A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age (The Cultural Histories Series) [English ed.] 9781847887894, 9781472554635, 9781845204952, 9781472554680, 9781350995581, 1847887899

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a cultural history of the human body VOLUME 2

A Cultural History of the Human Body General Editors: Linda Kalof and William Bynum Volume 1 A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity Edited by Daniel H. Garrison Volume 2 A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age Edited by Linda Kalof Volume 3 A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance Edited by Linda Kalof and William Bynum Volume 4 A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Carole Reeves Volume 5 A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire Edited by Michael Sappol and Stephen P. Rice Volume 6 A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age Edited by Ivan Crozier

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE HUMAN BODY

IN THE MEDIEVAL AGE Edited by Linda Kalof

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON OW R D DE • NL EW W D EK L H•I SY • SY DNEY EY LON DON• OX • NF E H IYO • RNKE•WN EYOR DN

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com

Hardback edition first published in 2010 by Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic Paperback edition first published by Bloomsbury Academic 2014 Reprinted by Bloomsbury Academic 2015 © Linda Kalof, 2010, 2014 © Linda Kalof, 2010, 2014 Linda Kalof has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: HB Set: PB Set:

978-1-84788-789-4 978-1-4725-5463-5 978-1-84520-495-2 978-1-4725-5468-0

EPDF: 978-1-3509-9558-1 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Apex CoVantage, LLC, Madison, WI, USA Printed and bound in Great Britain

contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Series Preface

ix

Introduction Monica H. Green

1

1 Birth and Death Katharine Park

17

2 Health, Disease, and the Medieval Body Ann G. Carmichael

39

3 The Sexual Body Ruth Mazo Karras and Jacqueline Murray

59

4 The Body Inferred: Knowing the Body through the Dissection of Texts Fernando Salmón

77

5 Bodies and the Supernatural: Humans, Demons, and Angels Anke Bernau

99

6 Beautiful Bodies Montserrat Cabré

121

7 Bodily Essences: Bodies as Categories of Difference Monica H. Green

141

vi

CONTENTS

8 The Diversity of Human Kind Monica H. Green

163

9 Cultural Representations of the Body Samantha Riches and Bettina Bildhauer

181

10 Self and Society Sylvia Huot

203

Notes

219

Bibliography

259

Contributors

287

Index

291

illustrations

INTRODUCTION Figure 0.1: Bloodletting (Phlebotomy)

4

Figure 0.2: Phlebotomy Man

8

Figure 0.3: Zodiac Man

9

Figure 0.4: Wound Man

10

CHAPTER 1 Figure 1.1: A Good Birth

24

Figure 1.2: Cesarean Birth

26

Figure 1.3: A Good Death

32

Figure 1.4: The Resurrection of Bodies

37

CHAPTER 4 Figure 4.1: The So-Called Nerve Man

80

Figure 4.2: An Example of True Textual Dissection

84

Figure 4.3: Diagram of the Eye Representing the Three Humors and Seven Tunics

87

Figure 4.4: Inflamed Eyes

89

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 6 Figure 6.1: Ugly Features: Head and Torso of a Naked Man Covered with Spots

123

Figure 6.2: Beauty and Sexual Difference

126

Figure 6.3: Personification of Pride (Superbia) as a Female Figure Beautifying Herself with Mirror

129

Figure 6.4: Trotula as a Female Figure of Authority on Women’s Health

137

Figure 6.5: The Queen Semiramis with Her Courtesans

139

CHAPTER 7 Figure 7.1: Male Genitalia

148

Figure 7.2: Female Genitalia

149

Figure 7.3: Fetus-in-Utero Figures

150

Figure 7.4: Diseased Woman

152

Figure 7.5: Hand Diagram

161

CHAPTER 8 Figure 8.1: A T-O Map of the World

165

Figure 8.2: Saint Maurice in the Cathedral of Magdeburg

168

CHAPTER 9 Figure 9.1: Corporal Works of Mercy

184

Figure 9.2: Saints Lucy and Agatha

188

Figure 9.3: Penis Tree

189

Figure 9.4: Sheela-na-Gig

191

Figure 9.5: Martin Schongauer, Temptation of Saint Anthony

193

Figure 9.6: Dream of Hercules

194

Figure 9.7: Birth of Antichrist

196

Figure 9.8: Saint Sebastian

198

series preface

A Cultural History of the Human Body is a six-volume series reviewing the changing cultural construction of the human body throughout history. Each volume follows the same basic structure and begins with an outline account of the human body in the period under consideration. Next, specialists examine major aspects of the human body under seven key headings: birth/death, health/disease, sex, medical knowledge/technology, popular beliefs, beauty/concepts of the ideal, marked bodies of gender/race/class, marked bodies of the bestial/divine, cultural representations and self and society. Thus, readers can choose a synchronic or a diachronic approach to the material—a single volume can be read to obtain a thorough knowledge of the body in a given period, or one of the seven themes can be followed through time by reading the relevant chapters of all six volumes, thus providing a thematic understanding of changes and developments over the long term. The six volumes divide the history of the body as follows: Volume 1: A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity (750 b.c.e.–1000 c.e.) Volume 2: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age (500–1500) Volume 3: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (1400–1650) Volume 4: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800) Volume 5: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (1800–1920) Volume 6: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (1920–21st Century) General Editors, Linda Kalof and William Bynum

Introduction monica h. green

In 1995, a leading medieval historian published an essay entitled “Why All the Fuss about the Medieval Body?”1 Why all the fuss indeed. Hundreds of books and essays have been published in the last two decades claiming to talk about the medieval body, the physicality of Christ, the ethics of torture, the role of bodily metaphors in shaping political discourse. An interdisciplinary journal launched in 1993 devoted its entire first issue to “Discourses of the Body,” and it has regularly focused on such somatic themes as the corpse, the five senses, and the heart. Although much of the initial interest in “body history” gravitated toward questions of sexuality, the field now embraces music and medicine, blood and baths, war and displays of wealth. Precisely because the body touches every aspect of human existence, there has also been resistance to the idea that it merits recognition as a coherent subdiscipline of history. I do not disagree with that assessment. But “the body” has proven a lively forum for dialogue across the disciplines that study the human past, a gathering place in which older fields (literature, religion, the history of medicine) have taken on new vigor and in which newer ones (disability studies and paleopathology, for example) have been able to demonstrate their importance to our conceptual frameworks and empirical data. In a way, the body as a focus of historical inquiry has been ignored so long because it was, literally, right in front of our noses. The body serves as both a lens and filter through which pass all the stimulants and stresses of the surrounding world, absorbing the shocks, relishing the pleasures, and nursing the blows. There is no life, no culture, no history without bodies. Yet we ignore them and take them for granted. We like to think (or perhaps begrudgingly accept) that our lot in life is dictated by who our parents were, where we went to school, how much money we make, what our political affiliations are, or in

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what way we choose to worship any deities we acknowledge. We like to think that simply being human grants us rights that should transcend the particular physical dimensions of our bodies. Yet as the civil rights, feminist, gay rights, and disability rights movements of the last half century have shown (at least in the American context), physical characteristics and behavior do indeed matter tremendously. Notions of universal human rights are (in their current secular formulations) recent concepts, and it might well be argued that bodies mattered far more profoundly in the past than we can imagine. An example of why body history matters: It has been argued that while male slavery gradually disappeared in Europe over the course of the early Middle Ages, female slavery persisted throughout the entire medieval period. Why? In part, it was because female labor was primarily used in domestic settings, both for regular household needs and for the important work of textile production. Yet female slavery had another distinct advantage from the master’s or mistress’s point of view: Female slaves passed their servile status on to their offspring, whereas male slaves did not. Manumit a male slave and you have simply given up the labor of that one individual; manumit a female slave and you lose all the future slaves she and her female heirs might have produced.2 The term heirs of the body could apply to both the mother’s and the father’s bodies, but in the case of slavery, to have begun your life within the body of a female slave meant retaining the status of chattel forever. This volume of the Cultural History of the Human Body focuses on the Middle Ages. The term Middle Ages was created to refer solely to western European history, a “middle period” between the supposed cultural peaks of antiquity and the Renaissance. The Middle Ages are part of the narrative that Christian culture has told itself, and this volume reflects that long-standing bias toward the West. We have attempted to acknowledge some ways in which medieval Jewish and Muslim culture—which coexisted with or thrived adjacent to Christian culture in the larger Mediterranean basin—shared principal attitudes toward the body or, in some cases, did not. The shared traditions of religion obviously created a shared substrate of views. Here, however, I wish to offer a few thoughts about other ways we might see the peoples of Europe and the Mediterranean basin sharing certain common beliefs about the body beyond religious views, which have already been extensively studied by scholars. First, what did the medieval body look like? Surely, we might answer, that is easy enough to figure out from the many medieval images that now clutter decorated calendars, are exhibited at museums, and proliferate on hundreds of Web sites on the Internet. Surely we can have no question what the medieval body looked like or how medieval people themselves visually imagined the body. Yet when we ask that question from a standpoint other than Christian religious life—which produced the thousands of illustrated Bibles and Books

