Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  Hypatia is often described as a Neoplatonist; that is to say, her philosophy was rationalist in the classical Greek tradition. Much has been made of her paganism, but the term is unhelpful. She was certainly not an avowed or baptised Christian – even though her protégé Synesius became bishop of Ptolemais during her lifetime. Conflicts between ultra-orthodox Christians and other sects led, it is true, to outbreaks of mob violence like the grisly episode that led to Hypatia’s murder; but it is, I think, more helpful to suggest that contrasting ideas of spirituality and philosophy were in vigorous competition in the great city on the Nile delta. Tensions might easily become inflamed.

  The events that led to Hypatia’s death are related by a contemporary, the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, whose Ecclesiastical History was compiled in Constantinople around 439:

  About this same time it happened that the Jewish inhabitants were driven out of Alexandria by Cyril the bishop… The Alexandrian public is more delighted with tumult than any other people: and if at any time it should find a pretext, breaks forth into the most intolerable excesses; for it never ceases from its turbulence without bloodshed…2

  In this case, a dispute erupted over large crowds gathered to watch dancing on the Jewish Sabbath, a practice tolerated by Orestes, the city’s liberal governor, but deplored by its Christian bishop, Cyril. After an eruption of extreme violence on the streets, the entire Jewish community was expelled and tensions between governor and bishop became strained to breaking point. Cue the intervention of 500 monks from the monastic community of Nitria in the desert southwest of Alexandria (Egeria had visited them thirty years previously), who came into the city to confront Orestes:

  …and meeting the prefect in his chariot, they called him a pagan idolater, and applied to him many other abusive epithets… and a certain one of them named Ammonius threw a stone at Orestes which struck him on the head and covered him with the blood that flowed from the wound… The monk was secured and brought before the injured prefect, who had him tortured to death… The animosity between Cyril and Orestes did not by any means subside at this point, but was kindled afresh…3

  Socrates now introduces his improbable – pagan – heroine:

  There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more. Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Cæsareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.4

  Hypatia’s odd status as a pagan martyr, with Bishop Cyril playing the part of Pontius Pilate, has been enshrined in the works of writers as diverse as Edward Gibbon and Charles Kingsley. She is remembered by generations of admiring mathematicians, inheritors of the free intellectual spirit of scientific enquiry. Even so, without her own words or physical remains, her life as a creative woman remains intangible, out of reach.

  St Brigit of Kildare

  Between animism and Christianity lies a spiritual and political zone of subtle liminalities inhabited by men and women whose affinities might have lain with either, or both. There has always been a suspicion that St Brigit of Kildare (c.450–526), a younger contemporary of St Patrick and a deeply revered co-founder of the Irish Church in the fifth century, is a conflation of some real but obscure holy woman and the pagan goddess of the same name whose feast day is 1 February, the spring-heralding Imbolc of the pre-Christian calendar.

  As late as the tenth century, the Irish goddess Brig or Brigid was still credited with powers of healing, with skills in smithing and poetry; and in Britain her equivalent, Brigantia, was a supernatural being with similar powers whose name, like the Irish, means the ‘high one’. But there is no reason to doubt the existence of the first abbess of Kildare. It is true that her vita or ‘life’ was not written down before the end of the seventh century, and that its composition places it firmly in a tradition of propagandist rivalry with the churches of Armagh (St Patrick) and Iona (St Columba or Colm Cille). It is true, also, that many of the miracles associated with Brigit are the conventional tropes of sainthood: turning water into ale; healing the blind and the leprous, and so on. And yet she inhabits a tangible and credible Early Medieval landscape populated with realistic characters – the poor and hungry, the infertile, the sick, the ambitious, the greedy – and with people whose names are attested in other reliable sources.

  Brigit is said in her vita to have been the daughter of a nobleman called Dubthach and his bondswoman, Broicsech. His legal wife, or cetmuinter, took an understandable exception to her competitor and urged her husband to sell the bondswoman while she was pregnant. A druid had foretold that the baby would be illustrious and ‘shine in the world like a sun’; nevertheless, Dubthach was reluctantly forced to sell Broicsech, and so her baby, born eventually at the court of some unnamed king and queen, was fostered by their chief druid;π she was also baptised. Brigit later returned to her father’s house but tensions resurfaced when she started giving away household provisions to passing beggars, even to dogs. She gave her father’s sword, a gift of the king, to a poor man. She refused to accept marriage to a nobleman chosen by her father and, after disfiguring herself to put the suitor off, was allowed instead to take the veil. She founded the monastery of Kildare, some 65 kilometres (40 miles) southwest of Dublin, and performed many miracles of healing, transformation and prophecy. She met and conversed with St Patrick and acquired a bishop, Conleth, to govern the many daughter houses of her familia.

