Is There a Harlot in This Text? Hagiography and the Grotesque

In her book Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Averil Cameron argues that hagiography can be characterized as a "continual reworking and reenactment of idealized Christian biography, the pattern of Christian truth in action." ¹ Found first and foremost in the Gospels, "the Christian story is itself a biography"; thus later Christians, through the writing of saints' lives, "could present an image of the life in imitation of Christ, the life that becomes an icon." ² Following this line of thought, but taking it to a different part of the New Testament, Philip Rousseau and Tomas Hägg have remarked that "no Christian biographer or panegyrist could entirely escape the apostle Paul's evocation of the 'new man'—especially since the idea was linked with 'putting off mortality and putting on immortality.'" ³

Surely it is this "new man" who provides the model for Peter Brown's holy man, most recently defined by Brown in terms of the "'transformation' of his person, through a Spirit-filled ascetic discipline and through the imaginative alchemy associated with the return of Adam, in the desert, to his Paradise Regained." ⁴ With this new emphasis on transformation rather than translocation, Brown now finds "the issue of his male gender . . . that much more interesting," "for maybe holy men were not 'men.'" Figures like the angelic Symeon the Stylite, he suggests, "had transcended the categories of gender as normally defined." ⁵

While the rhetoric of the angelic life may well indicate a desire to construe the character of men like Symeon apart from sexual behavior (Brown specifically mentions procreation as what defined "normal" male-gendered identity), it does not indicate that maleness had ceased to function normatively as a measure of religious status. Although, as Elizabeth Clark has pointed out, "gender-bending" was a feature of Christian portrayals of ascetic heroes from early on, Thecla being a notable example, still the gender that was "bent" was typically female rather than male. ⁶ There was no male equivalent to the female transvestite, who by the fifth century had become a stock character in hagiography, and even in earlier biographies holy women were often portrayed as honorary men: the "female man of God" is Palladius's memorable phrase. ⁷ Just as there was no female equivalent to Brown's "holy man," as Clark, again, has shown, there was also a marked tendency to position the identity of holy women in terms of male-gendered norms. ⁸

Although manliness and holiness seem to be virtually inextricable from each other, especially in early Christian literature that portrays historical women, there is a literature that takes a step in the direction of imagining holy women who are valued for more than their "manly" character. This is the hagiographical literature of the so-called "holy harlots" that, as I will argue, gestures toward a "pattern of Christian truth" that destabilizes the dominant maleness of the "life as icon," to recall Cameron's phrases. Yet my focus will be on the paradoxical quality of these portrayals, for these "seductively feminized figures" are nonetheless "spectacles of conflicting images that refuse to resolve into a visual whole." ⁹

The two texts that I am going to discuss are the Life of Mary of Egyptand the Life of St. Pelagia of Antioch. ¹⁰ As Virginia Burrus has remarked, these vitaeof loose women are themselves "promiscuous," so to speak, because they are difficult to locate historically, geographically, textually, and in terms of authorship. ¹¹ Although the earliest written versions of both texts may be from the seventh century, each has a complicated literary and oral past, due at least in part to elaborations of anecdotes about reformed sinners. Both were translated into several languages and appear to have circulated rapidly. ¹²

Briefly, the storylines of these two popular hagiographies run as follows. The Life...