INTRODUCTION

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of Hours from which most published images of the European Middle Ages come—we come to see the medieval body somewhat differently. Consider this. The medieval body may well have been more scarred than we would ever imagine. This was not simply from accidents—though these were no doubt common, whether among agriculturalists in the countryside, urban artisans in their workshops, or elite males playing their war games. There was probably also a lot of deliberate scarring. In medicine, not only were the techniques of cupping, scarifying, and cautery used frequently to rectify humoral imbalances and treat a variety of conditions, but phlebotomy was also practiced prophylactically—ideally once every season—to bring the body back to a healthy balance and (among the religious) to curb concupiscence. In many towns, surgeons and barbers outnumbered physicians toward the end of the Middle Ages. In their texts, surgeons debated means to minimize unsightly scars whether caused by wounds or by the procedures they performed with their patients’ consent. Surgeons also debated whether it was their obligation to help individuals achieve a bodily image better than the one with which they were naturally endowed.3 Scars were also burned into the flesh of slaves to mark them permanently as the property of others. Those scars in turn suggest that the medieval body probably felt more pain than most of us have ever experienced—whether caused by those same surgical procedures, by accidents or illness, by judicially inflicted torture, or by selfimposed chastisement of the flesh. While we would expect religious writers to focus on the sufferings of Christ or the martyrdoms of saints, it was a physician, Bernard of Gordon (d. 1308), who opined that life was made up of just three stages (and not the seven or eight usually recounted by philosophers): birth and childhood, old age and death, and, in between, “an age of hard work, affliction and pain.”4 Surgeons had some limited means to alleviate pain: opium, henbane, hemlock, and wine were all used in various ways in medieval medical practice.5 But the patient’s fear of pain was a driving force in surgeons’ own debates about the utility of their procedures as well as in miracle narratives about individuals saved at the last minute from the surgeon’s knife by saintly intervention. Judicial torture was not used as randomly as we might suppose, yet the threat of its use surely influenced behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand. And the quotidian nature of pain can also be seen in the silence of the grave. The field of paleopathology—the assessment of disease and physical trauma on the basis of surviving skeletal remains—demonstrates the sad regularity of physical suffering, whether by disease, accident, or violence inflicted by others.6 Answering the question “What did the medieval body look like?” also entails that we take seriously medieval people’s own mental conceptions of the world their bodies inhabited and belonged to. The notion of the universe as a macrocosm and the human body as a microcosm is well known in accounts of

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FIGURE 0.1: Bloodletting (phlebotomy) was used frequently in the Middle Ages.

medieval thought. Whether most individuals dwelt on such cosmic thoughts on a day-to-day basis is doubtful. But most people with any exposure to learned traditions (say, through listening to preachers’ sermons) would probably have recognized certain basic tenets of medieval scientific and medical thought about the body. A common summary of the subject matter of medical science was that it pertained to knowledge of the natural, the nonnatural, and the contranatural. The “natural” included all those things that made up the essence of the physical body: the basic qualitative elements (the hot, the cold, the wet, and

INTRODUCTION

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the dry); the humors (hot and wet blood, hot and dry yellow bile, cold and wet phlegm, and cold and dry black bile); and so forth. The “nonnaturals” were all those things outside the body’s essential being that influenced the state of the “naturals”: not simply material factors like food and drink or the quality of the air one breathed but also behavioral choices, like sleeping and waking or sexual indulgence. The “contranaturals”—those things that worked “against nature”—were what constituted disease. There was no division between the human body, therefore, and the environment in which it existed or the food or air it absorbed. Medicine and science were part of the “worldview.” Although it may be doubted whether any single unifying view of the medical body existed prior to the year 1100, within the next 150 years major new texts on medical theory and practice had been absorbed into western Europe from both the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds, and centers of medical study had grown up in southern and northern Italy, southern France, and Paris. Theologians and preachers regularly read works of medical theory, and they absorbed key concepts of this system of understanding the body as a product of the physical world, subject to the same laws and amenable (potentially) to the same rational interventions. Medical terminology and concepts were therefore not the preserve of a closed learned elite but were disseminated broadly through society. Urban dwellers especially came to see care by physicians, surgeons, barbers (who let blood as well as shaved), and midwives as a regular aspect of life. They submitted to periodic phlebotomy to have their bodily humors brought back into balance, purchased prepared drugs believing that certain combinations of ingredients (calculated almost mathematically by their “degrees” of heat, cold, and so on) could rectify disease, and even signed contracts—both as individuals and as municipal corporations—to ensure that medical practitioners were locally available at all times. Medical practitioners were increasingly turned to in legal proceedings: Civil and criminal lawyers relied on the testimony of surgeons to determine whether certain wounds inflicted in violent attacks had been fatal, and canon (church) lawyers came to rely on physicians to testify that certain cures were indeed miraculous because they so exceeded any transformation that natural medicine could predict or effectuate.7 “What did the medieval body look like?” also takes us into the question of what anatomical knowledge people had of the human body. This question is examined in some detail in chapters 4 and 7. But a more general question has to do with one of the most widely recognized contributions that the European Middle Ages made to the history of medicine: the “rediscovery” of human anatomy. Or, rather, the regularizing of its practice, since although dissections (and perhaps vivisections) of humans had been practiced in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in the third century b.c.e., the practice was abandoned soon after. Even an extraordinarily skilled anatomist like Galen of Pergamon in the

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INTRODUCTION

second century c.e. had to rely on animals to develop his understanding of human anatomy. Katharine Park’s recent study of the revival of anatomical dissection in later-medieval northern Italy demonstrates that the desire to peer inside the human body came from several different directions, with “scientific empiricism” being only one (and perhaps not even the most important) of the motives for opening up the body. Park finds one example of nonmedical interests in the case of Chiara of Montefalco (d. 1308), who was opened up after her death by her fellow nuns because they believed they would find physical signs of her saintliness in her heart. They were not disappointed. The idea that anatomical dissection could be investigative—not simply “forensic” in its legal uses to determine whether death was caused by a knife wound or poison but also diagnostic in assessing disease and its possible implications for one’s heirs—would later impel some upper-class women and their families to request postmortem autopsies. Dissection was not universally degrading; only adverse circumstances (such as the provision of criminals’ bodies for public dissections) made it so.8 Yet it would be wrong to celebrate this development as a triumph for scientific empiricism—“reading nature as an (illustrated) book”—without taking into account the larger fact that medieval physicians and surgeons seem to have functioned quite happily without much in the way of visual representation of human anatomy, whether or not dissection was regularly being practiced. Visualization was not unimportant, but it happened more in the mind’s eye than on the page of a book. Two illustrated copies of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, for example, one from the thirteenth century and another from the fourteenth, show how individual artists could create anatomical images less out of concern for “scientific accuracy” than as a way of adding unique “color” to their work. Both artists included differing scenes to show individual organs in the initials that opened the relevant anatomical chapters in Avicenna’s text. One artist showed living patients standing before the physician, opening up their chests, for example, to reveal their liver or heart. The other artist showed the seated physician holding the organ (say, the eye or the uterus) in his hand, using his other hand to gesture in instruction. Neither sequence showed realistic scenes of dissection, and it can well be doubted whether the wealthy physicians who must have owned these deluxe manuscripts ever dirtied their hands with such investigations. When, beginning in the fifteenth century, copies of major surgical works or even general encyclopedias proudly displayed dissection scenes (such as the one on the cover of this volume) in their opening pages, it may well have been because the men who commissioned such volumes knew that owning illustrated works like this would enhance their social capital as learned practitioners. Indeed, we know that at least one such volume was made not for a medical practitioner at all but for an aristocratic client who may have wished to claim a command over military surgery.9

