Introduction: The Monstrous Borders of the Female Body | 7

ABSTRACT

The medieval monster is a slippery, messy, and terribly attractive ﬁgure. Written in the disordered and wily contours of its body are a range of social, religious, racial, and sexual aberrations. This book examines how one incarnation of medieval monstrosity-the female body-both exempliﬁes and complicates the processes by which monstrosity operated in the Middle Ages. It resisted the (largely spatial) marginalization that deﬁned the circumstances of most other monstrous groups: Saracens and Jews were excluded from the body of Christ, the corporealized borders of the Catholic Church; medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world. The monstrous female body, however, took the form of mother, sister, lover, wife, and daughter. It was pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. The study of medieval monstrosity is now being recognized as a rich ﬁeld

of inquiry into matters of identity because the monster’s body is not simply peripheral, but “constitutive,” that is, “producing the contours of both bodies that matter and bodies that don’t.”1 Those bodies marked monstrous by medieval discursive authorities belonged to demons, non-Christians, the so-called monstrous races, freaks of nature, deformed infants, miscarried fetuses, and-the object of this study-women. Precisely because monsters make up a genus too diverse and polysemous to be contained within the bounds of any single conceptual system, medieval teratology must also be the study of parts, particulars, and fragments.2 This book, therefore, is both concerned with a nexus of ideas centered on female corporeality and the monstrous transgression of boundaries, but it is also committed to the speciﬁcity of the monstrous body, the discursive tradition that animates it, and the particular readings it produces. The organization of this book attempts to grapple with the monster’s semantic ﬂexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to deﬁne without overlooking the particularity of its various incarnations. Each chapter focuses on a text written in thirteenth-or fourteenth-century Europe that is representative of a speciﬁc discursive authority on female bodies in order to ascertain how it draws from its discursive tradition, how it diverges from its tradition, and how it contributes

elements of teratology speciﬁc to the Middle Ages. These texts are: the PseudoOvidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women); and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, an autobiographical account of a series of visions she experienced during an illness in 1373. In all of these texts, the anatomical structures and physiological processes of female bodies are marked as unstable, permeable, and overﬂowing-attributes associated with monstrosity in the Middle Ages. The chapters of this book also explore in depth an important feature of

the monstrous female body that this Introduction can only gesture at, namely that female corporeality is “out of bounds,” not only because it transgresses the boundaries of the proper human form, but also because it transgresses the epistemological and ontological boundaries that structure the very ideologies that give birth to the monstrous female itself.3 This predilection to exceed established categories of meaning far from renders the monstrous body meaningless; rather, it underscores the processes by which the monstrous body becomes meaning-laden, and this meaningfulness is rooted in its very name: the monster, monstrum, is etymologically the thing that signs, that shows, that reveals (from the Latin, monstrare).4 The monster enmeshes body and word by corporealizing signs, by becoming texts of ﬂesh, whose meaning is not their own, but the one readers ﬁnd there. Both material corpus and literary corpus, monsters thus invite a modus legendi, “a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender.”5 Because the medieval monster is a text constructed and deciphered by medieval ideologies, it is also a text in which the mechanisms of those very ideological systems can be read. This book aims to uncover in monstrous bodies the mechanisms whereby speciﬁc medieval ideologies designate and recuperate monstrous signs and thereby solidify the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural while also betraying the contingency of these categories. In other words, the chapters in this book are readings of late-medieval literary representations of monstrous bodies. These readings, in turn, explore how representations of bodies are themselves acts of reading performed by the representatives in each text invested with the power to decipher transgressive bodies. The book is divided into three Parts: Part I Ovidian Poetry, Part II Gynecology, and Part III Mystical Theology. As the longest and most complex pseudo-Ovidian text, De vetula repre-

sents the apogee of the Ovidian imitation that accompanied the renewed interest in Ovid’s poetry during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This poem, however, has received nearly no scholarly commentary. This book’s ﬁrst chapter, “Virgins, Mothers, and Monsters: Ovidian and PseudoOvidian Bodies,” demonstrates the literary importance of this largely ignored text, and looks speciﬁcally at its complex representation of the boundaries and oriﬁces of the female body. This subtext is crucial for appreciating the poem as a cohesive text, and for understanding how it draws from the Ovidian literary corpus, which so often engages similar

