This is the first of several posts inspired by my summertime visit to Budapest’s Margaret Island, where the ruins of the medieval Dominican convent still preserve traces of the community in which Margaret of Hungary lived, prayed, and eventually became the focus of a thriving cult. I’m grateful to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence Fund, which supported the travel and research behind this work.
For a Dominican Sister, losing your voice meant losing more than speech. It meant losing your place in the sung services – a central part of the rhythms of religious life. In the thirteenth-century miracle accounts gathered to support Margaret of Hungary’s reputation for holiness, two stories (across three witnesses) tell of her restoring the ability to sing. Each begins with a multi-day sore and painful throat.
Dwell with that for a moment; consider strep throat, or tonsillitis, or the raging rawness of the Cold That Would Not Go Away. Pain, inability to eat, the lift of the shoulders as one tries to swallow. This is a human lived reality, in which the small irritation can be magnified, as the only, ONLY thing on your mind. No distractions, just the “ugh” of illness, mixed with the frustrations of being unable to do the work expected of you.
So there you are, a Dominican sister, unable to sing. You’re miserable. You’re mute. You’re unable to audibly join in, while all your Sisters are diligently doing their duty, singing the Liturgical Hours.
And in both these stories, the turning point comes right at the end of the liturgical day, when dusk descends and the sisters join together for Compline. The sick sister can be present, can hear, can pray – but she cannot add her voice to the sounds around her.
That’s where miracles happen.
The two women approach Margaret rather differently. Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen V, makes her petition physically. Catherine, the convent’s cantrix, on the other hand, calls upon Margaret verbally, invoking Christ’s Passion and Margaret’s own tearful response to it.
Elizabeth actually goes to Margaret’s tomb. She puts her throat against it. As she does so, she petitions Margaret. The liturgical details matter: this is Compline on the Assumption while the Salve Regina is sung. And then, by Matins, her cure can be tested: “I was cured,” she reports, “and I sang with the others.”
The same pattern shapes Catherine’s account. After Compline she asks Margaret to heal her “so that I could sing and perform my office.” When she rises for Matins, she discovers that she’s cured. The pain is gone, her voice has returned, and she performs her office successfully. Both women also insist that their vocal affliction never returned.
Why Compline? We cannot know whether the end-of-day exhaustion mattered to either woman, but the timing is striking. In both stories the petition comes as one cycle of communal prayer closes, and the cure becomes apparent when the next begins.
These are also Sisters who think in terms of sacred networks. For Lady Elizabeth, the Marian connection is explicit, for she specifically mentions the Salve Regina as context for her petition. In fact, her moment of intercession is doubly Marian: it is the feast of the Assumption, and the sisters are singing the Salve Regina. Catherine, on the other hand, makes a different connection. She asks Margaret for help through the Passion of Christ, remembering how Margaret herself had listened to accounts of the Passion with tears. The two petitions thus call upon different memories of Margaret’s devotional life.
And then there’s the who. Both stories are about choir nuns, rather than lay sisters. Both are expected to contribute audibly to services, so the gap left by a missing voice mattered. Healing, in these accounts, means not simply feeling better but returning audibly to the community.
But one of the two stories – the one with two witnesses – is even more significant. For the sister who lost her power of audible prayer is none other than the cantrix Catherine, and the week is Holy Week, a time when sung services are central to the whole of the convent’s experiences. Her recovery, attested by herself and by her fellow nun, a Lady Candida in whom she confided, occurred between Compline of Maundy Thursday and Matins of Good Friday. The Cantrix, in other words, miraculously recovers her voice just in time to perform her Office in the middle of the Triduum, when the community’s liturgical demands are unusually intense.
Candida supplies something Catherine cannot: another pair of ears. She remembers Catherine unable to speak or sing, and then suddenly being able to do so. When Candida asks what happened, Catherine tells her—quietly, in the choir—that she had been healed after invoking Margaret. The cure has become audible.
To my eye (and ear!), Catherine’s story makes the stakes especially clear. She was not simply a nun who liked to sing; she was the convent’s cantrix, charged with leading others. A damaged throat therefore interrupted both her body and her office. And this is why her testimony and that of her witness matter: her cure was proven in the most practical and audible way possible: Catherine got up for Matins and was able to do her job.
In a community built around voices raised together, perhaps that is exactly what a miracle of healing should sound like.
TESTIMONY
The three depositions behind this post are reproduced below, using the translation from Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis, cited below.
Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen of Hungary of illustrious memory, a sister and nun of the said monastery on the Island in the Danube, (193ff, here p. 195-197)
“A year ago I had a terrible pain in my throat, so that I could hardly eat, and I couldn’t sing, and then I went to the tomb of the said Margaret and placed my throat upon her tomb, and I asked the blessed Margaret to cure and deliver me, and I was made healthy through the merits of saint Margaret herself.” When asked the month, she replied, “I don’t remember.” When asked the day, she replied, “The day of the Assumption of the Blessed Mary.” When asked the hour, she replied, “The hour of compline, while the Salve Regina was being sung.” When asked how many days she had that sore throat, she replied, “For two or three days.” When asked how long her soreness lasted after she placed her throat on the aforesaid sepulcher, as she said, she replied, “When I got up for matins, I was cured, and I sang with the others.” She also said that she [Margaret] used to visit the sisters and nuns when they were sick, and she was very attentive about doing for them whatever she could.”
Lady Catherine the cantrix, daughter of Lord Andrew of Várad, sister and nun of the same monastery, (379ff, here p. 387)
“One day at the Lord’s Supper, I was supposed to lead the choir, because I was the chief singer, and I had such a sore throat that it hurt terribly and I couldn’t sing, and then I asked this saint Margaret to heal me through her merits and the passion of Christ, which she tearfully used to hear expounded, so that I could sing and perform my office, and I said this after compline, and when I got up for matins, I was so healed and delivered, that I performed my office well.” When asked if there were others present at the time when she asked this of the blessed Margaret, as she said, she answered, “No.” When asked how many days she had that pain in her throat, as she said, she replied, “For four days.” When asked how many days she went without having that throat pain or something similar after she was delivered in this way, she replied, “I did not have that pain afterwards, nor have I had anything like it to this very day.” When asked if other sisters at the time knew she had the said pain, she replied, “Yes, Sister Candida.” When asked how many years it had been since she was cured, as she said, she replied, “Three.” When asked the month, she replied, “The month of Easter.”
Lady Candida, daughter of the late Lord Taurus of Gaura, a sister and nun of the same monastery, took the oath, (393ff) [Here, p. 401-3]
When asked about miracles, she said, “One of the sisters had such a sore throat that she couldn’t speak well or sing, and this condition lasted from Palm Sunday until the very early Friday morning, and then she began to sing, and when I asked her, ‘How can you sing? Are you cured?’ she replied, ‘I can sing well and I’ve been well and truly cured by calling on the name of the blessed Margaret.’” When asked the name of that sister who was ill in this way, she replied, “The cantrix Catherine, daughter of Andrew.” When asked if any other sisters knew about the said illness, she replied, “I don’t know.” When asked if any other sisters heard, when she asked how she had been cured, and what the said Catherine said to her, she replied, “No, because she was speaking softly into my ear.” When asked where they were at the time, she replied, “In the choir.” When asked how many years ago this was, she replied, “I don’t know for sure, but I think it is three years ago now.” When asked the month, she replied, “In the month of Easter.” When asked how long she had seen her thus delivered, as she said, she replied, “Until now.”
RESOURCES
I have truly been enjoying having fun with the bilingual edition of Margaret’s miracles; I recommend it highly, and promise a return to its evidence in the weeks to come.
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).
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