The Defiant Middle by Kaya Oakes

Author:Kaya Oakes [Oakes, Kaya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC028000 Social Science / Women's Studies, BIO022000 Biography & Autobiography / Women, REL062000 Religion / Spirituality
Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Five

Butch/Femme/Other

Women’s lives in the Middle Ages were dirty and short. While still in your early teens, you were either pregnant and in danger of dying in childbirth or sent off to a drafty, perpetually damp convent where you weren’t allowed to wear shoes and your hair was hacked off, so you were likely to frequently be sick with colds, flu, or pneumonia, any of which could kill you. No matter where you lived, you either died from plagues or you survived them, but the latter was mostly luck because doctors treated most illnesses by slicing people’s arms and bleeding them. There was almost nothing in the way of recourse if something violent happened to you, other than inciting or enduring more violence.

Your teeth could kill you. Your uterus could kill you. The cut the doctor made on your arm with a dirty knife could kill you. Your husband could kill you, and so could your father, and no one really cared if they did.

Considering the ways in which women’s lives were flung so far out of their control, the legend of the medieval Saint Wilgefortis represents a defiance against that lack of control. But it also tends to be filed by most people under “Catholic Weird.”

The story of Wilgefortis began not with a specific woman, but with a piece of art, not of Wilgefortis, but of Jesus. Medieval images of Jesus on the cross sometimes showed him clad in a full-length androgynous tunic instead of the loincloth most of us are more familiar with, and as these pieces of art traveled around Europe, they took flight in the vivid, pious medieval imagination and sometimes merged with other narratives. Here’s how one narrative was born.

Once upon a time, a young noblewoman named Wilgefortis was promised to a man in marriage by her father. Christians of the medieval era were terrified of Muslims, who they believed to be infidels due both to their own ignorance of Islam and to teachings from Rome, so the legend was spun for maximum stir-fear-into-the-hearts-of-believers effect. Thus, the man to whom Wilgefortis was promised was a Muslim king. Wilgefortis, a good virgin girl, began praying that she would become disgusting so the king would refuse her, and in answer to her prayers, God helped her to grow a long, prominent beard. The king lost interest, and the girl’s father had her crucified. She died. The end.

Or . . . maybe not. As it turns out, like a few other saints of her era, Wilgefortis wasn’t real, and within a couple hundred years, the story’s origins started to be questioned. Because the notion of an androgynous Christ figure wasn’t entirely unheard-of in the Middle Ages, its adoption into the story of Wilgefortis isn’t as weird as may appear. And as her story traveled the world, devotions to her only grew. In England, she was called Uncumber, and in Italy she was known as Liberata. Her miraculous beard, and its ability to help Wilgefortis avoid an undesired marriage, was a medieval version of feminism.

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