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In fact, very few medical texts were ever illustrated. Again, modern popularizing picture books have seduced us with images from medieval herbals or regimens of health into thinking that such lavishly illustrated volumes were common. On the contrary, almost all such indulgently illuminated books were meant for upper-class clients, who used these volumes more as “coffee-table books”—for display of their wealth, status, and refinement—than as field guides for gathering herbs or manuals for surgical practice. Most copies of medical books had no images at all.10 Whereas we would consider it unthinkable that a work on anatomy would be published without multiple illustrations, the most important novel medieval text on anatomy, The Anatomy of Mondino (1316–1317), the first work based on direct observation of human cadavers since antiquity, was not illustrated in its original form.11 One highly unusual copy of the text that does have striking illustrations also has a unique genesis. It was produced in 1345 by a possible student of Mondino’s, Guido da Vigevano, who then spent the rest of his career in France as a royal physician and sometime military engineer. Guido claims that “making an anatomy on a body is prohibited by the church.” It is likely that he means that it was prohibited locally in France, since he presumably had personally participated in such dissections in Italy. This situation in turn prompted him in his own teaching to “demonstrate dissection . . . by figures accurately drawn, just as the organs actually are. . . . The pictures show them better than in a human body, because when we make an anatomy on a man it is necessary to hasten on account of the stench.”12 Guido was right, of course, that real corpses rotted too quickly to be effective objects of study. Henri de Mondeville, teaching at Montpellier and Paris in the early fourteenth century, had already had a series of thirteen images made specifically for instruction. However, Guido’s illustrated anatomy was made as a deluxe presentation copy for the king of France, not as a handbook for physicians’ or surgeons’ own regular use. As chapters 4 and 7 explain, two areas of medicine—discussions of the organ of vision, the eye, and of the more “secret” parts of women’s bodies— almost never received illustration because authors and readers considered verbal anatomical descriptions sufficient for comprehension. Aside from texts on cautery procedures (the application of hot irons as a therapeutic intervention), there are almost no types of texts that were always illustrated. Even surgical texts, where illustrations played the most valuable role, are illustrated in perhaps only one-fourth to one-third of the extant manuscripts. And these mostly have images of the surgical instruments themselves, not clinical procedures. What, then, do we make of the phlebotomy man, the zodiac man, and the wound man—those three medical images that seem so common in latermedieval manuscripts? These illustrations raise two questions: first, why the male body served as the “generic human” and, second, why these figures do not contradict my claims that medieval medicine was overall an unillustrated

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tradition. I turn to the first question in chapter 7. In answering the second question, we need to understand the difference between a representational goal of realistic depiction and one of heuristic reference. The phlebotomy man, zodiac man, and wound man did not function as anatomical images. They were not meant to be realistic at all, in fact, but rather were intended to function as diagrams to capture a range of information that could be communicated more efficiently visually than verbally. The phlebotomy man served to show where the phlebotomist ought to bleed the patient at different times or for different conditions. The zodiac man summarized astrological lore on which parts of the body were governed by which planets; it very often also functioned as a phlebotomy man, since phlebotomy was proscribed on certain parts of the body during certain astrological configurations. The wound man neatly summarized all the different kinds of implements that could cut and wound the body. If some of these images do rise to the level of “realism” that we would associate with “accurate” anatomical illustration, that is really just a function of the artist’s pride (and the commissioner’s wallet) rather than any common standard in artistic portrayal or practitioner expectation.

FIGURE 0.2: Phlebotomy man from a mid-fifteenth-century English physician’s handbook. Wellcome MS 8004, in the “Electronic Texts” collection, http://library.wellcome. ac.uk/cgi-bin/ph800.pl?id=31-32.

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Besides the obvious fact that the costs of illustration in a manuscript culture were always prohibitive, we need to understand that illustration was not a crucial aspect of medical representation in the ways we assume nowadays. The present series, the Cultural History of the Human Body, is premised on the idea that each volume will have the same average number of illustrations, leading the reader to believe that visual representation functioned equally in all historical periods. It did not. When we look at the Arabic tradition of anatomical illustration and find that almost the only images were triangles, circles, and other geometric forms, we should perhaps not jump to the conclusion that this was due to either prohibitions against bodily portrayal in Muslim law or artistic ineptitude. Rather, these were diagrams rather than feeble substitutes for “realistic” representation; indeed, close analysis shows that these developed over time to reflect new interpretations or understandings of the physical structure of the body. Muslim physicians may well have shared habits of “inferring the body” with their Christian counterparts and found such abstract figures satisfactory for their heuristic and pedagogical needs.13

FIGURE 0.3: Zodiac man from a late fourteenth-century physician’s folding almanac, meant to be folded and carried on the belt to the patient’s bedside.

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FIGURE 0.4: Wound man from a mid-fifteenth-century book of anatomical and medical

texts.

The body is not just an assembly of bone and muscle, sinew and viscera. It is a site of sensation, where emotion and intellect meet the natural flesh. The European Middle Ages contributed not simply practices of dissection but also basic Christian concepts such as the veneration of the wounds of Christ, not simply unique understandings of uterine anatomy but also valorization of the Virgin Mary’s role as a lactating mother. The bodily materiality of angels and

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demons may have received as much theological consideration as the ways in which the human body could earn salvation through its physical suffering. All these views about and practices on the body need not have been mutually coherent: Segregation of lepers in Christian Europe was accompanied by the notion that caring for them (even kissing them) was an act of charity that brought redemption to the soul of the caregiver.14 Augustine saw cruelty as that which injured the soul rather than the body, while Jerome (in line with a general Christian admiration for the sufferings of martyrdom) believed that suffering physical cruelty would benefit the soul. Early-medieval commentators in Latin Europe saw much violence but rarely called it cruel. Yet the depredations of the Mongol invaders of the mid-thirteenth century are described in a language of cruelty—systematic violence, sexual barbarism, and cannibalism—that had not been used to describe the Vikings or other groups in the intervening centuries. That this language owes more to a changing Christian ethos about violence (and a new emphasis on intent) than to the acts of the Mongols themselves is suggested by the fact that neither the Byzantines nor the Muslims, who suffered depredations by the Mongols no less horrific, used this language of cruelty.15 The present volume assembles the perspectives of historians and literary scholars to offer tentative soundings of medieval views on and experiences of the body. This multidisciplinary approach is needed because no one area of medieval culture held a monopoly on the body. Medicine certainly took the physical body as its main subject, but even if both criminal courts and religious jurists in Christian Europe increasingly turned to physicians, surgeons, and midwives for assessments of causes of death, severity of injuries, or miraculousness of cures, the body was the province of all. It was theologians and confessors who determined whether certain actions performed by the body constituted sin, and it was they who contributed formal speculations about what happened (or should happen) to the bodies of the dead and the resurrected. Secular authorities, for their part, determined when and how bodies needed to be sequestered, tortured, or obliterated. And every human who lived in the Middle Ages was an agent in the feeding and maintenance of his or her own body. These essays introduce us to many concepts that modern readers will no doubt find surprising. Neither birth nor death, Katharine Park argues in chapter 1, were discrete or momentary events; rather, they were processes that the body underwent gradually. Moreover, birth and death overlapped. “At the time of the labor, all women arrive in some way at death’s door,” it was said.16 But Park finds that even beyond recognition of the normal dangers of childbirth for women, the fate of the child was also of great concern. And, for Christians at least, that concern hung on its soul more so than its physical life. A stillborn child could be revived long enough to baptize it and save its eternal soul. This was the miracle sought, not the permanent resuscitation of the

