Welcome to a new series of close readings looking at the lives and voices of women in medieval literature I’m Mary Welsley a contributor to the lrb and I’m joined for this series by inen dumitrescu also an lb contributor who teaches medieval literature at the University of Bon hello Arena hello over
The next four episodes we’ll be exploring the common experiences of women over more than a thousand years of History roughly from the year 300 to 1500 and today we’re starting on a love cruise to Jerusalem with an Old English text about a repentant sinner it’s a
Story that takes us from the sea to the desert which features sexism sin Redemption and an obliging lion it also contains one of the most compelling images of female authority to have come down to us from the medieval period we are of course talking about St Mary of
Egypt so enina who was Mary of Egypt and how do we know about her sure perhaps it might be useful for us to just say how she got to to England in the Middle Ages so Mary begins as an anecdote in the sixth Century Greek life of St sakas and
Then she’s fleshed out into a longer story also in Greek which is attributed to sophronius of Jerusalem who was a monk and theologian there’s no evidence that she actually existed but this doesn’t seem to have stopped her career at all in the 8th Century a monk named
Paul who is the Deacon of Naples translates this story into Latin and it’s immensely popular there are over a 100 manuscripts of it circulating around Europe and then by the early 11th century we have a translation into Old English which exists in three versions three but two of them are fragmentary
Actually all of them are fragmentary it’s Anonymous it’s very close to the Latin so it’s often not very good old English it’s a little bit clunky because it’s following the Latin so so closely and a little bit unimaginably but the story is clearly interesting at the time which is why we
Have multiple copies of it and of course we only have one of baywolf and what’s the story that these texts tell us about Mary Mary’s born in Egypt anywhere between the 3rd and the fifth century she leaves her family at the age of 12 and goes to Alexandria it’s a Sex in the
City situation uh late antique style she basically just wants to live as sinful a life as possible drinks eats and has all the sex she can and this is something that’s quite fascinating about the story there are late take stories about sex workers which are quite judgmental about
About their erotic lives in this tale it’s very very clear that Mary is not someone who has sex for money she’s poor and she insists on staying poor because she will not take money for sex uh for fear that she might actually turn away suitors so she is is basically living in
Sin for 17 years and then in her late 20s is drawn by by some good-looking Sailors who are about to go to Jerusalem to participate in the exaltation of the Holy Cross she just wants to be on the boat with all of these men so she goes with them winds up in
Jerusalem seduces more people while there of course and as everybody’s rushing into the temple to take a look at the Holy Cross mysterious forcefield keeps her back it’s almost like a sci-fi movie she just keeps trying to get through and uh she comes up against this
Force field and is thrown back goes into a courtyard prays to the Virgin Mary and then with the support of the Virgin Mary is able to go into into the temple and to worship the Holy Cross she’s then baptized runs across the river Jordan with three loaves of bread and spends
The rest of her life wandering around the desert part of it thinking about her Temptations and and all of the good times she used to have in Alexandria and then and it it seems that for the latter part of her life sort of into her 90s she is no longer troubled by Temptations
But that’s something we could talk about because the old English does funny things with her memories and her her own life in the desert I think what’s striking about this story by comparison with many other lives of female saints from the Middle Ages that had a similar kind of
Popularity is that it’s a very kindly story in a way this is a woman who commits terrible sin and she does go through torments but she finds Redemption and she’s not she’s not completely Fallen she’s she’s able to to transition from her life of sin into
This path of aasis and to become a figure of great Authority and there’s something really there’s something really comforting about the idea that an audience in the Middle Ages could be presented with an image of a woman like like that that wasn’t so explicitly misogynistic in its description of that
Woman I love that and and you know I think there is there’s a sort of standard reading on on Mary which is that she is a model of repentance right she exists to prove the extent of God’s grace and so the life exaggerates her sinfulness almost to a ridiculous extent
Or I should say she does so when she tells her own story in the life which is how how we find out about her youth so there’s a sense that in order to really believe in God’s ability to forgive human sin you have to see the worst possible kind of Sinner being forgiven
And not just forgiven but as you said lifted up becoming even even a greater Saint or greater holy figure than other people might be but what I I guess what I would say appeals to me about about her is that I think she’s she’s not a person who really stays put and that’s
True in a literal sense in that she seems to wander around the desert her whole life and that’s quite unusual and that’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently that that’s really quite strange that even in this third fourth fifth century World in which people go out into the desert to
To face demons to purify their souls to punish their bodies and become less attached to the desires and the needs of the body in order to to make themselves more pleasing to God even in that world Hermits don’t tend to ro around the desert wildly they tend to stay put in
One place they might have a cell they might live in a monastic Community they tend to be enclosed as as you said and Mary’s not enclosed she seems to really sleep under the Open Sky her body is is battered by the elements it’s uh darkened by the sun she’s thin her hair
Is gray and short there’s a sense in which she’s she’s really been out in nature and almost a part of nature through this time spent in the desert desert and I think that there’s something about the way that she wanders around the desert that also reflects her inner spiritual state that she’s always
