Margaret's Monsters: Women, Identity, and the Life of St. Margaret in Medieval England by Michael E. Heyes (review)

The vita of St. Margaret, and the image of her erupting from the dragon's belly, was widely popular throughout the medieval period. Her story was told through Latin and English vernacular texts dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century, which, in turn, have produced a vast amount of scholarship on her Life. Previous work has typically focused on Margaret's role as a virgin martyr and patron saint of expectant mothers and on the metaphorical significance of the dragon. Michael E. Heyes's Margaret's Monsters, as the title suggests, explores the monsters and adversaries that shape Margaret's Life. As Heyes writes, "without her monsters, Margaret's tale would not have ended in her martyrdom, nor would it have reason to promise the extraordinary benefits to parturient mothers and their children that drove Margaret's popularity" (2). Heyes's text complements and builds upon previous scholarship by offering important insights on the development of St. Margaret as a role model for virgins and mothers as well as offering a valuable new approach by which to study hagiographies.

Heyes promises three significant contributions to the field of medieval studies. The first is the value of using a diachronic analysis of hagiography—an examination that follows how the text has developed and changed by studying multiple textual versions—instead of the traditional synchronic approach that examines a work contextually at one particular period. In particular, Heyes's primary focus is on lives from the Mombritius tradition, which refers to manuscripts of St. Margaret's Life that conform to a particular narrative pattern and that date from the ninth and tenth centuries. The Mombritius passio—named after the fifteenth-century editor of the catalogue of St. Margaret's vitae—was the most popular version of St. Margaret's hagiography and influenced the majority of her vernacular lives.

Second, Heyes argues that studying the saint's life through a diachronic methodology is essential to understanding the interconnection between hagiographical literature in related works and different versions of the same life. This intertextuality also demonstrates the sociocultural value found in the auxiliary characters. Heyes's third contribution to medieval studies is to underline the importance of the secondary characters, who, unlike the saint, can develop and change through time, as they are not bound to "the radically singularity of the sacred" (150). This latter point is the crux of where medieval studies and monster theory become intermingled in the monograph. Heyes's central point is that the monsters in the Life of St. Margaret are significant to understanding how the text has been read, understood, and developed for its audience—especially in how Margaret's followers constructed their own sexual identities in relation to her dual position as a model of imitation for both virgins and mothers.

Chapter 1 highlights the intertextuality of hagiographical literature by examining the image of the dragon in Athanasius of Alexandria's The Life of St. Anthony (ca. 360 CE), which was translated into Latin in the fourth century and remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, and Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict from book 2 of the Dialogues (593–594 CE). Both texts metaphorically envision lust and sexual temptation in the form of a dragon. In the Life of St. Anthony, the dragon represents a demonic presence, the "Spirit of Fornication." In the Life of St. Benedict, the dragon symbolizes the enticement of worldly pleasures: in succumbing to temptation, one is consumed by the dragon. Heyes argues that these images "form an important intext for understanding the Mombritius tradition's demons" (16). The audience would have understood that Margaret's encounter with the dragon should be read in the same way as Antony's encounter with his demon and Benedict's dragon—"as a struggle with her own lust" (16).

Following chapter 1's analysis...