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Abstract
Saint Margaret, as presented in the “Katherine Group” life of the virgin martyr, claims to have Christ’s “marks” and “seals” on her. Bringing together postmodern theories of body modification and Paul Zumthor’s concept of mouvance, this essay reads these marks as tattoos that consist of virtual (tattoo fantasies), oral (tattoo narratives), and written elements (the actual marks on skin). Margaret defends and empowers herself by claiming to possess Christ’s ownership tattoo. Her oppressor Olibrius, in turn, intends to overwrite that mark palimpsestically and hence to empower himself, not unlike slave-owners in antiquity. While the gruesome torture scenes suggest that Olibrius wins the upper hand in this contest, the outcome of the narrative instead proves that Margaret triumphs. She dies a virgin after defiantly appropriating, in her tattoo narrative, the torture marks as her own, divine tattoo.
Notes
1 For example, see the works of Sanders and Vail; Beeler; Rush; Kuwahara; Pitts; Featherstone; DeMello; Caplan. As for the tattoo renaissance, most anthropologists argue for the 1970s through the 1980s as the turning point, when tattooing emerged “as a new cultural, artistic, and social form” (DeMello 2). See also Benson (236) and Featherstone (1). Pitts, however, dates the tattoo renaissance to the “early 1990s” (3). The term “tattoo renaissance” has been ascribed to Arnold Rubin (Benson 236), although it appears to have been used much earlier (Hill).
2 Nina Jablonski makes a similar point: “Most tattoos are undertaken after much deliberation and forethought, and their permanence is their strong point” (151).
3 Quotations and page references are from Millett and Wogan-Browne’s edition, Medieval English Prose for Women.
4 There is one other occurrence of “seal” in the “Katherine Group.” In Hali Meiðhad, virgins are reminded not to break the seals between themselves and Christ: “And you then, blessed maiden, who are assigned to him with the mark of virginity, do not break that seal which seals you both together” (“Ant tu þenne, eadi meiden, þet art iloten to him wið meiðhades merke, ne brec þu nawt þet seil þet seileð inc togederes,” 8). Karma Lochrie reads the seals in this work as referring to “both the seal which binds the virgin to Christ and that which signifies her virginity ‘without breach’” (24).
5 See also Boyarin; Kay, “Legible Skins” and “Original Skin.”
6 See also Lewis: “This bargain has been written on her body through torture and will be signed by her decapitation. This links back to the contractual understanding of Christ’s suffering and death articulated by ‘The Charter of Christ’” (78).
7 The originally Polynesian term made its first appearance in English only in 1777, in the journal of James Cook’s co-traveler George Forster: Oxford English Dictionary, tattoo, n.2, 2nd ed. 1989; Web, 1 Oct. 2011.
8 The example of early Christians during the persecutions under Emperor Valerian around the year 250 proves that such invisible marks of God were a powerful and empowering symbol of resistance. Pontius, the biographer of the African bishop Cyprian, refers to Christians as having “a second inscription” on their foreheads: “frontium notatarum secunda inscriptione signatos” (Pontius, Life of Cyprian, 7.1488, as quoted in Gustafson 18). Gustafson interprets the “second inscription” as a penal tattoo that marked these men as condemned to the mines of Numidia and the first inscription as the invisible mark of baptism. In connection with the discussion of Margaret’s seals, it is important to note that Gustafson reads both Latin terms, noto (mark) and signo (seal), as tattoos and points out that these terms were frequently employed to describe penal tattooing. Similarly, I argue, Margaret’s seals do not necessarily need to be read as documentary vocabulary in the literal sense that Boyarin suggests.
9 Cordelia Beattie points to the possible confusion of different kinds of virginity and, discussing Albertus Magnus among different medieval categorizations, comes to the conclusion that “virginity in its ideal form consists of physical integrity, the will to safeguard it, and the dedication of that resolve to God” (19).
10 Boyarin (94) here criticizes Theresa Reed’s reading of Margaret’s body as “a sealed, crystalized body” (93). In this reading, Boyarin argues, “Margaret is sealed … not as a charter but as, say, a bottle might be sealed.” See also Lochrie, who reads the “seals” in Hali Meiðhad as referring “both to the seal which binds the virgin to Christ and that which signifies her virginity ‘without breach’” (24).
11 According to Boyarin, this signet ring may contain a gem. This leads to her reading of Margaret’s “gemstone” as both “a token of virginity, a sign of the physical body inviolate” and as a symbol “of the textual body inviolate”(92).
12 This connection of Saint Margaret with the control and protection of bodily orifices finds an intriguing echo in the depictions of Saint Marina, as Saint Margaret is known to orthodox Christians. Inside a number of Byzantine churches, paintings of the saint are located close to the doors — an expression of the belief that Marina has the power to defend these openings in the churches’ walls (i.e., bodies) from the intrusion of danger (Larson 28).
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Nicole Nyffenegger
Dr Nicole Nyffenegger is senior assistant of Medieval English Studies at the University of Berne, where she completed her PhD. She is the author of Authorising History: Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography, 2013. She is presently researching the textuality of human skin in English literature.