The version of the life of St Benedict (c.480–c.550) presented in the thirteenth-century "Golden Legend" contains a variety of anecdotal accounts of the activities of the saint and his followers. Two of these form an interesting commentary on medieval views of the temporal world and its temptations presented within the context of a collection of saints’ lives that was often used as a source for both sermons and images throughout Europe in the late medieval period. The first incident concerns St Benedict himself, living as a hermit in a desert place:
"Soon the devil brought to the holy man’s mind the image of a woman whom he had once seen, and he was so aroused by the memory of her that he was almost overcome with desire, and began to think of quitting his solitary way of life. But suddenly, touched by the grace of God, he came to himself, shed his garment, and rolled in the thorns and brambles which abounded thereabouts; and he emerged so scratched and torn over his whole body that the pain in his flesh cured the wound of his spirit. Thus he conquered sin by putting out the fire of lust, and from that time on he no longer felt the temptations of the flesh."1
Subsequently, there is an account of an interaction between St Benedict and one of his followers:
"[A] monk, who was unhappy in the monastery and wanted to leave, importuned the man of God so much that finally, having had enough of this, he gave the needed permission. Hardly had the monk got outside the gate when he met with a dragon, which opened its maw and wanted to devour him. The monk cried out to some of the brothers who were nearby: “Hurry, hurry, this dragon wants to eat me!” They ran up but saw no dragon, and led the trembling terrified brother back to the monastery, where he was quick to promise that he would never leave again"2
The three topics in the title of this article may at first glance appear to be only loosely related: certainly some saints encounter monsters, but to what extent are—or were—saints understood to have sexuality? What role have monsters played in an understanding of sexuality, both animal and human? Most particularly, do the encounters between saints and monsters give space to some kind of mutual sexual dynamic? These are all large questions that demand far fuller answers than is possible within the confines of this article;3 however, as these brief anecdotes from the life of St Benedict indicate, not only can we clearly identify the sexuality of saints—and its sometimes violent control—as a topic of interest to medieval people but we also have evidence of a monster being used as a personification of the temptations of the world. Admittedly, there is no direct evidence here that the sins that the apostate monk may have fallen into were necessarily sexual, but it seems very likely that thwarted sexual desire would have formed at least part of his motivation to seek to leave the monastery in the understanding of the medieval reader.4 As we shall see, dragons and other monsters seem frequently to have exhibited an association with untrammeled sexuality within medieval written and visual culture, and it is certainly possible to interpret this episode with this motif in mind.
I have written elsewhere on some of the range of meanings associated with saints’ encounters with monsters,5 and also, in common with several other commentators, on the sexualized discourse that attaches itself to some saints’ cults.6 However, this current collection presents me with a welcome opportunity to focus directly on the overlap between these topics, and hence to engage with some thorny issues around medieval understandings of the roles and meanings of both saints and monsters in connection with sexual urges and sexualized activities, particularly where written and/or visual accounts of the encounters between saints and monsters seem to invite a reading that highlights a sexualized dynamic. In this article I am focusing on some presentations and understandings of three saints in particular, St George, St Michael and St Margaret, with brief references to comparative figures. The choice of these three central characters is informed by a number of significant features of their presentation in late medieval Western Christian thought, and overall the article aims at giving the reader a sense of the potential for approaching visual and written accounts of other saints with a similarly nuanced set of questions in mind. First, all three encounter— and defeat—monsters, yet, as we shall see, different understandings and meanings have been mapped onto these saints and their concomitant legends so that they present a range of understandings of the meanings of both monsters and saintly encounters with them. Second, two of the three—St George and St Margaret—have martyrdom legends, while the third, St Michael, operates entirely outside this paradigm. In this way we can begin to gauge the extent to which an apparently sexualized discourse within an encounter between a saint and a monster is informed by other aspects of a saint’s cult that may also appear to be constructed to project, or enable, a particular kind of sexualized agenda. Third, two of the three—St George and St Michael—are ostensibly identified as “male” while the third, St Margaret, is demonstrably “female”: this too presents us with a range of gender identities upon which a sexualized encounter with a monster can be imposed. To begin with this issue of the gender of these saints, it is now commonly agreed by gender historians that concepts such as “male” and “female” are overly blunt labels to apply to any individual, for they obscure a multitude of nuanced gender roles. It is generally accepted that both masculine and feminine gender identities are qualified by a range of complicating factors such as age, occupation, activities, dress and social status, as well as the more obvious issues surrounding individuals who consciously move between gender identities through affecting the apparel or demeanor conventionally associated with a member of a different gender category. With a historically dubious saint the problems are magnified, for we must acknowledge that we are dealing with a figure who is almost entirely the projection of some kind of group consciousness, a consciousness that can vary quite radically over time and space, and even between different individual adherents inhabiting the same time and space. St George is a good example of a figure who seems to exhibit “gender slippage”: as we shall see below, he is sometimes presented as an authoritative, aggressive exponent of a particular type of high-status male identity, while on other occasions he is apparently labeled as a physically vulnerable and powerless figure who is “emasculine,” if not strictly “feminine.”7 St Margaret, by contrast, can be fairly securely identified as a feminized figure, although her presentation in her legend as a high-status woman who vows her virginity to God ensures that she is qualitatively different from the “average” female adherent of her medieval cult, and is arguably closer to higher status males than to lower-status women. Her most obvious gender ambiguity lies in the fact that, despite retaining virgin status throughout her life, she was identified as the patron saint of childbirth—a life-cycle experience common to virtually all women living outside the cloistered world of a nunnery, and indeed to quite a few of those living within it, particularly those who took the veil as widows.
