The lives of the holy harlots Pelagia, Mary Magdalene, and Afra in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology, as well as the late tenth-century Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, are the earliest extant vernacular accounts of these saints in medieval Europe. This testifies to their importance and early popularity in England before the Norman Conquest. This popularity is, I argue in this chapter, primarily due to the complexity of gender representation in these female saints’ lives which fits the flexible and multivalent conceptions of gender, and more specifically of the female gender, in early medieval England. Scholars have only recently started questioning their espousal of a binary gender perspective in their analysis of female saints and female heroes in Old English texts. They have often conceived women as performing either femininity or masculinity in their bid to become holy or heroic, and adopting stable notions of what constitutes such gendered performance. However, a clear-cut performance of either femininity or masculinity is not what can be observed in the Old English lives of holy harlots. The hagiographers instead portray the harlot's shift from sin to sanctity as a move from a femininity reductively symbolising sin and the fallen state of mankind, to a transcendence of gender: the newly formed saint becomes queer, in the sense that her gender becomes indeterminate, ambiguous, and her body incurs a desire that resists definition through binary sexual preferences.

In opposition to this move from binary to queer, the Latin sources or analogues of these lives do effect a gendered inversion of the harlot in order for her to become a saint, in the hieronymian conception that a woman rejecting her feminine role within society must necessarily become male. This binary opposition is the same that has been promoted by scholars today when focusing on pre-Conquest gender representation in hagiography and epic poetry. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, for instance, acknowledge in the revised preface to their 2008 edition of Double Agents that they tended to adopt such a preconception in their past approach to hagiography. Hugh Magennis's interpretation of Judith's female heroism is similarly constrained by binary representations when he claims that “within the ideological world of traditional Old English poetry heroic action is the prerogative of men, not women,” while Jane Chance attributes Judith or Elene's heroism to what she perceives is their feminine performance of chastity.