On the 11,000 virgin martyrs, iconography, and beauty standards

The other week while wandering around the Cologne Cathedral (shout out to a legend) I came upon an extremely excellent altar in one of the side chapels. Built into its base were several perfectly identical reliquaries showing smiling, beautiful blonde women. I stopped to look at it, because, firstly I was absolutely amazing, and secondly it took me a second to realise what I was looking at. Have a look at her:

Ordinarily, if you have images of saints somewhere you get a little hint about who they are by seeing if they have any symbols on them at all. So St Catherine of Alexandria has her wheel which she was tortured on. St Margaret has a dragon, because she busted out of the stomach of one. St Barbara holds her tower. St Lucy holds her eyeballs because she is extremely metal. You know, things of this nature.

These reliquaries, however, had nothing like that to clue you in to who the women in question were, and that’s when it hit me. I was looking at an altar dedicated to the 11,000 virgin martyrs.

Now for those not in the know, the 11,000 martyrs are a part of the larger legend of St Ursula, the patron saint of Cologne. Ursula is a really interesting very early Christian saint, because she is hugely popular in the German lands but was a Roman Briton from what would become England.

The brief hagiography is this: St Ursula was incredibly into being Christian, which was very much the style among royalty and Romans at the time, but still taking hold across Europe more generally. Her father, sometimes identified as the legendary King Dionotus of Dumnonia, in what is now Cornwall betrothed her to the pagan governor of Armorica, which is in what is now France, one (also legendary) Conan Meriadoc.

Before she got married though, she asked that Conan allow her and 11,000 of her besties, who were also travelling alongside her, to go on pilgrimage to Rome. He was like ‘oh for sure girl’, and off they went. The trouble was that once they got to Cologne where they were due to stop over, they ran into Atilla the Hun and several thousand of his own heavily armed non-Christian besties. There was a light massacre, Ursula was arrowed in the head by Attila the Hun (d. 453), and suddenly the 11,000 young Christian women were 11,000 young martyrs.

Meanwhile the Middle Ages happened, and Cologne continued to be a massively important urban centre. It thrived as a commercial trading place due to its enviable position on the Rhine. Its importance as an Archbishopric and a religious centre par excellence (hence the cathedral I was dicking about in), didn’t hurt it either. As a result, the city wanted to expand and grow, and that meant moving the walls out. In the twelfth century when they went to go dig new foundations, low and behold they found rather a lot of skeletons. Maybe 11,000 or so of them? Who knows, a lot!

Now there is a lot about this story that makes one go hmmmmmmm if you want to be a hater and pick apart every medieval religious story. To whit – how are you proving those are the skeletons of the 11,000 martyrs and not, say, skeletons from the several battles etc that happened there over time. Or you could go one step further on the hater scale and point out that 11,000 people at that time in Europe is … a lot? Especially in South West England? Like that is many more people than existed in most cities? And now indeed I am not alone in this one. My boy Caesar Baronius (1538 – 1607), who came up with the term Dark Ages, (to refer to a lack of sources and not intellectual decline, naturally) rejected the story out of hand.

But you know who didn’t? The medieval city of Cologne who were pretty keen so cement their legacy alongside this story, and also flex about how many relics they had found outside their own city walls. They promptly began to send bones off here and there in order to prove their importance of their city and bolster pilgrimage. Eventually so many relics were given away that there was a clamp down on exporting them. The remaining bones were used to do things like make the altar in question, and also for early modern people to get weird and baroque with them and make ossuary decorations, like so:

Anyway everyone from Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), to my good friends over at medievalists.net have covered the ins and outs of the legend. Hell, Jane Cartwright has written a whole and very amazing book about it.[1] So rather than attempt to do it better than a literal saint, the thing that I want to talk about here is the iconography of the 11,000 virgins, and the reason why I was so confused when I first saw their altar.

As I mentioned above, the reason I was able to puzzle out who the virgins were wasn’t because they had a neat little symbol to tip me off. It was the total lack of a symbol. I’ve written about this in my book, but the reason that such symbols were often necessary in medieval iconography was that in order for a woman to be holy, she pretty much had to look like one thing exactly – and that was the ideal maiden beauty.

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When I say ‘ideal’ here I mean that there was very literally one way that was accepted to be hot. It was largely created in literary circles from the twelfth century forward, where poets would sit around and write what we refer to as ‘literary portraits’ where the described noted babes. These were usually classical figures because medieval people were completely obsessed with doing classical era fan fic. So, for example we see in the twelfth-century French-language Trojan war epic, Le Roman de Troie by the poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure (d. 1173), we see lots of very specific descriptions of women from the Trojan War (bet you picked up on that) including Helen of Troy, Briseis, Polyxena, Queen Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra. While this might look like an exciting opportunity to see a bunch of interesting descriptions to ogle in the literary sense the descriptions are staunchly, resolutely, even maddeningly similar.