  We hear much of Brigit’s striking interventions on behalf of the needy. In this tale from the Kildare hagiographer Cogitosus’s Vita, Brigit’s intervention shines a light on the otherwise obscure role of Christian women in midwifery and nursing and hints strongly at a knowledge of abortion techniques:

  With a strength of faith most powerful and ineffable, she blessed a woman who, after a vow of virginity, had lapsed through weakness into youthful concupiscence, as a result of which her womb had begun to swell with pregnancy. In consequence, what had been conceived in the womb disappeared and she [Brigit] restored her to health and to penitence without childbirth or pain. And, in accordance with the saying ‘All things are possible to those who believe’, she went on working countless miracles every day without anything ever proving impossible.5

  The political and social setting for Brigit’s miracles and achievements is striking. Often she is seen to produce food for the hungry in improbable circumstances. She is able to multiply the livestock in her care; to find a source of honey where there was none before. She turns water into ale; milks a single cow three times in one day; tames a wild boar. There is a strong sense that Brigit’s monastery was productive in a time of hardship and hunger; that she became renowned as a provider. One of the more revealing stories concerns a woman, one of the faithful, to whose humble dwelling Brigit pays a visit:

  She received her with open arms and a warm welcome, giving thanks to the Almighty for the happy arrival of the most revered Brigit as if she were Christ. Since, on account of her straitened circumstance
s, she had no fuel to make a fire with or food to feed such guests, she threw into the fire as fuel the wood of the loom on which she used to do the weaving. On this pile of wood, she laid her cow’s calf which she had killed and cooked it with eagerness. When the supper in God’s honour was over, the night was passed in the customary vigils. And when they got up the morning after, our hostess, who had lost her cow’s calf, found with her cow another calf of the same kind, which she loved as much as the previous one, and she beheld the wood of the loom which had likewise been restored for her in place of the other in the same form and quantity as the previous lot had been: hence, she suffered no loss at all as a result of having welcomed and regaled St Brigit.6

  The following story shows that such feats of productivity might bear political as well as consumable dividends:

  At this time St Brigit was a guest at the monastery of St Laisre. Now one day towards evening St Patrick came with a large crowd to put up at that monastery. Thereupon the local community was worried and said to Brigit, ‘What are we going to do? We don’t have food for such a large crowd.’ But Brigit said to them, ‘How much do you have?’ They said to her, ‘All we have is twelve loaves and a little milk and one sheep which we have cooked for you and your folk.’ But Brigit said, ‘These will be enough for the whole lot of us, for the sacred scriptures will be read to us, thanks to which we shall forget about bodily food.’ Whereupon the two groups of people, namely, Patrick’s and Brigit’s, ate together and had their fill and the amount of scraps they had left over was greater than the supplies which St Laisre had offered them in the first place…7

  So far the tale is conventional. But then (this is the nub, for in reality it is a record of political acquisition):

  …St Laisre offered herself and her place to St Brigit in perpetuity.

  By such means, early monastic entrepreneurs like Brigit, Patrick and Colm Cille brought smaller, more modest or vulnerable houses into their paruchiae; and the hagiographers of the late seventh and eighth centuries were acutely alert to their duty to record such gifts. Patrick, in his Confessio, writes that many wealthy noblewomen gave him lavish donations but that he always used these for the benefit of the poor and to build the ministry of his church. The many lands and precious gifts made over to Brigit, in gratitude for her patronage and for miracles of healing and generosity, also show how the saints were able to enlarge their earthly holdings, ensuring an everlasting reputation and a place at God’s side.∆

  Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welsh archdeacon, historian and traveller who visited Ireland in the twelfth century, observed of Kildare that in his day nineteen sisters of Brigit’s community tended an eternal flame in her memory. It burned at a shrine within a hedged enclosure that no man might enter. All that now survives of the church that she founded, and where her remains were buried, is a thirteenth-century watchtower.

  Hestia, goddess of the hearth

  In the collections of the Dumbarton Oaks estate near Washington, D.C., a very rare sixth-century Byzantine wool tapestry depicts the Greek goddess Hestia Polyolbus (Giver of Many Blessings), sister of Zeus and guardian of hearth and community. She sits enthroned, distributing gifts into the hands of six robust-looking winged genii who are, helpfully, named for us: Euphrosyne (mirth), Euochia (good cheer), Prokope (prosperity), Ploutos (wealth), Eulogia (blessing), and Arete (virtue). Framing the arched panel on either side are two more female figures: Phos (light) and another whose name cannot be read because of damage to the cloth. Hestia wears an ankle-length tunic with matching beaded cuffs and collar, her laced sandals just peeking out at the bottom. Her dark hair is full, possibly ringleted and, like the woman in the Fayum portrait described earlier in this chapter,** her topknot is held in place by a tight braid above the forehead. A pomegranate headdress, or diadem, and pearl drop earrings complete the look.

  Hestia – Vesta in the Roman pantheon – was to be found at the centre of many rituals. Traditionally she received both the first and last libations in temple rituals. The hearth,†† whose fire must never be allowed to die out and which Hestia had traditionally fed with the fats of animal sacrifices, represents the ties that bind both family and community together and one thinks, in this context, of St Brigit’s eternal flame, kept alive by her community at Kildare.

  In an Orphic hymn,‡‡ the sense that Hestia fixes the orbits of the other deities around her, that she endures and personifies the stability of the dwelling, is neatly captured.

