Seeing Face to Face: Troubled Looks in the Katherine Group

Abstract

A visual hermeneutic can be perceived throughout the cluster of thirteenth-century religious prose works known collectively as the Katherine Group; indeed, it could be argued that vision is one of the Group’s unifying features. Acts of looking and metaphors of sight are central features in the three saints’ lives that appear in the collection, those of Katherine (after whom the Group is named), Margaret, and Juliana. 1 What these texts have in common, however, is not a focus on vision per se but a desire to organize or to structure vision as it is manifested in various textual identities or “positions.” Sight, the legends imply, is something that can be manipulated, appropriated, or exchanged by the various protagonists within an economy that associates it with power and subjectivity. At the same time, by mobilizing vision within a framework that is itself discursive and rhetorical—a framework that becomes especially apparent when viewed against the backdrop of the virgin martyr’s verbal eloquence—these texts also have the capacity to generate zones of ambivalence and contradiction. Seinte Margarete , for instance, is structured around a conflict between several different fields of vision: the look of the martyr, who prays to God that she may lay her “ehnen o Qe luðre unwiht Þe weorreð aeein me” [eyes on the wicked devil who is waging war against me] ( SM , 56); the look of the devil himself, who appears in the form of a dragon with eyes that “steareden steappre Qen Qe steoren ant ten eimstanes, brade asce bascins” [gleamed brighter than stars or jewels, broad as basins]; the look of the pagan tormentor, Olibrius, who announces that, when Margaret has been torn limb from limb, he will count all her sinews “in euchanes sihðe Þe sit nu ant sið Þe” [in the sight of everyone sitting here now] ( SM , 56); the look of those same spectators, who express sorrow when they “seoð” [see] the saint’s soft, lovely body cruelly ripped to pieces ( SM , 52), and gasp with horror at the sight of the dragon “glistinde as Þah he al ouerguld were” [glittering all over as if he had been gilded] ( SM , 58); and, of course, the imagined looks of the author and audiences of the narrative, who are afforded the option of identifying with any or all of these positions of viewing. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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