Tears, blood and miracles : the relationship between female suffering and female beauty in the later medieval narrative

The destruction of female beauty emerges as a recurring motif in medieval literature, particularly in hagiography, romance, and devotional writing, where bodily suffering frequently serves to demonstrate devotion. Although violence against women’s bodies has been widely studied in these genres, and ideals of feminine beauty have likewise attracted critical attention, the relationship between beauty and suffering has not been sufficiently investigated, especially across genres. By reading romance, lyrics and hagiography comparatively, this thesis argues that female beauty is not treated merely as an aesthetic object. Instead, these narratives repeatedly destroy, remake, and glorify women’s beauty in ways that restore the completeness valued in the later cultural imagination and produce a form of narrative harmony. Later medieval narratives thus rework female beauty through suffering, transforming it from an unstable and vulnerable quality into a sign of sanctity, harmony, or redemption. This thesis divides violence against women’s bodies into two main forms: external harm and self-harm. External harm includes violence inflicted from outside, ranging from gazing and sexual threat to physical assault and torture. Self-harm refers to suffering inflicted by women upon their own bodies. Narratives of external harm manage the improper consumption and violation of women’s bodies by remaking damaged beauty as signs of divine justice, social expectation, or sanctity. By contrast, self-harm becomes a narrative means through which women are transformed, moving from physical motherhood toward spiritual motherhood. This thesis also considers how real medieval women, such as Margery Kempe, might respond to and appropriate those ideals of beauty, in which self–inflicted suffering becomes a means of seeking spiritual wholeness and redirecting fertility away from secular motherhood toward a form of divine authority.