IN RECENT YEARS, the work of scholars such as E. Jane Burns, Kathryn Rudy, and Barbara Baert has firmly established material culture, specifically the representation of textiles, as a means by which to explore the often-silenced experiences of women in medieval literature. We have begun to recognize textiles as textual, considering the fabrics worked and produced by literary women as bearers of alternate histories and stories suppressed by the patriarchal culture of the written word. Developing this alternate literacy, reading through fabric, offers a particularly apt means of uncovering the history of female reclusion in the Christian church of the Middle Ages, specifically in hagiographical writing. Gail Ashton has astutely argued that female hagiography traditionally written by men can be defined as what Hélène Cixous calls “marked writing,” literature “run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy.” As Ashton explains, “female hagiographical texts are inherently fissured and unstable texts […] what is contained in them is a doubled discourse, the ‘heard’ and dominant, intended one—masculine—and a feminine voice that reveals itself differently that puts pressure on the masculine generic one, and is as much a part of the vitae as that other.” Textiles and clothwork in medieval narratives offer a means by which the feminine can speak, a means by which it can reveal itself despite the impositions of masculine authorship. This essay considers the ways in which female recluses speak through textiles in two hagiographical texts, Paul the Deacon's eighth-century Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate, exploring clothing as an important means by which the female recluse conceptualizes and defines the terms of her seclusion. The lives of the harlot turned Desert Mother and the virtuous Bride of Christ fleeing arranged marriage speak to one another, respectively delineating the predominantly patriarchal, and at-times dangerous, religious and secular values inherent in sartorial culture for women who seek to transcend the earthly realm.

Mary of Egypt (344–421) is known as perhaps the most famous of the “Desert Mothers,” the female recluses of the early Christian period who sought out the solitary life practiced by the Desert Fathers.