Transforming virgins: Margaret of Antioch, snake maidens and medieval mentalities

This dissertation will use folklore methodologies and a history of mentalities approach to interpret pivotal motifs in the medieval hagiographic legend of St. Margaret of Antioch. The narrative has been studied in terms of what it says about medieval women's relation to their bodies, to power and to the divine, but not in terms of the folklore it grew out of and engendered. Holding the hagiographic motifs up to similar ones that occur throughout Europe in various folklore genres sheds light on what this saint's legend meant to the medieval religious and lay people who read and heard it.; The version of the Margaret legend included by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century Legenda Aurea along with many medieval vernacular versions based more or less on the same 10th century Latin sources Jacobus used, has been carefully and comprehensively studied, compared, and analyzed by scholars, mainly as medieval literature and as ecclesiastical hagiography. Margaret's story was told in Latin, Old English, Old French, Middle Low and Middle High German, and vernacular Italian manuscripts through the 16th century and later. It contains many folklore motifs and is cognate with the snake maiden legend tradition in which a well-born girl is transformed into a repulsive dragon and then returned to her true form by the ritual intercession of a potential spouse. These elements are used in the hagiography to convey religious ideas and feelings. Comparing these with the way the same motifs are used in secular genres such as ballad, saga, and local custom uncovers cognate strands of the tales and adds context to the interpretation of the saint's legend.