Meanwhile, St Michael presents a whole other set of gender problems. As an angel he is to be understood, strictly speaking, as an insubstantial creature of light, with no genitals or other identifying marks of biological sex. However, he is consistently gendered male through his name,8 through the use of male pronouns in descriptions of his deeds,9 and, most significantly, through the activities and dress associated with him: he is frequently depicted wearing armor and engaged in battle, and as such is constructed with the overtones of a particular kind of high-status masculinity.10
Bearing these problematic gender identities in mind, we can move on to consider the additional layers of meaning provided by a sexualized reading of aspects of a saint’s legend. The clearest examples of the general connections between saints and sexuality are often thought to occur in the written and visual records of medieval understandings of martyred saints. Recounting the story of the “passion” of a saint presents an opportunity for the narrator (whether in oral, written or visual form) to present a commentary on the sanctified body’s capacity to transcend above both physical suffering and sexual urges. The motif of forcibly bared flesh is a common feature of martyrdom narratives. It is often contrasted with heavily clothed torturers, allowing for the construction of a dichotomy between the vulnerable body and the invulnerable soul. Penetration of the saint’s flesh is also a common feature of martyrdom narratives, and this topos seems to operate on several levels; it not only emphasizes the vulnerable body/invulnerable soul motif—arguably this informs the anecdote about St Benedict’s mortification of the flesh recorded in "The Golden Legend"—but also invokes the concept of innocent flesh that was untainted by ungovernable sexual impulse in the period before the Temptation and Fall of humanity. Furthermore, the penetrative tortures presented in these narratives often seem to operate as a way of labeling the torturers as unclean and sexual creatures in contrast to the clean and chaste martyr, and the trope of penetration is often accompanied by a direct evocation of chastity. This is particularly clear in the narratives of female virgin martyrs, for there is often an episode where an offer of marriage is made to the saint, which she refuses because she has already vowed her virginity to God.11 The legend of St Margaret is a good example of this format,12 and her rejection of the suitor is presented as a crucial element in the story of her ascent to claiming a heavenly crown for it precipitates her trial and torture under the direction of her rejected swain, a heathen ruler. St Margaret’s decision to live in chastity allows her to emulate both Christ and the Virgin Mary in their rejection of an active sexual life; chastity in itself is a form of sexual identity, albeit a largely negative one, and it is an identity that has been promoted to Christians as the pinnacle of virtuous living over many centuries.13 Masculine equivalence is harder to find, but there are a few male saints who are explicitly described as virgins,14 and others where this sexual status is strongly implied—St George rejects a thank-offering of the rescued princess’s hand in marriage in the legend of the dragon fight, for example.15 Furthermore, many male martyrs experience penetrating torments as part of their passion sequence: as we shall see, St George is one example, for he suffers a range of invasive tortures such as being raked, scourged, sawn in half and having nails driven into his body.16 Meanwhile, the case of the arrowfilled St Sebastian, who has famously been understood as a homoerotic figure over several centuries, is surely evidence of the sexualizing potential of a penetrative assault.17
While the physical sufferings presented in these martyrdom narratives often seem to position the saints as emasculine figures, we should also be aware that some very masculinized activities are also associated with these individuals— both “male” and “female.” For example, the conversion of nonbelievers, whether as individuals or as large crowds, is often a factor in these legends, sometimes through preaching and teaching and on other occasions through the forbearance demonstrated by the suffering saint. Conversion, preaching and teaching—particularly in a setting other than the domestic realm—all seem to be coded as “masculine” actions within late medieval consciousness, and it is notable that these activities are associated with a number of ostensibly “female” saints, such as St Margaret, St Katherine and St Ursula, as well as obviously “male” martyr saints, such as St George, St Lawrence and St John the Evangelist.18 Some “female” saints go even further in their adoption of “masculine” patterns of behavior: for example, St Ursula leads a large group of followers of both sexes, including 11,000 female virgins, although traveling and leading large groups are both conventionally associated with “male” saints in later medieval thought. According to the version of her legend presented in "The Golden Legend" she even founds an order of knighthood—surely a concept of high-status, privileged masculinity—for her female followers: this is an incident that surely indicates gender slippage.19
Thus we have a fairly clear paradigm where the martyr saint, whether physically “male” or “female,” is the object of an apparently gendering sexualized threat enacted by male torturers and their male paymasters—it is very rare for torturers to be presented as female, and then only as part of a mixed-sex group, and unknown for the heathen ruler (or equivalent) to be presented as a female figure. This in itself raises intriguing questions about gender roles that label the torturers and rulers as representatives of a particular type of aggressive, sexual masculinity, a masculinity that is arguably congruent with the life experiences of many “successful” laymen at a time when maleness was often defined in relation to the ability to procreate children and to fight to defend oneself and one’s family, but a world away from the (theoretically) celibate, non-combative lifestyle that was enjoined upon clerics.20 This aggressive masculinity acts as a foil to the transcendent martyred saint, who seems to be defined in ways that cannot be reduced to simplistic terms such as “male” or “female,” and instead calls upon a range of culturally defined gender markers such as physical vulnerability and authoritative behavior, including preaching and conversion, which effectively position the individual saint outside—or above—the conventional nexus of human gender roles.