Still a little in between sinfulness and Holiness especially in the Old English version she’s never fully fully without Temptation yeah and I think that’s the very kind of human and relatable part about her story in your wonderful monograph the experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon England you have this great
Line that she’s quote a living example of ongoing emotional struggle in the pursuit of aasis and I think that’s really encapsulates it that what we have here is this image of a woman who isn’t perfect who is striving all the time and who comes from a state of supreme
Imperfection and goes on attempting to reach Perfection but never quite achieves it absolutely and I think maybe this is the point which we have to introduce the other character in the story in order to understand what’s really so special about Mary so in the Greek life and the Latin life and the
Old English life all of which are are translations of of each other we don’t meet Mary directly there’s a frame story around her that begins with zosimus a monk who is basically given to a monastery as soon as he’s born he almost goes from his mother’s womb into the
Monastic life so you get a sense that he’s never felt any kind of Temptation whatsoever he’s never dealt with sinfulness or desire or anything like that anything messy and zosimus grows up in this Monastery and is perfect he’s basically perfect he does everything right he loves prayer he loves the study
Of scripture he’s so immaculate in his embodiment of the monastic life that people come to him to learn from him to hold him up as an example and model themselves after him which is kind of a typical thing we see in these desert stories that there are Superstar monks
Uh who whom become attractions to others he has Visions he has Divine Visions I mean he’s absolutely the model of a perfect Monk and around the age of 53 he has a bit of a monastic midlife crisis and begins to be worried that he might be just a little too
Perfect let me read a section of hum’s translation of the Old English he was oppressed by certain thoughts to the effect that he might be perfect in all things and might need no further teaching or example in his mind and he would speak thus can it be that
There is any Monk on Earth who can teach me anything new or help me in any matters that I myself do not know or that I myself have not perfected in monastic works or is there anyone among those who love the desert who is superior to me in his
Actions I think it really gives a sense of of uh zimus is pride at this point he’s he’s done everything so well for so long he’s been really the good kid the good student student that he now feels he has nothing Les left to learn and that’s troubling to him because I guess
He senses in some way that he is incomplete so he has a an angel appears to him leads him to another Monastery which is even stricter and even more perfect it’s on the edge of the desert and no one knows where it is and they keep everything absolutely secret so
It’s a little bit the opposite of his first Monastery where he seems to have been famous and he they have a a practice at lent where the the monks go out into the desert and do something spiritual on their own and then come back and never
Tell anyone about it he goes out into the desert looking for a teacher it’s explicitly put that way he wants to find someone to learn from we have to imagine he’s pretty old at this point already and that’s when he sees a creature a body some kind of unidentified thing
Speeding past past him and he gives Chase and it turns out to be Mary and he almost compels her to tell her story so really what I’m trying to say is this whole this whole story of Mary of Egypt is is set in the context of masculine monastic Perfection you
Know what can a man who has done everything right spiritually as a Christian learn and it turns out the things that he has to learn have to do with the power of not being so all of the time of not having done everything right and I think we should we should
Just take a step back and and really flesh out upon somewhat intended just how much Mary is an imperfect figure in this life before she gets to the desert you know she lives this life in Alexandria as you said she she won’t even take money for the sex that she has
And then there’s this extraordinary scene which perhaps we’ll talk about in a moment when she sees basically these hunky dudes on the beach and she wants to go with them and she wants to be with them and so she just gets on the boat and follows them and while she’s on the
Boat traveling to Jerusalem the sea itself is disgusted by her sinful ways and then when she gets to Jerusalem what she desires is to have sight of the Virgin which is also a really interesting moment but you know the details about Mary’s life are are so fantastic in opposition to this image of
Moral rectitude that we get from Z I think we have to go even a little deeper into how absolutely terrible she is because on the sea she says something like there is no there’s no form of depravity which I was not teaching in the boat so you get a sense it’s not
That she’s just having sex with all of these men she’s really she’s teaching them to do every possible thing imaginable and there’s this line in the Latin which says something like she she I had sex with both the willing and the unwilling at nenus and we have this line in two
Versions in the Old English and one it’s translated literally right the the willing and the unwilling and in the other someone has changed it to the willing and the giving Will andan on andan so it sounds like one of the scribes had a problem with it noticed that there was something deeply
Disturbing about it and what I would say is that she’s the implication is that she’s a rapist it’s not just that she desires men and they see her and she’s attractive and available and they have sex with her it’s also that she forces herself onto men that’s a tiny little
Detail but it clearly Disturbed one of the old old English scribes enough to change it and I think force is a really good word because you know there’s a real Force to her sacral power later on in the story and a force to her Authority as a teacher later on in the
Story despite the fact that she brings out this kind of character characteristic humility topos and says that well perhaps it’s not a topos but she expresses her own humility and says that she’s not worthy as a teacher but nonetheless she her story is one that has a tremendous educative power well
She’s she’s in this kind of funny position where in order to teach zosimus she has to confess to him in a sense she has to tell him how terrible she was so that she could prove to him how generous God’s grace is but if she tells him how terrible she
