The version of the life of St Benedict (c.480–c.550) presented in the thirteenth- century Golden Legend contains a variety of anecdotal accounts of the activities of the saint and his followers. Two of these form an interesting commentary on medieval views of the temporal world and its temptations presented within the context of a collection of saints’ lives that was often used as a source for both sermons and images throughout Europe in the late medieval period. The first incident concerns St Benedict himself, living as a hermit in a desert place:
Soon the devil brought to the holy man’s mind the image of a woman whom he had once seen, and he was so aroused by the memory of her that he was almost overcome with desire, and began to think of quitting his solitary way of life. But suddenly, touched by the grace of God, he came to himself, shed his garment, and rolled in the thorns and brambles which abounded thereabouts; and he emerged so scratched and torn over his whole body that the pain in his flesh cured the wound of his spirit. Thus he conquered sin by putting out the fire of lust, and from that time on he no longer felt the temptations of the flesh.1
Subsequently, there is an account of an interaction between St Benedict and one of his followers:
[A] monk, who was unhappy in the monastery and wanted to leave, importuned the man of God so much that finally, having had enough of this, he gave the needed permission. Hardly had the monk got outside the gate when he met with a dragon, which opened its maw and wanted to devour him. The monk cried out to some of the brothers who were nearby: “Hurry, hurry, this dragon wants to 2 3 4222 5 6 7222 8 9 1011 1 2 3222 4 5 6 7 8 9 20222 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3222
eat me!” They ran up but saw no dragon, and led the trembling terrified brother back to the monastery, where he was quick to promise that he would never leave again.2
The three topics in the title of this article may at first glance appear to be only loosely related: certainly some saints encounter monsters, but to what extent are—or were—saints understood to have sexuality? What role have monsters played in an understanding of sexuality, both animal and human? Most par- ticularly, do the encounters between saints and monsters give space to some kind of mutual sexual dynamic? These are all large questions that demand far fuller answers than is possible within the confines of this article;3however, as these
brief anecdotes from the life of St Benedict indicate, not only can we clearly identify the sexuality of saints—and its sometimes violent control—as a topic of interest to medieval people but we also have evidence of a monster being used as a personification of the temptations of the world. Admittedly, there is no direct evidence here that the sins that the apostate monk may have fallen into were necessarily sexual, but it seems very likely that thwarted sexual desire would have formed at least part of his motivation to seek to leave the monastery in the understanding of the medieval reader.4As we shall see, dragons and other monsters
seem frequently to have exhibited an association with untrammeled sexuality within medieval written and visual culture, and it is certainly possible to interpret this episode with this motif in mind.
I have written elsewhere on some of the range of meanings associated with saints’ encounters with monsters,5 and also, in common with several other
commentators, on the sexualized discourse that attaches itself to some saints’ cults.6However, this current collection presents me with a welcome opportunity
to focus directly on the overlap between these topics, and hence to engage with some thorny issues around medieval understandings of the roles and meanings of both saints and monsters in connection with sexual urges and sexualized activities, particularly where written and/or visual accounts of the encounters between saints and monsters seem to invite a reading that highlights a sexualized dynamic. In this article I am focusing on some presentations and understandings of three saints in particular, St George, St Michael and St Margaret, with brief references to comparative figures. The choice of these three central characters is informed by a number of significant features of their presentation in late medieval Western Christian thought, and overall the article aims at giving the reader a sense of the potential for approaching visual and written accounts of other saints with a similarly nuanced set of questions in mind. First, all three encounter— and defeat—monsters, yet, as we shall see, different understandings and meanings have been mapped onto these saints and their concomitant legends so that they present a range of understandings of the meanings of both monsters and saintly encounters with them. Second, two of the three—St George and St Margaret— have martyrdom legends, while the third, St Michael, operates entirely outside
this paradigm. In this way we can begin to gauge the extent to which an apparently sexualized discourse within an encounter between a saint and a monster is informed by other aspects of a saint’s cult that may also appear to be constructed to project, or enable, a particular kind of sexualized agenda. Third, two of the three—St George and St Michael—are ostensibly identified as “male” while the third, St Margaret, is demonstrably “female”: this too presents us with a range of gender identities upon which a sexualized encounter with a monster can be imposed.
