Desiring Virgins: Maidens, Martyrs and Femininity in Late Medieval England

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Imagine the scene. A gentry girl of, shall we say, fifteen, is sitting with her family in their parish church, in a private pew near the chancel. It is during Lent, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the priest has chosen for his sermon the well-worn theme of the seven deadly sins. He begins with the first mortal sin, pride, and among the admonitions our maiden hears this cautionary tale:

A countas, chast of body, gret in doing almes-dedys, devowt in prayerys, deyid, & was drawyn wyth feendys to helle-ward, & cryed, ‘alas!’, & aperyd to a lady of fraunce, fowl as a feend, & seyde to here: ‘be þou ware be me & alle oþere! For I was a good lyuere in alle oþere thynges, saaf I hadde delyӠte in pride and veynglorye, in prowde aray of myn heuyd & of my body, in longe traynes, & in brode hornys, and I desyred werdly worschyppe. And only for þis pryde I am dampnyd wyth-outyn ende!’

The dangers posed not only to a woman’s own soul but also to those of the men who might behold her fashionably dressed and adorned body are hammered home some minutes later when the priest, having been diverted onto other themes through discourses on wrath, envy, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, reaches his crescendo with lechery, which some called the sin ‘fyrþest … fro heuene’, because it damns two souls in one act. Again, our maiden and other female parishioners are urged to think on their carefully tended hair, their fine dresses, their eye-catching headdresses, and the desperate state of damnation which these could lead them, and others, into:

Men may synnen ofte in syӠt of wommen; as nyce wommen þat dyӠten hem qweyntly to make men to mys-vsyn here syӠt on hem, and Ӡit þei wenyn þei synen nouӠt, for þei consentyn noӠt to hem. but þei synne grevously, for þei are cause þat þe soulys of manye men are lost. Ӡif þe womman in here entent doth so in here aray, þat men þat beholdyn here hadde desyre to don foly wyth here, þanne sche is cause of here synne.