Yet within the saint’s encounter with a monster the ground rules are far less defined. First, we should be clear that by no means all of these encounters end in physical conflict—the battles between saints such as St George, St Michael and St Margaret with their respective dragons are justly well known, but there are many other examples of narratives of saints and monsters where the monster is merely banished to a place where it cannot harm people, or even is left entirely in peace to go about its business as it chooses.21 This flexibility is entirely at odds with the consistency with which martyrdom narratives are presented: the details of the tortures may vary, but the story reliably climaxes with the death of the saint, usually through beheading, and the soul’s acceptance into heaven. It seems that there is no equivalent in martyrdom legends of the saint and the monster agreeing to differ: the heathen ruler never backs down and allows the saint to continue to live a Christian life, presumably because the experience of persecution was such a formative influence on the Early Church. Second, where a conflict between saint and monster does take place the power relationship is very different to that between the martyr and the torturer. In martyrdom narratives—both written and visual—the vulnerability of the martyr’s flesh is a crucial part of the story, for it provides the opportunity for spiritual transcendence, and in consequence the heathen ruler—or equivalent—and his assistant tormentors are firmly cast in the roles of assailants. However, in the legends of saints who encounter monsters the saint is clearly identified as the principal assailant, or is at least party to an assault on the monster taking place at the hands of others.22 As yet I have not uncovered any medieval accounts where the saint suffers physically in the jaws of the monster, however horribly it is described or depicted. The monster may well have attacked and eaten people before the saint arrives, but the nature of the combative encounter between them is such that the saint’s holy power ensures that he or she is never in any real danger. As a concomitant to this, the penetrative weaponry of swords and lances wielded by St George or St Michael can be read as an equivalent of the arrows, hooks, rakes and flaming torches wielded by torturers in martyrdom accounts. In effect the monster becomes the object and the saint becomes the subject of a physical, potentially sexualized, aggressive encounter. The account of St Michael in The Golden Legend states that “the devil deceives the mind by false reasoning, entices the will by seduction, and overpowers virtue by violence,”23 yet in the aggressive encounters between saints and monsters it is virtue that triumphs through violence. This apparent volte-face is particularly evident in the legends of St George, a dragon slayer who uniquely wields sword and lance yet also finds himself on the business end of a range of such weapons, combining as he does the persona of a monster defeater and a fully fledged male martyr.
St George has been an enormously popular saint throughout most of Christendom since his cult first began to establish itself widely on the back of extensive martyrdom narratives of the eighth century. In the post-Reformation period his identification as a dragon slayer has been crucial in his success, with its clear potential for interpretation as a form of good overcoming evil, Christ overcoming the devil, urbs overcoming wilderness, and various other—often political—oppositions. However, the story of his encounter with a dragon was a relatively late embellishment of his legend, largely arising from its inclusion in the Golden Legend version of his life,24 and it seems that in the late medieval period he was recognized equally as a martyr and a dragon slayer, and celebrated in both these capacities.
As we have seen, the construction of the archetypal martyrdom legend can be understood to offer considerable potential for a sexualized reading, and St George is no exception to this rule. He is depicted in both words and images as the object of a considerable range of penetrative (and some non-penetrative) tortures that are presented with little consistency between different versions, to the extent that there are some geographically specific tortures associated with him, such as being nailed and chained to a table in Catalan imagery.25 He is frequently associated with being sawn in half, scourged, beaten and—like almost all martyrs—beheaded, and overall it seems safe to assume that St George was understood to function as a transcendent figure in the vein of female virgin martyrs. However, an equally potent evocation of sexuality is found in some late medieval images of his encounter with the dragon, one that, in contrast to the emasculinization of torture, seems to position him squarely within the ambit of aggressive, high-status masculinity. St George’s dragon has variously been interpreted as an allegory of heresy, chaos and more generalized evil, but, most interestingly for our purposes, it also seems to act on occasion as a figure of lust.
The encounter has obvious overtones of good overcoming evil, for St George, as a saint, is clearly identified with the forces of heaven, while the dragon, with its snaky associations,26 is strongly linked to the demonic tempter in the Garden of Eden. Figure 4.1 shows an early sixteenth-century image of St George and the dragon that formed part of a scheme of stained glass within the house of the Leicester patrician John Wygston.27 St George, armed as a knight and brandishing both lance and sword, tramples the dragon underfoot while spearing it through the jaws of the larger of its two mouths. The end of the dragon’s tail bears a secondary head, which makes a valiant—though ultimately fruitless— effort to attack the saint by biting his thigh while the tail itself curls around his lower leg. At the base of the tail an almond-shaped orifice is indicated, and this motif is the key to understanding the image as a depiction of a sexualized encounter, for it allows the dragon to be read as an archetype of a negatively charged feminized sexuality where an exposed vulva is symbolic of a base female sexual identity.
