Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body Out of Bounds Sarah ...

290 Pages·2008·1.12 MB·English

Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body Out of Bounds

Sarah Alison Miller

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature

Chapel Hill
2008

Approved by:

Eric S. Downing

Maura K. Lafferty

Sharon L. James

Brooke Holmes

Megan M. Matchinske
© 2008
Sarah Alison Miller

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Abstract

Sarah Alison Miller

Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body
Out of Bounds

(Under the Direction of Eric S. Downing and Maura K. Lafferty)

This dissertation examines representations of female corporeality in three late-medieval
texts: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human
generation erroneously attributed to Albertus Magnus, De secretis mulierum (On the
Secrets of Women); and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, an autobiographical account of
visions she experienced during an illness in 1373. These texts present female bodies
whose anatomical structures and physiological processes mark them unstable, permeable,
and overflowing – attributes associated with medieval monstrosity. These bodies not
only exceed their own physical borders, but vex the ontological and epistemological
boundaries that discursively structure the texts themselves.
Chapter One considers how the transformation of a virgin into the eponymous old
woman forces the poet of De vetula to confront the slipperiness between the erotized and
repulsive female body. I also show how the poet’s conversion to philosophy and
Christianity does not free him from the troubling significance of corporeal instability,
now extended beyond the economies of individual bodies to the Christian doctrines of the
Trinity, incarnation, and resurrection of the body. Chapter Two analyzes how the
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gynecology and natural philosophy of De secretis mulierum construct a leaky,
contaminating female body whose superfluities threaten the integrity of proximate bodies
with wounds, illness, and deformity. Although this text’s disclosure of women’s secrets
depends on the legibility of the female body, I contend that the instability of female
corporeality and the ambiguity of its signs trouble the text’s claim over this semantic
field. Chapter Three demonstrates how Julian’s Showings recasts the unbounded female
body by developing a theology of Christ’s maternity predicated on the permeability of his
flesh. I show how the perforated surfaces, uncontrollable flows, and overlapping
enclosures of Christ’s body are precisely what make possible communion between
humanity and divinity.
This dissertation measures how these texts negotiate classical and medieval
representations of female corporeality germane to their particular discursive traditions –
that is, of Ovidian bodies, medicalized bodies, and mystical bodies. I also explore how
the female body elicits both desire and disgust, and posit that an association between the
reproductive female body, the monster, and the corpse invites these responses.

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To Mom, Dad, Mary, Aaron, and Kamila

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Crossing Boundaries......................................................................................1

Chapter One: Stable and Unstable Body Boundaries in Pseudo-Ovid’s De Vetula..........21

Part One: The Monstrous Semivir..........................................................................27

Part Two: Virgin into Vetula..................................................................................34

The virgin body: order and moderation...............................................34

The vetula’s body: flux and filth..........................................................39

Part Three: Ovidian Bodies in De Vetula..............................................................49

Monstrous metamorphosis: two maternal bodies
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses....................................................................49

Dipsas and her ilk.................................................................................55

Monstrous didacticism: the double Ovid and disordered
female bodies in Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris..........................59

Part Four: The Aged Puella and “Ovid’s” Mixed Thanks.....................................72

Part Five: Cosmic Body Boundaries......................................................................84

Part Six: Myrrha and Mary: Models of Maternal Metamorphosis........................94

Chapter Two: Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum:
Decoding the Female Body.......................................................................101

Part One: Reading Secrets...................................................................................101

Part Two: The Semiotics of Virginity..................................................................114

Spiritual signs / corporeal signs.........................................................116

Virgin morphologies..........................................................................124

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Part Three: Blood: Hymeneal, Seminal, Menstrual.............................................144

Menstrual fluid bound and unbound..................................................153

Part Four: The Embryology of Monsters.............................................................162

Chapter Three: Julian of Norwich’s Showings: The Permeable Body of Christ.............171

Part One: Textual Bodies / Compassionate Bodies.............................................179

Part Two: Compassionate Illness.........................................................................192

Part Three: Blood, Dryness, and Desire...............................................................207

Part Four: Christ’s Maternal Body: Wounds, Breasts, Womb.............................228

Part Five: A Theology of Breaches and Enclosures............................................240

Part Six: Boundaries of the Anchorhold..............................................................249

Bibliography....................................................................................................................261