To begin with this issue of the gender of these saints, it is now commonly agreed by gender historians that concepts such as “male” and “female” are overly blunt labels to apply to any individual, for they obscure a multitude of nuanced gender roles. It is generally accepted that both masculine and feminine gender identities are qualified by a range of complicating factors such as age, occupation, activities, dress and social status, as well as the more obvious issues surrounding individuals who consciously move between gender identities through affecting the apparel or demeanor conventionally associated with a member of a different gender category. With a historically dubious saint the problems are magnified, for we must acknowledge that we are dealing with a figure who is almost entirely the projection of some kind of group consciousness, a consciousness that can vary quite radically over time and space, and even between different individual adherents inhabiting the same time and space. St George is a good example of a figure who seems to exhibit “gender slippage”: as we shall see below, he is some- times presented as an authoritative, aggressive exponent of a particular type of high-status male identity, while on other occasions he is apparently labeled as a physically vulnerable and powerless figure who is “emasculine,” if not strictly “feminine.”7 St Margaret, by contrast, can be fairly securely identified as a
feminized figure, although her presentation in her legend as a high-status woman who vows her virginity to God ensures that she is qualitatively different from the “average” female adherent of her medieval cult, and is arguably closer to higher- status males than to lower-status women. Her most obvious gender ambiguity lies in the fact that, despite retaining virgin status throughout her life, she was identified as the patron saint of childbirth—a life-cycle experience common to virtually all women living outside the cloistered world of a nunnery, and indeed to quite a few of those living within it, particularly those who took the veil as widows. Meanwhile, St Michael presents a whole other set of gender problems. As an angel he is to be understood, strictly speaking, as an insubstantial creature of light, with no genitals or other identifying marks of biological sex. However, he is consistently gendered male through his name,8through the use of male pronouns
in descriptions of his deeds,9and, most significantly, through the activities and
dress associated with him: he is frequently depicted wearing armor and engaged in battle, and as such is constructed with the overtones of a particular kind of high-status masculinity.10 1111 2 3 4222 5 6 7222 8 9 1011 1 2 3222 4 5 6 7 8 9 20222 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3222
Bearing these problematic gender identities in mind, we can move on to con- sider the additional layers of meaning provided by a sexualized reading of aspects of a saint’s legend. The clearest examples of the general connections between saints and sexuality are often thought to occur in the written and visual records of medieval understandings of martyred saints. Recounting the story of the “passion” of a saint presents an opportunity for the narrator (whether in oral, written or visual form) to present a commentary on the sanctified body’s capacity to transcend above both physical suffering and sexual urges. The motif of forcibly bared flesh is a common feature of martyrdom narratives. It is often contrasted with heavily clothed torturers, allowing for the construction of a dichotomy between the vulnerable body and the invulnerable soul. Penetration of the saint’s flesh is also a common feature of martyrdom narratives, and this topos seems to operate on several levels; it not only emphasizes the vulnerable body/invulnerable soul motif—arguably this informs the anecdote about St Benedict’s mortification of the flesh recorded in The Golden Legend—but also invokes the concept of innocent flesh that was untainted by ungovernable sexual impulse in the period before the Temptation and Fall of humanity. Furthermore, the penetrative tor- tures presented in these narratives often seem to operate as a way of labeling the torturers as unclean and sexual creatures in contrast to the clean and chaste martyr, and the trope of penetration is often accompanied by a direct evocation of chastity. This is particularly clear in the narratives of female virgin martyrs, for there is often an episode where an offer of marriage is made to the saint, which she refuses because she has already vowed her virginity to God.11The legend of
St Margaret is a good example of this format,12and her rejection of the suitor is
presented as a crucial element in the story of her ascent to claiming a heavenly crown for it precipitates her trial and torture under the direction of her rejected swain, a heathen ruler. St Margaret’s decision to live in chastity allows her to emulate both Christ and the Virgin Mary in their rejection of an active sexual life; chastity in itself is a form of sexual identity, albeit a largely negative one, and it is an identity that has been promoted to Christians as the pinnacle of virtuous living over many centuries.13Masculine equivalence is harder to find,
but there are a few male saints who are explicitly described as virgins,14and others
where this sexual status is strongly implied—St George rejects a thank-offering of the rescued princess’s hand in marriage in the legend of the dragon fight, for example.15Furthermore, many male martyrs experience penetrating torments as
part of their passion sequence: as we shall see, St George is one example, for he suffers a range of invasive tortures such as being raked, scourged, sawn in half and having nails driven into his body.16Meanwhile, the case of the arrow-
filled St Sebastian, who has famously been understood as a homoerotic figure over several centuries, is surely evidence of the sexualizing potential of a penetrative assault.17
While the physical sufferings presented in these martyrdom narratives often seem to position the saints as emasculine figures, we should also be aware that
some very masculinized activities are also associated with these individuals— both “male” and “female.” For example, the conversion of nonbelievers, whether as individuals or as large crowds, is often a factor in these legends, sometimes through preaching and teaching and on other occasions through the forbearance demonstrated by the suffering saint. Conversion, preaching and teaching— particularly in a setting other than the domestic realm—all seem to be coded as “masculine” actions within late medieval consciousness, and it is notable that these activities are associated with a number of ostensibly “female” saints, such as St Margaret, St Katherine and St Ursula, as well as obviously “male” martyr saints, such as St George, St Lawrence and St John the Evangelist.18 Some “female”
saints go even further in their adoption of “masculine” patterns of behavior: for example, St Ursula leads a large group of followers of both sexes, including 11,000 female virgins, although traveling and leading large groups are both conventionally associated with “male” saints in later medieval thought. According to the version of her legend presented in The Golden Legend she even founds an order of knighthood—surely a concept of high-status, privileged masculinity—for her female followers: this is an incident that surely indicates gender slippage.19
Thus we have a fairly clear paradigm where the martyr saint, whether physically “male” or “female,” is the object of an apparently gendering sexualized threat enacted by male torturers and their male paymasters—it is very rare for torturers to be presented as female, and then only as part of a mixed-sex group, and unknown for the heathen ruler (or equivalent) to be presented as a female figure. This in itself raises intriguing questions about gender roles that label the torturers and rulers as representatives of a particular type of aggressive, sexual masculinity, a masculinity that is arguably congruent with the life experiences of many “successful” laymen at a time when maleness was often defined in relation to the ability to procreate children and to fight to defend oneself and one’s family, but a world away from the (theoretically) celibate, non-combative lifestyle that was enjoined upon clerics.20 This aggressive masculinity acts as a foil to the
transcendent martyred saint, who seems to be defined in ways that cannot be reduced to simplistic terms such as “male” or “female,” and instead calls upon a range of culturally defined gender markers such as physical vulnerability and authoritative behavior, including preaching and conversion, which effectively position the individual saint outside—or above—the conventional nexus of human gender roles.
