Category: Women’s Studies

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Jacques de Vitry’s Defense of the Beguines

We want to like the prologue to Jacques de Vitry’s hagiography (c. 1216) of thirteenth-century holy woman Marie d’Oignies. It serves as a defense of the beguines: a grassroots movement of pious women inventing new ways of living a religious life alone or in community outside a formal monastic environment. But some of Jacques’ thoughts do not sit well with modern sensibilities:

It is sufficiently demonstrated that [the beguines] clung to the Lord during the destruction of the city of Liege. Those who could not flee to the churches threw themselves into the river and chose to die rather than to incur harm to their chastity. Some jumped into dung-filled sewers and preferred to be snuffed out in stink than to be despoiled of their virginity. Despite all this, the merciful Bridegroom so deigned to look after His brides that not a single one in such a great multitude was found who suffered either death to her body or harm to her chastity. [1]

Exactly what the modern reader wants to hear: it is better for a woman to kill herself than be raped. To the vita’s target audience, however, the beguines’ actions function as proof of their commitment to a religious life outside the formal claustration and celibacy vow of a convent. Their survival is evidence for God’s approval of their way of life.

The vita of Marie, moreover, is not the only time multi-continental bishop, preacher, and very prolific author Jacques talks about a literal leap of faith in service of religious order justification. In one of his Sermones Vulgares, Jacques seeks to exhort crusaders, and especially Templar knights, to spiritual greatness:

I have heard from a certain Templar that at the very beginning of the order, while they were still poor and very fervent in religion, that he himself was coming from the city of Tyre, bringing money and alms which they had received to the city of Acre. He came to a certain place, which has been called ‘Templar’s Leap,’ ever since. For the Saracens had placed an ambush for that noble knight, in a place where on one side there was a sheer cliff and on the other the deepest sea lay below, while the Saracens besieged him from in front and behind on the narrow path. As he had no where to turn, he urged his horse with the spurs, and leapt from the lofty cliff with the horse into the depths of the sea. But the horse – as it pleased the Lord – carried him unharmed to the shore. (trans. Helen Nicholson) [2]

Medaglia celebrativa di Jacques de Vitry del 1518

At first, the story appears to be a near-direct parallel to that of the Liege beguines. A Templar, facing violation of his life and mission (delivery of the money, a nice nod to the Templars’ fabled role as “the world’s first international bank”), chooses to jump from high ground into water, a plunge likely to end in his death. In this case, too, God intervenes, and the Templar’s life is preserved.

But on second glance, the Templar’s leap does not mirror the beguines’ actions so much as cast them into stark relief. In his crusade sermon, Jacques relates the knight’s mental process as he leapt off the cliff: he hoped and prayed that God would deliver him safely. The beguines, according to the bishop, hoped only that they would die.

Dyan Elliott has suggested that the story of the Liege beguines, propagated during the Albigensian Crusade against presumed Cathars in France, functions as anti-Cathar polemic. Orthodox martyrs do not die, so lay people who die in service to claimed religion are heretics, not martyrs. [3] Elliott skips over the underlying contention in her discussion of martyrdom, but it is worth drawing out in a discussion of beguines and sanctity. Jacques’ argument only works as anti-heretic polemic if the audience already stipulates the orthodoxy of the beguines. In other words, the vita prologue is a collective hagiography preaching (literally) to the choir, not an argument for an inquisitive audience. I’m more interested, though, in modern revulsion and the theological position Jacques implicitly stakes on a different topic: suicide.

Print of a Beguine in Des dodes dantz of Matthäus Brandis, Lübeck 1489.

Setting aside the views and experiences of women themselves, the rape of religious women was a theologically painful problem for medieval theologians—a problem bound up with suicide from the earliest centuries of Christian theology, thanks to the interplay with the classical tradition and the story of Lucretia. And Jacques and his hagiographical beguines were not necessarily on the right side. Augustine discusses the dilemma at some length in City of God I.16-19, arguing that the virtue of virginity is ultimately a matter of the will; the integrity of the body only reflects the sanctity of the will insofar as the person has control over it. [4] “We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.” (I.19) He continues on to drive home his point that suicide is a mortal sin, period:

Therefore a woman who has been violated by the sin of another, and without any consent of her own, has no cause to put herself to death; much less has she cause to commit suicide in order to avoid such violation, for in that case she commits certain homicide to prevent a crime which is uncertain as yet, and not her own. (I.18)

The apparent universal survival of the Liege beguines, furthermore, is no magic arrow for Jacques to avoid the problem of actions with a desired outcome of suicide. Medieval doctrine–in point of fact, even Augustine in that same section of City of God–was clear that intention was a crucial factor in determining a sin.

