About halfway through Ælfric's Life of Agatha (composed in the 990s) is the event that identifies her in iconography: her persecutor, Quintianus, orders her breast to be cut off.

Þa gebealh hine se wælhreowa and het hí gewriðanon ðam breoste mid þære hencgene and het siððan ofaceorfan .Agathes him cwæð to . Eala ðu arleasostane sceamode þé to ceorfanne þæt þæt ðu sylf suce .ac ic habbe mine breost on minre sawle . ansunde .mid þam ðe Ic min andgit eallunga afede .

(ll. 122–27)

(Then the cruel one was enraged and ordered her to be tortured on thebreast on the rack and ordered it afterwards to be cut off. Agatha said to him:"Oh you most impious one, are you not ashamed to cut off what you yourselfsucked? But I have my breast unharmed in my soul, with which indeed I willfeed my understanding.")¹

This scene has excited plenty of comment, particularly with respect to the gendered nature of the torture. For Kirsten Wolf, breast torture in the passions of Agatha and other saints is a way of confronting their problematic female corporeality and making it a means, rather than an obstacle, to holiness.² For Allan Frantzen, the removal of Agatha's breast is a moment when "she has transcended the female body and become, however briefly, [End Page 326] like a man."³ Shari Horner argues against Frantzen: the replacement of Agatha's physical breast with a spiritual one fits into a wider pattern by which Ælfric exhorts his audience to look beyond the literal to the spiritual, but that spiritual breast is still specifically female, indeed maternal, since it provides milk.⁴ Andrea Rossi-Reder goes further in reading the imagery of lactation, pointing out that Agatha is presented as a defender of Sicily and arguing that her breasts represent "the site of spiritual nourishment" and "the nourishment offered by her homeland."⁵ Alison Gulley argues that Agatha, unusually among Ælfric's virgin martyrs, is presented as feeling pain, and that, coupled to the image of the maternal breast, this makes of her a birthing mother who labors to give birth both to converts and her own new life in heaven.⁶ However, to many critics—perhaps especially to those examining not literary versions of Agatha's life such as Ælfric's but representations in visual art—the most obvious feature of the breast excision is its character as sexualized violence, reflecting the persecutor's desire to rape the saint. The scene is central to discussions of whether Agatha's torture is eroticized and how her passion might be used by male and female audiences.⁷

The present article reexamines the meaning of the breast in Ælfric's Life of St. Agatha, giving central place to Agatha's invocation of shame: "are you not ashamed to cut off what you yourself sucked?" Readings of the breast excision have not paid much attention to shame; conversely, previous work on shame in Ælfric's saints lives does not discuss the breast excision.⁸ Nonetheless, shame is a key element of the scene, which Ælfric [End Page 327] transmits with minimal change from the Latin source.⁹ Within the Life as a whole, the episode conforms to a repeated pattern by which Quintianus attempts to shame Agatha but she instead shames him. The breast excision offers an opportunity to think about the interplay of sexual shame with other types of shame, and about how shame circulates between male and female bodies.

There are several layers of meaning in Agatha's reproach to Quintianus, but the reading offered here draws particular attention to the relationship of the man who was once a baby with the maternal breast that once fed him. The breast is connected with the woman's sexual shame and vulnerability to assault. At the same time it is a sign not only of maternal nurture but of the infant's profound need for that nurture. My reading of the connection between Quintianus's shame and the breast is stimulated by the concept of...