SOURCE: “Ælfric's Women Saints: Eugenia,” in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 146-57.

[In the following essay, Szarmach analyzes Ælfric's treatment of sexuality and transvestism in his Life of Eugenia.]

In the last few years three major books in Old English studies have looked at women and the literary image of women in Anglo-Saxon England, while at the same time several articles and conference papers have also sought to bring new perspectives to bear on similar themes.¹ Yet this new movement continues this century's characteristic disregard of Old English prose—not to mention its major figure, Ælfric—and at best downplays the vast corpus of prose and its potential contribution to the field. With this paper I begin a study of women saints in Ælfric's Lives of the Saints, offering a reading of Ælfric's views on women. The focus here will be on sexuality in the Life of Eugenia, and the depiction of transvestism will also be a major theme. How Ælfric treats sexual or erotic details found in his sources is a necessary issue. Known for the “sobriety” of his doctrinal views and for a style that is “less strained” than that of his contemporaries, does Ælfric react with comparable “sanity” to the excesses of Latin hagiography?² Thus, by treating Ælfric in the context of the issues of women's studies this circumscribed study can lead to a revised estimate of Ælfric and contribute to the valid incorporation of new views into approaches to the whole of Old English literature. While perhaps any of Ælfric's major lives of women could provide an appropriate beginning for this study, the Life of Eugenia has, as will be seen, some special claim because of its treatment of sexuality.³

Ælfric's Life of Eugenia is a complex narrative that like so many saints' lives relates an exemplary life from birth through triumphant martyrdom, which should in turn inspire the reader (or the audience) to a moral conversion and ultimately salvation—or at least the hope of it. Conversion of self, family, and miscellaneous antagonists, particularly secular authorities, becomes not only a kind of moral triumph in the genre, but, in its fundamental form, a metamorphosis. Eugenia is virgin and martyr and, as is to be expected, the preservation of her virginity is a major narrative motif. What sets Eugenia apart from other female saints is that she is a transvestite; i.e., she disguises herself as a man, living the life of a monk so successfully that she becomes the abbot of her community after three years of exemplary monastic rigor.⁴ Only when her inverted sexuality inspires the lust of another woman does disguise lead to recognition at a trial presided over by Eugenia's father. Deuteronomy may condemn transvestism and St. Paul rail against it,⁵ but Eugenia nevertheless triumphs unto salvation as do those converted by her moral ways. It is inverted sexuality that creates the narrative and moral complexities of this story, making comparatively unusual demands on Ælfric's skills as storyteller and moral teacher. To see how Ælfric treats these erotic and sexual details, it will be necessary to offer a close analysis of the Life.

Eugenia is born into an excellent pagan family: her father Philip has an imperial commission to rule Alexandria, and he sends his only daughter to study Greek philosophy and Latin eloquence. The deep and irreconcilable conflict with saeculum ‘the world’ is telegraphed in these sketchy, understated background details, but Ælfric suspends the political theme here to focus on Eugenia and her education. In the course of Eugenia's studies, St. Paul's teaching comes into her hand—becom hyre on hand (24)⁶ is the casual expression—and her mind mycclum onbryrd (26). Skeat translates her reaction as “greatly aroused,” but the contemporary reader can be misled by the Modern English: Eugenia is not emotionally or sexually stimulated; rather, hers is a religious feeling related to, if not actually, compunction, which includes weeping as part of a change of heart.⁷ What is not clear from her hopeful reaction to St. Paul's teaching is her father's reaction. Ælfric suppresses any elaboration of the father-daughter relationship here: after all, Eugenia asks her father for permission to search for Christian teachers that he himself had driven away (28-34). After this narrative fact, Ælfric gives only another: … ‘So then Eugenia quickly journeyed’ (35). The simple sequential þa glosses over defiance or (unlikely) acquiescence or any potential dramatic conflict between pagan father and near-Christian daughter, which narrative option in the genre remains only latent.