This is where the comparison with the Crusade sermon becomes so revealing. The knight explicitly hopes to survive, even if he knows it is mathematically unlikely. Jacques could have given his hagiographical beguines this way out, but he did not. “Two of the enemy came to her in a boat and intended to commit vile fornication with her. But what can happen to the chaste among lions, to a lamb among wolves, to a dove among eagles? She preferred to sink again into the river than to be violated.” [5] The Liege beguines’ intention is death, or more flatly: their intention is to kill themselves. Despite this fairly flat contradiction of Church doctrine, Jacques intended this scene as an argument for the legitimacy of the beguines’ lifestyle.

The premium that Christianity places on martyrdom has long carried the uncomfortable flip side of where to draw the line between accepting one’s death and making one’s death happen. The rhetorical strategies of Jacques de Vitry in his vita of Marie d’Oignies and his Crusade sermons add an additional gendered dimension onto the dilemma. And in light of Jacques’ goal to promote the beguine movement, a comparison of the two texts suggests that when it came to arguing for orthodoxy, might heterodoxy be the best policy?

Cait Stevenson, PhD.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

—

[1] Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. Margot L. King (Peregrina, 1987), 19.

[2] H.J. Nicholson, trans., “Jacques de Vitry: Sermons to a Military Order,” De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History, April 12, 2014.

[3] Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2004), 65.

[4] Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (T&T Clark, 1913), digitized here.

[5] Life of Marie d’Oignies, 19.

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The Medievalism of Dorothy L. Sayers

The cover of the biography of Sayers written by her student and friend, Barbara Reynolds (Amazon.com).

            On October 14, 1920, the words, “domina, magistra” were spoken by the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University at the first ever graduation day for women. The grammatically feminine gender of these Latin words marked a major twentieth-century transition for university education. Among this first group of women was Dorothy L. Sayers. She was awarded a first-class MA degree in modern languages, a degree that she had earned in its entirety at Somerville College, Oxford University five years before but could not receive at the time merely because she was female. While her degree was in modern languages, at the time, and especially under the influence of the medievalist at Somerville College, Mildred Pope, an undergraduate degree in modern languages would have contained quite a bit of medieval studies, and this influence can be seen throughout her varied career. Whether Dorothy was writing advertisment campaigns for Guiness Beer (she did the Toucan campaign) or Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels or radio dramas on the Life of Christ for the BBC or translating the Song of Roland and Dante’s Commedia, the Middle Ages seems to never be far from her mind.

The first female graduates from Somerville College, Oxford University (https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/about/a-brief-history-of-somerville/degrees-for-women/).

            Perhaps my favorite example from the Lord Peter mystery series occurs merely in her early characterization of Lord Peter in Whose Body? (1923). Dorothy Sayers admitted later than one of her motivations for writing Lord Peter, besides the need to earn money, was a certain kind of wish fulfillment during her own economically uncertain times. She imagines a character who has the means to live a life that she can only dream about. And what does Lord Peter do? He has his man, Bunter secure the purchase of rare books from an auction house while he follows up on a lead for his murder investigation:

“Thanks. I am going to Battersea at once. I want you to attend the sale for me. Don’t lose time—I don’t want to miss the Folio Dante* nor the de Voragine—here you are—see? ‘Golden Legend’—Wynkyn de Worde, 1493—got that?—and, I say, make a special effort for the Caxton folio of the ‘Four Sons of Aymon’—it’s the 1489 folio and unique. Look! I’ve marked the lots I want, and put my outside offer against each. Do your best for me. I shall be back to dinner.”