The trope of the “gendering orifice” occurs in at least fifty images of St George and the dragon from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with other, far rarer, evocations of a female gender role and/or sexual identity for the monster such as the depiction of breasts or dugs and the presence of dragonlets. There is a high degree of consistency in the iconography of these images, with the dragon routinely placed on her back in a position of extreme vulnerability that reveals the pudendum. This type of positional cue is frequently enhanced by the presence of a pseudo-phallic pointer, such as a broken lance, that is aligned to lead the viewer’s eye to the orifice itself. Furthermore, the fact that St George is invariably shown in the process of attacking the dragon in the mouth or throat—as a variant he may be about to cut off the creature’s head while a prominent mouth or throat wound is already visible—is surely significant. The concept of the "vagina dentata"—the toothed vagina—was familiar to medieval culture, with its associations with the fear of female sexuality and the female sexual body, but the common perception of a link between the female mouth and the female genitals went far further than this.28 In effect, St George’s attack on the dragon’s mouth is a substitute for an assault on her vagina, an assault that would seem to demand a sexualized interpretation in the mind of the viewer.
While it could be asserted that the visual motif of St George’s encounter with the feminized dragon arose in order to permit a duality of high-status male versus base female, we should also be aware that the saint is strongly associated with chastity in his medieval cult. We have already noted his refusal to marry the rescued princess and also his apparent construction as a transcendent virgin martyr, but beyond these factors lies an oral and visual tradition that identifies him as “Our Lady’s Knight,” the champion of the Virgin Mary: there is very good evidence of this topos in English poems, carols and a range of visual imagery.29 The Virgin herself is, of course, an archetype of chastity, and in consequence she would seem to demand a chaste champion. The identification of St George in relation to the Virgin, and indeed as an explicitly chaste figure, also occurs outwith the context of the English medieval cult,30 and in consequence we can map this understanding on to a range of images of St George and the feminized dragon so that we find not only a dynamic of male versus female, high status versus low status, but also chastity versus untrammeled sexuality. Given medieval understandings of the susceptibility of mortal men to fall foul of women’s unbridled passions, it is perhaps unsurprising that this saint is shown sublimating his inherent sexual desire through attacking the dragon’s mouth with his phallic weaponry. Like St Benedict he defeats the temptations of the flesh, but he achieves this through assaulting the source of this lure—feminized sexuality—rather than attacking his own masculine body with penetrative thorns and brambles; that task is left to the hyper-masculine torturers who will attack his by-then stripped and emasculine flesh at a later point in the narrative.31
Unlike St George, St Michael is not associated with martyrdom. However, he is credited with engaging a dragon in an overtly physical manner, although in his legend the monstrous opponent is clearly identified as a form of the devil rather than as an actual animal or as an allegory of lust, heresy, chaos or generalized evil. St Michael is identified in several places in the Bible as the captain of the heavenly host, but he is frequently depicted in single combat with Satan, who tends to be represented either in the form of a human-like, or composite, demon, or as “the Great Dragon” that is referred to in the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation.32 Often these images show the saint trampling on his enemy, in reference to Psalm 91, 13: “The dragon shalt thou trample under foot,” and he frequently is shown binding the creature with chains or transfixing him with a lance: in this latter form the iconography of St Michael is particularly close to that of St George, a similarity that is evident in even a cursory comparison of Figures 4.1 and 4.2.
Figure 4.2 shows “Saint Michael triumphant over the Devil,” painted by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Bermejo in 1468,33 probably to stand as the central panel of an altarpiece that was formerly in the church of San Miguel in Tous, near Valencia. The kneeling figure on the left is the donor, Antonio Juan, Lord of Tous. He is shown in an attitude of prayerful contemplation, and holds a psalter open at two penitential Psalms (Psalms 51 and 130). On the right side the victorious archangel triumphs over his defeated enemy, presented here as a composite, grotesque monster. This visual treatment of the devil, and demons more generally, is typical of northern European art of the late medieval period: Hieronymous Bosch’s early sixteenth-century fantastical monstrous creatures are well known,34 but they were clearly influenced by the creations of earlier artists such as Dirk Bouts. His "Last Judgement" altarpiece of 1470 features a range of composite demons exhibiting body parts apparently derived from bats, birds, lizards, snakes, bulls, cats and fish.35 During the later fifteenth century, and beyond, there was a strong affinity between Spanish art and Northern European art, undoubtedly encouraged by the trade in paintings from north to south, and there is clear evidence in Bermejo’s painting of the influence of Flemish art in particular; indeed, he may well have been directly trained by a Flemish artist. Thus we are presented with a naturalistic but rather austere portrait of the donor; the whole work demonstrates a mastery of the Netherlandish technique of oil painting, particularly its facility for modeling and creating surface detail. The treatment of reflections, for example in St Michael’s crystal shield and in his polished breastplate, is especially fine, and again stands as testament to the strong influence of the art of the North.
The donor seems untroubled as he kneels immediately before the unholy, monstrous body of the devil, presumably because he is confident of the defeat of evil. St Michael towers over both the man and the devil, his armor gleaming while his swirling, red-lined golden mantle complements his glorious rainbow-hued wings. His elegance and majesty speak of a higher realm than the prosaic world inhabited by the donor (and indeed the viewer), and a strong contrast is drawn between the archangel—a creature of light and air—and the completely earthbound devil, the lowest creature here in several senses. The creature is pinned bodily to the ground by the trampling feet of the saint on his torso and wings, and this body speaks of base creatures and grotesque deformity. It is multiform: the tail is that of a serpent, the wings are bat- or dragon-like, the limbs are scaly and reptilian or bird-like. The torso is metallic, perhaps to form a commentary on the beauty and worth of the saint’s armor: the devil’s base armor is a pale imitation, which singularly fails to protect the unworthy fighter. Meanwhile, the monster’s arms combine reptilian scales with metallic panels, again demonstrating the unnaturalness of the monster.
