In this impressive study of harlot saints in vernacular texts, Juliette Vuille argues that holy harlots constitute a category of saints who enact “hybrid” and “multifaceted” models of femininity pre- and post-conversion (17). She argues that their sacred femininity is often more “flexible and relatable” (3) than that of the virgin martyrs and holy matrons whose sanctity is based respectively on virginity or motherhood. These harlot saints demonstrate a gender fluidity and indeterminacy (i.e., queerness) that appeals to the laity and the religious, especially women, who find in these saints some validation for “the complexity of the feminine gender” and the variable pathways to sanctity (6-7). Vuille contends that the saints’ pre-conversion erotic and affective traits (their “lechery”) create the foundation for post-conversion transgressiveness in their rhetoric and relationships to their clerical guides. Treatments of ender in these narratives bridge male-female binaries and others such as saintly-sinful, lay-religious, and coenobitic-eremitic (3).
Vuille describes this volume as “the first-ever study of the type of saints commonly called ‘holy harlots’” (17), a bold assertion given the extensive body of scholarship on Mary Magdalene and other holy harlots. She makes a credible case, however, which she situates within the wide-ranging, post-structuralist analyses of sexuality and gender in religious life and devotional practice by scholars such as Ruth Karras, Caroline Bynum, Barbara Newman, Dyan Elliott, Sarah Salih, and Lynda L. Coon, among many others (12). In the introduction and throughout the volume, Vuille synthesizes much of this scholarship in a conversational and accessible manner. To describe shifts in the “validating authority” for a harlot’s legitimacy, Vuille turns to Max Weber’s tripartite division of authority into three types: charismatic, traditional, and legal (15). She argues that in Old English hagiography, the holy harlot’s post-conversion legitimacy is best characterized as located in her unique authority (charisma) in which the holy woman guides the clerical guide but does not defer to male authority. In post-conquest texts, Vuille posits that the reformed harlot’s legitimacy is more mediated and even exploited through traditional gender roles (16).
While the number of texts covered in this study is relatively few, the coverage of vernacular texts from the ninth through to the sixteenth century is broad and sure-footed with the welcome inclusion of Old English and Middle English as well as Anglo-Norman hagiographical narratives. The treatment of late medieval sources is fuller than that of the earlier material as it covers several genres (e.g., Mirk’s Festial, the Digby Magdalen).
In the first chapter, “‘Seo wæs ærest synnecge’: The Holy Harlot’s Transformations in Old English Hagiography,” Vuille succeeds in demonstrating the erasure or minimization of pre-conversion feminine identities in the narratives of Pelagia, Mary Magdalene, and Afra in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology (OEM), and Mary of Egypt in the late tenth-century Old English Life of Mary of Egypt (LME). These lives, especially those in the OEM, do not reiterate Hieronymian polemics on virginity or patristic traditions that characterize conversion as a movement from a negative feminine to a positive masculine. Vuille focuses on subtle shifts in language, which are largely persuasive in demonstrating the flexibility of identity markers following conversion and the ability of the saints to “move beyond social or gendered conceptions of self” (57) while also welcoming the restoration of virginal purity by the Virgin Mary. In the OEM, the harlot’s gender is rendered invisible or difficult to determine by physical conditions, clothing, or the disappearance of other markers of gender. In this context, Vuille observes that the affective connection between Magdalene and Christ is also de-emphasized. She also rightly notes that gender markers are not always minimized but selectively employed to highlight virginal purity and bridal status (62). In another example, Mary of Egypt (LME), the qualities associated with femininity are not erased but reframed in the context of masculine qualities following conversion. In Vuille’s terms, these realignments serve as a “gender equalizer” signaling that paths to sanctity are not linked to binary notions of gender (47). Regardless, the post-conversion harlots are freed to exercise their own charismatic authority (drawn directly from their relationship to Christ) to speak boldly and win spiritual battles, such as repelling the devil and resisting the clerical guide’s fixation on womanly weaknesses and his attempts to intervene or give advice.
In the second chapter, “The Post-Conquest Harlot: Affective Piety and the Romance Genre,” Vuille presents two historically and linguistically distinct texts to argue that gender binaries are emphasized in these harlot narratives, which incorporate the conventions of romance and the affective spirituality of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the conclusion to the first chapter, she posits that the Benedictine Reform begins to lay the foundation for this shift, especially through the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux. Vuille’s characterization of the post-conquest harlot, however, seems more apt for the late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Vie de Marie l’Egyptienne (Vie l’Egyptienne) than for the thirteenth-century Middle English Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalene (ESEL). Vuille acknowledges this and observes that understanding the distinct depictions gender identity is hampered by the lack of information on the context of production. She makes a perceptive argument that the ESEL’s militaristic Magdalene validates the ninth crusade for its English audiences although the gendering argument is not as clearly delineated in this discussion. Vuille’s analysis of the Vie l’Egyptienne, on the other hand, identifies the romance conventions that emphasize the female body and convincingly argues that these reframe the harlot’s post-conversion teaching as sanctifying clerical authority consistent with a late twelfth-century emphasis on priestly authority later codified by the Fourth Lateran Council.
