The Women’s Saint

The wider shape of St. Marina the Great Martyr (Margaret of Antioch) as a saint of women — invoked across the female life-course, from the consecration of virginity through marriage to the perils of childbirth, and venerated as a protectress of women in their particular trials. This file sets the famous childbirth-patronage within the larger pattern of Marina as a women’s saint, traces why the virgin-martyrs became so peculiarly the patrons of women, and places Marina among the great company of holy women the Church holds up — Thecla, Catherine, Barbara, Paraskevi — as icons of the soul’s fidelity to Christ.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; virgin-martyr); with the Western reception of Margaret of Antioch

Beyond Childbirth: The Female Life-Course

Marina’s patronage of safe delivery (see The Protectress in Labor) is the most famous of her offices, but it is one expression of a broader character: across both East and West, Marina/Margaret became a saint to whom women turned across the whole arc of their lives. The same legend that made her the patroness of childbirth made her also a model and protectress of consecrated virginity, an intercessor sought in marriage and its difficulties, and a guardian invoked by women in their particular dangers and needs (Larson 2002; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”). Where her cult was strongest — and in the West it was very strong indeed, Margaret being among the commonest of women’s names through the later Middle Ages and beyond — she functioned as something like a patroness of women as such.

The shape of her legend explains the breadth. Marina is a shepherd-girl who consecrates her virginity to Christ, refuses the powerful man who desires her, endures bodily violation and triumphs over it, and — in the dragon and the bound demon — passes through the opened body and the deadly assault unharmed. Every stage of that legend answers to a stage or a peril of women’s lives: the keeping of chastity, the refusal of dishonor, the endurance of bodily suffering, the survival of the opened body in birth. The legend reads, on one level, as a compressed icon of the dangers and the dignity of the female life-course, and women across a thousand years read it so.

Why the Virgin-Martyrs Became Women’s Saints

Marina’s role as a women’s saint is part of a larger phenomenon: the virgin-martyrs of the early Church — Thecla, Catherine, Barbara, Paraskevi, Marina, and their company — became, collectively, the saints to whom women most particularly turned, and the reasons are worth naming. These saints were women who, in the legends, exercised a startling agency: they confronted emperors and prefects, refused fathers and suitors, out-argued philosophers, and overcame demons, all in the strength of Christ and all while remaining, in the world’s eyes, weak and lowly girls (on the type, see St. Thecla, St. Catherine of Alexandria, and St. Barbara the Great Martyr). They offered women an image of holiness that was specifically female and specifically powerful — the consecrated maiden whose fidelity to Christ made her stronger than the powers that threatened her.

Marina is among the most vivid of these. Her legend gives her not only the passive endurance of the sufferer but the active victory of the conqueror: she does not merely survive the dragon but bursts it; she does not merely resist the demon but pins it under her foot and interrogates it (see Hammering the Demon). The iconography that depicts her with the hammer, striking the demon she has subdued (see The Virgin Hammering the Demon), is the visual signature of this active victory — the maiden as conqueror, an image of female holiness as strength in Christ that the faithful, and women above all, found and find compelling.

The virgin-martyr type carries, in addition, a feature that made it peculiarly the property of women’s devotion: the body of the saint is at the center of the story, and it is precisely her body that is threatened, violated, and vindicated. The legends dwell, sometimes at length, on the assaults the maiden’s body endures — the stripping, the scourging, the burning, the water, the dragon’s maw — and on its preservation or its glorification through them. This bodily focus, which a later sensibility might find excessive, answered directly to the experience of women whose own bodies were the site of their gravest trials: the threat of violation, the dangers of childbearing, the long endurance of bodily suffering. Hippolyte Delehaye, in analyzing the hagiographic genre, observed how the virgin-martyr passions conform to a common literary type, their episodes recombined from a shared stock (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905); but what the source-critic reads as a literary type, the women who venerated these saints read as a mirror of their own embodied lives, and it is no accident that the most intensely bodily of the virgin-martyrs — Marina, with her swallowing dragon and her vessel of water — became the most intensely invoked in the most bodily of women’s crises.

The Patronage and Its Audience

The modern scholarship on Marina/Margaret has emphasized that her cult was shaped in significant part by its audience — that the women who venerated her were not merely recipients of a cult handed down from above but active shapers of it, drawing from the legend the meanings that answered their lives (Larson 2002). The childbirth-patronage is the clearest case: it is the women in travail, and those who attended them, who fastened on the dragon-bursting as an image of safe delivery and made Marina the saint of the birthing-chamber. The cult, in this reading, was constructed in part “from below,” by the devotion of the women who needed her — a pattern the repository has documented for other women’s saints whose cults grew from the needs of the faithful (compare the lower-class women’s devotion that shaped the cult of Blessed Xenia; see St. Xenia: Methodology).