Was she stands in danger of seducing him of tempting him of introducing ideas into his mind this is a man who spent over half a century in monasteries among other men not that there weren’t Temptations in monasteries with other men as well and and not that those weren’t recognized but certainly with
Zosimus the idea is this guy has never thought about anything in his entire life and she says this when he asks her who she is and what her story is she says I’m afraid that I will defile both the both you and the air she’s afraid of
The power of her own words and of course it is her own words which will teach him humility the humility that he so desperately needs to learn in order to be saved but it’s a tight RPP act how do you teach someone through your own sinfulness the best manuscript uh
Version of this text is um part of the cotton collection in the British Library and it contains a rather unified hagiographic collection the lives of the Saints by alfri of aam who was a 10th Century Abbott who wrote These wrote an extensive collection of lives of saints in the vernacular which were clearly
Intended some of them were intended for a monastic audience but clearly they were also intended for Lay instruction because of the fact that they’re in the vernacular and and it is a clear and unified collection at the beginning of the text Alfred has this preface where
He says you know you know addresses the scribes you please copy this correctly and perfectly that didn’t work out it did not work out when it came to this manuscript because right at the start of this manuscript there’s a table of contents which tells you you know which
Saints lives you can find on whichever page and conspicuously absent from that table of contents is the life of St Mary of Egypt and clearly the life in this manuscript has been copied by a third scribe not the main scribe and not even the secondary scribe and without going
Into too much bone dry codicological detail it’s in a separate choir or booklet which means that the decision to include it was quite a late one and it contains some blank leaves at the end so it’s kind of been slightly shoehorned into this collection and I think this detail about the physical construction
Of the manuscript is useful because stylistically it’s also a kind of a bit of a cuckoo’s child as well because alr’s lives of the Saints I was rereading some of them last week and and I’d forgotten I know this is kind of heresy to say as a medievalist but
They’re they’re quite bad um they are they formulaic the language is often quite repetitive there are certain words that you hear repeated time and again he uses the word mayo meaning dung to describe the kind of ways of the heathens and you think God was was there
Not more lexical range available to you but it’s as though he you know there are these certain words that he finds kind of so ideologically freed that he has to just Trot them out again and again but the main point about alr’s lives of the Saints and and more specifically his
Female saints is that the kind of story he often tells take for example the life of St Agatha is this beautiful young virgin who some kind of terrible Heathen Pagan figure often a man in power falls in love with and desires to marry and she refuses to marry them and insists on
Affirming her faith to Christ and and therefore this Heathen figure will have her subjected to some kind of terrible torture and the way that alfr describes these tortures he almost seems to Delight in the description for example of Agatha’s breast being twisted and then sliced off as she’s attached to a
Rack and it makes for very uncomfortable reading as a as a woman and and it’s it’s painful and then you come to this I mean imagine what it would be like to read this text in in this manuscript which is the the best copy of the text
And to have read these kinds of texts and then to come across this life of Mary of Egypt which seems to say so unambiguously that it’s okay to be a woman and it’s okay to lead this life of sin and to have these sexual experiences and to then become a figure of authority
And one of the things that intriguing is that Mary’s passion her Temptation the the arduous trial that she has to go through is not a physical one that is imposed on her it’s not like she’s boiled in a bath like St Cecilia or any of these other kind of terrible torments
That we often find in these lives of female saints her passion is is a very different one in the in the desert absolutely well let me just back up though a little bit and say something to to what you were not noting about alfrid I I think we could say his notion of
Virginity is is very simplistic he’s really thinking about bodily Purity uh virginity as a as a state of the body really and I think what we see when we’re looking at texts from the fourth to the sixth centuries um having to do with desert asceticism is that there’s
Another sense of virginity as well which is a kind of spiritual virginity and which comes from God’s grace so you can become a little like the Madonna song You Can Be Like a Virgin in the desert touched by God for the very first time and that’s really the point you
Know you can be physically a virgin and not very not be very virginal because you are sinful because you are proud because you think so highly of yourself for having kept your body pure but you can be reverified in a sense if you simply love God enough should we just
Gloss perhaps the artical tradition we didn’t really talk about that at the start but you know why why were people retreating into the desert in this period And clearly these these lives become very popular and and something of that tradition lives on in different contexts later in the medieval period
But perhaps it’s it’s a good brief summary to say that when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire under Constantine the kind of opportunities for martyrdom as it were were greatly reduced and therefore great devotees were no longer able to show their fervent Faith by dying for
The for the cause of their faith and therefore they had to choose other forms of self-abnegation and bodily mortification to prove their devotion and this is where the kind of aromatic tradition begins and of course the the kind of key figure is St Anthony who Retreats into the desert and is often
Thought about as this the father of monasticism because he seems to have formed a community with some other recluses in this period and this idea then is repurposed in various different cultural contexts so in the early medieval period there’s a wonderful life of a saint called St guthlac who’s a