When Eugenia encounters the Christians and their hymn-singing, she has a second attack of compunction, this time with weeping, and she decides to join the Christians. But Eugenia is not traveling alone. She has two companions, Protus and Jacintus, who had been schoolmates learning Latin and Greek with her. As Ælfric introduces Protus and Jacintus, he emphasizes that Eugenia's ‘two young men’

… (… were eunuchi, that is to say, castrated, and were to their mistress true and faithful.)

(46-47)

Whatever Philip's prudent or practical intentions might have been in giving his daughter two such companions, Ælfric now makes sexuality a major theme in this Life by his straightforward, glosslike explanation of the Latin word. For this Life, cnihtas now carries a major contextual definition, “eunuch,” which is hardly its customary signification.⁸ This quiet, but important, semantic shift is in the background of Eugenia's more daring action:

… (Then Eugenia took them apart in conversation, called them brethren, and besought that they would shear her hair after the fashion of men, and disguise her with garments as if she were a boy. She desired to approach the Christians in the garb of a man, that she might not be betrayed.)

(48-53)

Eugenia's conversion of heart to Christianity requires a transformation of sex, or at least the appearance of sex. And her transformation is dual: she wishes to appear as a man and she wishes to be brother to her eunuchs. Note the collocation heo cniht ‘she boy’ (51), which is good syntax, technically bad grammar (because of the pronominal reference), but correct sexuality in this Life. Eugenia is repudiating her own sexuality, which is de rigueur for those who join “sex-negative” Christianity, and she is presumably changing her social status. As Vern L. Bullough has explained, female cross-dressing—here Eugenia's desire to be a man—has generally proven acceptable in Christianity, biblical proscriptions to the contrary, for such a change is a healthy desire, as Bullough puts it, “a normal longing not unlike the desire of a peasant to become a noble.”⁹ In fact at several times in this Life, Ælfric repeats this theme and the phrase in wærlican hiwe ‘in the garb of a man’ or similar phrases.¹⁰ The further complication of this Life is Eugenia's desire to become a brother to her companions, who are presumably below her in social class, and who are themselves deprived of their male organs. Eugenia's sexual inversion to male and to (brother-) eunuch and her accompanying social change can only obliterate her sexual identity. These changes symbolize the totality of her conversion to Christianity. The announced motivation in the narrative for her disguise, that she would not be betrayed (or disclosed), ameldod (53), has a touch of the tautological about it. Females often disguise themselves as males to protect their chastity, but it is hard to see how that concern should be present when joining a group of presumably chaste Christians. Pagans would also presumably be welcome among Christians, for after all they are ripe for conversion. One can thus only infer Eugenia's need to change status to enter the group as the motivation more implied than expressed.

These thematic inversions and the narrative complication of transvestism create problems for plot and story. However devout the disguised Eugenia and her companions might be, they are still unbaptized. True baptism would require Eugenia's real identity and discovery. Fortunately, the bishop Helenus has a vision that informs him of the entire situation. It is a masterstroke to have the narrative device of vision overcome the narrative problem posed by disguise.¹¹ With full knowledge of who Eugenia and her companions are, Helenus baptizes the three in secret. He praises Eugenia's virginity and prophesies persecutions because of it; he encourages her companions, elevating their status by citing Christ's words, “I do not call you servants, but on the contrary you are my friends.”¹² Eugenia and her companions thus receive episcopal endorsement for their actions, and indeed Helenus bids them continue their secret lives in the service of the minster. On the whole, however, Helenus is a plot figure, the recipient of a timely vision and a prophesier of further incidents in the Life. As far as thematics are concerned, the need for disguise now could be considered nonfunctional: Eugenia and her companions have become Christians. The continuation of disguise, however, allows Eugenia and her companions to achieve further moral perfection. Eugenia lives in the minster mid wærlican mode ‘with virile intent’ (93), such that she is further transformed; Ælfric says she is awend of wulfe to sceape ‘changed … from a wolf to a sheep’ (100). The image is startling because Eugenia has hardly been wolvish in any of her actions or thoughts, but it does emphasize the fundamental redirection of her moral life.