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child. Similarly, death brought the potential for rebirth, either as malevolent revenants or as immortals in the resurrection. Birth and death could be good or bad, the quality of the union or separation of body and soul being paramount in both instances. In a wonderfully rich survey that spans the whole of Europe, Ann Carmichael introduces us in chapter 2 to the material body in its most literal sense. In what she calls the “medieval dietary revolution,” medieval bodies were transformed right around the millennium by a revolution in agricultural production that made new nutrients and a more consistent food supply part of the average person’s dietary life. In part, this transformation was due to the success of the Christian church in literally changing what people ate: They converted the whole of Europe to a Mediterranean diet, based on the triple axis of wheat, wine, and fish. This “cerealization” of Europe relaxed previous constraints on population growth, and in the immediate centuries thereafter we see population levels hitherto unknown in European history. Technological changes followed the increased demand for these three food items, which in turn made the land even more productive. Class distinctions in access to resources remained, of course, and these are also reflected in the incidence of various diseases among medieval populations, some having to do with contaminated food supplies (like ergotism), others with the increasingly successful spread of infectious diseases. Among the latter, leprosy, though not the most important in terms of the numbers of people infected (modern studies suggest that transmission rates of Hansen’s disease are very low), was the most important in effecting a major change in the social landscape of Christian society from the twelfth century on. A final factor impacting health was environment, and here Carmichael analyzes the new environments that urban dwellers of the High Middle Ages created, including their never-ending attempts to manage water and waste products within their cities. Even the siting of cemeteries became an object of public health concern, though cities were not entirely disadvantageous: They brought not only a more stable and diverse food supply but also more regular medical care since multiple medical specialties could thrive when they had large enough populations to support them. The late-medieval decline, Carmichael suggests, was probably due to multiple factors that undercut this complex economic system—including the onset of the Little Ice Age—and not just the impact of the singular disease of plague. In chapter 3, Ruth Mazo Karras and Jacqueline Murray introduce us to the notion of the “sexual body.” The sexed body is a body marked by the physical differences between the sexes. The sexual body, in contrast, refers to the role of the body in sexual activity. As they demonstrate, either male or female bodies could play male (active, penetrative) or female (passive, receptive) roles in sex. Moreover, Christian commentators also frequently used the notion of “natural” or “unnatural” sexuality to refer to sexual activity that could either

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lead to reproduction or not. Thus, all homosexual activity was unnatural, but so, too, was much heterosexual activity, for example, during menstruation (when impregnation was impossible). This system of beliefs was not always internally consistent; for example, despite characterizing women as passive, it also viewed them as inherently more lustful than men. And prostitution— which by definition contributed to either fornication (sex between unmarried persons) or adultery (where at least one of the partners was married)—was tolerated because it prevented greater social disruptions. What united these Christian views about sexuality, however, is that sex was largely seen as disruptive. It was to be tolerated within the bounds of marriage as a control to lust (which Augustine had seen as the principal feature of original sin) and as a means to bring more Christian souls into the world. But rejection of sex altogether was preferable, with the result that chastity might well be considered as important a “sexual identity” as any other. In chapter 4, Fernando Salmón takes an original perspective on the body as interpreted by learned medicine. Obviously, as we have already seen, medicine was the one field that took the body as its most central concern. But did physicians “see” the same body we do? Decades of work in the history of science and medicine have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a transcendental objective perspective on the body (or any other natural phenomenon); one has always to reckon with the way the eye is taught to see. Salmón cleverly takes the organ of vision itself, the eye, and uses it as a case study of how (as we have already seen) medieval physicians managed quite successfully without images or even dissection in creating a medical understanding of the body and its processes. In chapter 5, Anke Bernau explores “Bodies and the Supernatural: Humans, Demons, and Angels.” Using literary, didactic, and encyclopedic texts meant for general audiences, Bernau looks at the entire spectrum between microcosm (humans and the natural world) and macrocosm (the heavens and all entities that populate them). Amid these “cosmic networks,” Bernau finds intense concern about how angels, but especially demons, moved between these worlds and how they might involve themselves in the affairs of humans. Their “bodiliness” was paramount. As Augustine said, “[demons’] rational mind they share with the gods and with mankind. Their eternity they share only with the gods; their liability to passions, only with men, while their body of air is their own peculiarity.”17 Demons, ever seeking human ruin, bring sickness, insanity, and death. What is more, they can temporarily take on bodily form, even to the point of having sexual intercourse with humans. Fighting in their corner, however, mortals also had a good angel on their shoulder, “a sign of God’s love for us.”18 In the following chapter by Montserrat Cabré, we find a survey of medieval ideals of beauty. Grounded on shared philosophical ideals of light, proportion, and clarity, the three medieval religious and ethical traditions also shared

14

INTRODUCTION

certain notions of what constituted male versus female beauty. For the most part, male beauty was equated with sound morals: Although certain embellishments of the hair were acceptable, most cosmetics were not. Cabré’s essay is particularly revelatory in examining evidence for female authority in issues of cosmetics and beauty, the one area of body knowledge where women’s authority was widely recognized. My two contributions, chapters 7 and 8, examine the categories of “marked” bodies. For the most part, the preceding chapters have talked about the body as something all people have in common. True, we have already seen in Carmichael’s chapter the profound effects of social class (meaning most fundamentally “access to resources”) on the survival and nutritional status of different groups. But just as the history of the body can allow us to see the material and sensorial commonalities of humans, so it also allows us to see how social and legal distinctions have been grounded historically on differences between those bodies. Chapter 7 addresses, first and foremost, the most universally recognized—and profoundly consequential—bodily difference, that of sex. Despite a theory that has gained much popularity among modern academics that premodern Europe saw only a “one-sex” body, there is ample evidence that sex difference was recognized in the Middle Ages. Both the belief that some males could menstruate and ways of explaining and dealing with the phenomenon of hermaphroditism (the state of having some combination of male and female physical characteristics) offer ways to assess cross-culturally how medieval cultures constructed gender (social position and expectations believed to be grounded on biological sex) as well as how they explained sexual difference in their own scientific frameworks. Bodies could also be marked not by genetic chance but by disease and disability. Given that even healthy bodies would regularly be scarred by bloodletting, the physical marks of pathological or accidental trauma may have been less distinctive than we might assume. Again, modern techniques of paleopathology allow us some sense of the incidence of disfiguring diseases like spinal tuberculosis and leprosy, and these data in turn can help us make meaning out of various social practices dealing with disease. The arts of “reading” the body’s individual characteristics—physiognomy and chiromancy—were not the inventions of the Middle Ages, though they certainly thrived then, both of them taking on new interest in differentiating the characters of women from those of men. In chapter 8, we turn to European understandings of the diversity of humankind. Even though most Europeans would never in their lives have seen anyone that (in modern definitions) would not have been categorized as “white,” human variation was well understood to exist in the Middle Ages. The expanse of the world was imagined both through tales of marvels and monsters and through maps and geographic writings. An important question, however, is how notions of human difference intersected with practices of slav-

INTRODUCTION

15

ery. Although many areas of northern Europe did not practice slavery in the central and later Middle Ages, around the Mediterranean the ancient practices never ceased. Under both Islam and Christianity, slavery was premised on religion: One could not enslave a person of one’s own religious group. Most slaves by definition, therefore, were imported into the Mediterranean basin. Many were from Central Europe (especially Slavs, whence our word slave), but increasingly toward the end of the Middle Ages more were coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, I examine “blackness” as a way in which difference was defined, juxtaposing it to medieval understandings of the humanness of monsters in order to assess where and on what grounds the line defining “human” was drawn. In chapter 9, Samantha Riches and Bettina Bildhauer offer a rich survey of cultural representations of the body. Challenging the notion that there was a universal opposition between a “pure” soul and “sinful” flesh, they suggest that the body could at times partake of the transcendental and was, in truth, inseparable from the soul. The bodies of martyrs and mystics used their suffering or unusually empathic bodies to feel the presence of God and convey his love to others. The concept of the seven corporal works of mercy joins the notions of the body as both earthbound and transcendental in insisting that the pious Christian can earn spiritual rewards for tending to the bodily needs of others. Like Bernau, Riches and Bildhauer use a rich corpus of literary texts as evidence, and they find throughout such notions as the idea that body parts (including the genitalia) could have separate existences, while the practice of dividing up the bodies of saints in order to further disseminate their holiness is perhaps the most striking of medieval Christian practices. Finally, Sylvia Huot, likewise drawing on literary texts, looks for evidence of notions of the self as grounded in the body. The body, she finds, can literally be read as a book: It is the book of physical experience, in which the individual “knows his misery.” As she notes, “The body is indispensable to any sense of self, both as a private entity and as a member of society.” Evidence for this is found in French literary texts ranging from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. For example, the wonderfully unique romance of Silence tells the story of a girl who is raised by her parents as a boy in order that she not be disinherited. How does one form a masculine identity when endowed with the body of a woman? Silence is, in fact, enormously successful in creating a social identity as a man, but the story examines her inner turmoil (played out literally as a contest between nature and nurture). Two other stories—the twelfth-century Lai of Bisclavret by Marie de France, where the protagonist is a werewolf, and the late-medieval romance Melusine by Jean d’Arras, where the fairy Melusine must watch her body become partially serpentine every Saturday—show the body as magical or doubled, acting as a metaphor for the secrets of a self literally divided between two natures. As Huot notes, “these metamorphic and