Who’s a soldier and then he becomes a monk and then he Retreats into the nearest approximation of the desert that early medieval England can offer which is the fence in East Anglia and there in the middle of the marshes in a disused barrow he sets up home and he’s tempted
By Devils but he also dispenses spiritual counsil to various people that come to visit him so just to to kind of put a little bit of context about where this idea of of wanting to be a recluse or a Hermit comes from although as
You’ve said uh s Mary is kind of in some ways not the perfect hermit but I think you’ve just clarified this question of of The Passion of a saint or the suffering of a saint so during the persecutions of Christians you have the opportunity let me put it that way the
Opportunity to be martyred which is uh the straight get to heaven car do not pass go did not collect 200 drma and your you’re Set uh for for all of eternity uh so in a lot of the kinds of lives that Alf tells and which are very
Popular in the Middle Ages the the great climax of the story is the martyrdom of the saint and they’re always a little bit odd because these Saints don’t feel anything they’re often they’re often actually without any sort of pain so terrible horrible things are done to their bodies right they might be burnt
Barbecued on both sides they might have Parts chopped off they might be boiled uh boiled alive but they they seem to not actually have any pain there’s a kind of Disconnect with the body in the desert in the age of this athetic Retreat to the deserts of Egypt and
Palestine and Syria the martyrdom becomes internal there’s not an external political force that is sentencing you to death or to to be torture you take on the torture yourself by going to be alone in the desert and there’s something kind of funny about that because on the one hand some of these
Texts talk about escaping the city because the city is so sinful and it’s full of pleasures and luxuries and temptations and distractions from God so you go to the to the desert in order re to be able to really focus on prayer sometimes solitary sometimes communal but always aesthetic life on the other
Hand what do these guys and sometimes sometimes gals find when they go to the desert they find demons they’re essentially forced to they’re forced to face themselves in the desert and there’s a sense in which that’s even more painful than being in the in the cities and among other people with all
Of those distractions they go out and they have to face the state of their souls so I think Mary of Egypt has several different kinds of martyrdoms in that sense it begins with her physical lust her passion which you know is of sometimes described as as with using the
Word loo in the Old English but there’s this odd moment where the translator uses the word throwing to describe her sexual erotic longings early on in her life and throwing is a is a word in Old English that’s usually used for passion in the sense of suffering in this older
Latin sense of of suffering it’s the word that’s used for the passions the martyrdoms of saints in a classical sense when they’re being thrown to the Lions or whatever and she seems to already be beginning her martyrdom in her erotic Youth and then continues it post baptism in the desert suffering
Both physically fasting being exposed to the elements but constantly recalling her own sinful past and weep weing weeping weeping weeping over her own sinful past so she has this kind of funny martyrdom which which seems to span at least in the Old English version seems to span right from her youth into
Her old age and I think that’s what’s so fascinating I think whoever the Old English Translator was and I was a little bit cruel to this translator earlier I said it wasn’t a very good translation but I think they did do something neat in that they know they
Understood that there was a relationship between her erotic desire and as you said the force this this spiritual force that she later has it also seems to have to do with love or desire to some extent it’s almost as if the arrows the the sex drive is transformed into something else
But it’s not put aside right the these Martyrs that whom um alfri likes so much like the Lucy and the agas they seem to have IFH frosin they seem to have no sex drive whatsoever there’s nothing for them to overcome they only have to protect themselves from other people but
With Mary of Egypt she has to overcome herself or transform her own her own sinfulness into into something higher yeah and perhaps we should just talk a little bit about when we first see Mary there’s this extraordinary scene of zosimus you talked about it a little bit
Earlier but he sees this this creature on the horizon and it’s not clear whether it’s the Beast or whether it’s a spirit and it is has a completely black body and this white hair like she heeps wool and this figure is wearing no clothing so everything about her her
Female sexual body appears to have evaporated been just kind of burnt to a crisp by the desert heat and I think that’s an interesting thing the fact that her body has lost its kind of sexual veilance and yet she has this kind of ongoing battle as you say and
There’s this incredible bit where she describes how she’s tormented with the memory of the lewd songs that she used to sing in her Youth and thoughts of wine which she wishes to drink it’s true that she doesn’t look like a an appealing young woman anymore but that doesn’t mean she’s not appealing to
Zosimus so in that scene when he first sees her and he can’t at first even tell what she is if she’s Spirit or flesh if she’s an animal or a human being his reaction is one of intense desire I’ll read another bit from magus’s translation zosimus kept gazing intently
At these details and because of the longed for loveliness of that glorious sight filled with joy he ran speedily in the direction in which he had seen hastening that which had appeared to him there truly in all the days before he had not seen the sight of any human
Being or the appearance of any animals or birds or wild beasts and therefore he ran eagerly and desired to learn what kind of wild beast that might be which appeared to him oh I love that bit could you possibly read that in Old English of course let me give it a go theim
And or the and the and will not so he’s like a hunter in that moment he’s like a hunter and he’s like a young lover you know there’s this this Trope In classical literature and in medieval literature of hunting and and love being similar you can use the same language
