Cross-Dressed Saints as Brides of Christ: Adapting Representations of Holy Women in the Middle Ages

Resumen

Cross-dressed saints’ lives, in a nutshell, concentrate on stories of women who wore men’s clothes, fled the world, and hid either in solitary places, as Saint Pelagia decided, or in monks’ monasteries, as Saint Eugenia of Rome did. This paper aims at presenting the process in which both the vitae and (some of) the visual representations of cross-dressed saints incorporate different elements of female mysticism both in France and in the German speaking areas. Not only have the lives of these holy women in disguise been transferred from the East to the West and translated, first, into Latin and then into the vernacular, but they are also adapted to local religious-cultural-artistic milieus. Accordingly, one will find insertions reminiscent of the mystique courtoise and The Song of Songs in the lives of such saints, as Saint Marina the Monk or Saint Euphrosyne. The passages which are suggestive of the phenomena of female mysticism vary according to the importance of the episode they are inserted in. In the case of Saint Marina the Monk, for instance, the episode of her death includes a part in which the sponsa communicates with the Sponsus. If we turn our attention to the manuscript folios that accompany the vitae (both in verse and prose), we will notice that the saints are depicted as men. In this case it is the textual sources that enable us to view the cross-dressed saints as holy woman offered as exemplum. Furthermore, representations of Saint Margareta Pelagius (Fig. 1) focus on her being depicted enclosed in a cell, with a small window. In my opinion, these elements are reminiscences of the image of the inclusa living withdrawn from the world. Therefore, the representations, by emphasizing seclusion, adapt to new emergent models of female piety, that of the mystic women.