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Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

Book

Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

DOI link for Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body book

Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

DOI link for Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body book

BySarah Alison Miller
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2010
eBook Published 18 June 2010
Pub. Location New York
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203844915
Pages 226
eBook ISBN 9780203844915
Subjects Humanities, Language & Literature
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Miller, S.A. (2010). Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203844915

ABSTRACT

The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages—the female body—exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle Ages: the Pseudo-Ovidian 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. Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples 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. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form properly: it is a body out of bounds.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |8 pages

Introduction: The Monstrous Borders of the Female Body

part |2 pages

Part I Ovidian Poetry

chapter 1|42 pages

Virgins, Mothers, and Monsters: Ovidian and Pseudo-Ovidian Bodies

part |2 pages

Part II Gynecology

chapter 2|36 pages

Gynecological Secrets: Blood, Seed, and Monstrous Births in De Secretis Mulierum

part |2 pages

Part III Mystical Theology

chapter 3|43 pages

Monstrous Love: The Permeable Body of Christ in Julian of Norwich’s Showings

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