For both and this is a CL he’s almost stepped out of a nidian poem in this moment and and is hunting his beloved who’s like a wild beast that she’s running and he’s running after her and they spend kind of a slightly ridiculous amount of time in the story running
After one another they’re on the move and what I love is if you really start to picture the scene forgive me they’re geriatric they’re quite old at this point just running through the desert she’s completely naked uh but pretty fast and spry uh he’s getting exhausted
And yelling after her to stop and talk to him so I think it’s funny too right the the whoever wrote the original life I could appreciate the humor of the scenario of this kind of youthful passion in this elderly body you’re listening to encounters with Medieval women a close readings
Miniseries from the London review of books to listen to Arena and Mary’s 12p part series medieval beginnings and our other close reading series sign up to our close reading subscription go to lb. meclose readings or click on the link in the description so this sort of leads us to you know
What does osus learn from Mary what is the lesson that she has to teach both the audience of this text be they readers or listeners and what does she teach zosimus well here’s where I have to add in a few more details which is that he very quickly starts to see that
Mary knows a little too much and Mary has some Powers which are a littleit beyond the the mere human so the first thing is she calls him by his name and he’s already a little bit shocked because how does this strange person in the desert know his name at one point
They’re praying she levitates in the air later in another meeting she walks on water she walks across the river Jordan she seems to quote scripture even though she’s never had any kind of formal education and when he wonders about that when he asks her about it she says well
I don’t need any education I have the inner illumination of the Lord to teach me so she seems to learn directly from God in some way that’s beyond these normal human processes of of people teaching one another that’s the way he grew up he learned from other people and
Then he went and taught others she’s outside of that system altogether and has this privileged relationship to God you use the word Authority a number of times already and I think that’s really to the point she has this kind of authority that’s beyond masculine learned Authority it can do the things
That educated monks can do because she can pray and she can quote scripture and so on and later turns out she can write because when at the very the very final meeting he finds her body with her writing it seems by implication her writing in the sand next to it where she
Says I’m Mary and please bury my body and so on so it seems she can write how does she know how to write nobody knows God must have taught her and so on and there’s this really great moment which I have to say I I just love this she seems
To know exactly how things are done in his new Monastery and at one point I believe it’s in the first meeting which is the longest one of their encounters she says to him by the way there are some practices in your Monastery which aren’t very good and ought to be corrected so
Could you let abbath John know to correct these things and this is really neat because in the Latin it seems to be there’s some people in the monastery who need to be corrected in the Old English it’s been transformed to monastic practices so someone’s thinking about Mary of Egypt this wild uneducated sex
Pot running through the desert as an administrative mind a sharp administrative mind and one of the very last things that happens in the whole tale is that zamus goes back to his Monastery and they correct the practices in their Monastery so that’s really a sense especially in the Old English
Version that she has access to a wisdom about male life that even the men don’t so that’s the intellectual side of Mary and it’s actually quite robust when one starts to look for the little details they they pop out that she could do a lot of things she has a lot of
Powers but then the other aspect is just the humility it’s quite simple and profound which is that zosimus lacks humility and he doesn’t understand that he’s not perfect and that in the face of God it doesn’t even make sense to to try to be perfect because salvation is given
It’s not earned he doesn’t really get that yet he thinks he can earn salvation if he’s if he’s a good little boy he can get all his check marks and get good grades on his salvation report card and Mary blows all of that out of the water
Because the point is it’s just Grace it’s just Grace that’s given and repentance will get you more grace than thinking you’re perfect already yeah I think that’s the that’s the kind of central appeal of the story that she knows she’s imperfect and she realizes it’s an ongoing struggle and that’s the
Kind of in a way the the salvific power of the story for an audience it doesn’t matter what you’ve done if you seek Redemption you you can also be offered salvation what do you think it suggests about the relationship a Christian might have to their body because there’s I
Think a stereotyped version of of medieval Christian thought in which which is very body hating right it’s all about kind of dualistic division between body and soul and the soul is good and needs to be cherished and it and the soul is cultivated through the pain of the body you you
Weaken the body through fasts and through well at some point flagellation or discomfort and try to decrease its hold on on the soul but what do you think the story of Mary of Egypt suggests about the soul and the body well it is striking that clearly Mary’s
Body is one that no longer is young and beautiful and sexy when we meet her uh or rather when zosimus meets her and so it does seem to suggest that the body must be mortified in order to achieve a state of Enlightenment but perhaps it’s useful here to take a step outwards and
And talk about other stories of the kind of so-called air quotes here Harlot Saints pagia and TI those are both stories about very beautiful women who have this incredible sexual appeal who then become these these saintly figures but in both of those stories they well in the story of pagia she is this
Incredibly beautiful actress and she’s famed throughout the city of Antioch and when we first meet her it’s described that she’s wearing nothing but gold jewels and pearls and she even has jewels on her feet but no clothing um it’s just and kind of unambiguously sexy description and she’s seen by this group
Of Bishops and there’s this one Bishop Bishop nonis who sees her and afterwards he says to the other Bishops you know did you not see how beautiful she was and they all you know hang their heads in shame because presumably they they do recognize how beautiful she was but they
