The Road to Antioch: Wace's Vie de Sainte Marguerite on Crusade

This study investigates the relationship between the medieval context of sainthood and the contexts of pilgrimage and crusade as articulated in Wace's Vie de sainte Marguerite. A twelfth-century Anglo-Norman hagiography that tells the life, death, and posthumous miracles of a young Early Christian martyr from Antioch, the text gives rise to a series of symbols that conjures legends of the lands and peoples on the southeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. As such, it enters into dialogue with the contemporaneous military campaign that aimed at the Christian recovery of the Holy Land. The symbol of the pearl, the fundamental role that the city of Antioch plays in the construction of Margaret's martyrdom, and the discourse of King Solomon embedded in the verse of the text all combine to suggest a subliminal apology for conquest. In this way, the text forges an ideological space that posits a privileged connection between the Anglo-Norman readership, increasingly female and lay, and the Late Antique virgin martyrs from the land on the southeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Anglo-Norman literary cultural aimed at preserving the memory of legendary saints from the distant past. The martyrdom of a Late Antique virgin from Antioch resonates with the quest for political, cultural, and religious hegemony over the eastern Crusader States.