16

INTRODUCTION

hybrid bodies are disturbing because of their paradoxical honesty, their quality of being at once incomprehensible and yet all too meaningful.” We will meet in these pages a broad cast of characters: everyone from the great theologians Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas to medical observers like Avicenna and literary writers like Boccaccio and Dante, together with many obscure and often anonymous people whose ideas or experiences have passed ephemerally through the records of history. There was no singular medieval view of the body. And, indeed, there is much this volume has not even touched on. We find nothing of the joys of dance, little about the torments exacted by the executioner, not enough about habits of bathing and notions of hygiene. Perhaps the biggest absence is the lack of any single piece on body as metaphor. We should know by now, of course, never to dismiss anything as “mere” symbol. In fact, there is ample evidence that figurative uses of “the body politic” could have very physical implications: An alleged traitor in Avignon in 1401, for example, had his body parts distributed in different sections of the city as part of a display of new civic authority to show that the popes no longer held sway there.19 Even acknowledging these absences, the essays that follow present a rich distillation of the best scholarship that has been brought forth on the “medieval body” in the past two decades. Why all the fuss? Because the body is indeed “good to think with,” precisely because it allows us to compare different cultures, different societies, and different moments in time and see how humans have variously perceived and worked with this same material substrate of flesh, bone, blood, and breath.

CHAPTER ONE

Birth and Death k atharine park

The thirteenth-century encyclopedist Thomas of Cantimpré concluded his discussion of human anatomy with a section on the “seven ages of man”; there, he divided the body’s path through time into distinct stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, “decrepitude,” and death.1 By incorporating death into his account of the temporal trajectory of the human body, he acknowledged its importance not merely as an event but as a corporeal age or state. For him, the dead were truly an “age class,” in the words of Patrick Geary; their corpses persisted after the soul’s departure, sharing space with and demanding attention from the living.2 The same could be said of those whom medieval Latin writers called the unborn (nonnati): fetuses whose bodies had achieved human form but had not yet been safely delivered. Although the unborn do not appear in Thomas’s account of the stages of the body, by the thirteenth century they, too, had become an important age class whose status and welfare increasingly preoccupied theologians, philosophers, and medical writers, as well as their own families and communities. Rather than focusing on birth and death as punctual events, marking the beginning and the end of the human life cycle, I will treat them as the first and last stages in the trajectory of the physical body from the point it was understood to take on human identity in its mother’s uterus to its ultimate reduction to dry bones in the grave. Then as now, the boundaries of these two stages were difficult to determine: It was unclear precisely when the fetus began to be human and what exactly it meant to be born, just as it was unclear precisely when the soul separated itself from the corpse and at what point, if at all, that corpse ceased to be a human body. Furthermore, birth and death often overlapped.

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Death was the constant and much-feared companion of birth throughout the Middle Ages; medieval accounts of pregnancy and childbirth were shaped by an acute sense of the vulnerability of mother and child and punctuated by descriptions of tragedies that took the life of one or both. At the same time, Christian accounts of the fate of the dead body emphasized its potential for rebirth, whether as a sinister revenant preying on the living or as an immortal entity resurrected at the Last Judgment. This chapter surveys medieval beliefs concerning birth and death on the part of both laypeople and learned authorities, as well as the practices to which these beliefs gave rise. I have tried to emphasize the multiplicity of those beliefs and practices, which varied over time, changing markedly over the thousand years between 500 and 1500, as well as in space; particularly in matters concerning the dead body, inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula—and to a lesser degree the Iberian Peninsula—differed significantly from their northern European counterparts. Finally, there were important social and cultural divergences between the beliefs and practices of Jews and Christians, country folk and city dwellers, rich and poor. In many respects, however, the most dramatic differences were those that separated the learned (primarily Christian clergy who wrote in Latin, at least until the late Middle Ages) and laypeople, most of whom could neither read nor write even in the vernacular. It is particularly difficult to recapture the beliefs and experiences of the latter group, who left no records of their own and whose lives we can know only through indirect evidence—through the records of criminal courts and inquisitions, archaeological remains, and visual sources, as well as the testimony of learned writers, whose interests and points of view often differed markedly from those of the unlearned. All of these sources have important limitations; read with care, however, they allow us to reconstruct, if sometimes insecurely, medieval ideas and practices regarding the body at both ends of the human life span.

THE BODY BEFORE BIRTH Attitudes toward the human fetus changed dramatically over the course of the medieval period. Abortion, like infanticide, had been legal and culturally acceptable in ancient Roman society, which sanctioned the absolute power of fathers over their children, both born and unborn. In contrast, early Christian doctrine emphasized the value of the lives of the very young. The first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine, outlawed infanticide in the fourth century, and church fathers such as Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo extended the prohibition to abortion, which they classified as homicide if performed after the fetal body had achieved human form.3 Augustine’s contention that the humanity of the fetus depended on the degree of its bodily development in utero was elaborated by theologians, natural philosophers, and legal au-

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thorities over the course of the Middle Ages. In the process, Christian doctrine increasingly diverged not only from its classical roots but also from its Jewish counterpart, which taught that the fetus did not achieve human status until its head had emerged from its mother’s body.4 Although learned Christian writers generally agreed that the fetus became human once its body was “formed” (formatus), that is, took on a human shape inside the uterus, authorities differed as to exactly how and when this occurred. While early Christian authors tended to place this at roughly forty days after conception, an influential discussion of the topic by the eleventh-century medical writer Constantinus Africanus delayed formation until the fourth month. For Constantinus, each month of the fetus’s gestation was governed by a different planet. During the first two months, influenced by Saturn and Jupiter, the fetal body developed from a milky drop of paternal semen into a wormlike lump of moist flesh, nourished by the mother’s retained menstrual blood. During the third month, in Constantinus’s words, Mars “divides the legs, separates the arms from the sides, and shapes the neck and head,” while in the fourth, the Sun “creates the heart, the liver, and the brain, and, infusing a soul into what it has created, naturally endows the embryo with movement.”5 The formation of these three principal internal organs coincided with the fetus’s animation as a human being. Following early Christian authorities, as well as Aristotle and Arabic writers in the Aristotelian tradition, later Latin writers tended to place the formation of the fetus somewhat earlier—between thirty and ninety days after conception—and they held that female fetuses, being wetter by nature, were slower to solidify than male ones. They were also more specific about the stages of development before this point, arguing that the fetus initially had the status of a plant followed by that of an animal; only after formation did God infuse it with a rational, immortal soul.6 For canon lawyers and Christian theologians, human ensoulment had two principal practical implications: It marked the point at which causing the death of a fetus—whether by assault or by the use of abortifacient drugs—became a form of homicide,7 as well as the point at which the fetus had a soul to lose. If a formed fetus died unbaptized, whether in utero or during childbirth, it was condemned to perpetual damnation. For laypeople, too, the status of the fetus changed dramatically over the course of pregnancy. Rather than wrestling with the fine points of theoretical embryology and its theological implications, however, they took a more practical view. A pregnancy became “official” when the mother felt the fetus quicken, or move within the womb (generally in the course of the fifth month). Before then, it was difficult for women, particularly first-time mothers, to know for certain that they were pregnant, given the many possible ways to interpret missed periods and other signs of pregnancy. Quickening, in the words

