexual act.

A rather clever solution to this was to declare that the couple, the spouses, are jointly the ministers of the sacrament (as well as the matter of it). Basically so long as each spouse intends to contract a true marriage, and they have sex with each other after that, the sacrament is performed. This bestows the effect of the sacrament: an increase in sanctifying grace for the spouses, a participation in the divine life of God.

But now you have a new problem. If you want to see marriage as a sacrament, as a mystical reality, you have to wrest it away from its contractual basis and its socio-legal nature. If the partners to the marriage are going to be the ministers and matter of the sacrament they have to be free to form that intention – or else it is not going to work. Marriage cannot be a contract of association, or a treaty between two rulers – it has to be a free choice of the spouses. This is not a major problem in the case of the groom, but it is a serious difficulty in the case of the bride, who may well have no legal existence in her own right, no capacity to witness at law or even take oaths (as opposed to vows), own no property and be, in essence, the chattel of her father – to be counted as it were with his other possessions. This new Sacramental nature of marriage requires that, at least in the matter of getting married, the woman must be free to choose. The Church needs, imaginatively and creatively to wrench the ownership of women’s sexuality and their choices about it, out of the hands of their fathers. And the only thing to do with it then is to bestow that freedom of choice on her so that she can be the minister of her own marriage.

At the same time as the top-end so to speak (the hierarchy, the intellectuals, the theologians) of the

Church wrestled “academically” with this massive development in sacramental theology – and with it ritual and liturgical practice and form, we see at the more popular level the emergence of a new kind of . These are all women, for reasons that I hope will emerge, and their popularity marks a very sharp change from previous women saints. One interesting thing about them is that they are not, as they would be to-day, contemporaries. They were nearly all obscure saints from rather vague but distant historical eras, who suddenly became central and popular. This evening I am going to look specifically at three of these women – Margaret of Antioch, Wilgefortis – who was also known as Liberata, Uncumber and various other names – and Dymphna (do not worry if you have not heard of any of these, especially the latter two: that is part of the point as you will see.)

Speaking through analogy, it is not unreasonable to say that in mediaeval culture Saints were similar to “Celebrities” to-day. That is people wanted to know more about their personal lives, gossiped freely about their goings on and wanted emotional contact and connection with them. Particularly enthusiastic devotees wanted to go round their houses (pilgrimage, touch and if possible own their relics (a bit like autograph or memorabilia collecting), have their pictures and so on. Saints accumulated larger or smaller, more international or more local, general or specific fan clubs. And the “managers” of these celebrities manoeuvred to increase their standing, and indeed make money

(often a lot of money) out of them. (As an example, we have good records on the efforts of the town of March near Ely, to get a decent Indulgence attached to a visit to the relics of St. Wendreda, a moderately unimportant Anglo-Saxon saint who was buried there. March was on the pilgrimage route to Walsingham – and obviously would profit (over its neighbours) if it could attract some of the pious tourism. And luckily for us they were successful – because it was on the strength of these money-spinning indulgences that the town could afford the glorious angel hammer-beam roof, which attracts tourists still, despite the decline in the pilgrimage trade.)

Saints occupied this position for a complex set of reasons – not all of which can by any means be put down to “superstition.” The cult of the saints represented several separate but important elements of mediaeval Christianity. I’m going to mention just two of these: one is what we might call the creation of “bottom up” theology. Until well into the second millennium (and in a lesser way still actually) – the making of saints was the principle way that lay people had of influencing the content of theology. Unlike now, saints were not made from the centre downwards, but from the local outwards. A saint was a saint because there was a cult of the saint in a particular place. A local saint became a major saint if the local devotion spread outwards to the , the country and eventually the “world.” Formal canonisation was more or less nonexistent– and ultimately meant only that the Saint’s feast day was entered into the Canons of the Mass. (There are traces of this still in the Roman breviary: there is a General Calendar – which all Catholics throughout the world are supposed to keep – though some saints’ celebrations are “optional”; there are national

Calendars – in which universal saints get upgraded for liturgical purposes (St Margaret of Scotland is an “optional memorial” in the Universal Calendar but a full feast in Scotland); others are not in the