This audience-shaped character is part of what makes Marina a women’s saint in the fullest sense: not only a saint for women but a saint whose cult was made by women’s devotion, her legend read and used and elaborated by those who turned to her in the trials the legend seemed to image. The saint and her people met in the cult, and the cult bears the marks of that meeting.

Larson’s argument has a sharper edge worth drawing out, because it bears on the whole question of what a cult is and how it grows. The same legend, she shows, could yield different emphases for different audiences: where the clerical transmitters of the passion might foreground Marina’s confession of faith, her disputation with the prefect, or her place in the company of the Holy Helpers, the women who invoked her at the bedside foregrounded the dragon and the dying-prayer, reading the text for the meanings their own lives demanded (Larson 2002). The childbirth-patronage is, on this account, not a meaning the legend simply contained and handed down but a meaning its audience drew out and made central — the cult constructed in significant part by the needs and the reading of those who used it. This is the same pattern the repository has documented at its flagship limit case, where the cult of Blessed Xenia was shaped “from below,” appropriated above all by lower-class women whose devotion gave the cult its specific shape (see St. Xenia: Methodology). In both cases the lesson for reading hagiography is the same: a cult is not only a deposit handed down but a living thing made and remade by those who venerate, and its meanings can be traced in part to the people who needed them. To understand why Marina became the saint of the birthing-chamber, one must look not only at the legend but at the women who read it there.

Among the Holy Women

Marina takes her place, finally, among the great company of holy women the Church holds up for veneration — the virgin-martyrs, the ascetic mothers, the myrrh-bearers, the women whose lives image the soul’s fidelity to Christ (see Women in Orthodoxy). Within that company she has a particular place: the conquering virgin, the protectress of childbirth, the saint whose legend gathers up the perils and the dignity of women’s lives and answers them with the assurance of a holy intercessor. The legendary character of her record (set out in The Historical Core) does not diminish this place; it is the cult, not the biography, that the Church receives, and the cult of Marina is, among the cults of holy women, one of the broadest and most beloved.

Her kinship with the other beloved women’s saints of the East throws her particular character into relief. Each of the great virgin-martyrs gathered to herself a cluster of intercessions answering to the needs the faithful brought: Paraskevi became the protectress of the eyes and of the sick (see St. Paraskevi); Barbara, by the manner of her legend, the patroness of those facing sudden death and the help against an unprepared end (see St. Barbara the Great Martyr); Catherine, the patroness of learning and of those who must answer for the faith (see St. Catherine of Alexandria); and Marina, by the dragon and the dying-prayer, the protectress of the birthing-chamber. In every case the particular office grew from the particular shape of the legend as the faithful read it — a pattern the modern scholarship sees plainly in Marina’s case and that holds across the company (Larson 2002; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”). The intercessions differ; the common thing is the type: the consecrated maiden whose fidelity to Christ, tested unto death, made her in the faithful’s eyes a sure and powerful helper. Marina is one of the most beloved of these because the trial her legend images — the body opened and survived — is the trial nearest to the most universal and most dangerous of women’s experiences, and the help she was believed to give reached women at exactly the point of their gravest need.

That a fifteen-year-old shepherd-girl, of whom history can recover almost nothing, should have become across a thousand years the saint to whom women turned in chastity, in marriage, and in the deadly hour of birth, is a fact about the Church’s devotion more striking than any biography. It is the cult — the women’s devotion, the answered prayers, the legend read at the bedside — that made Marina a women’s saint; and it is on that cult, not on the dragon, that her standing rests (see The Cult Without a History).

It would mistake the matter to read this breadth as a kind of generalized “patroness of women” in a sentimental sense, as though Marina’s office were a vague benevolence toward one half of the human race. Her standing among the holy women is more particular and more demanding than that. What the virgin-martyrs offered women, and Marina among them most vividly, was an image of the soul espoused to Christ and faithful unto death — a fidelity tested in the body, in chastity, in the refusal of dishonor, in the endurance of suffering, and crowned in the martyr’s victory. The childbirth-patronage, the protection in marriage, the model of consecrated virginity are not separate offices loosely gathered under a feminine heading; they are so many applications of the one thing the cult holds up — the maiden faithful to Christ through every trial the body can be made to bear. Marina is a women’s saint not because the Church assigned women a lesser patron but because her legend gathers the perils and the dignity of women’s lives and answers them with the single assurance the martyrs all proclaim: that the soul given wholly to Christ passes through death and is not held. On that assurance, received in the cult and not deduced from the dragon, her standing among the holy women rests.

References

Larson, Wendy R. “The Role of Patronage and Audience in the Cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch.” In Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih, 23–35. London: Routledge, 2002. (The audience-shaped cult; women as shapers of the devotion; the breadth of the patronage.)
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 8, “Margherita di Antiochia.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII, 1967. (Margaret/Marina as a women’s saint; the breadth of the cult; the popularity of the name.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes hagiographiques. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1905. (The virgin-martyr type to which Marina belongs.)