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BIRTH AND DEATH

of Laura Gowing, was “the moment at which the child announced itself definitively to the mother, and the mother announced it to the world.”8 Like the learned, laypeople often described the solidification and formation of the fetal body in terms of the coagulation of milk. The young Béatrice de Planissoles used this analogy to explain the operation of the contraceptive herbal amulet given to her by her lover in early fourteenth-century Montaillou, comparing it to “the [herb] the cowherds hang over a cauldron of milk in which they have put some rennet, to stop the milk from curdling so long as the herb is over the cauldron.” By preventing the (menstrual) fluid in her uterus from coagulating, despite the introduction of “rennet” (male semen), the contraceptive herb prevented the development of a fetal body.9 Whether described in terms of coagulation, quickening, formation, or ensoulment, the point at which the existence of a human fetus was acknowledged had important implications for laypeople as well as theologians and canon lawyers. For husbands, it promised a potential heir, another mouth to feed, or another pair of laboring hands. For wives, particularly the newly married, it solidified their identities as matrons—married mothers—the highest status available to the vast majority of laywomen. For unmarried women, in contrast, it presaged family dishonor and personal ruin. The extent of the disgrace is clear from petitions embedded in some of the late-medieval letters of remission issued by the French Crown, which rescinded the death penalty in cases of people convicted of capital crimes, including abortion or infanticide. Two letters from the end of the fourteenth century communicate the anguish experienced by young single mothers. One was driven to infanticide “by fear and dread of her father and mother . . . and also by her shame regarding her sin,”10 while another—an eighteen-year-old named Jehannette—attempted to rid herself of her fetus before it was born. According to her letter, she had sought out “a woman named Margot of the Large Arms and asked her if she could give her advice, and if she would provide her with some [abortifacient] herbs, which the said Jehannette ate only once. About two months later, whether by illness or otherwise, she brought forth from her body a child that was no larger than a little apple and seemed to her to be alive.”11 She suffocated the fetus and was convicted of infanticide, despite its prematurity, because it showed signs of life and had the form of a human child. Cases of this sort show that learned debates regarding the beginning of human life could have serious consequences for ordinary women and men. Those consequences became more marked over the course of the Middle Ages—evidence of the increasing concern for the welfare of the fetus on the part of ecclesiastical and secular authorities, as well as of lay Christians. Archaeological evidence from early-medieval sites shows the ways in which changing attitudes toward the fetus worked in practice. Miscarried or stillborn fetuses, because they died before they could be baptized, were by definition

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excluded from the Christian community and could not be buried in sacred ground.12 In the southern French village of Dessargues, for example, as late as the sixth century the remains of perinatal children were buried in special zones far removed from the church, suggesting that parents could not resist ecclesiastical prohibitions against the Christian burial of the unbaptized or had little interest in doing so. Five hundred years later, however, the unbaptized had migrated into the churchyard. Remains of perinatal children from the eleventh century were mostly clustered against the wall of the east end of the church directly underneath its gutters—a poignant substitute for baptism, as their corpses were bathed in water that had washed over the holiest section of the church.13 This shift in the location of the graves of the very young, which is also found elsewhere in Europe, testifies both to their increasing acceptance as part of the Christian community and to the increasing importance of baptism in defining that community. The same shift also demonstrates the degree to which local priests were willing to bend or adjust the rules to accommodate the sensibilities of families whose children had died before baptism, even as the church’s official emphasis on the necessity of baptism for salvation became more insistent. Some of these accommodations were ritual: Increasingly, infants were no longer baptized in batches at Easter and Pentecost, as in the early Middle Ages, but individually, shortly after birth, in order to reduce their chances of dying without the benefit of the sacrament. Other accommodations were theological, most notably the invention in the late twelfth century of the “limbo of young children,” a special section of hell in which unbaptized children did not suffer but were merely deprived of the sight of God.14 One of the most striking signs of this increasing concern for the salvation of the very young is the proliferation, beginning in the early thirteenth century, of miracle stories in which saints temporarily reanimated dead or stillborn infants so that they could be baptized, and the subsequent spread of “respite” shrines, where desperate parents might bring their dead babies for temporary resuscitation.15 The church’s campaign in favor of baptism intensified dramatically in the early thirteenth century. Synods and preachers announced with increasing force the obligation of Christians to baptize their children. They insisted that midwives receive instruction in the proper formulas and procedures, and they encouraged the practice of cutting living fetuses from the uteruses of women who died in childbirth, in hopes of saving infant souls.16 Parents and birth attendants became ever more eager to christen premature or miscarried infants who showed signs of life, however ambiguous or fleeting. By the same token, parents who were unable to baptize their children might try to circumvent church rules concerning Christian burial; a royal license issued to Hereford Cathedral in 1398 allowed the chapter to build walls around its precinct and to lock the gates at night, in part to prevent clandestine burials of unbaptized children.17

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In sum, there is a great deal of evidence that by the end of the thirteenth century, the church’s campaign in support of infant baptism had strongly influenced lay attitudes and practices. While it is not clear that ordinary Christians always had the same understanding of baptism as theologians— the inhabitants of Montaillou believed that the ritual also improved a child’s complexion and protected it from drowning and being eaten by wolves18— they accepted its importance and went to great lengths to confer its benefits on their children. This emphasis on baptism as a salvific practice seems also to have influenced circumcision among European Jews. While circumcision, unlike baptism, was performed only on boys and was not required for Jewish identity, medieval Ashkenazi scholars wrote of it as facilitating entrance into the Garden of Eden, and Jewish parents began to circumcise their infant sons even after death.19 Thus it was largely through the church’s increasing emphasis on baptism that the unborn became a true “age class” in medieval Christendom. Like their mothers, fathers, and older siblings, later-stage fetuses had souls that might be saved and bodies that required burial in hallowed ground. Baptized fetuses joined their families in family tombs and might even be the object of masses for the dead. Conversely, a fetus’s death could be classed as murder if someone caused its miscarriage by assaulting or poisoning its mother or if it was intentionally aborted, depriving it of both life and salvation. In this way, baptism and the benefits it conferred became an integral part of birth ritual, helping to distinguish between good and bad births.

GOOD BIRTHS AND BAD Unlike baptism, which had as its ultimate goal the welfare of the child, medieval birth ritual focused primarily on the welfare of the mother. The period before, during, and immediately after birth was seen as a time of maternal vulnerability, as is hardly surprising in a period in which childbirth and its complications were the principal cause of death for women of childbearing age. Medical writers stressed the importance of protecting those in the later stages of pregnancy from heavy labor and emotional distress, which might provoke a miscarriage and endanger the health of mother and child; in families that could afford it, women went into seclusion several weeks before birth. The perceived risks of late pregnancy were far outstripped by the risks of childbirth itself. Women feared not only the pains of birth but also its physical dangers; they might be unable to deliver their children, dying in long and fruitless labor, or they might succumb shortly afterward, unable to “purge” their uteruses of retained blood and tissue. And even successful deliveries carried with them the risk of serious illnesses such as perineal tearing and uterine prolapse.