The narrative tension of disguise increases with Eugenia's success as a servant of God. When her abbot dies, the brothers, implicitly considering her to be the best of their own and not knowing that she is in a basic way not one of their own, choose her as abbot. Eugenia's reaction to the burdens of office is human and real:

… (Then became the maiden extremely anxious how she was ever to direct men …)

(121-22)

Virtue triumphs as Eugenia excels as moral exemplar and administrator, further given divine aid to act as healer and exorcist. Yet to this point Eugenia, earlier praised for her virginity, has never had her virginity tested. As Milton would have it, hers has been a “fugitive and cloistered virtue,” and one protected by disguise to boot. The logic of the plot would seem to require that Eugenia-the-man be the object of lustful attention by a woman. And so it is that Melantia, a wealthy and wanton woman who has been cured of fever by Eugenia, attempts to seduce her transvestite physician. The inverted situation is the stuff of Roman comedy or Restoration farce, but the context of hagiography and Ælfric's treatment control the comic potential.¹³ The persistent and lust-struck Melantia offers gifts, whispers sweet nothings, and feigns illness to see her physician again. Melantia, evidently saying that she and her deceased husband had had no intercourse, offers her virginal self along with her inherited wealth. Eugenia responds with pieties, and Melantia tries the direct approach with an embrace. Blessing herself, Eugenia responds as Jankyn might have to the Wife of Bath, saying that

                                        … (… she verily was
a kindler of lust, a child of wrath,
a companion of darkness, and filled with blackness,
a daughter of death, and the devil's vessel.)(14)

(172-175)

Yet the sharp rebuke helps rob the scene of any comic potential, while Melantia's reaction further underlines the seriousness of the situation. Melantia, though ashamed, opts not for conversion but for falsehood to cover her lustful advances lest Eugenia hyre word ameldian ‘her words disclose’ (179). The word ameldian echoes Eugenia's earlier, more moral choice (53) to seek moral perfection, not mere deception, through disguise. The falsehood consists of lying accusations to Philip that the transvestite abbot was the initiator of the lust. The ironies deriving from Eugenia's disguise are here multiple. Unbeknownst to all, the pagan Philip is called upon to defend the apparent virtue of the wanton widow against his transvestite Christian daughter who is in fact virtuous beyond reproach. The scribes of the Otho and Julius versions, in fact, cannot agree on how to present Eugenia's switching, the former considering her a “he” and an “abbot” while the latter considers her a “she” and “Eugenia.”¹⁵ At the trial Melantia marshals false witnesses, her servants, who offer damaging testimony that enrages Philip. But Eugenia's defense is irrefutable. She tears off her clothes, baring her breast to her father-judge, and declares:

                                        … (… “Thou art my father!
and thy spouse Claudia bore me as a child,
and these that sit beside thee are my brethren,
Avitus and Sergius, and varily I am
named Eugenia, thine own daughter.
And I, for Christ's love, abandoned you all,
and despised as dung the lusts of the world.
Here are also the servants to whom I told my secret,
Protus and Jacinctus, thy foster-children,
with whom I went to the school of Christ.
and therein have ministered unto this present day,
and Him will I serve ever, even unto the end.”)

(235-46)

This somewhat lengthy speech, effectively a plot summary, closes the disguise motif and serves as a multiple recognition scene just as in “classic” romance: daughter to father (and family), accused to accuser, individual to all of society. There are narrative complexities within each kind of recognition. Philip and his family thought Eugenia dead, having erected a golden statue of her in memory, and she is now resurrected, so to speak. Melantia, her cold and calculating viciousness exposed, is undisguised woman at her moral worst, contrasting with de-sexed Eugenia. Melantia's punishment comes not from Philip, Eugenia interceding, but rather directly from Christ who sends a fire that totally destroys her mansion. So much for woman's lust. The harsh, almost personally vindictive punishment, is in harmony with “black farce.”