Universal calendar but are in the national one: Bede, Alban and Edward the Confessor (among others) are specific to and Wales; Ninian to Scotland and a very large number of individual saints to . The religious orders also have their own calendars. These are the last lingering shadows of the more ancient system where local enthusiasm (probably lay led, and especially women-led) could promote particular strands of ethics or spirituality and thus influence the theological teaching of the church. We saw a sign of this when the crowds at St Peter’s in Rome started chanting “Santo subito” (Saint Now/ at once) on the announcement of the death of John

Paul 11; and similarly in the way the Church in S.America has de facto canonised Oscar Romero, without waiting for the Vatican Process (and it looks as though, after all these years, the papacy is going to catch up with the people – it is not by chance that Oscar Romero is a “local saint” for the present .)

And secondly – more interesting to me perhaps – is the mediaeval genius for Narrative Theology to which the cults of the saints gave substance. Narrative Theology is the idea that as Jesus told parables which he did not turn into allegories by explicating, so profound – poetic if you like – theological ideas could be embedded in stories. Given the wider “turn to narrative” as it is called within academic thinking at the moment t is not surprising that we are getting lots of writing about

Narrative Theology and what a good thing it would be, but actually serious theologians are not doing it – it can be seen in C.S.Lewis Narnia Books and in Chesterton’s Fr. Brown Stories and in what is perhaps a more sophisticated form in much of Graham Green’s writing. But for mediaeval

Christianity this was a natural, flourishing and lovely way of doing theology (that is – talking (logos) about God (theos)). And the 12th Century Church was unerringly good at it, at the psychological level.

I am going to digress a little and talk about this, because it underpins and informs what I really want to say and because it is enormous fun! And because we have a post-Enlightenment tendency to see mediaeval “narrative theology” as somehow primitive, a-historical, “unscientific” and, especially in hagiographic works, (talking about saints and their lives)as absurdly credulous, superstitious and silly. I’d like to give as an example the popular devotion of the Stations of the Cross, which developed after the Holy Lands fell to the Muslims As it became more and more difficult and dangerous to go to Jerusalem and the other biblical sites, there was an attempt to re-create the experience at home, by creating walks with stopping places (stations, like trains!) that represented the major events of Jesus’ passion. In the late 12th C and early 13th the new Franciscan movement encouraged this form of prayer (along with the Christmas crib scene) as a way of making Jesus’ suffering and therefore generosity real to a broadly illiterate laity. The exact number of the stations

(14) did not become fixed until the 17th C – the maximum I have come across was 64. But right from the earliest records, some of these were clearly biblical but quite a lot were not. In the traditional

14, 5 (numbers 3, 4, 6, 7, 9) have no biblical basis whatsoever. Three of them are the three “falls” – where Jesus falls over while carrying his cross. The mediaeval church justified this by reference to the end of John’s which says that not everything Jesus did is included because “were everyone of them to be written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (John 21: 25) – and the idea that a tired man who needs help carrying his cross up a steep, crowded city street might well fall over is of course entirely plausible. But there is more to it than this: the psalms frequently use the image of stumbling and falling as something from which

God will protect his favoured ones. (“He will not suffer thy foot to be moved” and so on.) Satan used this set of psalms to tempt Jesus in the wilderness – God “will give his angels charge over you, on their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone.” How better to demonstrate Jesus’ abandonment and desolation than these repeated falls. At the same time there is a prophetic element: Ps 35 says, “At my stumbling they gathered in glee” and thus Jesus’ falls also deftly hint that he is mocked and despised and laughed at. Further, the three falls represent the three temptations – “the world, the flesh and the devil.” This does not need to be abstracted or spelled out to the mediaeval mind: it needs to be told as a story against the background of the passion narrative. We see the same thing elsewhere – Matthew’s rather vague “wise men from the east” take incarnational form as three kings – eventually with names – bringing three specific gifts, all of which acquire symbolic power. And, of course, perhaps this is most easily seen in the narrative paintings which now began to take over from the Iconic representations of the Byzantine kind. Just as the mediaeval church felt free to create theologically meaningful narratives that open out the biblical texts, they also felt free to use the lives of the saints to the same theological ends. This was, never forget, a predominantly non-literate culture with a strong oral tradition – things had to have the mnemonic power of stories or songs to be absorbed and integrated into people’s lives.