In her third chapter, “Heterodoxy, Patronage, and the Harlot in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography,” Vuille provides a thoughtful assessment of narratives composed by different authors for distinct audiences: the prose Magdalene in John Mirk’s late fourteenth-century Festial, which addresses a “rural and uneducated lay audience” (102), and Osbern Bokenham’s mid-fifteenth-century verse Magdalene, which he composes for Isabel Bourchier, his noble East Anglian patron. Both texts try to counter the problematic image of a preaching-teaching Magdalene associated with Wycliffite influence. Vuille begins her analysis with an incisive discussion of the highly feminized renderings of the Magdalene in representations of the “true man” promulgated by Wycliffe. Turning her attention to Mirk’s Festial, Vuille notes that Mirk’s approach is s to tame the apostolic Magdalene for his largely illiterate audience. To do so, Mirk creates a highly feminized Magdalene who acts like a romance figure reminiscent of earlier Anglo-Norman narratives; she is a passive Bride who is deferential to patristic, apostolic authority. Vuille contrasts this Magdalene with Bokenham’s Lyf of Marye Maudelyn and his translation of the Voragine’s Legenda aurea (in the Abbotsford Legendary, possibly for Cecily Neville). Bokenham’s approach to this problem involves a more delicately drawn model of female authority for his aristocratic patronesses, which, as Vuille notes, could have caused trouble for Bokenham. She argues that he found ways of affirming the literary and devotional culture of his East Anglian patron while qualifying the controversial moments of the Magdalene’s public apostolic voice. Vuille takes the middle road in the debate on how much risk Bokenham faced by complying with his patron’s request, suggesting that this project caused him “uneasiness” but probably did not put him in danger.
The fourth chapter, “‘She shal byn abyll to dystroye helle’: Gender and Authority in the Digby Mary Magdalene” is one of the densest in this volume. Vuille’s larger arguments on harlots as types of “Everyman” and “bridging” figures are most fully realized in her analysis of the Digby Magdalene and other late medieval texts (Vitas Patrum and Gilte Legende). This expansive chapter is organized into three large sections: the Magdalene as a vessel of the Word; the Magdalene and Feminine Persuasion; and the Sexual Magdalene. Vuille clearly explains the connections between vernacularity and universalism in this chapter. What follows is a layered exploration of the abundantly contradictory, ambiguous, and elaborate impulses invoked through Magdalene’s pre- and post-conversion personae in the Digby. Vuille takes time to demonstrate the assimilation of the Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin as vessels of divine holiness and models of reconstructed virginity which give birth to the divine Word. The vernacular is situated in a cooperative yet critical relationship to a traditional Latin articulation of the Word. Vuille’s account of this reconfiguration of sacramental authority is delightful. Peter is an awkward third wheel in speaking the Word to the King and Queen while Mary Magdalene is the effective, pastoral teacher who secures their conversion. The Digby Magdalene iterates Wycliffite prescriptions for good preaching. These ideals are especially resonant in the context of performance for the male actors who are probably friars. Vuille gestures toward these complications in performance, a topic that deserves further development but for which there is hardly space in this ambitious chapter.
Vuille’s fifth chapter, “‘Admiranda et Imitanda?’: Emulation of the Holy Harlot Type by Late Medieval Female Mystics,” is one of the most rewarding chapters in this volume, which covers Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Elizabeth Barton. Vuille focuses on the complexities of creating the narratives and voices of real women imitating the transgressive harlots they were supposed to admire but not imitate, especially by experiencing a conversion that changes the structure of their lives and legitimizes their authority (182-3). While Vuille notes that the clerical authors are essential to this process, she chooses not to foreground questions of male representations of female mystics by noting that these partnerships reflect writing practices that are almost always mediated. Vuille examines each of the women’s spiritual ambitions with great attention. This chapter’s strength is in the detailed explication of each mystic’s imitatio Magdalenae to mitigate transgressive or potentially transgressive beliefs and actions. Vuille’s analysis of the re-casting of the Magdalene’s autonomy by Kempe and by Barton is especially perceptive. In her careful explication of Kempe’s imitation of Mary Magdalene, Vuille underscores Kempe’s engagement with the repeated rejection and criticism of a transgressive “holy woman at odds with her own time” (215). This is one of the most compelling and original assessments of this text I have encountered.
In the volume’s concluding chapter, “Holy or Harlot? The Early Modern Demise of the Saintly Prostitute,” Vuille underscores the advantages of the holy harlot as a versatile blueprint which was a “more inclusive and overarching representation of femininity” than those available through the virgin martyr or holy matron (223). She makes a strong case for this indeterminacy of Old English harlots in the first chapter and again during her discussion of the Digby Magdalene as an Everyman in the fourth chapter, but little in between. This creates some challenges for Vuille’s contention that the holy harlot can rise above gender binarism and present femininity as a metaphor for humanity. Her focus on queering in the challenge to gender binarism indicates the usefulness of queer theory in deepening our understanding of vernacular hagiography and devotional praxes. Future studies might address the relevant critical approaches in more depth, for example, by exploring the value of queer historicism in literary analysis. The argument that these holy harlots offer a freeing or liberating precedent is appealing and convincing (225); yet it also seems somewhat strained across the entire breadth of the texts discussed, especially where gender binaries are foregrounded with little promise of negotiation with clerical authority as they are in Mirk’s Festial. Vuille acknowledges the fragility of the holy harlot as a blueprint for humanity during the Protestant Reforms which saw the Catholic Church’s imposition of a stricter orthodoxy on women’s religious practices and explorations of autonomy.
Vuille brings a fresh approach to the study of holy harlots in this volume. This study is an exciting contribution to the study of gender and religion that opens new directions for discussion and research.