The public recognition opens what is effectively the second half of the Life, which affects saeculum in direct ways. After a public celebration where Eugenia is decked with gold (somewhat unwillingly), Philip follows his daughter into Christianity; the people choose him as bishop; and a new governor has Philip murdered on imperial command. Eugenia moves to Rome, where she is well received by her father's friends. The Roman scene has several counterpoints to the Alexandrian scene. Eugenia's Christian activities attract Basilla, a heathen maiden, who cannot approach Eugenia because of opposition. Eugenia sends her eunuchs, now described as twægen halgan ‘the two saints’ (348), to teach Basilla, with the result that Bishop Cornelius secretly baptizes her. The two virgins now work together to advance Christianity, along with the pure widow Claudia (Eugenia's mother), and Protus and Jacintus. In narrative structure it is clear that Eugenia and Basilla are heroine and surrogate, or perhaps more succinctly, doubles. Eugenia is the foreground character, Basilla the background character.¹⁶ Genre demands that both (indeed all Christians) face martyrdom. The presence of Basilla in the narrative allows Ælfric a form of narrative economy. Eugenia's virginity has already been tested and proven, if somewhat unconventionally. There is no narrative or thematic need to test Eugenia again. Basilla, however, can face the conventional test of virginity when the pagan Pompeius seeks to marry her. Of course, Basilla hæfde gecoren crist hyre to brydguman ‘had chosen Christ as her Bridegroom’ (352), and she refuses. Pompeius appeals to the Emperor, who orders Basilla to marry Pompeius or face death mid heardum sweorde ‘with hard sword’ (360), and all Christians to return to heathendom or face death. The emperor's edict links virginity and Christian belief in such a way as to suggest that to be a Christian is to be a virgin. Basilla accordingly suffers martyrdom, Ælfric repeating that

… (… would not Basilla choose as her bridegroom
any other but Christ, whom she had chosen. …)

(364-65)

The eunuchs Protus and Jacintus face death too. While theirs is a simple test to worship false gods, Ælfric emphasizes after their execution that

… ([These martyrs] were never, throughout their lives,
defiled with women, but continued in purity
unto their lives' end, with much faith. …)

(380-82)

Faith and chastity are moral equivalents even when within the bounds of “conventional” Christian morality; the moral agents are not capable of sexual activity.

The martyrdom of Eugenia, however, brings the several sexual and moral themes together in Christian triumph. With a quiet and unmentioned irony, Eugenia is asked to sacrifice to Diana, the goddess of chastity in classical mythology.¹⁷ She refuses, bringing down Diana's temple through prayer, and hence faces successively and successfully drowning and fiery baths. Thrown into a dark prison for twenty days without food, Eugenia finds relief when a radiant and visionary Christ offers her a snow-white loaf, promising martyrdom on the day that he com to mannum ‘came to humanity’ (410). The phrase denotes Christ's physical appearance on earth, but further it connotes his Incarnation, the transformation of transformations when the divine became human, if you will, that makes salvation possible for all. Christ's birthday is Eugenia's birthday into eternity. Claudia sees her daugher in a celestial vision, adorned with gold, which confirms her final transformation. The mention of gold echoes previous golden moments of transformation for Eugenia, one will recall: when she was thought dead but only converted to Christianity, her family made a golden statue of her, and when she was discovered at the trial, she too was adorned with gold. This recurrent image helps unify the main parts of the narrative.