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Women countered these dangers with a host of defensive measures.20 Many were purely naturalistic and appear in contemporary medical works: potions, suffumigation with aromatic substances intended to open the uterus, soothing herbal baths, and amulets made of natural substances, such as the loadstone, thought to ease the pains of labor and speed the process of birth. The most common measures to ensure a successful birth, however, mobilized supernatural forces using sacred objects and supplicatory prayers. The birth rooms of Jewish women were safeguarded against the malevolent figure of Lilith by iron knives—the Hebrew word for iron contained the initials of the four matriarchs Bilhah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Leah21—while Christians placed images of the Virgin Mary over their beds and girded laboring women with belts made from parchment scrolls inscribed with the legend of Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth. Measures of this sort aimed to ensure a good birth, understood as one that not only resulted in a healthy mother and baby but also conformed to norms of family honor and social and moral order. Good births were restricted by definition to married women, or very recent widows, and took place in domestic spaces, where the mother’s modesty was protected and where the pollution that attended childbirth, with its blood and its close association with sexual intercourse, could be contained.22 Although private, these spaces were also highly social; during and after childbirth, the mother was supported and attended by other women, including female relatives and neighbors experienced in childbirth, servants (in all but the poorest households), and sometimes a paid doula, whose function was to attend to the needs of the mother during the birth, and a midwife, whose role was deliver the baby. Midwifery—a recognized profession in ancient Mediterranean towns—appears to have reemerged as a paid and specialized occupation in larger European cities over the course of the thirteenth century and to have spread gradually to smaller townships and rural parishes; midwifery was one of only two female occupations listed on late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Jewish tombstones in one Bavarian town.23 This new development sprang in part from the church’s growing concern to provide for the baptism of dying infants—one early fourteenth-century Parisian synod required every town to have “skilled midwives sworn to perform emergency baptism”24—although it also reflected broader developments in health care. But it is only in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that we find evidence for the existence of professional midwives in significant numbers, even in smaller towns. Before then, births to royal mothers might be supervised by male physicians, but most women were attended by experienced matrons from among their relatives, friends, and neighbors. A mid-fourteenth-century painting by Giovanni of Milan shows a birth chamber immediately following a good birth of this sort (see Figure 1.1). (Although the scene depicts the birth of the Virgin Mary, the furniture, clothing,

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BIRTH AND DEATH

and activities reflect contemporary Italian practice.)25 A servant helps the new mother wash her hands—a purifying ritual—while the midwife has just finished washing and swaddling the newborn and has passed it to an older matron, most likely a close relative of the mother. A younger woman admires the healthy child, while another, at the left of the painting, receives a female visitor in festive dress, who has brought a gift for the mother, probably a platter of chicken or sweets, which were thought to be nourishing for women who had just given birth. The “goodness” of this birth resides not only in the evident health of mother and baby but also in the social and moral order of the scene. The messy effluvia of labor and delivery are nowhere in evidence; the placenta has been disposed of and the unclean uterine blood washed away. The soft body of the child has been swaddled to aid in forming straight, healthy limbs, an extension of the process of fetal coagulation inside the womb. The mother— a respectable, married matron—is surrounded by other women, whose role is not only to assist in the birth process but also to serve as witnesses to this important family event. The appearance of the female visitor shows that the birth has been duly announced to the broader community. Everything about the scene bespeaks conformity with social and religious norms. The birth scene in Giovanni of Milan’s painting is idealized and conventional; it does not reflect the many possible variations and perturbations of the birth ritual, including the occasional, if infrequent, presence of men (male

FIGURE 1.1: A good birth. Giovanni of Milan, Birth of the Virgin (fresco, Church of

Santa Croce, Florence), ca. 1360. From Wellcome Trust Site M0013514.

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relatives, physicians, surgeons, priests, and even notaries). More to the point, it does not show the many ways in which births could go seriously wrong. These bad births fill the rolls of medieval miracle collections—saints were invoked for the most part when things were not proceeding smoothly—and appear in private correspondence and family records. They included not only miscarriages and stillbirths but also prolonged and difficult labors, which threatened the lives of mother and child. In such cases, midwives or other birth attendants might try to reposition the fetus or to use expulsive techniques, such as provoking sneezing. If these failed, they might entertain more drastic measures, including—as a last resort—dismembering the fetus in utero to extract it surgically. This procedure seems to have been extremely rare, however, not least because it precluded an emergency baptism, which could be performed only after the appearance of the living infant’s head. Much more common are references to what would later come to be called Cesarean section (because Gaius Julius Caesar was reported to have been born in this way).26 The Cesarean operation was performed only on mothers who had already died, and its principal purpose was to extract the child for baptism rather than to save its life. The increasing currency of the procedure over the course of the later Middle Ages is another indication of the way in which the church’s growing investment in infant baptism profoundly affected contemporary birth practices, for the operation was strongly promoted by ecclesiastical authorities from the early thirteenth century on. Although it might be undertaken by midwives, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts and images suggest that families increasingly called in surgeons or barbers to perform the actual cutting. Figure 1.2, from a gynecological text in an early fifteenth-century German manuscript, shows an unusually successful Cesarean operation: The midwife holds a swaddled, living, and apparently healthy baby, which has just been extracted by her male colleague from its naked mother’s womb.27 Bad births, like good ones, had a social as well as a physical and spiritual dimension; almost as horrifying as the deaths of mothers and their unbaptized fetuses were the sordid circumstances in which unmarried mothers—frightened, often destitute, and themselves hardly more than children—delivered their babies alone. The French letters of remission describe numerous cases of this sort, which contrast strongly with the happy scene in Figure 1.1. Women gave birth in fields, empty rooms, or stables, stuffing their mouths with their clothes to muffle their cries. Fearing shame and dishonor, some killed their newborns, drowning them in town fountains or smashing them against walls and hiding the corpses under beds, benches, and dung heaps. One letter from 1457 describes the agonizing and solitary labor of a young woman named Denisette Bieart, who gave birth in the courtyard of an inn on a heap of stones and nettles, rupturing her navel in the process. After delivering a daughter, she “went into the inn, where she took a basin and water . . ., and having done this she

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FIGURE 1.2: Cesarean birth. London, Wellcome Library, MS. 49 (1420–1430), fol. 38r.

From Wellcome Trust Site L0000846.

climbed up to the privies, and there she took the said child by one of its arms and threw the water on its head, saying, ‘My child, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit’ . . . and then threw her child in the privies of the inn.”28 Denisette’s petition underscores the importance attached to infant baptism by laypeople as well as clerics. Indeed, the secular penalties for infanticide were often less if the mother had baptized the child before killing it or if she had killed it out of inability to support it rather than out of desire to hide her sexual sin. It was in large part to avoid situations of this sort that many urban hospitals, at least as early as the mid-thirteenth century, created special wards for pregnant women who wished to give birth secretly or had no other place to go. By 1378, the great Hôtel-Dieu in Paris employed a midwife, and by the fifteenth century, it had a lying-in room with space for twenty-four women, together with the midwife, her apprentice, and a dedicated nursing sister.29 The rituals, prescriptions, and practices that surrounded childbirth in latemedieval Europe reflected an intense and growing interest in the spiritual—and, to a lesser extent, the physical—welfare of the baby on the part of laypeople and of secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Attitudes toward the babies’ mothers were more ambiguous, shaped by pervasive concerns about female sexual immorality and bodily pollution. Women who gave birth to legitimate children in the context of legal marriages were honored as matrons who had fulfilled

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their familial duty and were celebrated with gifts, special food and clothing, and the festive events that accompanied the ritual of purification (or churching), which was usually performed about a month after the birth.30 In contrast, women who gave birth under other circumstances could find themselves ostracized by their families and marginalized by the church. The evolution of the purification ritual in northern Europe reflects the church’s increasing attempts to legislate lay morality from the twelfth century on. From the beginning, this ritual, which marked the mother’s cleansing from the pollution of childbirth and her reintegration into the Christian community, was denied to clerical concubines—an exclusion that was progressively broadened over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to include lay concubines, fornicators, adulterers, and those who had conceived in the context of incestuous relationships. In the process, as Paula M. Rieder has argued, it “produced the identity of a properly married wife and mother as appropriate and praiseworthy, setting such women forward as examples . . . towards which all women ought to strive.”31 Thus, over the course of the Middle Ages, official Christian teaching increasingly shaped lay views regarding both birth ritual and the lives of the unborn. It was in large part the church’s growing emphasis on the sacrament of baptism and its necessity for the salvation of infants and late-stage fetuses that fostered a new sense of the unborn as an “age class” parallel to that of the dead. But whereas late-medieval practices and beliefs that emphasized the selfhood of the unborn were relatively new in European culture—one reason why Thomas of Cantimpré began his list of the stages of human life with infancy rather than fetushood—the dead had long been conceived of in this way. From the very beginning of the medieval period, in Geary’s words, “death marked a transition, a change in status, but not an end. . . . The dead were present among the living through liturgical commemoration, in dreams and visions, and in their physical remains, especially the tombs and relics of the saints.”32 The living and the dead had long formed a true community, bound by mutual obligations and by an ongoing set of physical, social, and spiritual relationships, in a way that was not true of the living and the unborn.

