She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Virgin Whore, and reported the following:Page 99 of Virgin Whore (an academic study of the late-medieval celebration of the Madonna not only for her chastity but also for her sexual promiscuity) lands us at the end of the third chapter, which expands upon the cultural history of God the Father’s adoration of the Virgin Mary, the first two chapters having taken us through the long list of her many other admirers: Joseph, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, the archangel Gabriel, Adam, Eve, and humankind more broadly. The chapter begins with a close reading of the apocryphal legend of the Miracle of the Cherry Tree, in which Mary—the Second Eve—reenacts the scene of her foremother’s fall from grace, but with a twist. Like Eve, Mary craves forbidden fruit. On the way to Bethlehem, she demands that her husband Joseph fetch her fruit from the unreachable branches of a barren cherry tree. When impotent old Joseph fails to satisfy Mary’s desire, God grants her wish, and blooms the fruit and bends the branches to her feet so that she can eat her fill. Medieval exegetes studying this legend wondered why God rewarded Mary where he had punished Eve, and concluded that only infatuation could explain his change of heart. This chapter then goes on to elaborate on two intertwined allegories that represent Mary’s seduction of God the Father in greater detail (the allegory of the Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn and the allegory of the Parliament of Heaven) and concludes with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales, which reimagines these sacred allegories as a dirty joke—an easier translation than you might expect. Page 99 ramps up to the punchline: Chaucer slyly compares the doctrine of the virgin birth to a cliché from the medieval genre of the fabliaux (comic and obscene narratives about the battle of the sexes)—the often-repeated claim that wives caught in the very act of adultery spontaneously come up with such ingenious excuses for their bad behavior that their husbands believe women’s lies over the proof of their own eyes. Chaucer phrases this kind of con as a Christian miracle, like the virgin birth. At first glance, Mary’s miraculous pregnancy looked rather suspicious, but God’s grace turned a potential domestic tragedy into a divine comedy. As the scholar F.M Salter aptly put it in 1955, ‘In the Middle Ages, God himself had a sense of humor’ (Medieval Drama in Chester, 103–4).Learn more about Virgin Whore at the Cornell University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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