Unsexing St. Agatha

The proposed debut of my first contribution to The Collation happened to fall on February 5th, or the feast day of Saint Agatha, which struck me as a serendipitous opportunity to take on a project I’ve had on the backburner for about as long as I’ve worked here–that is, to try my hand at transcribing Saint Agatha’s legend as it is recorded in one of my favorite Folger items.¹

V.b.334 is an early 17th century manuscript consisting predominantly of female saints’ lives adapted in typical hagiographical fashion from a variety of earlier texts.² The scribe of V.b.334 helpfully cites their rendering of Agatha’s legend as having been “taken for the most part” from the work of “Ado, Bishoppe of Trevaers,” in reference to Ado of Vienne’s 9th century martyrology.³

So, without further ado… Ado… ha! Let’s revisit the life of St. Agatha through the lens of this stunning manuscript.⁴ And perhaps we can talk about the hermeneutics of it all, too, if you’ll indulge me for a moment.

The events of this legend take us to Catania, Sicily, in the year 252 AD, set against the backdrop of the Decian persecution. We are introduced to a teenage Agatha, who V.b.334 describes as being both “borne of a noble linage” and “verye fayre.” A devout follower of Christ, Agatha had chosen to walk the path of chastity from adolescence.

Enter one Quintianus, a Roman prefect–or consul, or in this iteration “liefetenaunt”–who was a man of “greate auctoritie” and very little integrity.⁵

It should come as no surprise that the well-off and by all accounts beautiful Agatha would have the misfortune of catching his eye. But being unwavering in her faith, Agatha rejects his sexual advances and refuses to make sacrifice to his pagan idols.

Affronted, Quintianus devises a plan to place Agatha in the care of a “certen infamous woman,” this being the duly named procuress, Aphrodisia, and her “verye vnhoneste and Shamelesse” daughters. It is his misplaced hope that a change in scenery, specifically a stay in a brothel, may diminish her religious convictions. Thirty days elapse, and Aphrodisia has this to report back to Quintianus:

Agatha is summoned before Quintianus, and a debate between the two ensues, during which she is interrogated about her upbringing and moral character. Although this is certainly the point at which she is tempted to suggest one not throw stones at glass houses, Agatha assures him that she is in fact of “noble stocke,” and that he doesn’t have to take her word for it–you can ask anyone, and they would tell you the same. Quintianus then inquires of her: 

That’s simple–Agatha tells him that she debases herself so because she is the “servaunt of Christe,” case closed. It is at this point Quintianus, unable to outwit her, orders Agatha to be “buffeted and beaten” before being imprisoned, to which she not only acquiesces, but proceeds gladly, “triumphinge as thoughe she had gone to a banquett”.

The next day she is summoned before a judge. In a grimly-humorous turn of events, the judge and Quintianus happen to be one and the same. He determines (after consulting himself, presumably) that she should be “hanged vppon an Ingine” as punishment for her transgressions. Agatha welcomes this, responding with emphatic aplomb:

It is then we arrive at the critical moment of her passion, wherein Quintianus orders for Agatha to be “tormented in her pappe,” culminating in one or both of her breasts being “cutte of.”

While V.b.334 skews reticent concerning the method, the scene of her involuntary mastectomy dominates the iconography of Agatha’s legend throughout time, and it is almost always a gruesome affair. Agatha is often depicted strung up on the rack and stripped to the waist, breasts being pried from her chest by pincers; blood streams in lurid rivulets from the site of her wounds.⁶

Back in prison, Agatha is visited by a “certen reverent old man” claiming to be a physician, who offers to heal her mutilated breasts. She resists his aid, for she deems intervention from “corporall medicine” to be unnecessary, stating: “I haue Ih[e]s[u] Christe my sauiour whoe healeth all thinges w[i]th his word.” Luckily for her, the stranger reveals that he is Christ’s apostle–with the reader understanding this to be St. Peter–and he restores her breasts via spiritual means before vanishing into the night.

Several days pass, and Quintianus, having caught wind of this miraculous intervention, sets into motion one last act of torture for Agatha, wherein “sharpe Potshardes and coales should be laid abroade, and that she should be layd vppon them.” Just before this can be carried out, an earthquake tears through the city, causing the walls around them to collapse and killing two of Qunitianus’ companions who had taken part in Agatha’s torture. 

Agatha is put into prison for a final time, where she prays to God for deliverance, thereafter meeting her untimely end on her own terms. Don’t worry–Quintianus gets what’s coming to him. As he and his army embark on a mission to make away with Agatha’s family’s wealth, he is, with a befitting lack of ceremony, thrown off his horse, “wherby the lust iudgm[en]t of god he was by the way drowned in a Riuer.”

The reproduction of familiar relationship models through saints’ lives allowed the Christian reader to evaluate their lived experiences against a conventional ideal. Keeping this in mind, what would Agatha’s legend convey to its audience? That the text is marked by an undercurrent of anxiety surrounding Agatha’s role in society can’t be ignored. But this anxiety isn’t hers–she welcomes and encourages the destruction of her body as a means to certify her sanctity. Rather, this tension resides in the roles she refuses to perform.

I’ve long since been compelled by readings of saints’ lives that deconstruct “male” and “female” designations to allegorise proximity with the divine. While Agatha’s vita lacks the more obvious gender-bending elements of other contemporaneous hagiographies, it underscores both the androgenizing function of salvation, and the salvific function of subverting ascribed gender imperatives. 

Because Agatha is unwilling to sacrifice her virginity, and subsequently unwilling to wed, she will in turn never produce a child. Her model for a potential husband is bleak, and her body, with the focus on her breasts as the most obvious indicator of her womanhood, is reduced by Quintianus to a site of ruined sexual potential. Agatha herself alludes to the unrealized capability for her to become a mother as she berates Quintianus following the mutilation of her breasts:

However, in a crucial follow-up that is missing from V.b.334, but present in Caxton, Agatha adds:

That is, like separating the wheat from the chaff, divesting Agatha of her corporeal body, her breasts, is meaningless relative to her spiritual wholeness. Rather than speaking to a masculine reversal of her gender or a perversion of her femininity, the disfigurement of her breasts provides a narrative device through which Agatha is relieved of her earthly responsibilities as dictated by her gender–of marriage, of sex, and of motherhood–and in which the gendered body becomes but an ontological barrier between herself and Christ.

When structures of authority are dependent on the performance of gender upholding a perceived biological truth, failure or inability to cooperate challenges the legitimacy of the structure itself. Agatha’s legend could have provided a nuanced critique for early modern women who sought to replicate her particular brand of sanctity on the importance of self-authorship in piety, where the limitations of the physical body and the socio-patriarchal matrix are circumvented through negotiation with the ungendered soul.