The women, we learn are beautiful like flowers: roses in the cases of Helen and Casandra, lilies in the cases of Polyxena and Briseis, and just any old white flower in the case of Andromache.[2] Their hair is blonde, their foreheads are clear, their eyebrows arching, their eyes bright, their breath sweet. Fast forward to the thirteenth century and you see these same desciptions used to describe the personification of Beauty herself in Guillaume de Lorris’s (c. 1200-c.1240) best-selling smut novel Le Roman de la Rose. Beauty, and a host of other concepts suddenly walking around as women, all have skin as white as the moonlight, skin like lilies and roses, and long blonde hair.[3] In my book I go on and on about all the different people, from Matthew of Vendôme (twelfth century) to Chaucer (c. 1340s – 1400), who present hot women and describe them in exactly this way.[4] Because to be hot was to have a high hairline, blonde hair, white skin, arched eyebrows, blushing cheeks and a nice little mouth. That was the only way! Other forms of beauty were simply not available, unless you trotted over to the Eastern Roman Empire or into the Islamic lands.[5]

And hey, wouldn’t you know it – so are all the images of the 11,000 virgin martyrs. (Well, OK look I can’t say anything about their breath but we are assuming that goes along with the territory.)

Why was every martyr necessarily what medieval people would class as a grade A hottie? Well, because being holy meant that someone was in harmony with nature. Because nature was considered divine, those who were holiest, and therefore closest to God, were then in harmony with nature and God. They therefore had to be hot if they were saints because to be in harmony with nature was to be a babe. Beauty was therefore conceptualised as a moral attribute just as much as a physical one.

These girls had given their life … sorta for their faith? Well at the least they had been killed by non-Christians while they were on pilgrimage and that was as good as. They therefore have to look a particular way – the one way that there was to be hot – because otherwise they wouldn’t have been martyred in the first place as they wouldn’t have been holy enough.

This makes for some pretty incredible pictures where dozens upon dozens of completely identical women set out with St Ursula, who also looks exactly like them but has a crown. And pals, it cracks me up. Look at ‘em:

Now why do I bring all of this up? Well firstly to show you some cool pictures. Secondly, because it’s kinda interesting and funny. But thirdly? It’s because we still are sorta doing this. If I said the words “Instagram Face” to you right now, I am sure you would know exactly what I was saying. It’s what Grazie Sophia Christie has described as a ‘chiseled nose … overfilled lips … cheeks scooped of buccal fat, eyes and brows thread-lifted high as the frescoed ceiling.’ She notes that, ‘Kylie Jenner is widely considered the face that launched a thousand fillers. The reality star did her lips in 2014, and seemingly everything else soon after. If you believe social media, the model Bella Hadid covered Carla Bruni’s features like a singer does another’s song. Emily Ratajkowski, the extended Kardashian cast: Each began to modify herself until as if in some joint experiment they arrived at an aesthetic congruence. Their platonic ideal was an ethnically ambiguous woman, neotenous from the neck up, hypersexual from the neck down.’[6]

So then, like my podcast says – we’re not so different. It’s easy for us to question the idea that holiness and beauty are synonymous, and further, that there’s one way to do it. But babies, we are still doing exactly that. And sure, we’re living through a backlash to this latest ideal of beauty. But along with jettisoning Instagram Face and butt fillers, we are also accepting a whole new and totally homogenous idea of beauty that is the whole Vanilla Girl ideal slapped on top of Ozempic fueled unattainable thinness.[7] All in all then, the only difference we have with our medieval European counterparts is that we come up with new beauty standards that everyone is supposed to live up to much more quickly. So, hooray?

Moreover, we still also see beauty, and conforming to the beauty standard, as proof of some sort of moral rectitude. All you have to be is the “wrong sort of woman” online (you know, the kind who is talking and cares about her bodily autonomy, that sort of thing) and you will be bombarded by right wing idiots sending you pictures of women they don’t think are attractive to show you how you have strayed from the bonds of acceptability. We are assured over and over by the right that all righteous women all look one, attractive, way and are currently barefoot and homeschooling their kids, or something.

Truth be told, we haven’t really grown a whole lot in our expectations of women or our attitudes towards beauty over the past eight hundred or so years. Is that disappointing? Yes, it certainly is. However, if we take the time to critique why 11,000 or so women are all expected to look the same, it can help us critique these same ideals when we are told that it’s time to completely remake our own bodies because a new beauty standard has come along. These ideals are simply ideals, and as such we cannot actually live up to them. We may never escape these pressures from within this culture, but at least we can examine them when they are thrust at us. You don’t need to be one identical reliquary at the bottom of an altar. You are you. That’s great. I promise.

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[1] Jane Cartwright, The Cult of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016).
[2] Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie par Benoit de Sainte-Maure, ed. Léopold Constans, Vol. I, (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1904), Vol. I., pp. 265; 289; 290; 274; and 288, respectively.
[3] Guillaume de Lorris, Le roman de la rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meung, ed. Ernest Langlois, Vol. II, (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1914-1924), pp. 51-52.[4] Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society,(New York: W.W. Norton, 2023), pp. 46-53.
[5] Ibid., pp. 52-53.
[6] Grazie Sophia Christie, “The Class Politics of Instagram Face”, Tablet, 16 February 2023. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/class-politics-instagram-face. Accessed 19 June 2023.
[7] Stephanie McNeal, “The ‘Vanilla Girl Aesthetic” is TikTok’s latest – And Exclusionary – Fashion Trend”, Buzzfeed News, 28 January 2023. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/vanilla-girl-aesthetic-tiktok. Access 19 June 2023; Fiorella Valdesolo, “What You Need to Know About Ozempic: The Diabetes Drug Fuelling Hollywood’s Harmful Weight-Loss Obsession”, Vogue, 10 February 2023, https://www.vogue.co.uk/beauty/article/what-is-ozempic. Accessed 19 June 2023.

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For more on beauty in the middle ages, see:
On constructing the “ideal woman”
On the ideal form of women

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© Eleanor Janega, 2024