ABSTRACT
Discourse about the body, both from a physiological viewpoint and in a symbolic sense, increased gradually from the twelfth century on. One might say that the interest in the individual body in the various kinds of discourse, like the interest in the human body of Christ, climaxed in the latter half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century.1 The concern with the body’s physiology grew as part of the general interest in the concrete, in the phenomena and laws of nature, which from the thirteenth century on was strongly influenced by the natural philosophy of Aristotle and his Arab commentators. The body’s partial rehabilitation was justified by its divine creation, the mystery of the Incarnation, and the belief in the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day. As the nun and mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) wrote: ‘Without the soul the body is naught, yet the soul cannot act without the body.’ The soul is superior to the body, yet depends upon it. It is the microcosm in which the soul dwells. She went on to describe the beauty and intricacy of the human body, which was also the body of Christ when he was made flesh.2 In Medieval culture the body was a multifarious symbol: it was a metaphor for the Church, for the polity, for society and the family. The four elements of the human body reflected and symbolized the four elements of the world. The body-microcosm was a symbol of the world-macrocosm. Even the souls departing from the body were depicted as bodies, as the naked bodies of small children. Despite the belief in the separation of the soul from the body at death, the torments of hell were described as bodily torments. The corpse of a saint whose soul had departed became, paradoxically, a holy relic. By a reversal the body also occupied a central place in the ascetic ideal. In scientific discourse and in symbolic contexts, reference was made to all types of bodies: to the child’s body, the young man’s and the young woman’s body, and also to old bodies.
