St. Ermelindis,
1517
Woodcut on laid paper

Museum Collection
.597

Beck was a book illuminator and painter with an occasonal talent for romantic narrative. This image belongs to a series of woodcuts he did for the House of Hapsburg: Saints from the Family and Relatives of the Emperor Maximilian. A rather obscure and local saint, St. Ermelindis, born around 510, was the daughter of respectable parents who wished her to marry when she came of age. Vowed to chastity, she refused and was imprisoned in the dungeon of her parental house. Her continual practice of pious exercises gave her the miraculous ability to escape. In this image, she is trampling like a hero on what apparently are her guards. She became a hermit. In an age when women were almost devoid of rights, a hermit's existence might constitute a kind of power. Such accumulated virtue was like a storage battery whose energy was available to the less saintly. Were only desexualized women considered powerful at this time?