Masculinity across Sexual Difference in the Bearded Image of St. Wilgefortis

A conventionally attractive, Christian Portuguese princess was once promised to the king of Sicily in marriage by her pagan father. Because she wanted to remain unmarried and had committed her chastity to God, she prayed that God would make her repulsive so that the king of Sicily would refuse to marry her. The hairy answer to her prayer was a resultant beard that appeared overnight, which had the intended effect on the king of Sicily. This outcome so enraged the princess’s father that he crucified her/them.[i] This is the legend of St. Wilgefortis, the ‘strong virgin,’ which dates to the fifteenth century in the Netherlands region of Europe’s Low Countries. St. Wilgefortis—also known as Uncumber, Ontkommer, or Kümmernis, all words rooted in the German word for grief, trouble, or obstruction—is not a person for whom there is a clear historical record, but they were venerated as a saint by growing numbers of people after their first mention in the fifteenth century across the Netherlands, Germany, and England.

Predominantly, people seeking miracles or divine interventions through difficult circumstances in their lives would pray to St. Wilgefortis or make a pilgrimage to one of the sacred places that had an image or carving of her/them as a ‘bearded lady’ crucifix.[ii] This also included a subgroup of women who prayed to them to escape harsh marriages and bullying husbands, for which St. Wilgefortis was designated the patron saint of unhappy wives.[iii] By the start of the seventeenth century, their devotional cult was primarily restricted to regional pockets of the Netherlands, Germany, and England, where images of them persisted among folk art into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the Catholic church increasingly saw St. Wilgefortis’s devotional cult as too superstitious, the Church discouraged her/their veneration and saw the robed and bearded crucifix as a misinterpretation of a robed Christ on the cross.[iv]

This paper examines St. Wilgefortis as a dangerous figure, one whose body did not congruently align with prescribed ideas about gender binaries, and whose prayers of resistance disrupted the social order of patriarchy such that their illegible body provoked the anger of their father to the point of their torture and death. Their image dangerously persisted through their veneration in folk art as a prospect of hope for others to be similarly unencumbered by societal norms and expectations. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of St. Wilgefortis is that they transgressed social norms and gender boundaries with God’s blessing. To explore how they emerge as a dangerous figure requires analyzing the interplay of masculinity and materiality both in their image and in their legend’s impact. Understanding masculinities as “configurations of practice within gender relations,” which “includes large-scale institutions, economic relationships, and sexuality,” Kishonna L. Gray argues that masculinity “must extend beyond men’s bodies and biology, and must also incorporate a focus on objects, symbols, gestures, places, and spaces.”[v] Thus, the image of St. Wilgefortis as a symbol can tell us something both about the ways masculinities police their cultural boundaries and the ways religion contributes to the transgression of those boundaries.

Reading this legend and respective images of St. Wilgefortis through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz’s argument that “one and the same message, inscribed on a male or a female body, does not always or even usually mean the same thing or result in the same text,” this paper will trace the danger St. Wilgefortis’s figure represents from the multiple sides of sexual difference.[vi] Grosz’s work on sexual difference and bodies emphasizes the pliability and plasticity of bodies within a range of possibilities grounded in their own specificities.[vii] One of the examples she uses to explain her theory is that of stigmata and other bodily markers that “can be induced or produced through the adherence to certain beliefs (about religious piety, worship, a sense of worthlessness or supreme value, the notion of the body as a vessel for divine intervention or satanic interference, etc.). These indicate that biological and physiological processes can be induced in subjects through the inculcation into certain beliefs about the body and its place in social and religious life.”[viii] For St. Wilgefortis, her/their commitment to God that was pledged with her/their chastity receives beardedness as an answer to a desperate prayer, and the beard becomes a symbol of hope for those who venerate her/them that God is on the side of removing obstacles for those in trouble or who grieve. But the beard thus provided access to a virility associated with masculinity to a body that is depicted with curves and garments typically associated with femininity—a masculinity rooted more in power than merely increased facial hair was inscribed on a body that otherwise should have been denied access to it. Historically, St. Wilgefortis was a symbol of hope for the oppressed, and in their resurgence in popularity in the last several decades among scholars, they are seen as a potential symbol for trans and non-binary identities who emphasize that masculinity does not belong maleness and that its definition and cultural location is malleable and not fixed.

[i] Throughout this paper, I will primarily refer to St. Wilgefortis as either they/them or she/they and her/them.

[ii] Ilse E. Friesen, *The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages* (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 61. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=nlebk&AN=148727&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

[iii] Hannah Skoda, “St Wilgefortis and Her/Their Beard: The Devotions of Unhappy Wives and Non-Binary People,” *History Workshop Journal* 95 (2023), 52. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbad005.

[iv] Friesen, 2.

[v] Kishonna L. Gray, “Masculinity Studies,” *Feminist Media Histories* 4 (2018), 107. DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.107.

[vi] Elizabeth Grosz, **Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Pres, 1994), 156.

[vii] Ibid, 190.

[viii] Ibid.