One very striking aspect of this image of the devil is the artist’s use of the motif of additional mouths. Most obviously, a large secondary mouth is placed in the monster’s abdomen, but the elbows of the creature also sport toothed mouths. There seem to be at least four aspects underlying the presence of these supernumerary mouths. First, they emphasize the monstrosity of the creature and in consequence its otherness. A useful comparative is offered by the blemmye, a human-like creature that has no head but instead sports a face—and hence a mouth—in the chest; the blemmye is a standard feature of both early world maps and late medieval travelers’ tales.36 Misplaced and oversized body parts are a feature of a number of exotic monsters such as the blemmye, which are located in medieval consciousness on the margins of the known world, and their quality of otherness can be interpreted as permitting a commentary on the nature of humanity itself: it is only by recognizing the other that we can define ourselves.
Second, we should also be aware that hell is frequently represented by medieval artists in the form of a huge, monstrous mouth, gaping open to receive the souls of the unredeemed. This subject is widely found in sculpture, manuscript illuminations and panel paintings, but perhaps most significantly it appears in wall paintings of the Doom, of the Last Judgement, which were a standard feature of the decorative scheme in late medieval churches.37 There is, therefore, clear evidence that, within popular consciousness, mouths, especially the mouths of monsters, could have demonic overtones: there is a clear linkage between the devil, a mouth and hell.
Third, the “elbow mouths” give the appearance that the creature is consuming itself. The “self-eater” is a standard motif in early medieval art, with the tailswallowing snake known as Uroboros frequently appearing in Celtic interlacing in early medieval work such as the eighth-century Book of Kells,38 for example. In this earlier format the self-consumer is often interpreted positively as symbolic of eternity; however, in this much later image the implication would seem to be the eternal damnation that awaits all whose ultimate destination is hell. Meanwhile, the concept of self-consuming can again be understood as other: it is demonstrably unnatural behavior in the context of “civilized” human life.
Finally, the supernumerary mouths arguably evoke the "vagina dentata", the toothed vagina already referenced in relation to St George and the feminized dragon. The particular monster shown in Figure 4.2 would seem to be less clearly gendered than the dragon in Figure 4.1, for no identifiable vulva is visible. However, we should be aware that the secondary mouth in the torso may well be standing for a vulva, playing on the well-established concept of the dangers of a wandering womb.39 The doubled mouth/doubled vulva implied in this image is, of course, a negative attribute: more female genitals indicates more danger. This evocation of female sexuality and its terrors is also played upon in the monster’s twin sets of eyes: each mouth is surmounted by a pair of hard red jewels, which imitate nipples. The mimesis is particularly clear in the eyes above the lower mouth, for their position in the creature’s chest is surely testament to their duality. The twinning of these nipple-eyes with the “actual” eyes in the monster’s face serves to underline the link between the mouth and the vulva: in effect, the creature’s face and torso both sport the fundamentals of the female sexual body.
Returning to focus on the lower mouth, a further clue to the evil and dangerously sexualized nature of the monster is evident, for a snake can be discerned partly within and partly outwith the monster’s body. Does the snake live inside the monster, in an evocation of the belief in vaginal serpents that attack unwary men through biting the penetrative penis?40 Or is the creature paying only a temporary visit, recognizing and appreciating the evil quality of the monstrous body? It is possible that both meanings are intended. The presence of the snake certainly highlights the perceived link between the devil and the serpent who acts as the tempter in the Garden of Eden, and we can also make a comparison to the snakelike tail on St George’s dragon in Figure 4.1, where the coiling action, and indeed the bite of the secondary head, underlines the link between dragons and snakes. All these aspects combine to create a being of unnatural, evil and dangerous sexuality. This sexualized aspect is not necessarily “male” or “female,” although the dangerous female gender role perceptible in some images of St George and the dragon, including Figure 4.1, would tend to indicate that it is female sexuality that is being invoked here too: the presence of breast-like protuberances around the lower eyes/nipples of the monster, the apparent play on the concept of the vagina dentata and the fear of the consuming or assaulting female orifice all tend to contribute to this impression.
St Michael holds a magnificent crystal shield in his left hand, orienting it towards the monster, who holds up an arm in apparent terror. The artist may here be seeking to evoke the Classical myth of Perseus, who overcame the snake-haired Medusa by assaulting her with her own reflection in his shield. The snakes presented in the image, both at the abdomen of the monster and in its elbowmouths, all fit with this reading; again, it seems that a dangerous female aspect is invoked. However, we should not overlook the breast-like quality of the shield with its rounded, pendulous shape and its ruby red nipple-jewel: the saint is arguably being endowed with a nutritive, positive aspect of female sexuality, in sharp contrast to the base invocation of the dangerous vulva within the presentation of the devil. Admittedly, the monstrous creature is endowed with nipples and breast-like protuberances, but, as we have already observed, these aspects are freighted with negative connotations as a result of the otherness that obtains to them through their dual nature as nipple-eyes and also the depiction of metal-like flesh. By contrast, the saint’s breast is pure, its clarity arguably standing as testament to its noble quality. The theoretically genderless archangel is thus charged with aspects of both masculine and feminine gender roles, through the depiction of armor and weaponry and also the breast-shield. The former markers certainly indicate the privileged masculinity associated with knighthood, but it is also likely that this invocation of a nutritive, positive femininity is also endowed with a high status. In particular, there is a possibility that this heavenly breast-shield would be interpreted as a reference to the breast of the Virgin, the coredeemer whose milk was understood as a counterpart to the blood of Christ himself in late medieval religious thought. In this way the breast-shield born by St Michael is, like the saint himself, a creature of the heavenly realm, deeply significant within the teleology of the redemption of humanity, and a sharp contrast to the role of the monstrous devil. The donor’s clear ability to ignore the great enemy and to keep his mind fixed on higher things is ample testimony to his sure belief in the power of heaven to triumph.
