ABSTRACT
During a grave illness in May of 1373, the anchoress, Julian of Norwich, experienced a copious seepage of blood which she would come to understand as a leakage intimately linked to the reproductive female body, but not her own-or any other woman’s for that matter. This body whose blood flowed so freely at Julian’s bedside that she imagines it soaking her bed clothes was Christ’s.1 Julian’s Showings, her meditative account of this and the series of visions that followed it, is marked by the boundary violations of the monstrous reproductive female body, and in particular, the bleeding, gestating, birthing body of “Moder Jhesu.” While this body shares the fundamental features of female monstrosity exemplified by the permeable bodies in De vetula and De secretis mulierum, it is instead eternal, salvific, and the ultimate source of comfort where Pseudo-Ovid’s and PseudoAlbertus’ reproductive female bodies were wracked with death and decay, contaminated, and dangerously deceptive. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore how Julian’s Showings recasts the features of female monstrosity without purging them of their messy roots in the pains, overflows, and engulfments germane to medieval conceptualizations of female anatomy and physiology. These very features of female monstrosity appear in Julian’s visions and become the most crucial elements of her Christology. Whereas the previous chapters have considered the relationship between female monstrosity and Ovidianism (De vetula), female monstrosity and gynecological literature (De secretis mulierum), this chapter turns to representations of the monstrous female body in mystical discourse to consider how Julian borrows and breaks from this medieval tradition that reproduced anxieties about permeable female flesh, but also found in female illness, wounds, and exudations the sacred and miraculous. Julian’s ultimate message is a Christology that hinges on the boundary
violations of Christ’s body, and her discourse is, therefore, steeped in the language of medieval monstrosity. Both son and mother, man and God, corpse and immortal, Julian’s Christ is a “puzzling amalgam, a bizarre mixture of roles, genders and body parts unresponsive to any singular framework of understanding.” In some sense, Julian’s Christ is a monster.2
Her Showings represent the most complex medieval meditation on the
relationship between Christ’s monstrosity and Christ’s maternity, but it forms a part of a growing late-medieval discourse concerned with the permeable borders that defined Christ’s nature and circumscribed his body. Recall that “Ovid” intimated the potential monstrosity of Christian doctrines such as the trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection of the body. He was troubled by the difficult task of sorting out the confused boundaries between Christ’s body and Mary’s maternal flesh, and of finding the proper places for the bits and pieces of resurrected bodies, given that flesh is always in some sense inextricable from the maternal body that fashioned and nourished it in utero. These Christian doctrines harbored the threat of unstable and mixed corporeal borders that “Ovid” associated with the monstrosity of the semivir, the transformation of virgin into vetula, and the hemorrhaging boundaries of the old female body. Pseudo-Albertus and his commentators uncovered all sorts of monstrous secrets traceable to the porous boundaries of the maternal body, whose own unstable corporeal boundaries threatened the bodies of others with contamination, deformation, disease, and death. Showings recasts these associations between the maternal body, the monster, and the corpse by identifying the perforated surfaces, uncontrollable flows, enclosures, and fragmentations-in short, the boundary violations, the monstrosity-of Christ’s body as precisely those qualities that brook communion between divinity and humanity. Rather than simply rejecting the cultural inscriptions of monstrosity we have noted thus far, Showings exploits the inherent ambivalence of the monstrous. In De vetula and De secretis mulierum, the monstrous body is both an aberration of nature and commonplace; it is the “intimate stranger.”3 If the monstrous is inscribed on the reproductive and aged female body, then all human bodies-once fashioned and nourished by female flesh-harbor some visceral connection with monstrosity, albeit unspoken, denied, or renounced. This slipperiness of the monstrous across the scale of normalcy and alterity becomes adopted in late-medieval christological contexts, of which Showings is one important example. Representations of monstrous bodies prior to the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries were often structured as “antibodies of Christ.”4 The monster was the pagan, demonic, or debauched other whose brokenness was reflected in the inviolable, intact body of Christ, both Church and eucharist. Teratological metaphors were also used to critique the body politic: a state ruled by both pope and emperor, for example, was named a monster, an animal biceps.5 Alongside these inscriptions of monstrosity in perverse bodies and institutions were instances of monstrosity appropriated to represent central dogmas of the Catholic faith, such as the trinity. These instances constitute a veritable trend in late-medieval art and mystical texts where representations of Christ’s body “began to assimilate some of the liquidity and liminality of … monstrous things.”6 The borders between the monster and God became porous as medieval bestiaries, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations depicted “the Christian deity as a bestial,