Ælfric's Life of Eugenia derives of course from the Latin tradition. It is not at all established which version of the Vita Sanctae Eugeniae Ælfric might be following, and indeed the scholarship on the Latin tradition itself has not developed in any full or complete way.¹⁸ The apparent mainline version, popular and early, is a considerably more extensive treatment, offering many more details about Eugenia, her life, and its background than Ælfric gives. Ælfric's characteristic method of abbreviation is obviously at work here, if the mainline Latin version is a reliable guide. An exhaustive point-for-point comparison with a Latin version of uncertain status is likely to raise more problems than it solves—and this treatment is clearly provisional pending Patrick Zettel's promised study—but a selective treatment can highlight Ælfric's apparent intention to hold first to a narrative line that creates a coherent story. Thus, in the Latin, Helenus and the first Christians Eugenia meets play a considerably more important role. For instance, a full chapter (cap. v) of the thirty in the Latin vita recounts the struggle between Helenus and the sorcerer Zareas. This struggle with dark but ineffectual powers has no direct narrative bearing on Eugenia's progress toward salvation. The incident highlights the theme of sorcery, a charge Christians face whenever they are successful against pagan persecution. This theme is present at the end of both Latin and Ælfrician treatments when Eugenia foils the pagans, but in the latter it is merely incidental. Likewise the Latin text gives much exposition or background material on the Christians, their observances, and their fervor. The history of early Christianity could have proven an interesting byway for Ælfric to follow, but he gives only the amount of information necessary to establish a credible basis for Eugenia's conversion.

It is Ælfric's avoidance of source material supporting his treatment of the sexual theme that presents more interesting problems. In cap. ii the unknown author of the Latin gives personal information about Eugenia:

Erat enim acris ingenii, et tam memoriae capax, ut quidquid audiendo semel vel legendo potuisset arripere, perpetuo retineret. Erat autem Eugenia pulchra facie et eleganti corpore. …

(PL 73, 607)

(She had a sharp mind, and so retentive a memory that whatever she learned quickly by hearing or reading she retained forever. She was, moreover, good-looking and had a good figure. …)¹⁹

This intellectual and physical beauty leads to marriage proposals, including a potential match with the son of the consul, all of which Eugenia animo castitatis obsisteret, ‘resisted with the soul of chastity’ (PL 73, 607). Ælfric gives nothing of this material. As the discussion above indicated, Eugenia's first real moral test in Ælfric is the attempted seduction by Melantia. This suppression of biographical information is the first of several places where Ælfric eschews details or incidents or speeches that advance the theme of sexuality in the Latin. For example, when Eugenia introduces herself to Helenus as “Eugenius,” Helenus says: Recte tu Eugenium vocas; viriliter enim agis ‘You rightly call yourself Eugenius; you act in a manly way’ (PL 73, 610). Possibly the most important passage in the Latin and not in Ælfric is part of the recognition scene speech that Ælfric otherwise quotes directly. Before she bares herself Eugenia says:

Tanta est enim virtus nominis ejus (Christi), ut etiam feminae in timore ejus positae virilem obtineant dignitatem; et neque ei sexus diversitas fide potest inveniri superior, cum beatus Paulus apostolus, magister omnium Christianorum, dicat quod apud Dominum non sit discretio masculi et feminae, omnes enim in Christo unum sumus [Galatians 3:28]. Hujus ergo normam animo fervente suscepi, et ex confidentia quam in Christo habui, nolui esse femina, sed virginitatem immaculatam tota animi intentione conservans, virum gessi constanter in Christo. Non enim infrunitam honestatis simulationem assumpsi, ut vir feminam simularem; sed femina viriliter agendo, virum gessi, virginitatem quae in Christo est fortiter amplectendo.

(PL 73, 614)

(So great indeed is the power of His Name that even women standing in fear of it may obtain a manly dignity; nor can a difference in sex be considered superiority in faith, when blessed Paul the Apostle, the master of all Christians, says that before God there will be no distinction between masculine and feminine, we are “all indeed one in Christ.” Therefore, his percept I have followed with a burning heart, and from the firm trust which I have had in Christ, I have not wanted to be a woman, but preserving a spotless virginity with a total effort of the soul, I have acted consistently as a man. I have not put on a senseless pretense of respectability so that as a man I might imitate a woman, but I, a woman, have acted as a man by doing as a man, by embracing boldly a virginity, which is in Christ.)²⁰