Meanwhile, St Margaret makes a fascinating comparative to both St Michael and St George: she is a bona fide female virgin martyr whose written legend recounts that she encountered and overcame the devil in the form of a dragon through much less aggressive means than those employed by these “male” saints. The Golden Legend version of her life states that the episode occurred while she was imprisoned during the sequence of tortures that formed part of her trial: she had previously refused to marry the prefect Olybrius, who had then tried to persuade her to renounce her Christianity by means of force.41 Following a beating with rods and laceration with iron rakes, when “the blood poured from her body as from a pure spring,”42 surely evidence of both penetrative torture and also the assertion of her virginal state, Margaret was imprisoned overnight. She prayed to God to let her see her enemy, whereupon “a hideous dragon” appeared. Jacobus, the author of this collection of saints’ lives, then presents us with two different versions of what happened next. He initially tells us that she made the sign of the cross (presumably with her hand), whereupon the creature vanished. A second version, which he tells us “is apocryphal and not to be taken seriously,” is that the monster opened its maw and swallowed her whole. As it was trying to digest her she made the sign of the cross, and by the power of this sign the dragon burst open so that she emerged unscathed. In medieval art St Margaret is commonly depicted appearing from within the monster, especially through its back while the edge of her robe is still visible, trailing from the creature’s mouth, as a reminder that she had been swallowed by it. This vivid narrative was clearly far more popular with both artists and patrons than the relatively tame version preferred by Jacobus where the monster disappeared; indeed, St Margaret’s identification as the patron saint of childbirth is directly linked to the tradition that she was swallowed and emerged unscathed, just as a baby should emerge safely from the womb.
However, turning to Figure 4.3, an English alabaster figure of the fifteenth century, we find that the iconography of St Margaret by no means always mirrors these written narratives. Here we see the saint trampling a dragon, much in the manner of both St George and St Michael in Figures 4.1 and 4.2; furthermore, she is stabbing the creature with some kind of weapon.43 It is unclear whether it is to be read as a cross-topped lance or, perhaps, as a processional cross that is serving as a spear: either way, the object combines clear Christian symbolism with the deadly effect of a penetrative weapon. This iconography is clearly not derived from the Golden Legend version of her story; in fact, it seems likely that it is inspired by imagery of other saints with monsters, most obviously St George and St Michael. Does then St Margaret take on some of the sexualized aspects of these other saints? It may be tempting to read the swallowing of the virgin by the monster in this way, especially because of the possibility that the creature’s mouth is acting as an invocation of a vulva, but I would argue that in this specific image, and perhaps in imagery of St Margaret generally, there is little reason to make this reading: it is more likely that the dragon’s mouth is acting as a reference to the hell mouth. Another, potentially more fruitful, possibility lies in the saint’s use of penetrative weaponry: there seems to be an inherent paradox in a virginal woman violently penetrating the body of the dragon just as she herself has been tortured. The allusion may be to her own impenetrable and transcendent soul and also to her power in overcoming her (male) oppressor, and hence to a gender position that is above and beyond the standard male/female dichotomy.
One other complicating factor about St Margaret is the identification of her dragon as a form of the devil. While we have seen this already in relation to St Michael, we should be aware here that the creature takes on a kind of hallucinatory quality, for in Jacobus’s preferred version it vanishes entirely at the sign of the cross. On one level this raises questions about medieval understandings of dragons (are any of them actually real?), and it is also an indicator of the nature of the devil: he is a tricksy creature who can slip beyond sight and reach, then shapeshift into another format. In St Margaret’s legend he next takes on the form of a man, but, clearly unimpressed, the saint grabs him by the hair, pushes him to the ground and tramples him, crying: “Lie still at last, proud demon, under the foot of a woman!” His response to her is equally indicative of an awareness of their shifting gender roles; “If I’d been beaten by a young man I wouldn’t mind, but by a tender girl . . . !” To ram the point home, Jacobus states that Margaret was reassured by her encounter with the devil. “[S]he had defeated the chief, she would certainly outdo his hireling.” The hireling in question is the prefect Olybrius, the figure who exhibits the most privileged of male gender roles within the narrative. In this way the episode exhibits the power of saints in general and St Margaret in particular: she is a figure of strength and authority who can overcome the greatest of foes, and consequently occupies a supreme human gender role, well above the common level of ordinary men and women.