And this meant that there were inevitably “fashions” in saints – you needed different saints and different kinds of saints to meet different theological needs and personal aspirations. We can tell which saints were in fashion by a sensitive reading of external evidence –who was in or dropped from the various editions of the Golden Legend; which sites were getting rich, were getting large gifts and new buildings and shrines, and above all by dedications. We usually know quite accurately when a particular church was built – looking at patterns of the selected patron saints you can follow the transmission of some (not all) cults with considerable precision. When you see a new type or style of saint whizzing up the popularity ladder, you want to look and what is happening and why.

So. In the 11th and 12th centuries we see a strong surge in a new style of woman saint. In the period before this, in northern Europe especially (and excepting the biblical women) the “favourite” saints were women of noble birth and great worldly competence: St. Hilda of Whitby would be a good example; with Tetta of Wimbourne, Lioba and Walpurga who went with Boniface to his German mission and perhaps above all Radegund; and in a more southerly tradition Scholastica These women were scholarly, mature, authoritative and on the whole did not become “miraculous” during their life time. They all have considerable historicity. But at this point in time they were gradually replaced by something entirely different. I am going to follow the narrative tradition by telling you the stories of three of them.

Margaret of Antioch in Pisidia – also known as Marina – was the daughter of a pagan priest. When as a teenager she became a Christian her father threw her out of the house. So she became a shepherdess. Obviously. She was so beautiful that Olybrius, the local Prefect, wanted to marry her.

Infuriated by her refusal he had her bound hand and foot and thrown into a cauldron of boiling water. Immediately however her shackles fell off and she hopped out of the cauldron completely unhurt. Next he decided to burn her, but just as the flames began to lick around her a passing dragon swooped down, snatched her off the pyre, swallowed her whole and flew on. However her great purity – or in other versions the cross she happened to be carrying – made the dragon most uncomfortable, so he landed, opened his mouth and allowed her to walk out through his narrow red throat. She placed a chain (in many pictures a chain of flowers) round its neck and led it back to the city where Olybrius cut her head off. Based on what the Catholic Encyclopedia rather optimistically calls her “untrustworthy” Acta (the official word for the biography of early saints) her cult appears to have been brought from the Byzantine Churches to Europe by the soldiers of the first or second

Crusades (1095 and 1147) and she quickly became immensely popular especially in northern Europe where she had more Church dedications than any saint except Our Lady in the 12th century and an almost bizarre number of relics and shrines.

She became one of the “14 Holy Helpers” (a group of saints deemed particularly effective for specific intercessions).She was specifically the patron of women in childbirth – probably because she had walked out through the dragon’s throat. In a great many cultures the patron of Childbirth itself (as opposed to of mothers) is a . Artemis, the Greek Goddess of wild places and hunting for example.) On the whole, until well into the modern era people were not looking for role models as we do now, but for the reverse – for someone who could stand against, entirely free from, whatever problem or danger you had to deal with

Wilgefortis – or, in England Uncumber and elsewhere Liberata – was a Portugese Princess. She was, of course, exceptionally beautiful and her father decided that she should marry usefully and profitably to a pagan prince. She was not very keen on this idea but he was adamant, so she prayed hard that God would intervene and protect her and on the morning of the wedding it turned out that overnight she had sprouted a beard. Not surprisingly her about-to-be-husband pulled out of the

Contract and her father was so angry that he had her crucified. Like Margaret Wilgefortis became extremely popular, especially with women, who regarded her as a sort of unofficial protector of women with abusive husbands. Two hundred years later her cult, which contained the oddly pagan custom of offering her image a handful of oats, made Thomas

More extremely cross and he wrote sarcastically

Saint Willgefort is (so they say) served and content with oats. Whereof I cannot perceive the

reason, but if it be because she should provide an horse for an evil husband to ride to the

devil upon, for that is the thing that she is so sought for (as they say). Insomuch that women

hath therefore changed her name and instead of Saint Willgefort call her Saint Uncumber,

because they reckon that for a peck of oats she will not fail to unencumber them of their

husbands.