  Daughter of Saturn, venerable dame,

  The seat containing of unweary’d flame;

  In sacred rites these ministers are thine,

  Mystics much-blessed, holy and divine

  In thee, the Gods have fix’d place,

  Strong, stable, basis of the mortal race:

  Eternal, much-form’d ever-florid queen,

  Laughing and blessed, and of lovely mien;

  Accept these rites, accord each just desire,

  And gentle health, and needful good inspire.8

  If Hestia was still being depicted in sixth-century Christian Byzantium, it suggests that her powerful evocation of family and communal fortunes had not, by then, been entirely displaced by the virtues of the Virgin Mary; that, for women at least, the more earthly guardian and focus of the home retained her potency.

  The Quiet Woman

  Until a few years ago, the village of Halstock in the English county of Dorset was served by an inn called the Quiet Woman. The sign outside showed a colourful portrait of a headless, but otherwise Hardy-esque maiden in a pastoral landscape, holding her head under one arm. I remember the Quiet Woman well: as a teenager, I spent my summers nearby, learning the arts of excavation on the site of a Romano-British villa in the company of some very kind and engaging retired men and women. The name Halstock derives from Old English Hālig + stoc – and means ‘holy farm’ or ‘enclosure’. In a fifteenth-century compilation by John Capgrave of saints’ lives called Nova Legenda Angliae, we find the story of Juthware, a native of Halstock whose father, Benna, took many pilgrims and wayfarers into his household. Juthware’s mother had died in childbirth. Legend has it that, after remarrying, Benna died too, leaving Juthware in the care of her stepmother, Goneril. This woman so bitterly resented Juthware’s Christian piety and her charity to strangers that she invented evidence that the girl had given birth to an illegitimate child and fed it to wolves in the forest. Goneril’s son, supposedly coming upon the evidence of the crime, executed his stepsister by decapitating her with a sword. But Juthware’s severed head called out to her body, which rose to its feet and carried the head to the altar of the nearby church. The remains of St Juthware, as she became, were later translated to a nunnery at Sherborne Abbey. The name of Halstock’s village pub, with its painted sign offering an improbably bucolic depiction of the awful tale, was an ironic acknowledgement of her fate.

  Juthware, oddly, is not the only female head-carrying saint, or cephalophore. Gwenffrewi was the only child of a seventh-century Welsh warrior with an estate in what became Flintshire. Her uncle was the minor monastic entrepreneur St Beuno who, given land on which to build a church on the family estate, instructed Gwenffrewi in the scriptures. Inadvertently, she attracted the attention of a princely suitor, named Caradoc. Finding her alone one day in her parents’ house, he forced himself on her. She fled for sanctuary towards the church where Beuno was preparing mass with her parents but Caradoc, catching her as she crossed the threshold, cut her down with a single sword blow to the neck. Beuno’s response was to strike the attacker down on the spot with a curse, so that he melted ‘as wax before a fire’, while Gwenffrewi’s blood, spattering the floor, caused it to crack open. From that crack a fountain sprang up in a torrent. The holy man revived his niece by the simple expedient of reattaching her severed head and praying fervently. Gwenffrewi, or St Winifred as she became known, survived to found her own community of religious women. She is venerated at Holywell in Flintshire, and at Woolston in Shropshire.

  The legendary
life of a third-century cephalophoric martyr and patron of musicians, St Cecilia of Trastevere, prefigures many medieval stories of female sainthood. She was forced into an arranged marriage with a pagan nobleman, despite a vow of virginity (she sang in private meditation throughout the wedding ceremony), but succeeded in converting him, prophesying that an angel would be revealed to him. The couple were martyred during a campaign of persecution under Emperor Alexander Severus (208–235). Cecilia survived her decapitation for three days and became a popular subject for Renaissance artists, while her church in Trastevere became a sanctuary for musicians.

  These stories have a common theme: jealousy, or at least resentment, that the women concerned had dedicated their lives to a spiritual rather than secular lord. In each case, the woman’s virtue is expressed by a miracle. Their lives also bear comparison with celebrity martyrs like St Denis of Paris, a cephalophoric victim of Roman persecution in the third century, and St Oswald of Northumbria, traditionally depicted as a severed head crooked in St Cuthbert’s protective arm. These stories may carry faint echoes of native, pre-Christian head cults, surviving in folkloric explanations for the holy wells, shrines and miracles associated with special places and people in the landscape. The Old Welsh settlement name Merthyr – meaning ‘martyr’ – prompts one to wonder how many other holy women and men suffered in the cause.

  In the case of Juthware, there may be something else. More than one scholar has commented on the possible transformation of some Romano-British villas, with their large, well-managed estates and ample accommodation, into the earliest British monasteries of the fifth century – Lullingstone Villa in Kent, mentioned earlier in this chapter,§§ is a good candidate for precisely this sort of transformation. In such a context, Juthware’s story might distantly reflect the life of a woman who, inheriting her father’s estate, dedicated it to the service of a shrine and suffered the vengeance of a grasping stepmother.