In conclusion it can be argued that it is the issue of oppositionality that is the key to the interpretation of these stories and images, and also the source of their popularity. Saints are malleable, mutable beings whose usefulness lies in their ability to exemplify a whole range of concepts. Thus St George is able to be understood simultaneously as a vulnerable emasculine virgin martyr and an authoritative hypermasculine military figure: his own transcendence above the flesh and its sexuality is encoded in both his forbearance during torture and his defeat of the dragon (who is only the heathen emperor in a monstrous guise anyway). St Michael and St Margaret would seem to be more fixed in their gender roles as “male” and “female,” yet they too can be shown to demonstrate that the status of saint seems to give the individual (or rather, the artist or author depicting them) the license to call upon both feminine and masculine signifiers, particularly those associated with high social status. Meanwhile the monsters in all their forms operate as foils to the saints, sometimes highlighting their virtue through a display of baseness and otherness and at other times simply providing a suitable locus for virtuous violence. In some encounters between a saint and a monster there is clear potential for us to make a reading where sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is encoded as negative, but this forms just one aspect of a discourse where the saint is constructed as a figure who is able to transcend the limitations of their humanized body.
Notes
1. “St Benedict,” in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William G. Ryan (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 186–93, at 187.
2. Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, 192.
3. All these topics are treated in my ongoing research for a monograph on the various meanings of both written and visual treatments of saints’ encounters with monsters.
4. For the purposes of this chapter the term “reader” encompasses the listener, whether to communal readings of the life of the saint, sermons or other oral forms, and also viewers of imagery relating to these types of stories (which could include dramatic presentations as well as static paintings, sculpture and so forth) in addition to actual physical readers of textual accounts.
5. Samantha J. E. Riches, “Encountering the Monstrous: Saints and Dragons in Medieval Thought,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, eds Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 196–218.
6. Samantha J. E. Riches, “St George as a Virgin Martyr,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, eds Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), 65–85.
7. The fifteenth-century visual cycles of St George at Stamford and Windsor provide examples of the presentation of St George as both emasculine and hyper-masculine within the same sequence. On these cycles see: Samantha J. E. Riches, “The Lost St George Cycle of St George’s Church, Stamford: An Examination of Iconography and Context,” in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the Late Middle Ages, eds Colin Richmond and Eileen Scarff (Leeds: Maney for the Dean and Canons of Windsor, 2001), 135–50; Samantha J. E. Riches, “The Imagery of the Virgin Mary and St George in the Stalls of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle,” in Windsor: Medieval Archaeology, Art and Architecture of the Thames Valley, eds Laurence Keen and Eileen Scarff (Leeds: British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions XXV, 2002), 146–54.
8. The name “Michael” seems to be exclusively masculine. Its meaning is usually glossed as “who is like God,” which in itself seems to imply maleness given the conventional understanding of “God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit”: the gender identity of the latter is ambiguous, but the terminology of the former two is undeniably male. There is very little evidence of a widespread recognition of a feminine aspect of God during the later medieval period, and this underlines the identification of St Michael as a male figure.
9. It could be argued that the male pronoun is used in this context merely as a default—because the English language does not have a neuter gender—rather than to connote a masculine identity, but taken in conjunction with the masculine overtones of his name and the nature of his legend the conclusion that he was perceived as male by his devotees seems irresistible.
10. There are a few examples of female soldiers, most notably St Joan of Arc, but we should be aware that she was perceived by her contemporaries, according to the transcripts of her trial, as a problematically masculinized figure, especially in relation to her chosen mode of dress. See: Susan Schibanoff, “True Lies: Transvestism and Idolatry in the Trial of Joan of Arc,” in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, eds Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood (New York: Garland, 1996), 31–60.
11. There are a few important exceptions to this general rule where the virgin saint does agree to marriage: St Ursula and St Cecilia both transcend the conventions of female virgin martyrs in this regard. However, there seem to be no examples of a saint who goes back on a vow of virginity by actually consummating the marriage.
12. “St Margaret,” in Voragine, Golden Legend vol. 1, 368–70.
13. The role of chastity and virginity within Christian thought is a complex one, not least because of the inherent paradox that if all Christians live an entirely chaste life the religion will almost inevitably become extinct. Issues around chastity and virginity are explored in Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001).
14. St John the Evangelist is the prime example of a male saint who is explicitly describedas a virgin: “St John the Evangelist,” in Voragine, Golden Legend vol. 1, 50–5, at 50.
15. St George is consistently offered a reward for killing the dragon, which he always refuses. In some cases this reward includes the rescued princess’s hand in marriage: this element is found in Alexander Barclay’s version of 1515, while William Caxton’s translation of The Golden Legend (1483) informs us that she was arrayed as a bride when she was sent out to meet the dragon. Both versions are reproduced in Alexander Barclay, The Life of St George, ed. William Nelson, Early English Text Society, 230 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955 and 1960).
16. For a full discussion of St George as a martyr see Samantha Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Stroud: Sutton, 2000 and 2005).
17. All saints are modeled on the life and sufferings of Christ, and we should not overlook the fact that he too was the object of penetrative assaults, most obviously in the use of the lance, nails and crown of thorns. The potential for Christ to be understood as a sexualized figure has been explored by a number of commentators, most recently Robert Mills in “Ecce Homo,” in Gender and Holiness, eds Riches and Salih, 152–73.
18. As noted above (note 14), St John the Evangelist’s incontrovertible status as a male virgin martyr makes him highly unusual among the pantheon of saints. The fact that he is a rare example of a saint who did not die as the result of attempts to kill him through violence, which included poisoning and boiling, but who is understood to have died a natural death at an advanced age, adds to his inherent interest as a potential site of gender slippage.
19. On St Ursula see Samantha J. E. Riches, “‘All Took the Oath of This New Knighthood’: Gendering St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins,” in the proceedings of the conference “The Cult of Saints in Eastern and Central Europe (1400–1800),” Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 2003 (publication forthcoming).