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Introduction:
Crossing Boundaries
Virgins, Mothers, Monsters is about bodies that exceed their proper physical boundaries
and thereby trouble the conceptual boundaries according to which texts represent and find
meaning in corporeality. Drawing from Aristotle’s Physics, the fourteenth-century
treatise on human generation, De secretis mulierum, defines monsters as “those
individuals of a certain species which in a certain part of their body are outside the
bounds of the common course of the nature of the species [cursum communem illius
speciei excedunt].”1 This dissertation considers how the monster is “out of bounds” in a
dual sense – because its corporeal excesses, deficiencies and deformities violate the
boundaries of the proper human form and because these abnormalities violate the
epistemological and ontological categories whose boundaries structure the very
ideologies from which the monster is born.2 But the monster’s predilection to exceed
established categories of meaning far from renders it meaningless; indeed, the monster is
a meaning-laden creature, this meaningfulness being rooted in its very name: the monster,
monstrum, is etymologically the thing that signs, that shows, that reveals (from the Latin,

1 DSM 6; Lemay (1992), 112. Unde sciendum quod monstra sive peccata nature vocantur individua
alicuius speciei quae in aliqua parte corporis cursum communem illius speciei excedunt. See Aristotle,
Phys. II, 8; 199a 32.

2 Bynum (2001), 117. See also Cohen (1996): “This refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of
things’ is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist
attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form
suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6).
monstrare).3 The monster therefore enmeshes body and text by corporealizing signs to
become books of flesh, so to speak, whose meaning is not their own, but the one readers
find there. Jeffrey Cohen has suggested that monsters invite a modus legendi, “a method
of reading cultures from the monsters they engender.”4 Thus the medieval monster acts
as text for medieval readers, but because it is a text whose meaning is constructed and
ascertained by medieval ideological systems, it also becomes a text in which the
processes of those very ideological systems can be read. Virgins, Mothers, Monsters
aims to uncover in monstrous bodies the process whereby specific medieval ideologies
designate and recuperate monstrous signs, thereby solidifying the boundaries between the
natural and the unnatural while also betraying the contingency of these categories. In
other words, this dissertation is about reading late-medieval literary representations of
monstrous bodies, and it is about reading those representations of bodies as acts of
reading performed by the representatives in each text invested with the power to decipher
bodies “out of bounds.”
The study of medieval monstrosity is now being recognized as a rich point of
entry into matters of identity, corporeality, race, religion, and gender because the
monster’s body is not simply peripheral, but “constitutive,” that is, “producing the

3 See Cohen (1996), 4; Bildhauer and Mills (2003), 14. For a discussion of monsters centered on their role
as portents, see Friedman (1981) 108-130. This etymology was often underscored by classical and
medieval readers of monstrosity, among them Augustine who wrote in The City of God: “From this power
[of God] comes the wild profusion of those marvels which are called omens, signs, portents, prodigies. If I
should try to recall and enumerate these, where would this treatise end? The various names monstra,
ostenta, portenta, prodigia come from the verbs monstrare ‘show’ because they show something by a sign,
ostendere ‘display,’ portendere ‘spread in front,’ that is, display beforehand, and porro dicere ‘say
aforetime,’ that is, predict the future” (Augustine of Hippo, ed. and trans. McCracken [1966], vol. vii, 57
[book 21, ch.8]).

4 Cohen (1996), 3. For Cohen’s own practice of this modus legendi, see also Cohen (2006, 2003a, 1999,
1994).

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contours of both bodies that matter and bodies that don’t.”5 Among the numerous groups
whose bodies were marked as monstrous in the Middle Ages were demons, non-
Christians, Saracens, Jews, the so-called monstrous races, freaks of nature, deformed
infants, miscarried fetuses, and women. Precisely because monsters make up a genus too
diverse and too polysemous to be contained within the bounds of any single conceptual
system, medieval teratology must, in Cohen’s words, “content itself with fragments.”6
This dissertation is concerned with one of these fragments of medieval teratology: the
monstrous representation of anatomical features and physiological functions of the
female body, particularly those germane to the process of reproduction. It explores how
female bodies are imagined as “out of bounds,” permeable flesh that overflows, leaks,
engulfs, doubles, and splits.
All monstrous bodies are in some sense “out of bounds,” where physical
aberrancy signals the violation of categories of nature and categories of knowledge. But
this dissertation explores several ways in which the female body exists in special relation
to medieval monstrosity. First, the physiological processes socially and ideologically
privileged as the tokens of female sexual difference are precisely those processes that
verify female monstrosity. Elizabeth Grosz has argued that female maturation is
“represented in terms of various cycles of bodily flow” and thus the trajectory of female
corporeal development is inextricable from the processes of reproduction.7 Physiological
processes germane to puberty and pregnancy (i.e. menstruation and lactation) are cast as

5 Bildhauer and Mills (2003), 2. See Friedman (1981), Williams (1996), Cohen (1999), Bynum (2001),
McAvoy and Walter (2002), Jones and Sprunger (2001), and Bildhauer and Mills (2003), which contains a
literature review (219-226) and a comprehensive bibliography.

6 Cohen (1996),7, 6.

7 Grosz (1994), 207.

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