Yet within the saint’s encounter with a monster the ground rules are far less defined. First, we should be clear that by no means all of these encounters end in physical conflict—the battles between saints such as St George, St Michael and St Margaret with their respective dragons are justly well known, but there are many other examples of narratives of saints and monsters where the monster is merely banished to a place where it cannot harm people, or even is left entirely in peace to go about its business as it chooses.21This flexibility is entirely at odds
with the consistency with which martyrdom narratives are presented: the details 1111 2 3 4222 5 6 7222 8 9 1011 1 2 3222 4 5 6 7 8 9 20222 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3222
of the tortures may vary, but the story reliably climaxes with the death of the saint, usually through beheading, and the soul’s acceptance into heaven. It seems that there is no equivalent in martyrdom legends of the saint and the monster agreeing to differ: the heathen ruler never backs down and allows the saint to continue to live a Christian life, presumably because the experience of persecu- tion was such a formative influence on the Early Church. Second, where a conflict between saint and monster does take place the power relationship is very different to that between the martyr and the torturer. In martyrdom narratives—both written and visual—the vulnerability of the martyr’s flesh is a crucial part of the story, for it provides the opportunity for spiritual transcendence, and in consequence the heathen ruler—or equivalent—and his assistant tormentors are firmly cast in the roles of assailants. However, in the legends of saints who encounter monsters the saint is clearly identified as the principal assailant, or is at least party to an assault on the monster taking place at the hands of others.22As yet I have not
uncovered any medieval accounts where the saint suffers physically in the jaws of the monster, however horribly it is described or depicted. The monster may well have attacked and eaten people before the saint arrives, but the nature of the combative encounter between them is such that the saint’s holy power ensures that he or she is never in any real danger. As a concomitant to this, the penetrative weaponry of swords and lances wielded by St George or St Michael can be read as an equivalent of the arrows, hooks, rakes and flaming torches wielded by torturers in martyrdom accounts. In effect the monster becomes the object and the saint becomes the subject of a physical, potentially sexualized, aggressive encounter. The account of St Michael in The Golden Legend states that “the devil deceives the mind by false reasoning, entices the will by seduction, and overpowers virtue by violence,”23yet in the aggressive encounters between saints and monsters
it is virtue that triumphs through violence. This apparent volte-face is particu- larly evident in the legends of St George, a dragon slayer who uniquely wields sword and lance yet also finds himself on the business end of a range of such weapons, combining as he does the persona of a monster defeater and a fully fledged male martyr.
St George has been an enormously popular saint throughout most of Christen- dom since his cult first began to establish itself widely on the back of extensive martyrdom narratives of the eighth century. In the post-Reformation period his identification as a dragon slayer has been crucial in his success, with its clear potential for interpretation as a form of good overcoming evil, Christ overcoming the devil, urbs overcoming wilderness, and various other—often political— oppositions. However, the story of his encounter with a dragon was a relatively late embellishment of his legend, largely arising from its inclusion in the Golden Legend version of his life,24and it seems that in the late medieval period he was
recognized equally as a martyr and a dragon slayer, and celebrated in both these capacities.
As we have seen, the construction of the archetypal martyrdom legend can be understood to offer considerable potential for a sexualized reading, and St George is no exception to this rule. He is depicted in both words and images as the object of a considerable range of penetrative (and some non-penetrative) tortures that are presented with little consistency between different versions, to the extent that there are some geographically specific tortures associated with him, such as being nailed and chained to a table in Catalan imagery.25 He is
frequently associated with being sawn in half, scourged, beaten and—like almost all martyrs—beheaded, and overall it seems safe to assume that St George was