Margaret of Hungary Does Pilates?

I've developed a new stretching routine, and have been reading up on Pilates lately (thanks to my enthusiast sister!), as I have become newly aware that there are muscles I apparently neglected to acquire during those Covid years. Oooouch.

This has also changed the way I read medieval saints' lives.

Take Margaret of Hungary. I’ve mentioned her before  -- she’s a thirteenth-century Dominican nun whose sisters were questioned about the sanctity of her life after her death. Time and again, they remembered what Margaret did with her body when she prayed. She didn't simply say prayers. She knelt, bowed, prostrated herself, stayed in uncomfortable positions, got up, and did it again.

Reading their testimony after reading about Pilates, I suddenly recognized something: Margaret had a prayer workout!

Not literally, of course. Margaret wasn't trying to improve her core strength, and she didn’t have any of those fancy machines. But prayer involved repeated physical actions, and doing those actions day after day trained her body just as surely as it trained her attention and devotion.

Here are three exercises from the Margaret of Hungary workout.

1. The medieval genuflection squat

Margaret's anonymous Life says that whenever she passed an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary, she greeted it by bending her knees. She did this so often that her kneecaps became swollen and callused.

Think about that spatially.

Every encounter with a sacred image required something from her body. Image: bend, rise, walk. Another image: bend, rise, walk....

In Pilates terms, that's repetition. The movement becomes automatic because you've done it approximately nine gazillion times and the instructor has somehow found another set of eight.

But religiously, something else is happening. Margaret is training herself to respond physically to sacred presence. Seeing produces movement. Reverence isn't just something she thinks or feels. Her body has learned what to do.

The calluses are therefore evidence of two kinds of formation at once: a body altered through repetition and a devotional habit made physical.

2. The thousand-veniae challenge

Then Margaret turns up the reps.

Multiple sisters testified that on major vigils Margaret performed one thousand veniae. A venia was a Dominican prostration: lowering the body to the ground and rising again.

And they really do mean a thousand. They cite the number repeatedly. (And even if it is only a stand in for “a whole lot of times in a row,” once you’ve done 30 reps of *anything* you can feeeeeel the burn.)

One witness says Margaret performed a thousand veniae with a thousand Ave Marias. Another specifies veniae on Marian vigils, for Veni Sancte Spiritus at Pentecost, and at the Pater noster at Christmas.

Try imagining the physical mechanics of that.

Down. Prayer. Up.

Down. Prayer. Up.

Only 998 more times to go.

That's where my Pilates analogy becomes useful. The individual movement isn't the whole practice. Repetition is the practice. Your body changes through doing the same thing again and again.

For Margaret, the verbal and physical repetitions were joined. One prayer, one movement; another prayer, another movement. Counting structured both.

And her body retained the history of doing it. After Margaret died, her former nurse and teacher Olimpiades remembered a callus on her knee, “rock-hard and as thick as an egg” (The Oldest Legend, p. 299), which she attributed to the many veniae Margaret had performed.

Pilates instructors generally prefer that you stop somewhat earlier.

3. Hold that position

My favorite testimony, though, concerns endurance.

Sister Candida once saw Margaret praying on her knees and elbows (The Oldest Legend, p. 395). Candida gives us an extraordinary measurement of how long she remained there: as long as it took Candida to read the entire Psalter.

Then a plank fell on Margaret's head. (A literal plank. I guess the carpenter hadn’t attached things well?)

Margaret still didn't move.

This is where the Pilates comparison gets weirdly appropriate.

Anyone who has held an oh-my-gosh-I’m-exercising-now plank—or watched the clock apparently cease functioning while holding one—knows that maintaining a position is an activity. Stillness requires work.

But Margaret's stillness also communicated something religious. Remaining physically fixed in prayer demonstrated the sustained attention that devotional writers repeatedly valued. Her body wasn't merely accompanying prayer. Holding the body in prayer was part of the act of praying.

And apparently falling lumber did not constitute sufficient reason to break form.

So was prayer medieval Pilates?

Obviously not.

Margaret wasn't secretly developing a thirteenth-century fitness program. In fact, her sisters sometimes thought her physical practices were excessive. Her convent superior, Magistra Olimpiades, reportedly complained that Margaret was praying with her “nose and face in the ground like a pig” and destroying herself (The Oldest Legend, pp. 371-373, 397).

But the comparison has made me notice something I might otherwise have read straight past.

We tend to encounter historical prayer as text. The sources preserve words, so we study the words: Ave Maria. Pater noster. Veni Sancte Spiritus.

The testimony about Margaret reminds us that prayer also had a body.

And as I’ve discussed elsewhere (Cyrus, Praying), bodies bent. They knelt. They lowered themselves to the floor and got up again. They held positions. They acquired calluses. Repeated gestures trained physical habits at the same time that repeated prayers trained devotional ones.

And that's why I love evidence like this.

A witness mentioning someone's swollen knees can suddenly recover something that the surviving prayer text cannot: what praying actually required a body to do.

Which is pretty cool.

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REFERENCES

Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space,” Religions 16, no. 10 (2025): 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277.

Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis; et, Miracula Sanctae Margaritae de Hungaria = The oldest legend; Acts of the canonization process; and, Miracles of Saint Margaret of Hungary, edited by Ildikó Csepregi, Gábor Klaniczay and Bence Péterfi, translated by Ildikó Csepregi, Clifford Flanigan and Louis Perraud (Budapest, Hungary; New York, NY: Central European University Press, 2018).

Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpadhazi_szent_margit.jpg and  www.freevector.com

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