She even gives a footnote:

Aldine 8vo. of 1502, the Naples folio of 1477—”edizione rarissima,” according to Colomb. This copy has no history, and Mr. Parker’s private belief is that its present owner conveyed it away by stealth from somewhere or other. Lord Peter’s own account is that he “picked it up in a little place in the hills,” when making a walking-tour through Italy.

Notice that this isn’t an example of high-level scholarly influence. It is about the formation of her loves and passions soon after leaving Oxford. When she could fantasize about doing anything with money, she fantasizes about having enough money to buy expensive incunabula of Dante and de Voragine!

            In addition to writing mystery novels, one of Dorothy Sayers’ earliest jobs after graduation was working at an advertising firm, the one for which she developed the Guiness Beer campaign. It appears from a paper given years later at a Vacation Course in Education at Oxford in 1947, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” that medieval studies may have given her a unique perspective on the advertising industry. She gave this paper almost twenty years after personally working in advertising (and writing Murder Must Advertise based upon her experience) but only a few years after the end of World War II, when the powers of propaganda in the modern world were first beginning to be fully recognized. With these experiences in mind, she writes:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of or unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechancial fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?…Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so that they experience great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction…between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Sayers suggests that the susceptibility of modern people to advertising and propaganda may be the result modern education. She even goes so far as to suggest that a return to the medieval trivium might be the best antidote! While realizing her proposal might be laughable, Sayers suggests that the issue is that “modern education concentrates on teaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking arguing, and expressing one’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholars as he goes along” whereas “medieval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.” The medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric was not really a series of “subjects” but rather a way to train students in the verbal arts, enabling them to then apply those arts to whatever subject they studied. Without this kind of medieval training, the modern person is enslaved to those with the ability to spin words most effectively.

            These examples from Whose Body? and “The Lost Tools of Learning” give only a taste of the way Sayers’ undergraduate education in medieval studies shaped her later work. More could be written about resemblances between medieval mystery plays and Sayers’ 12-part BBC radio drama on the life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King (and the way her medieval approach caused major controversy in 1942), not to mention her more serious scholarly pursuits translating The Divine Comedy (1949/1955)and The Song of Roland (1957). More could also be said on her remarks on medieval female brewsters in “Are Women Human?” (1947). What becomes clear, however, when one looks at her varied career is the impact of medieval studies upon the whole. The seeds of medieval studies sown at Oxford seem to have born fruit in her distinctively twentieth-century, modern life, one of the only times in history that a female graduate from Oxford University could be an advertiser, mystery novelist, radio dramatist, amateur educational theorist, and independent scholar.

First editions of Dorothy Sayer’s medieval works (abebooks.com).


Lesley-Anne Williams
PhD in Medieval Studies (2011)
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Selected Bibliography

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, Part 1: Hell. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. London: Penguin Classics, 1950.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, Part 2: Purgatory. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Penguin Classics, 1955.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, Part 3: Paradise. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. Twenty-Seventh Printing edition. Harmondsworth Eng.; Baltimore: Penguin Classics, 1962.

Moulton, Mo. The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women. First edition. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019.

Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning. Louisville, Kentucky: GLH Publishing, 2016.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Man Born to Be King: Wade Annotated Edition. Edited by Kathryn Wehr. Annotated edition. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Song of Roland. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1957.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Three for Lord Peter Wimsey: Whose Body? Clouds of Witness. Unnatural Death. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

Whyte, Brendan. “Munster’s Monster Meets Dorothy’s Dragon: Lord Peter Wimsey Consults the Cartography of the ‘Cosmographia.’” Globe (Melbourne), no. 91 (2022): 61–74.

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Unearthing the Vampire: Succubi, Secrets, and Women’s Monstrosity

Earlier this month, the corpse of a woman with a protruding front tooth and a sickle positioned across her throat was discovered in a 17th-century cemetery near the village of Pien in south-eastern Poland. The sickle was meant to keep the body contained: should the deceased woman have attempted to rise from her grave, the blade would have promptly beheaded her. Coupled with the woman’s prominent incisor, the placement of the sickle suggests that those who tended to her burial may have feared she was a vampire.

