Epicene and the Bearded Woman Saint

Abstract

This article identifies a hitherto unnoticed reference to Saint Uncumber, a bearded woman martyr, in Ben Jonson's Epicene. Saint Uncumber was venerated and polemicised in England through to the seventeenth century, with her memory – and several images – persisting long after the Protestant Reformations. This article suggests that Jonson invokes Saint Uncumber as an archetype for the play's miraculous disruption of gender and frustrated marriage.