This passage gives the moral explanation for Eugenia's transvestism, deriving its ultimate justification from Galatians: masculine and feminine will be one in Christ.²¹ Whether in Paradise this state is true androgyny or true sexlessness one might leave to mystical theology. Eugenia also makes public her motivation and explains further her search for (moral) status or how a woman can be like a man. In the Latin vita this speech provides the thematic foundations for much of the narration. In Ælfric, by contrast, six lines present only one of the ideas in the Latin, Eugenia's preservation of virginity:

… (Well then, Eugenia, the noble woman,
said that she had desired to keep herself secret,
and to preserve her purity to Christ alone,
living in virginity, unknown to man,
and therefore at the first had assumed the robes
of a man's garb, and had had her hair shorn.)

(227-32)

Why did Ælfric render this speech in so limited a way? John Anson suggests that some early baptismal rites, particularly those with Gnostic associations, have sexual themes, including transvestism, in actions seeking to be enim in Christo ‘one in Christ Jesus’.²² It is not likely that Ælfric would have particular knowledge of these early rites. More likely is Ælfric's perception that the doctrine expressed and implied in Galatians 3:28 requires a great deal of complicated analysis to present, including notions of the resurrection of the body and the beatified state, while the idea of preservation of virginity is a simple enough concept to relate. Incomplete or incorrect explication of Galatians 3:28 could inspire irregular Christian conduct or observance. There is something blatant and heavy-handed about this part of the speech too, but a purely literary explanation may be not as compelling in this case.

What then do a close reading of the Life of Eugenia and a comparative analysis with the Latin vita reveal about Ælfric's treatment of sexuality? Ælfric's literary architectonics has fashioned from the looser Latin a two-part Life, which can be characterized by systematic contraries as Alexandria and Rome, Eugenia and her surrogate(s), disguise and (public) recognition, “unconventional” and “conventional” sexuality, among other contraries. Ælfric's power of abstraction has sharpened and focussed incidents from the Latin in such a way that transvestism (or the Melantia incident) takes on a central importance in narrative and theme that it did not have in the Latin. The romance motifs of disguise and recognition have a comparatively greater narrative impact in Ælfric, thus bringing forward the theme of sexuality in high relief, while the “doubling” of Eugenia and Basilla balances and contrasts, and verbal echoes contribute a unifying effect among narrative elements rather more disparate in the Latin. But the high relief is unelaborated in its verbal style. Ælfric's treatment of scenes and situations tends toward understatement and, on the surface, unselfconsciousness. Melantia's attempts at seduction are unelaborated, and Eugenia's recognition speech is shortened by eliminating most of its sexual content. In a sense, Ælfric's shaping of incident and his telling of incident work in a harmonious contrariety: he offers an erotic story with no erotic content.

Does the Life of Eugenia repudiate women and woman's sexuality? It would be mere simplistic surface-reading to say “yes.” Rather, it is Galatians 3:28 and its complex view of sexuality that is operating in the deep structure of Ælfric's Life. Eugenia has un-womaned herself, Protus and Jacintus are un-manned, and these three sexless saints anticipate on earth the state in heaven. Melantia and Pompeius are too much of this world in seeking sexual satisfaction, while Claudia as chaste widow and Basilla as virgin are ready for the beatific life. However many sexes there may finally be, the Pauline vision of none is metaphysical indeed.

The Life of Eugenia, therefore, is a complex narrative about sexuality that within the boundaries of hagiography demonstrates Ælfric's special talents as teacher and storyteller. Yet Ælfric's Life of Eugenia is not at all known in the field of hagiography, where it should be a part of the saint's narrative history, and it is not a work that occupies any particular place in Old English literary studies. The developing field of women's studies, bringing with it a new interest in the corpus of literature and in new themes therein, can on the other hand become the occasion for a reinvestigation of various areas in Old English literature that hitherto have received little literary attention. Old texts can come out as new. These new critical interests thus fulfill their promise when they stimulate a positive reconsideration of Ælfric's Lives of the Saints and provide a framework for approaching this collection. Only one of the Lives was the subject of this paper. Further consideration of other women in the Lives of the Saints should enhance and develop the study of the major prose writer of the Old English period and extend the impact of the critical interests of women's studies.

