Be fruitful and multiply’: The Purpose of the Virgin Spouses in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints
Event details
The biblical imperative to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ evidently caused some issues for the medieval abbot Ælfric. Much like the church fathers, Ælfric expresses an apprehension, and at times distaste, towards human sexuality, and is vehement in his praise of virginity as the highest state, which he believes affords extra spiritual merit in this life and the next. However, for many people in early medieval England, the economic, social, and religious imperatives to have children necessitated heteronormative, procreative marriages. As such, we might be surprised to find powerful figures, such as Ælfric, circulating stories about saints in virgin or ‘spiritual’ marriages. How, then, did Ælfric intend for his audience to interpret these stories, particularly his noble, male patrons? This talk examines Ælfric’s departures from his source materials and his engagement with patristic models of virginity, chastity, and conjugality to clarify his aims when translating and collating these stories. I argue that Ælfric is anxious to negate and control the sexuality which the private intimacy of marital cohabitation can conceal. I examine a selection of the virgin spouses from the Lives of Saints, whereby Ælfric inverts the potential for secret intercourse in marriage, to instead promote marriage as a secure and private space for secret vows of celibacy. In this sense, Ælfric frames continent marriage (that is, marital sex only for procreation) as the minimum standard, but nonetheless promotes spiritual marriages, such as those in his collected Lives of Saints, as a viable possibility for the laity.