Canonical Norm and Narrative Form in the Life of Christina of Markyate

Abstract:Composed sometime in the mid- twelfth century, the Life of Christina of Markyate recounts the trials and tribulations faced by an Anglo- Saxon woman who initially takes a vow of virginity to enter into a spiritual marriage with Christ, subsequently takes an oath to escape sexual assault by a bishop, flees an earthly marriage, and eventually founds a priory at Markyate in England. The Life foregrounds Christina’s spiritual, physical, and legal struggles to live by her vow and have it continually legitimized in the face of a marriage forced upon her by her strong- willed parents and their clerical supporters, among others. In a series of ad hoc trials, Christina’s advocates—ranging from a hermit associated with the St Albans monastery to the archbishop of Canterbury—defend the legitimacy of her vow of virginity and deem her coerced marriage with a nobleman invalid. By contrast, Christina’s opponents, who range from her parents to bishops, defend her earthly marriage as valid and disregard her vow of virginity. I contend that questions of norms (such as those pertaining to Christina’s vow, oath, and marriage and their concomitant impact upon her legal status) and questions of narrative (such as the rhetorical strategies by which supporters and detractors of Christina organize and recount details pertaining to her legal status) intersect and interanimate each other in the Life. By uncovering the interrelations between the normative and the narrative in the Life, I further argue that the form of the Life has an “agency” of its own distinct from that of the various characters in the hagiographical text. When we attend to such formal legal and literary devices in the Life in light of both contemporary digests of canon law and school texts on rhetoric, Christina’s individual actions will appear as functions of narrative that both enact and impact the received principles of canon law, especially those pertaining to the vow, oath, and marriage. In making a case for the intersection of normative matters in the Life with the narrative means by which they are expressed, this essay, more generally, participates in the growing body of law and literature studies that treat the literary and the legal as coproductive rather than as hierarchically related.