Notes

1. Helen Damico, Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Christine Fell with Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-Saxon England and The Impact of 1066 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). These books have useful bibliographies directing the reader to other secondary sources. For a sense of the latest developments in this fast-moving field see the Appendix “Abstracts of Papers in Anglo-Saxon Studies,” published in each Spring issue of the Old English Newsletter.

2. The best overview of Ælfric is still Peter Clemoes, “Ælfric,” in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G. Stanley (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1966), pp. 176-209, esp. 184-85; in the same collection, see also Rosemary Woolf, “Saints' Lives,” pp. 37-66, esp. 60-62. See also James Hurt, Ælfric, Twayne English Author Series, vol. 131 (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1972), esp. 60-83 on the Lives of the Saints. Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel Calder, with Michael Lapidge, offer the latest treatment of Ælfric in the context of prose writers contemporary to him: A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986), pp. 68-106.

3. The standard collection is Walter W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric's Lives of the Saints, Early English Text Society, o.s., vols. 76, 82, 94, 114 (London: Oxford University Press, 1881-1900; repr. in two vols., 1966); I cite here the reprint, vol. I, pp. 24-51, with trans. en face, by line number. Not all the Lives printed are Ælfric's: nos. 23, 23b, 30, and 33 are not his. No. 33, the Life of Eufrasia, who is another transvestite saint, is relevant to the present study. I give Skeat's translation for Old English passages. Skeat did translate the Life of Eugenia and others, but the “greater part” of the translation appearing in the edition is owed to the Misses Gunning and Wilkinson, who are generally uncredited in the scholarship and on whose work, Skeat says, he made “inconsiderable” alterations; see Skeat's Preface to Volume II, liv-lv. Robert Alexander criticizes aspects of Skeats' edition and calls for a new edition in “W. W. Skeat and Ælfric,” Annuale Mediaevale 22 (1982): 36-54. For a discussion of Ælfric's canon, see Peter Clemoes, “The Chronology of Ælfric's Works,” in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of Their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959), pp. 212-47 (repr. with additions as Old English Newsletter Subsidia 5 [1980]), and John Collins Pope, ed., Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, Early English Text Society, o.s., vol. 259 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 136-45. Students of Ælfric owe Luke Reinsma a considerable debt for his Ælfric: An Annotated Bibliography (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987); Reinsma annotates some twelve items relevant to the Life, published through 1982 (see Index of Works under LS 2 Eugenia).

4. For transvestism and transvestite sainthood, see the following: John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: the Origin and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5 (1974): 1-32; Vern L. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1974): 1381-94; Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), pp. 150-56. Delehaye studies St. Eugenia in Études sur le legendier Romain, Subsidia Hagiographica 23 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936), pp. 171-86. The Bollandist Delehaye is interested in disentangling the reality of the saint from fiction, a recurrent theme in early scholarship but not of interest here. For transvestitism in early modern France and particularly “Women on Top,” see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124-51. Perhaps the most famous transvestite in the Middle Ages was Joan of Arc; see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 146-63, for Joan as the ideal androgyne.

5. Deuteronomy 22:5, Non induetur mulier veste virili, nec vir utetur veste feminea; abominabilis enim apud Deum est qui facit haec ‘The woman shall not put on men's clothing, and the man shall not put on women's clothing; for the one who does so is abominable before God’; I Corinthians 11:14-15, Nec ipsa natura docet vos, quod vir quidem si comam nutriat, ignominia est illi; mulier vero si comam nutriat, gloria est illi; quoniam capilli pro velamine ei data sunt ‘For does not nature itself teach you, that if a man has long hair, it is a shame to him; but truly if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her; because her hair is given to her as a covering’. But see the discussion of Galatians 3:28 below.