Don’t want to admit it and he says well think about how much time this woman spends trying to be beautiful trying to make herself pleasing to others and so the good Christian Soul should spend a similar amount of time making themselves pleasing to God this is kind of really
Interesting because here Beauty and sexual appeal are not entirely condemned because they’re seen as to some degree a sort of route to Salvation then later on in the story pagia escapes and she goes and builds herself a little cell on the Mount of Olives and her body becomes so wasted
That she appears to be a man and people think that she’s a man and when she dies it’s only when she dies that they realize in fact she was a woman again I think that’s an example of the body being mortified in order to achieve salvation and its distinctively feminine
Qualities being wasted away in the same way that Mary’s skin is burnt Black by the desert heat but nonetheless there’s an idea that the body was nonetheless a kind of vessel a vehicle that allowed the soul soul to take itself to the path of Salvation I think that’s right and I
Think there’s something about this uh this aesthetic how should I put it way of thought mode of being that has a lot of rules but is not invested in following them and I’m thinking for example of Barbara Newman’s essay in the London review on medieval bodies where
She talks about the way that quote even though the Bible prohibits crossdressing both Saints lives and romances celebrated women who dawned male GARP to spend their Liv as monks clerics or soldiers and that’s very much true men and women are not supposed to crossdress according to the Bible and yet we have
These heroic female figures especially who live as men in the desert and some recently have been considered to be trans figures they’re certainly not figures who follow the rules in any kind of obvious or or banal or simple sense and so I think there there is the sense
That the these relationships are are not as simple as simply a opposing Body and Soul or opposing virginity and sexuality for example because sexuality is still a form of love and that’s why I think there’s this PO the popularity of these of these repentant Saints who are
Renowned either for sex work or for desire for act for just Desiring to be with lovers and to be pleasing to lovers there’s a sense in that sexual love is a stepping stone to love itself it’s not its opposition or so to Christian love I should say so you have the popularity of
Mary Magdalene in the Middle Ages who’s really she’s a composite figure kind of put together by Gregory the Great uh from different parts of the gospels that’s the Mary Magdalene who becomes famous as it were and she I think is one of the most popular figures in the
Middle Ages I guess after the Virgin Mary it’s Mary Magdalene for for women or for anyone else because she’s also she’s someone who loves and her past in sex work is not in opposition to that it’s a stepping stone to the love of Christ and what’s what’s quite
Interesting is that in the Middle Ages the life that circulates about Mary Magdalene cannibalizes a bit of the life of Mary of Egypt so near the end of the story that develops around Mary Magdalene she winds up going to the desert and meeting a Hermit there and
Telling him her story so you see that these there’s also something a little bit interchangeable about these figures that they’re all appealing and attractive and they all have pelagia ta Mary of Egypt Mary Magdalene they have traditions of their own but partly because of the names there are a lot of Marys
Involved and a lot of them um have kind of similar patterns to their to their stories there’s often a scene often quite creepy or disturbing scenes where men try to get them out of the brothel holy men try to to get them out of the brothel by pretending to be customers in
One case it’s an uncle trying to rescue his niece from sex work but before he reveals himself to her he really plays the part of a potential customer very well so there are these slightly titillating story elements which seem to be repeated in these Tales but what it
All adds up to is a powerful interest in the early and then also in the late Middle Ages in women who are sexually uncontrolled or sexually um voracious or or simply sinful early on having then privileged relationship to God through that sexuality not beyond that sexuality not despite
It okay Arena maybe let’s perhaps read another passage we’ve been thinking about what zosimus learns from Mary but I I wanted to think about this moment towards the end of the text when he he comes to see Mary again this is also from the mcginness translation then when the course of the
Year had passed he came into the vast desert and eagerly hastened to the Glorious vision and he traveled for a long time seeking hither and thither until he perceived some clear sign of the longed for vision and the place of his desire as he eagerly looked both to
The right and to the left with the keenness of his eyes just like the most skillful Hunter seeing if he might be able to catch there the sweetest wild animal when he could not find anything that moved he began to soak himself with tears and with upraised eyes he praised
And said reveal to me Lord that Hidden Treasure of gold which formerly you condescended to show me I ask you Lord for the sake of your glory I think it’s really striking that even towards the end of the text Mary remains this this prey and and zosimus is hunting her and
This these overtones of eroticism remain but also this idea that Mary is still this bestial creature at least in zm’s imagination and perhaps in the imagination of the reader or audience as well she remains this imperfect figure that she hasn’t achieved Perfection which I think is really interesting when
We think about the moment right at the end after she’s dead when zosimus finds her body and you talked about how he he finds next to her written in the sand her name which is really kind of wonderful it’s this sort of big reveal that he just doesn’t know her name until
That point but then as he’s attempting to bury her body this this lion appears and interestingly in in the Old English text it’s a female lion and the lion is intriguing because there are lots of lions I mean there are lions in the Bible and there are hagiographical lions
And so it’s it’s a relatively common Trope I mean we find for example in the life of St Edmund a similar sort of thing this idea of animals helping Saints so St Edmund has his head cut off and a good wolf finds the head and keeps