Professor Dariusz Poliński from Nicholas Copernicus University observed, “The sickle was not laid flat but placed on the neck in such a way that if the deceased had tried to get up most likely the head would have been cut off or injured.” Photo courtesy of Miroslaw Blicharski and Alexsander Poznan.

The woman was found with the remains of a silk head dressing, which indicates she was someone of high social status, as such a garment would have been an expensive commodity. Of course, this woman would be neither the first aristocrat nor the first woman to be suspected of vampirism.

In addition to the positioning of the sickle and her prominent incisor, a padlock was secured around the big toe of the woman’s left foot, which may be meant to symbolize “the closing of a stage and the impossibility of returning,” according to Poliński. Photo courtesy of Miroslaw Blicharski and Alexsander Poznan.

Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian noblewoman and history’s most prolific female serial killer, who tortured and murdered as many as 650 girls and women between 1590 and 1610. Her association with vampirism manifests in the folklore that describes the countess’s ritual of bathing in her virgin victims’ blood to retain her youthful beauty. Neither the number of victims nor her bathing activities are confirmed. Nevertheless, a servant girl testified that she saw the figure recorded in one of Báthory’s private books, and another witness stated that he had seen the countess covered in blood. Colloquially, she became known as the Bloody Countess and, more contemporarily, Lady Dracula. 

A copy of the only known portrait of Elizabeth Báthory, depicting the countess at age 25. The original painting from 1585 has been lost.

Vlad Dracul, the late medieval ruler more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler, derived his namesake from his preferred method of murdering his enemies: impalement, a particularly gruesome form of death where a wood or metal pole is inserted through the body either front to back, such as a stake might be driven through a vampire’s chest, or vertically through the rectum or vagina. The prince purportedly enjoyed dining amongst his dying victims and dipping his bread into their blood.

Portrait of Vlad Dracul by an unknown artist, circa 1560. This painting, like the one of Elizabeth Báthory above, may be a copy.

As Dracul’s surname, which incidentally means dragon, and Transylvanian origins indicate, the intermittent ruler whose brutality spiraled into legend subsequently became a source of inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula character. Another source, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, not only preceded Dracula but also, conversely, rendered its vampire antagonist female. Moreover, the novella, set in Austria in the late 1800s, positions Carmilla as a clever seductress whose victims are predominantly male. Although Stoker’s iconic novel all but synonymized the vampire with maleness, Le Fanu’s character reflects the traditional association of vampiric tendencies with femaleness that preceded and pervaded the medieval period.

Depiction of Carmilla and her companion, Laura, whom the novella positions as both a friend and a romantic interest. The illustration, by D. H. Friston, accompanied Carmilla when it was first published as a serial in the literary magazine The Dark Blue between 1871 and 1872.

While sensational news specifically citing vampires did not appear in Britain or Europe until the 1700s, the veil of vampirism shrouded the female body during the medieval period and for centuries prior in many parts of the world. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, the Assyrians feared a demon goddess known as Lamashtu, a name meaning “she who erases,” who was said to steal infants and suck their blood. Lilith, first wife of Adam turned primordial demon, has a similar reputation. Some stories describe her as a creature who steals babies under the cover of darkness, but she also has sex with men in their dreams and spawns demon offspring with their seed. Lilith’s legacy as a sexually wanton demon of the night seems fitting, as she was the woman who first cohabitated with man but refused subservience. More specifically, Lilith questioned why she should lie beneath her husband during sex, and her resistance reinscribed her as monstrous. She became a succubus, a demon in female form who, essentially, sucks the life from men.

Painting of Lilith produced by John Collier in 1887, which conveys her association with the devil and her sexual proclivity through the intimacy she shares with the snake that embraces her naked body.

In the late Middle Ages, the fear of women’s vampiric nature was embodied by the figure of the succubus and implied throughout the wildly popular treatise De secretis mulierum, or On the Secrets of Women. The misogynistic, pseudo-medical text posited women as polluted physiologically and prone to witchcraft; in turn, it laid the foundation for the 15th-century inquisitorial treatise Malleus maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches. Witches were also believed to imbibe in blood, particularly when feasting on the bodies of infants.  