Dymphna was the very beautiful – and virtuous – daughter of a Pagan Irish King, of no particular date sometime in about the 7th century. Her mother was a Christian and brought her daughter up as one. When the mother died the husband was genuinely distraught but decided that he would marry his own daughter as she was so like her mother. Not surprisingly she fled (to Belgium) but he pursued her – had his servants kill her faithful priest and servants and with his own sword hacked off her head. She became the patron of people with mental illnesses.

So what do these four women have in common with each other and in difference from their predecessors?

i) They are markedly younger (all adolescents/ or very young women) and although two of

these three are in fact princesses they themselves have no power or authority.

ii) They are a-historical (they have no actual dates, specific locations or external

authentication.) iii) They are miraculous – even magical – in their own [supposed] life times, and this magic

has strong fairy story elements. Dymphna and Allfurs, from the Grimms collection are in

effect the same story.

iv) They are all resisting their fathers – not just their fathers’ religious convictions, but their

fathers’ attempts to marry them off. They are not martyred for owning Jesus as Lord or

any other doctrinal point (like the very early church’s child and virgin martyrs) but for

refusing to marry the man selected by their father.

Well it is not very often in its history that the authorities of the Church have gone out of their way to support young women against their fathers – so it is reasonable to ask what is going on here.

And what I think is going on is a re-calibration of the meaning of marriage at the popular or cultural level. These are what I call the “marriage resister saints.” They are important at this point because if

God will take into heaven, directly and immediately, a young woman who refuses to do her father’s bidding in the matter of marriage she is asserting hr freedom to marry as she chooses. You will notice in the brief accounts I gave that these young women are not specifically committed to

Virginity as a virtue in its own right – just to not entering a particular marriage which their fathers or other authority figures (like Olybrius) are proposing. There is no element of sexual torture, such as we see in the lavishly extravagant (and I would suggest quasi sado-masochistic) accounts of the torture of the girl-child saints – Lucy, Ursula – for instance of previous (and subsequent) periods and which was taken up into the accounts of ascetic saints in the 18th and 19th C – like Faber on the subject of Rose of Lima. Of course they are virgins because all “good girls” (and you have to be a good girl to be a saint) were chaste and pure, but it is not their virginity per se they are defending – and indeed dying for. (None of them, in any pre-nineteenth century hagiography I have read declare themselves as “brides of Christ” or as having dedicated their virginity to the church or to Jesus)

In asserting their right not to get married at patriarchal command, they are affirming and upholding those women who want to get married without paternal permission or arrangement. But although their cults support and confirm the theological thinking ft he Church they are also distinctly women’s

– and probably uneducated women’s - stories. These saints are effective in very female domestic concerns- childbirth, domestic violence, paternal sexual abuse, and mental illness for which we know women carried a very high responsibility.

Did women believe these stories? I doubt it; on the whole hard working, poor women do not really believe that dragons swallow girls and then let them go. Nor that getting rid of a violent husband is going to cost you as little as a handful of oats. How silly of . And I am afraid they are magical precisely because realistic women knew that there was not a hope of living out free lives in the real world.

Nonetheless, in the real world, there is some evidence for this change of view. The word “spinster” appears in the marriage service from the mediaeval period. A spinster did not mean “a woman unable to get married”, it meant a “woman who was good at spinning” (spinster” was also a name for spiders for that reason). A spinster was a woman in about the only employment that made a mediaeval woman financially independent – of husband or father. A spinster therefore was a woman who did not need to get married – but chose to freely. Because all women could spin to some extent (even if not professionally) it was an easy courtesy to extend them the title and the status of marrying freely.

But “believable” or not, imitatable or not, these saints represent, for me, a moment of great hope subtly worked into the fabric of the Church’s life and which certainly enabled the extraordinary flowering of female mystical experience in the next century, of which Caroline Bynum has written so well. Another similar saint was Catherine of Alexandria; and in her hagiographic biography, Jesus gave her a wedding ring – he married her in a “mystical marriage”. In the 1340s, the painter Barna of

Siena made an image of her holding her ring. (1347-1380) must have known that painting – as a young woman she became the first historical, actual recipient of a “mystical marriage”. She was a tradesman’s daughter, but free to marry the King of the Universe. A freedom that the Church was – at least theoretically – offering all women..