Stanzaic "Life of St. Margaret"
Text: [Lydgate]Durham University Library MS Cosin V.II.14, fols. 97v-106r. ; [Mirk]London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.ii, fols. 90v-91v.; stanzaic Life]Cambridge University Library MS Additional 4122, fols. 6r-38v.
Plot: Margaret withstands the tortures of two levels of assailants, the Earthly pagan "Olybryus," and the demons she commands to Hell from within her cell. She is holy from birth, but careful analysis might detect her development of powers as she moves from her mortal to her immortal antagonists.
Issues and Research Sources:
1) Note the references to Margaret's clothing and body. These are typical, and far more less emphatic, than the point-of-view offered readers/hearers of Margaret's legend in most other sources, including authorized Mass breviaries and books of hours. How does the intersection between female identity, erotic attraction, and church doctrine work itself out here?
2) It's easy to dismiss Margeret's legend as demeaning to women and pointless for modern readers because she is depicted as a victim, but her forthright challenges to human and demonic enemies, and her triumph over them, establishes her as a cult-hero. Her resistance to her enemies frequently involves elements of women's dress, like this early passage in which she binds the dragon/demon with her head-scarf, or "wympyllle":
Can this be read as allegory? What does a wimple look like and what is its intended effect as an element of medieval women's dress?
3) Margaret's career, as the "Life" represents it, seems to fall into stages, her "mayde" life among the sheep and her disciples, and her saint-warrior life, in Olybryus' dungeon and confronting the "tourmentoures" and Malcus, the "manqweller. If you look closely at the use of dialogue, you can trace her transformation from preaching innocent to interrogated prisoner to interrogating imprisoner. What tools does the author use to make that dialogue work?
4) Margaret is striking among the female virgin martyrs for her astonishing physical and mental strength: "The chrome and steel she rides, collide with the very air she breathes." No, that's Neal Young singing about a Harley-riding waitress, but it captures something of her "Alien"-resisting powers. She is a great character to analyze as a challenge to the Modern obsession with Medieval representations of women as weak, voiceless, powerless, and oppressed. Were this a movie, and were it the 1970s, she would be played by Sigourney Weaver. By contrast, Olybryus also occupies one of those character positions like Hannibal Lector and Grendel, but more like Grendel than Lector, his character falls away from frightening authority to pathetic complaint as the saint rises to her martyrdom. The "Sarrasynes" who do Olybryus' bidding also play an important role as intermediaries between ultimate good and ultimate evil. What does their unusual level of character development do for the tale?
5) In Margaret's early debate with Olybryus, a subtle theme emerges as saint and tyrant talk at cross purposes because they value life and death differently. To a saint, what are pain and death? The pathway to reunion with God in Heaven. So when Olybryus threatens to kill her, how does Margaret react? Then there is "Malcus, that was his manqweller" (l. 284). Malcus represents a second sort of intermediary pagan, similar to the "Sarasynnes" when they first encountered Margaret, but different from them in some important ways. Malcus' dialogue with Margaret (ll. 295-334) is one of the more peculiar demonstrations of the paradox of faith which the "Life" communicates.
6) The "Life" also is populated by outright Divine characters who are given dialogue, namely the angel and "oure Lorde Jhesu Cryste" (ll. 323 ff.). What effect does this have on the readers' reception of this tale? What kind of document does it become, or at least, what kind of document does it try to become? Notice the explicitness with which the saint's cult is explained in the conclusion of the "Life" (ll. 339-250), and how specifically Margaret describes the kinds of human suffering and misfortune which she will attempt to mitigate in her saintly role. How does this change the "Life"'s function from mere biography to something doing "cultural work"?
7) Visual images of scenes from Medieval literature, like those found in stained glass windows and manuscript illuminations or wood-cuts, are one measure of the popularity of a tale, and the specific scene depicted can be understood as a "reading" or "performance" of the text because of what the visual artist decides to include or exclude, what to highlight or repress, or even what to introduce from his/her own imagination that was not found in the text. (We are still awaiting evidence of a Stanley-Fish "Eskimo" St. Margaret, but stranger things have happened.) Click here for an image of a 1522 Parisian printed horae (Book of Hours) leaf depicting Margaret stomping her dragon, along with St. Barbara at the moment of her execution. For yet another image of one of the "virgin martyrs" who usually comprise the final subjects of intercessory prayers in a Book of Hours, click here for the "verso" side of that same leaf where St. Apollonia proudly displays the tongs used by her torturers to extract her tooth. In all three instances, notice the images' emphasis on aspects of the female body which erotic verse writers praise as elements of female beauty (long flowing hair and white teeth). Go back to the torture passages in Margaret's "Life" and notice how the poet ratchets up the emphasis on similar specific aspects of her body that might be described as eerily erotic, though only to a sado-masochist in Modern culture. Similar details have been detected in all other female virgin martyr legends, and they do not happen in any of the male virgin martyr legends. Why? And don't leap to the easy conclusion that the monks who wrote the tales hated women, though that might be true in some instances. Women readers collected and avidly read these saints' lives.
Click here to visit the Monastic Matrix, a scholarly web site on Medieval women's religious communities that was begun at the Yale Divinity School but has since moved out into a genuinely "virtual" community of scholars.