6. What is lost in the transmission here is a possible link to early Christian belief and observance, some of which comes forward trailing Gnostic associations. See Anson, “Female Transvestite”: 21 and 1-11 for the background.

7. See onbryrdan and onbryrdness s.v. in Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898; repr. 1964) and Toller's Supplement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921; repr. 1955); hereafter cited as Bosworth-Toller. Alcuin describes compunction in cap. xi of his Liber de Virtutibus et Vitiis, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: 1844-91), 101, 620-21; hereafter cited as PL by volume and column.

8. See belisnian s.v. in Bosworth-Toller.

9. Bullough, “Transvestites”: 1392.

10. To summarize: see lines 53, 84, 93, 232. Perhaps one might also count on læces hiwe ‘in a physician's garb’ (186, 203).

11. The Vita Eugeniae [presented by Heribert Rosweyde, Vitae Patrum (Antwerp: 1628)] can be found twice in the PL: among the works of Rufinus in PL 21, 1105-22, where there are helpful chapter headings, and as part of the Vitae Patrum in PL 73, 605-20. There is also a version in Boninus Mombritius, ed., Sanctuarium Seu Vitae Sanctorum, 2 vols. (Paris: Apud Albertum Fontemoing, Editorem, 1910), considered earlier and not of as wide currency, which Delehaye compares in part to the Rosweyde version in Étude sur le legendier Romain, pp. 176-77. The details presented by Delehaye suggest that Ælfric did not follow the Mombritius version. For the Helenus chapters, see PL 73, 607-10. In Ælfric's treatment, where there are fewer details, the narrative function of vision is correspondingly sharper.

12. John 15:15, I am non dicam vos servos … ; vos autem dici amicos ‘For I do not call you servants: but I call you friends’.

13. Humor and comedy exist in saints' lives, but it is not always easy to tell when there is a jest, particularly when Ælfric's style is so measured and cool. For humor in hagiography, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row Publishers, 1963), pp. 425-28; Charles W. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1947), pp. 67-69. Marina Warner has pointed out to me that St. Dympna, fleeing her incestuous father, left with her confessor and the court jester.

14. Compare PL 73, 612-13.

15. See Skeat's notes at the bottom of pp. 34, 36, 38. Line 204 is exemplary in its gender confusion.

16. See generally Robert Rogers, The Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 1-17 on varieties of doubling; and also Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, ed. and trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), esp. pp. 8-33 on doubles in literature.

17. Ælfric discusses the gods of both classical and Scandinavian mythology in “De Falsis Diis,” in Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 2, ed. John C. Pope, Early English Text Society, o.s., vol. 260 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 677-712, esp. pp. 681-86, but he does not mention Diana.

18. Patrick H. Zettel's “Saints' Lives in Old English: Latin Manuscripts and Vernacular Accounts: Ælfric,” Peritia 1 (1982): 17-37, offers a key from his study of the “Cotton-Corpus Legendary,” a collection later than Ælfric but closer to the source which Ælfric probably used for his Lives than many printed editions cited in prior studies. Zettel has promised a more detailed study beyond this introduction in Peritia. For the Life of Eugenia, Zettel cites Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS P7 vi, one of the four extant manuscripts of this Legendary (written at Hereford, c. 1150), as offering “a strikingly close textual correspondence” (37), but he does not offer specific parallels to the Life of Eugenia as such, focusing rather on other examples. For a sense of the complexities of the Latin tradition in the tradition of the Old English Martyrology, see J. E. Cross, “Passio S. Eugeniae et Comitum and the Old English Martyrology,” Notes and Queries n.s. 29 (1982): 392-97.

19. The free translations here and following are mine.

20. See also Anson's translation (“Female Transvestite”: 23).

21. Galatians 3:28: Non est ludaeus, neque Graecus; non est servus, neque liber; non est masculus, neque femina. Omnes enim vos unum estis in Christo lesu ‘There is not Jew, nor Greek; there is not slave, nor free; there is not male, nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus’.

22. Anson, “Female Transvestite”: 23.