Unlike depictions of the incubus, who adopts a male form and engages in sex with willing women, the succubus stalks unconsenting men, often in their sleep. As medieval historian Dyan Elliott explains, “Often a succubus is introduced into a tale so that the holy man can resist it.”[i] Involuntary nocturnal ejaculation served as evidence that a man had been preyed upon by a succubus whilst asleep. As the victim of a rapacious female entity who had extracted semen from his body without permission, the man was absolved of any sin stemming from sexual emission.

In her book Fallen Bodies, Dyan Elliott identifies the life of Saint Anthony as a quintessential depiction of a man who resists the succubus. Painting titled The Torment of Saint Anthony by Michaelango, circa 1487-88, depicts a demon with breasts and a perineal orifice that also functions as the mouth of a second face.

Semen was understood during the medieval period as a substance that was not only life-engendering through its role in conception but also life-sustaining in relation to the maintenance of men’s health. In short, the preservation of semen was vital to the preservation of the male body. Sex, therefore, posed a danger to men, who could become “dried out” if they engaged in sexual activity too frequently. Women, however, were believed to draw strength from the male body during sex by absorbing its heat, as described in the Secrets.[ii] Sapped of both his semen and his own bodily heat, the man was physically drained by intercourse, and the woman ingested his life force. 

The Secrets heightens the vampiric qualities of the female body when it identifies a sign of conception as the feeling of the penis being “sucked into the closure of the vagina,”[iii] emphasizing how the woman’s sexual anatomy acts upon the male body to extract its fluids and does so, seemingly, of its own accord. One of the commentaries that frequently circulated with the text exacerbates this somewhat unsettling sentiment by ascribing desire directly to the female body when the writer states, “The womb sucks in the penis, for it is attracting the sperm because of the great desire it has.”[iv] This is not the only instance where the Secrets suggests that female bodies behave so deliberately. Another commentator explains how “it often happens that a woman conceives if she is in a bath where a man has ejaculated because the vulva strongly attracts the sperm,”[v] whereby the language alludes to the agency possessed by the female body that appears inherently poised to entice and consume the essence of its male counterpart if only for the purposes of reproduction.     

Moreover, the Secrets infers that the vagina itself might bite the man during intercourse when the text warns its readers that women sometimes place iron inside their vaginas with the malicious intention of harming their sexual partner, who then “suffer[s] a large wound and serious infection of the penis.”[vi] The phrase vagina dentata was not coined until psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud connected it with his concept of castration anxiety circa 1900, but the idea of the “toothed vagina” effectively manifests much earlier in a medieval treatise that likens women to succubi who thirst for mortal men and threaten them with their monstrous appetite.

Written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein and produced by Joyce Pierpoline, Teeth is a 2007 comedy-horror film that draws upon the concept of the vagina dentata. The film was positively received by critics when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and provides a sharp commentary on consent and sexual violence, despite its poor performance at the box office. 

Although women’s relationship with the postmedieval vampire can only be implied in a document that predates the term, women’s correlation with monstrosity could not be clearer. The commentator takes pains to note at an odd point in the text that, “according to Aristotle in the 16th book On Animals, woman is a failed male, that is, the matter that forms a human being will not result in a girl except when nature is impeded in her actions,” so “[i]f a female results, this is because of certain factors hindering the disposition of matter, and thus is has been said that woman is not human, but a monster in nature.”[vii]

As for the female remains recently unearthed in Poland, the skeleton has been relocated to a university for further study. While this woman was not the first to be found buried in a way that suggests her contemporaries feared she might rise from the dead, the placement of the sickle across her throat was unique. She was also spared from mutilation intended to prevent a vampire’s resurrection, which has been observed at other sites. Perhaps those who orchestrated her burial were being politely precautious. After all, if stories had instilled in them that a woman naturally desires to feed on men while she lives, how terrifying that hunger might be once her body was released from restraint by her death.

[i] Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies, University of Pennsylvania Press (1999), 53.

[ii] Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, State University of New York Press (1992), 127.

[iii] Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 121.

[iv] Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 121.

[v] Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 66.

[vi] Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 88.

[vii] Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 106.