subjects. Written in an autobiographical voice, De vetula tells the story of Ovid’s renunciation of amorous pursuits for a life devoted to philosophical continence and Christianity after being duped by way of a bed-trick substitution into embracing an ugly old woman (vetula) instead of the beautiful virgin (puella) he had expected. Substantial portions of the poem focus on the body boundaries of puella and vetula. The virgin’s body is a study in order and containment: none of her features transgresses its proper boundaries, none of her oriﬁces opens inappropriately wide, and nothing ﬂows from the inside of her body to the outside. By contrast, the oriﬁces of the vetula’s body gape so that her corporeal surface allows continual commerce between inside and outside. Pseudo-Ovid, who elsewhere in the poem deems the semivir (“half-man”) to be a monster on the ground that his body violates all systems of corporeal and rational classiﬁcation, confronts in the transformation of virgin into vetula the slipperiness between his rigid classiﬁcations of bodies. The erotized and repulsive female body-the delineated objects of his desire and disgust-begin to merge. This chapter argues that the old woman’s monstrosity issues from an association between the reproductive life cycle-embodied in the instability of female corporeality-and mortality: female bodies inevitably change from something stable and attractive (i.e. the virgin body) into something loose and leaky (i.e. the multiparous body) before the ﬁnal dissolution into old age and eventual decay. Pseudo-Ovid asserts that the transformation of virgin into vetula was more amazing that any “he” had recorded in his Metamorphoses, but the most troubling aspect of this mutatio seems to be its utter familiarity. Chapter 2, “Gynecological Secrets: Blood, Seed, and Monstrous Births in

De Secretis Mulierum” focuses on the “hidden, secret things about the nature of women” that this philosophically-informed treatise on matters of human reproduction and gynecology promises to disclose to its cleric readers. Under this rubric, Pseudo-Albertus and two medieval commentators, whose notations were frequently copied along with the text, describe the corporeal signs that communicate whether a woman is a virgin or not, the corrupting eﬀects of menstrual ﬂuid, and the circumstances under which women give birth to monsters. This text, which a prominent scholar of medieval gynecology has called “one of the most inﬂuential documents in the history of medieval scientiﬁc attitudes toward women,” has received little scholarly interest despite its exempliﬁcation of the inﬂuential trend in the late Middle Ages of adopting misogynist claims about menstrual ﬂuid and menstruating women in scientiﬁc and medical texts.6 This chapter examines how Pseudo-Albertus and his commentators substantiate their representations of the female body by misreading earlier gynecological authorities, including Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, Averroës, and Avicenna. Whereas these writers held that the superﬂuities in the female body rendered it vulnerable to illness, De secretis mulierum (DSM) holds that these superﬂuities leak from the oriﬁces of the female body, bringing cancer, leprosy, and monstrous deformation to the bodies of men and children. Pseudo-

Albertus and his commentators thus transform conditions associated with the retention of superﬂuities into conditions association with the seepage of superﬂuities. These secrets concerning menstrual ﬂuid certainly corroborate Pliny’s

claim in Historia naturalis that “nothing could be found that is more remarkable/monstrous [monstriﬁcium] than the monthly ﬂux of women”: menstrual ﬂuid is a medium that violates boundaries and disorders bodies.7

Most troubling of all, it can seep from the eyes of menopausal (i.e. old) women to kill babies in their cribs. The absence of any detectable sign of this secret of women evinces the problematic hermeneutic process whereby monstrosity is inscribed on the female body to be read in the form of secret signs. De secretis mulierum’s disclosure of female monstrosity depends on the legibility of these corporeal signs, but the instability of the female body and the ambiguity of its superﬂuities trouble the text’s claim over this semantic ﬁeld. Inconsistent codiﬁcations of virgin genital morphology, for example, suggest that female ﬂesh ﬁnds ways of keeping its sexual experience secret. Similar challenges to Pseudo-Albertus’ hermeneutics arise from his conﬂation of female seed (matter from which human bodies form) and menstrual ﬂuid (matter that deforms human bodies) under the word menstruum. The darkest secret about human generation, then, may be that all bodies, normative and monstrous, are fashioned from abject superﬂuities and gestated in contaminated receptacles of the female body. The ﬁrst and second chapters posit that the misogyny of De vetula and De

secretis mulierum is symptomatic of their associations between female reproductive functions, the monster, and the corpse. Chapter 3, “Monstrous Love: The Permeable Body of Christ in Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” considers how Julian recasts the abject qualities of the reproductive female body-its perforated surfaces, uncontrollable ﬂows, enclosures, and fragmentations-as precisely those qualities that shape her mystical experience, illustrate her theology, and promise union between Christ and humankind. Showings fashions a Moder Jhesu whose maternity is speciﬁcally corporeal, predicated not on “maternal” characteristics such as pity or mercy (as were most examples of the motif among medieval theologians and mystics), but on the maternal capacities of Christ’s body. Julian recasts the pains of cruciﬁxion as the labor pains of birth, and the wound in Christ’s side is imagined as the opening to a large womb where humankind dwells, enclosed forever in Christ’s body. Julian’s meditations on the signiﬁcance of compassionate suﬀering, Christ’s incarnation in the womb of a virgin, the circumstances of the fall, the nature of the trinity, and human psychology draw upon her visions of Christ’s cruciﬁed body as a ﬂuctuating site of both penetration and enclosure. This chapter explores how Showings transforms the monstrous boundary violations of the maternal body into a salviﬁc process. Through comparative analysis of other late medieval anchoritic literature such as the Ancrene Riwle, this chapter also explores how Julian-who became a renowned anchoress-articulates a view of female corporeality

