Margaret's Monsters: Women, Identity, and the Life of St. Margaret in Medieval England

St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret's monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret's importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained. More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints' Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints' Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.

About the Author

Michael E. Heyes is Assistant Professor of Religion at Lycoming College. He has published within the field of monster studies, film, and medieval studies, and his edited volume - Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques : Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States - contains contributions to all three topics. He is a general editor of The Journal of Gods and Monsters . This is his first monograph.