3 - Heterodoxy, Patronage, and the Harlot in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Hagiography

Summary

The argument that the Early South English Legendary poet's portrayal of a particularly powerful Magdalene should be read against the backdrop of the Ninth Crusade illustrates the influence that specific historical contexts of production could wield on the representation of holy harlots’ authority. This interpretation, however, derives more from elements found in the text than from any secure knowledge about the poem's context of production. In this chapter, two late medieval lives of holy harlots exemplify that a specific context of composition, when it is known, can help us understand widely diverging representations of female saints’ authority and exemplarity. Femininity, sexuality, and authority intersect at different points depending on the date, locale, authorship, patronage, and socio-economic circumstances of hagiographical production. The valuation of outspoken and repentant saintly women does not therefore evolve monolithically, solely influenced by such far-reaching movements as the rise of affective piety or the influence of the romance genre over hagiography (as Chapters 1 and 2 of this monograph might have hinted at): it also varies depending on the specific context of production. To facilitate comparison, the two texts focus on the same holy harlot, Mary Magdalene. Both are based on Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea and are written, during a time when John Wycliffe's reformist ideas had a strong impact on literary production, by Augustinian friars who explicitly positioned themselves against the heresy.

The first text under consideration in this chapter is the life of Mary Magdalene in the Festial, a collection of prose saints’ lives penned in the late 1380s by John Mirk, an Austin canon from Lilleshall in Shropshire. The second work is a mid-fifteenth-century verse life of Mary Magdalene by Osbern Bokenham, Austin friar from Clare Priory in Suffolk, East Anglia. Both Augustinians explicitly position themselves on the side of the orthodox Church, rejecting what they conceive pejoratively as the Lollard heresy. This last piece of contextual information is crucial to this chapter, as I will show that even though the radical potential contained in holy harlots’ lives made repentant prostitutes particularly fertile ground for use by dissenters, our two hagiographers treated their Magdalene very differently because they each had a very different intended audience.