that challenges the normative boundaries by which the monstrous was circumscribed in mystical and anchoritic discourses. Taken together, these texts demonstrate that whether discursively con-

structed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, female corporeal boundaries fail to form properly. It should also be said that the discourses and ideologies represented in this study are in no way mutually exclusive. The newly Christian Ovid of De vetula forsakes his preoccupation with the erotized boundaries of Ovidian bodies for the intact body of the Virgin Mary and the eternally stable boundaries of the resurrected body. Even then, he must confront the signiﬁcance of corporeal instability, now extended beyond the economies of individual bodies, in the Christian doctrines of the trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection of the body. Among those symptoms associated with the retention of menstrual ﬂuid, Pseudo-Albertus and his commentators cite mystical visions such as those experienced by Julian of Norwich.8 And several medieval scholars have argued, in turn, that images of illness, bloodshed, and gestation in Julian’s Showings are informed by medieval gynecology.9 These texts, therefore, represent the contributions of particular discourses to medieval teratology, but, read together, they also illustrate the dialogues among scholastic Ovidianism, natural philosophy, gynecology, and Catholic mysticism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some sense, the monstrous female body united these discursive traditions by transgressing their generic boundaries. Although all monstrous bodies violate boundaries, where physical aber-

rancy signals the transgression of categories of nature and categories of knowledge, it is a primary thesis of this book that the female body exists in special relation to medieval monstrosity. Female bodies are monstrously out of bounds “by nature” (where “nature” does not imply nature at all, but a set of assumptions and prescriptions by which medieval authorities deﬁned women and their bodies). Elizabeth Grosz has argued that female maturation, those physiological processes germane to puberty, pregnancy, and menopause are cast as “modes of seepage” so that the female body and indeed womanhood itself bear the tokens of monstrosity.10 Late-medieval representations of female corporeality bear out these claims. De secretis mulierum is supremely concerned with the signs of monstrosity harbored in female urine, blood, menstrual ﬂuid, and menstrual vapors, and the ways in which these seepages may deceive or harm men and infants. These instances of monstrous seepage, moreover, exist against a backdrop of Galenic physiology that described the bodies of both sexes as vessels precariously containing an ever-ﬂuctuating economy of ﬂuids. In her study of the relationship between embarrassment and corporeal porosity in early-modern English drama, Gail Kern Paster notes that despite the fact that the ﬂuids of this humoral body “were entirely fungible,” and “despite the fact that the processes by which these ﬂuids issued from the body-whether by natural or artiﬁcial means-were relatively equivalent,” corporeal ﬂows and

emanations were read and appraised diﬀerently according to the sex of the bodies from which they seeped.11 Thomas Laqueur has stressed the physiological and anatomical equivalencies of the two sexes of the Galenic body, namely that they are constituted by the same body ﬂuids (though in diﬀering proportions) and equipped with the same genital anatomy (though positioned inversely).12 But Paster argues that this “one-sex model” eﬀaces the encoding of sex and gender diﬀerence in the ﬂows and emanations of the humoral body, especially when the ﬂuid seeping from that body is blood.13

The relationship between male and female corporeality is a specular one where the male body is privileged over the female body as an original is privileged over a degraded reﬂection. Female blood, Paster notes, is inscribed with “cultural narratives of engenderment;” it is “slower moving, clammier, grosser,” shed involuntarily as menstrual ﬂuid, and consequently “classiﬁable as superﬂuity or waste.”14 Menstruation becomes, then, a natural sign of “woman’s inability to control the workings of her own body.”15 In De secretis mulierum, menstrual ﬂuid is the medium with powerfully transgressive properties: it seeps beyond the corporeal boundaries of women, but also of men and children. The “natural” process of menstruation is thus rewritten as a mode of intrusion and contamination. Aristotle’s theories of human generation were co-opted to substantiate

such claims. Despite the legacy of Galen’s two-seed model, Aristotle’s theory that women contributed the matter and men the form to the hylomorphic compound of the fetus was widely accepted in the Middle Ages. Not only did Aristotelian embryology associate female corporeality with unbounded, ill-formed stuﬀ in need of the containing and shaping powers of the male principle, it identiﬁed as female those fetuses that failed to form properly. “Females,” writes Aristotle in Generation of Animals, “are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity [anape-rian].”16 This “natural” state of deformity renders the female body the ﬁrst and most common instance of monstrosity: