The Trouble of Medieval Women’s Hair

Women’s hair troubled Medieval men. In art and literature, they loved to show women with long unbound tresses, even though in real life, married women usually bound their hair up or wore veils to cover it when they were in public (unless they were mourning, as I wrote about in yesterday’s post).

Two types of women let their hair down long: the unmarried young, and prostitutes. Quite an opposition, no? The fact that long hair signaled both purity (youth) and sin (prostitutes) gets at the basic virgin/whore dynamic that is an oh-so-tired trope among Medieval (and let’s face it, well beyond Medieval) authors.

In depicting the body of Mary Magdalene – and her wild hair – artists could have it both ways. In the early Christian tradition, Mary Magdalene was considered to have been a prostitute who reformed her ways once she met Jesus. And wow did she have hair. Legends about her turning to a life of ascetic denial and wandering in the wilderness as a reformed sinner were extremely popular. Whereas Mary’s long locks drew men to her during her years as as a prostitute, the same hair became symbolic of her penitent denunciation of this-worldly pleasures as she became wild in the desert.

All of this shows up deliciously in art. The first slide shows Tilman Riemenschneider’s limewood carving (from 1499-92). Mary’s long hair and sweet face are very beautiful, and her torso is covered in a sort of sexy hairsuit that leaves open her breasts. In sharp contrast is Donatello’s carving of the Penitent Magdalene out of white poplar wood (from 1453-55). Mary’s hair is long but the woman’s beauty has vanished. I just put the third painting in (Mary Magdalene in a Grotto by Jules Josef Lefevre from 1876) to highlight another reason artists liked to portray Mary Magdalene’s hair — they liked to look at it, and because she was a Biblical figure, they could get away with showcasing nudity: Lefevre liked painting boobs.