hybridized figure.”7 Robert Mills suggests that “the hybridization of identity categories in the writings of female mystics” was both a contributing factor and a manifestation of late-medieval associations between Christianity and monstrosity.8 In Showings, Christ’s identity incorporates multiple hybridizations of identity categories, and, like the late-medieval representations of the trinity as a three-headed deity, these identity categories are mapped out on Christ’s body and negotiated along its borders. This chapter examines how Showings contributes to this construction of
the monstrous Christ. It analyzes the function of the disordered, wounded, and female reproductive body in Showings, how Julian’s wishes for wounds and illness operate as an imitatio Christi, how her visions of Christ’s passion fulfill her desire for affective identification, and how these visions are “reiterated in the body of her written text, culminating in a fully realized depiction of God as divine mother.”9 After exploring how Julian reads Christ’s wounds, blood flow, and internal body cavities, I demonstrate how the permeable limens of Christ’s body underpin his identity as Moder Jhesu, and how Julian builds the dense theological portions of her text upon the processes of birth and enclosure she finds in his body. Finally, I turn to some examples of late-medieval literature written for female anchoritic readers, principally, the Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century rule for anchoresses, to show how Julian’s articulation of maternal corporeality challenges the normative boundaries by which the monstrous was circumscribed in anchoritic discourses. The monstrous body that emerges from this analysis is both abject and divine by way of the boundary violations elsewhere associated with the reproductive female body. It is a body that may belong to God, but its power stems from the very qualities of monstrosity feared and condemned in other late-medieval discourses, including those represented by Pseudo-Ovid and Pseudo-Albertus. Julian’s God shares the vetula’s disordered decay and reveals to Julian the bleedings and birthings that PseudoAlbertus and his commentators divulge to their readers as dangerous secrets of female corporeality. The readings of the female body performed by these texts thus overlap so that the intertexts among them demonstrate the intransigency of female monstrosity in the late-medieval imagination while also expressing the flexibility of the female body as a monstrous sign system. As we have seen, “Ovid’s” readings of female bodies in De vetula are efforts to control and contain the monstrosity latent in all-even fantasized, fetishized, and virginal-female flesh. The author and commentators of De secretis mulierum read and disseminate the truths of female monstrosity in the form of secrets, endowed with the urgency of male and infant survival in the face of an ever-present threat of female contamination. Both of these readings aim to draw firmly the boundaries between male readers and female corporeal sign systems. Julian’s reading of the monstrous maternal body in Showings is, by contrast, a participatory act that brings her own painful body into communion with Christ’s. Julian calls this act of reading “compassion,” which is-I argue below-a transformative reading of
monstrous signs that reconfigures Julian’s own body by way of its encounter with Christ’s. Christ’s maternity is, for Julian, predicated on Christ’s corporeality, and
specifically the permeability of his body. Julian locates Christ’s maternity in the anatomy and physiology of a body that bleeds, gestates, gives birth, and nourishes-functions that materialize the sacrificial and redemptive possibilities of pervious flesh. In Showings, as in De secretis mulierum, the ebb and flow of blood occurs across the boundaries of the female reproductive body, but in Showings the body whose blood surrounds, nourishes, and pours forth in child birth belongs to Christ. The porosity of the crucified body also affirms Christ’s fundamental promise to Julian that “alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thynge shalle be wele.”10 In her long text, Julian develops an eschatological theology which she reads in the orifices, exudations, penetrations, and enclosures modeled in Christ’s body. Drawing upon these corporeal signs, Julian develops her own readings of the problem of evil, the nature of sin, and the promise of salvation.
