Abstract
This paper proposes an exploration of the medieval aspects of the early modern period with a particular focus on the lives of medieval female saints and the relevance of the accounts of their martyrdoms to early Shakespearean tragedy. The most distinguished hagiography collection in the Middle Ages (in Continental Europe and in England alike) was the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), which reflected the spiritual, religious, socio-political, and cultural landscape of medieval Europe. It remained influential in the sixteenth century, and various elements of it seeped into Protestant martyrologies like John Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes (Book of Martyrs) and John Bale’s 1546 account of Anne Askew’s interrogation and execution (The first examinacio[n] of Anne Askewe latelye martired in Smythfelde—The Examinations). I offer an interdisciplinary discussion of the impact of medieval hagiographies in early modern England, a subject frequently overlooked by scholars of Renaissance studies. The focus falls on the saints in The Golden Legend who represent a strong female voice and who are silenced violently. I also examine pre-and post-Reformation voyeuristic tendencies in (for instance) Foxe’s and Bale’s accounts and in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
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Notes
Cf. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Jean-Christophe Mayer’s Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith (2006), Alison A. Chapman’s Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature (2013), Julia Lupton’s Afterlives of the Saints (1996), Helen Cooper’s Shakespeare and the Medieval World (2010).
Cf. Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (1990); Elizabeth Robertson, “The Corporeality of Female Sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret” (1991); Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (1997).
Cf. Carla Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England” (1998) and Lisa Perfetti, Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature (2003).
For medieval anxieties regarding female speech see popular pamphlets like the anonymous The Anatomy of a Woman’s Tongue (1638) and William Perkins’ The Government of the Tongue (1593).
Cf. Janette Dillon, The Language of Space in Court Performance 1400–1625 (2010).
Cf. Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman (ca. 1618), Henry Shirley’s A Martyred Soldier (ca. 1619), and the anonymous The Two Nobel Ladies (ca. 1619–1623).
Cf. Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613).
Especially Seneca’s Thyestes and Ovid’s books 1 and 6 of the Metamorphoses are relevant for Titus Andronicus. Cf. Natália Pikli, “‘The Crossing Point of Tears and Laughter.’ A Tragic Farce: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” (2004); Attila Kiss, The Semiotics of Revenge. Subjectivity and Abjection in English Renaissance Tragedy (1995); James Black, “Shakespeare and the Comedy of Revenge” (1986).
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Turi, Z. “A certaine whorish brauery”: Silenced Women in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Neophilologus 105, 305–322 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09663-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09663-5