It hidden in a bush until the friends of Edmund come and they they hear the head shouting to him saying I’m here I’m here and then they’re able to reattach the head to the body of Edmund and he achieves Sanctified status uh so it’s so it’s a similar kind of Trope in the
Sense that you know here’s this this beast from the natural world aiding in in God’s work but I think there’s a kind of larger symbolism perhaps that Mary having been this bestial figure having been the prey having been hunted having had these kind of Base bestial sexual desires as we
Understand them at the beginning of the story and now she’s transcended beyond the bestial realm and Beyond even the human realm to to the celestial realm and zosimus a beast like the lion must bury her body and bury Buri the vessel that had held her soul such that her soul can
Then Ascend into heaven I left out this detail earlier on but it’s one that I’ve come back to over and over again kind of obsessively and the way that one gets obsessed with these little passages that makes no sense in in medieval texts when he chases her the first time he’s just
Seen her and she jumps into into a kind of Valley which is marked as though a river a dried up River had gone through it and then she jump she hops up the other side turned away from him and he seems to be stopped by this Valley he can’t move even though
It’s empty it’s dried I think it’s a Wii I think it’s really originally referring to to one of these desert River beds but it makes no sense by the time it gets into the old English but there’s something about this invisible river that still stops him and there’s another
Part in the Old English where she jumps into the river again and suddenly it seems as though there’s a river there so there something about the desert landscape which also flickers I mean the River Jordan is solid enough for her to walk on but then you know is water
There’s a kind of instability about the space that they’re moving through which seems to Echo her instability as a person she’s not someone who’s can really be fixed down as one kind of human being or another as as Sint sinful or a saintly yeah and there’s there’s an
Interesting way in which the landscape responds to the lives of of the human beings within it I mean thinking back to the way the sea is disgusted by her you know sexual acts on the boat and as you say there’s there are these fascinating boundaries and Borderlands in the text
And there’s a moment in the text where it talks about her her proceeding to the inner desert you know the idea that there there isn’t just a desert but there’s a there’s a place that’s just so far from everything so far from civilization the way the text moves
Between these different places is is quite exciting it’s it’s kind of interesting for the reader but it’s also full of symbolism you know the other thing that maybe we could say about her is that she seems to cover a lot of ground as opposed to zosimus who spends
Over 50 years in one Monastery and then spends his time in in a second Monastery and just gets out into the desert these these two times or three times she travels she travels from rural Egypt I guess to Alexandria she gets to Jerusalem she goes across the river
She’s in the desert and this is something we’re going to see again in some of the figures we’ll talk about in in future podcasts that we see women who are covering a lot of ground as they negotiate this this struggle between sanctity and or Holiness and and sinfulness and desire they’re moving
Through space much more than it’s may be appropriate for women to do the ideal holy woman would stay put right I think it’s that’s true in the sixth Century as well uh and and in the 10th Century but they maybe they get some of their Authority from their movement from the
Fact that they go to a lot of places and they gather experience which is maybe the other thing to say I’m thinking of the wife of baath right now where she’s you know her great opening line experience and not Authority right Mary of Egypt is already Gathering experience
In order to build her Authority I think what what we’re going to think about a lot in later episodes is just what it means for a woman to be a teacher in the Middle Ages and where they get that Authority and where they get their knowledge I mean it’s very interesting
Thinking about that moment when zosimus finds uh the note that Mary has seemingly left for him and the text says very clearly you know she had never she had never learned to read or write that this is some kind of divine uh miracle that she has this literacy and this is
Again something we’ll think about in later episodes but the way that women to some degree might wish to pretend that they don’t have literacy or they don’t have this power they don’t have this knowledge because they lose their their Authority as teachers if they do and therefore their knowledge has to appear
To come directly from God in this kind of unmediated way are almost putting on a certain kind of Simplicity I think in the way margerie Kemp later says I’m not teacher I’m not preaching right I’m just telling some stories but I think you know that to come back to marry of Egypt
I think that’s there’s a way in which she needs saamus too and you know in some of the later versions of the life certainly some of the old French versions there’s no zosimus the frame disappears and you meet Mary first thing she’s she’s centered in in the story but
In this classic version which we have we have in the Old English and which is circulated so widely in Latin we see all of it through zam’s eyes he’s the figure through whom the reader enters the story and there’s almost a strange sense that well I think that Mary almost kind of
Called him to her because zosimus is a priest and that gives him access to something that she she cannot get which is the Eucharist so she seems to want to be shriven once before she dies she seems to want to confess and and to get the Eucharist and he provides that to
Her and then she she dies quite soon afterwards so there’s a sense in which she can never be fully separate from his masculine institutional power from the church from the rights of the church nor does she want to be she still needs the thing that only can he can have and which she
Can’t and then maybe we could say even that you know he buries her he buries her he gives her a funeral right and he’s the one who then tells her story after her death and she makes him she swears him to secrecy as long as she’s
Alive but she allows him to tell the story after she dies but there’s a sense in which she owes her tradition obviously she’s fictional but within the logic of the text she owes her tradition and her story and her message moving beyond her own life to him as a witness
