Legends of Saint Wilgefortis and the origin of the image of the bearded virgin

There are two legends of the venerated Virgo fortis, the "strong virgin": one tells of a daughter (one of nine) of a Portuguese king of the eighth century, who secretly took a vow of chastity and prayed that the wedding her father had arranged with a pagan might not take place. In answer to the princess's prayers, she grew a beard. Her enraged father ordered the bearded maiden to be put to death.

The other tale also concerns nine sisters, whom their mother handed over to her maidservant to be drowned the moment they came into the world. The mother feared that daughters coming one after another would put her husband in mind of her infidelity. But the servant saved the infants, and two of the girls were baptised and grew up, only to be executed when they refused to worship the Roman gods.

Be that as it may, both legends feature witless parents whose tyrannical whims cost their children their lives. Wilgefortis was indeed canonised and is venerated on 20 July.

There is a theory that the lives of the saints go back to the ancient myth of the hermaphrodite. But this is highly improbable, since the hagiographies appear in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, around an already existing crucifix showing a bearded man in a dress.

Catholic encyclopaedists suppose that the image of the bearded maiden originally arose from a misreading of the image of the Saviour in a tunic and crown from the Archdiocese of Lucca in central Italy. The crucified Saviour of the basilica of Lucca does indeed look rather feminine. In its day the work of Nicodemus was copied many times, but from the eleventh century this image of Jesus ceased to be canonical and, as we see, acquired a wholly different interpretation.