20. See Patricia H. Cullum, “Clergy, Masculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 178–96.
21. St Senán and St Carantoc are two examples of saints who do not physically engage with the monsters they encounter but send them away to a location beyond the realm of human civilization. See Riches, “Encountering the Monstrous.”
22. An example of this format is found in the legend of St Martha. She transfixed the Tarasque, a river-dwelling monster that preyed upon ships in the River Rhone, by making the sign of the cross, then stood aside while local people beat the monster to death with sticks and stones. See “St Martha,” in Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, 23–6, at 24.
23. “St Michael, Archangel,” in Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 2, 201–11, at 207.
24. The ultimate allusion is probably to a metaphorical description of the heathen emperor who puts St George on trial: some revisions of a fifth-century Greek source, which purports to be based on an eyewitness account, describes him as a dragon as a way of indicating his evilness (Riches, St George, 27). In consequence the identification of St George as a dragon slayer seems to have been born out of his identification as a martyr, an interesting conclusion in the light of the extent to which the persona of the dragon-slaying champion seems to have sidelined the martyred saint in the post-medieval age, at least in Western Christian culture.
25. See Claus M. Kauffmann, “The Altar-Piece of St George from Valencia,” Victoria and Albert Museum Yearbook, 2 (1970), 65–100, 85.
26. There is a strong visual association between dragons and serpents through the depiction of the dragon’s snake-like tail, but over and above this factor is the common perception of dragons as a form of snake: the bestiary definition of the dragon is that it is the largest of all serpents: Bestiary (an edition of Oxford, MS Bodley 764) trans. Richard Barber (London: Folio Society, 1992), 183.
27. The rationale underlying Wygston’s selection of imagery, which includes both secular and religious subjects, is unclear. However, given that the Guild of St George was a powerful political force within late medieval Leicester, and the general association between the triumph of St George over the dragon and the assertion of civic values over the chaos of wilderness, it is at least possible that the imagery was selected as a testament to the power of the urbs. In this reading the sexualized aspect of the iconography is incidental rather than fundamental—I have argued elsewhere that by the sixteenth century, in English visual material at least, it is possible that the “feminized dragon” is part of the stock-in-trade of artists creating imagery of the saint, in that it is a variant that the patron can select along with the number of wings, legs and heads that the dragon will sport. However, this does not undermine the possibility that a sexualized dynamic could be read into this iconography, and hence a commentary on the sexual status of the saint vis-à-vis the dragon could be formulated in the mind of the observant discussant. For a full discussion of the trope of the sexualized dragonsee Riches, St George.
28. Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V (London: Phoenix, 2004), 24.
29. Riches, St George, 68–71.
30. For example, the Virgin is shown arming St George as a knight in the Valencia altarpiece, a German work created for a Guild of St George in Valencia c.1420. It is unclear whether the impulse to present him in relation to the Virgin came from the artist or the patrons. Meanwhile, St George is still considered to be an emblem of chastity within contemporary Coptic and Orthodox Christian belief.
31. The chronology of the dragon-slaying legend in relation to the martyrdom legend is not fixed, but they frequently occur in this order, apparently on the basis that it is the saint’s conversion of the rescued princess and others that leads to his arrest.
32. Revelation 12: 9.
33. Bermejo is a nickname meaning red: the artist’s actual name was Bartolomé de Cardenas. Probably originating from Cordoba, he was a leading painter of the fifteenthcentury in Spain, working particularly in Barcelona, Valencia and Zaragoza. Recorded from about 1468, when he was already working, he died in 1495.
34. For example, the Hell wings of the triptychs known as the Haywain (c.1500) and the Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1515), both Madrid, Prado, depict many composite monstrous demons, with fish-like, bird-like and stag-like aspects present among a wide range of ghastly creatures.
35. Paris, Louvre. One of the demons even sports a pair of nipple-eyes very similar in conception to those seen on the devil in Figure 4.2, and this may well indicate that Bermejo’s treatment formed part of an established tradition of form for devilishcreatures.
36. For example, the apocryphal travel work credited to Sir John Mandeville mentions the blemmye; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).
37. Examples of English churches with at least partially extant medieval doom paintings on the chancel arch include Bacton (Suffolk), Beckley (Oxfordshire) and Great Harrowden (Bedfordshire).
38. Dublin, Trinity College.
39. I have argued elsewhere that the medically inaccurate longitudinal wound depicted in late medieval images of the birth of the Antichrist by Caesarian section acts as aform of vulva—artificial, violently opened and base—to form a diametric opposition with the ever-hidden, ever-sealed vulva of the Virgin Mary. The date of Figure 4.2 is congruent with these images, and this tends to suggest that a similar understandingof the movable, visible and unnatural vulva is being brought into play. See Samantha Riches and Bettina Bildhauer, “Cultural Representations of the Body,” in A History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age, ed. Monica Green (Oxford: Berg, forthcoming).
40. Blackledge, The Story of V, 194.
41. Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, 368–9.
42. Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, 369.
43. St Margaret holds her book in her other hand: this may look rather unlikely at first glance, given the attack on the monster, which is happening simultaneously, but the book is a standard piece of iconography for saints who were learned—an understanding that was associated with this saint. Its presence indicates the extent to which visual symbolism could operate outside the conventions of written narratives.
By Samantha J.E. Riches in "Medieval Sexuality - A Casebook", Routledge, 2008, USA, excerpts pp. 59-78. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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