He has to be the person who then goes back and tells the story which is something we find very very commonly in lives of saints particularly throughout the Middle Ages that it’s very rarely a woman’s testimony that can form the basis of of a Saint’s life it often has
To be kind of validated by a male Witness in order to have an authority I want to come back to this question of what these stories serve I mean Mary of Egypt was an extremely popular story as you mentioned in the later Middle Ages it’s translated into French into Spanish
Into German I think into Icelandic as well so clearly there’s there’s a long tradition to these stories of these repentant women sometimes in a kind of passionate tug-of war with with the men the athetic holy men who love them right what can we say about the ways that
Audiences might relate to them yeah so I was thinking in the last few days about the popularity of this story and whether we can see anything of this story in contemporary popular culture and I was thinking about the 1990 film Pretty Woman and how this depicts this in a way
You know the story has many of the Contours of the story of Mary of Egypt it’s about this woman who well it’s not clear that Mary is a sex worker at the beginning of the story but nonetheless a woman who she represents the kind of archetype of the Fallen woman and she
Meets this man and yet she has this power to reform him because in Pretty Woman the point about Edward is that he’s this kind of hollow man who can’t love and viven is this woman who is able to love and through her love she’s able to redeem him and I was thinking that
That’s that has certain similarity to Mary of Egypt and it’s interesting for thinking about the dynamic between zosimus and Mary that here this powerful male figure is reformed by this supposedly Fallen woman well and I mean that suggests to me that these figures are also in a way possibilities for for
Social or institutional critique right that the figure of the Fallen woman who does not belong to the the she’s not part of the order of the people who who run things they can see things differently you know that reminds me again of Mary’s little side remark there’s some practices that are wrong in
Your Monastery let Abbot John know viven reforms Edward but she’s also showing him what’s wrong with his line of work that there’s a sense in which his line of work is rapacious and destructive and she helps him see that and then she obviously the movie helps the viewer
Reflect on that as well and I think that’s actually the powerful thing about Mary of Egypt as well and that she is suggesting that monasteries have limitations to them that they can only take a person so far spiritually speaking that’s actually kind of radical you know there’s also an interesting
Question about what these stories how these stories might be interpreted in in the modern day and I was also thinking about other contemporary stories that have something of Mary of Egypt and I was thinking about flea bag um and again that is a that is I mean you know Mary
Of Egypt in a way she’s she is the 4th century fleabag she’s this woman who who has this I mean fle bag is a story about the central character who has these very Hollow sexual encounters um there’s this moment in in the show in in season 1
When she talks about how it’s not so much the sensation of sex that she enjoys it’s the kind of Chase and the awkwardness of it and you know in our kind of post 1960s conception of sexuality the only kind of sex that’s truly sinful is that that is without
Pleasure and so this in a way is is the kind of modern version of am Mar of Egypt’s sinful sexual misdemeanors but that is fle bag is also a story about Redemption it’s a story about being imperfect and learning to make better choices and coming to terms
With your sort of past sins in a way and so there’s something the story of the in quotations Harlot saint has Echoes In contemporary culture I think so and I think think you know it’s it’s so easy to take these old Tales of um of repentant women and and treat them on
Mass and but in fact they’re quite different from from one another pagi as you mentioned is really a figure of Love she’s a figure of love and beauty that’s simply misdirected and once the the love and the attempt to please are are directed correctly she becomes Holy Mary
I think as you suggested really seems to desire the sin more than the pleasure and she really likes the chase so just as she and zosimus are always running around in the desert after one another she’s she’s running at the beginning she’s always running she’s running towards something and she wants other
People to run towards her so there’s something about I keep saying there’s something about Mary but there’s something about Mary which almost has to do with a kind almost has a kind of emptiness in it right that she’s trying to fill things and I’m not sure with her
If she ever really FS it because we only really ever see her running and running and running and the only time she stops running is when she’s dead so I I see her as a fundamentally different figure than some than even Mary Magdalene in that sense whom we we see as loving
Loving Jesus loving Christ she is a great figure for the love of of God in that sense Mary of Egypt is a little more complicated and that’s why I think she I talked about her slightly rapist Behavior I mean not it’s literally she’s a rapist on the on that
Boat to Jerusalem there’s a sense that she stays dangerous throughout and and again that’s where I think we sort of have the sense of her being U possibly a demon possibly an animal you know even in late Antiquity you if you were a woman out in
The desert or even a man out in the desert living the aesthetic life you would probably live in a Cell you would stay in one in one place she almost becomes one with a desert she’s absolutely rest less and that I think is part of what’s so compelling about her
As a figure is that even though she’s encased in this narrative and she’s there’s a moral attached to her she’s a riddle that can never be fully answered yeah thank you so much Arena thank you Mary so join us next time when we’ll be discussing a very different kind of holy
Life with the work of the Mystic and anchoress Julian of norch who wrote the first work in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman thanks for listening to listen to Arena and Mary’s 12p part series medieval beginnings and our other close reading series sign up to our close
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