GOOD DEATHS AND BAD Like births, deaths could be good or bad, and as in the case of birth there were differences between lay and clerical views on the topic.33 Both groups emphasized the importance of the last rites—confession, communion, and extreme unction, all administered on the deathbed—and Christian burial, of which the basic elements were a funeral mass, the purification of the corpse with incense and holy water, and its burial in consecrated ground.34 In general, however, those educated in Christian theology described death in terms of the separation

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of body and soul, emphasizing the fate of the latter; at least until the middle of the thirteenth century, they had relatively little interest in what happened to the body during the period between its burial and its resurrection at the Last Judgment, except in the case of saintly relics.35 Laypeople, in contrast, had a much broader range of concerns. While many of these were social, focusing on the order and safety of the community and the appropriate transmission of property within the family, others were concerned with the fate of the corpse. The dead body was a highly charged and powerful object in large portions of medieval Europe and strongly implicated in lay views concerning good and bad deaths. The Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach organized the penultimate book of his early thirteenth-century Dialogue on Miracles, called “On the Dying,” according to a fourfold typology: those who lived and died well, those who lived and died badly, those who lived badly and died well, and those who lived well and died badly.36 In every case, his principal concern was with the soul of the dying person. The best deaths were those where the dying had prepared themselves spiritually for their passing and greeted it with joyful acceptance. This was easiest for the truly holy—in Caesarius’s compilation, overwhelmingly Cistercian monks and lay brothers—but laypeople could also die well, even under unpromising circumstances; one lucky Frisian soldier received a fatal wound in battle but was carried back to his village, where he had just enough time to receive the last rites before “giving up his soul.”37 And even the last rites could be dispensed with under exceptional conditions, as in the case of pilgrims who died on pilgrimage or crusaders who died in battle.38 In general, however, clerics viewed sudden and unexpected death with horror, as it precluded the spiritual and ritual preparation required for salvation; for this reason Caesarius included among those who had died badly a monk who perished from a fulminating stroke while listening to the gospel in the church choir.39 Other elements of a good death also required advance notice: Before receiving the sacraments, the dying were expected to dispose of their material affairs in a just and orderly manner, making restitution to those they had harmed and bequeathing a certain amount to God in the form of alms or donations to the church. For this reason, many Christians waited to make their wills until they were on their deathbed, where the act became part of the ritual severing of ties to the material world. According to Caesarius, some were even revived miraculously just long enough to do this, including one lay brother who had cheated a ferryman of a small fare.40 In contrast, some of the most horrifying deaths in his collection involved people who insisted on holding onto their wealth. One avaricious usurer from Metz, who had persuaded his wife to bury his money with him, was found with two toads in his grave, “one in the mouth of his purse and the other one his chest”; the first was taking gold coins out of his

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purse and giving them to the second, who was inserting them into the corpse’s heart. “How his soul must have been suffering in hell from immortal worms,” concluded Caesarius, “if such horrendous things were happening to his body in his grave?”41 Because good deaths were foreseen and prepared, they rarely happened in solitude. The community gathered to support the dying person: fellow monks and lay brothers, in the case of the many male religious who figured in Caesarius’s compilation, or family members, neighbors, and associates, in the case of laymen and -women. The corpse was then washed, either reclothed or wrapped in a linen shroud, and placed on a reusable hearse. At this point, lay and monastic practices diverged. At least in Caesarius’s order, the dead body was carried to the oratory to await the funeral mass, whereas in large portions of northern Europe, including the region of Germany in which Caesarius lived, local townsfolk and villagers kept it overnight at home for the wake, where it became the focus of a rowdy celebration, which involved feasting, dancing, joking, and singing. (In regions where the wake was less common, such as France and Italy, the funeral party was often held after the interment.)42 This widespread practice had long met with ecclesiastical disapproval: The German abbot Regino of Prüm (fl. ca. 900) noted that the corpse should be taken immediately to the church and watched over with “fear and trembling and reverence” rather than “diabolical songs.”43 Whether it belonged to a layperson or a monk, however, the corpse would be the object of a funerary mass the next morning, after which it was carried from the church to the cemetery, repurified with incense and holy water, and buried.44 Before the fourteenth or fifteenth century, burial arrangements tended to be quite simple; the corpse was placed in its grave, usually without a coffin, and the excavated earth piled up over it to form a mound that was often its only identifying sign. As modern excavations have confirmed, graves were typically oriented in an east-west direction, and corpses were placed on their backs with their feet toward the east so that they would be facing Christ when they rose again at the Last Judgment. It is not clear to what extent graves were identified; some images show markers such as wooden crosses, slabs, or standing stones. Prayers for the dead were often offered at the gravesite, and people occasionally asked to be buried with family members, which suggests that communal memory of individual burial places persisted for some time.45 One of the most dramatic developments in funerary practices over the course of the later Middle Ages was the increasing differentiation of graves, as laypeople requested to be interred in locations previously forbidden to them, such as the cemeteries of monasteries and hospitals (sanctified by the prayers and religious discipline of the inhabitants) or inside the fabric of the church (closer to the relics of the saints). Such privileges were expensive, enriching

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religious houses and cathedral chapters and available only to the wealthy and influential.46 This development coincided with the creation of ever more elaborate and differentiated tombs for those who could afford them; these might incorporate portraits and epitaphs carved into slabs set into church pavements or even carved effigies on raised tombs.47 The increased visibility and individualization of these tombs not only reflected the honor and status of the person and his or her family but also encouraged passersby to offer prayers for the soul of the dead person; one of the factors contributing to this practice was the elaboration and spread of the doctrine of purgatory, which allowed the prayers of the living to shorten the period during which the dead had to expiate their sins before joining the community of the blessed.48 Together with the last rites, therefore, the orderly disposition of the corpse was fundamental to a good death. The worst deaths, in contrast, were those that precluded burial in hallowed ground, as in the case of people whose corpses were physically unrecoverable, whether lost at sea, burned to death, or devoured by animals. (It is worth recalling that the inhabitants of Montaillou believed that baptism protected against death by drowning or being eaten by wolves.)49 Sometimes the violation of the usual rituals resulted from particular circumstances, such as devastating epidemics, where the sheer numbers of the dying, combined with the fears of the living, outstripped the number of priests available to administer the sacraments and demanded hasty and impersonal burial in mass graves. The Florentine chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani vividly described the proliferation of bad deaths in Florence during the great plague of 1348: “Many died without confessing or receiving the other sacraments, and many died alone. . . . At every church they dug wide, deep pits down to the water level, and those of modest means who died during the night were carried over the shoulder [by household members] or people who received a great deal of money for the service. In the morning when many corpses were found in the pit, they took earth and shoveled it down on top of them, and later other bodies were placed on top, and then another layer of earth, just like making lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.”50 There were, finally, certain classes of people who were excluded by definition and decree from Christian burial, including Jews, unbaptized infants, suicides (a prohibition unevenly enforced), executed criminals, heretics, and the excommunicated. The corpses of these groups met various fates: Jews were buried with their own rites in their own cemeteries, which were often located outside of the city walls, and unbaptized infants might be buried in special, unconsecrated annexes to churchyards, as already mentioned.51 Criminals were often left to rot on gallows or gibbets, as a deterrent, while the excommunicated and those whose deaths stank of demonic intervention were hastily interred in woods or fields. The bodies of heretics—and later witches—were usually burned.

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The bad deaths described by Caesarius of Heisterbach in the early thirteenth century were on the whole extreme: usurers who were plagued by demonic frogs, murderers, thieves, blasphemers, and a debauched monk who refused communion on his deathbed, saying, “The trumpet of hell is blowing; let’s go.”52 One of the most striking aspects of clerical writing about death in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in contrast, is the way in which this definition of a bad death came to be broadened, so as to threaten even those who died in good order, at home, in their own beds, with wills made and a priest close at hand. This lowering of the threshold for a bad death seems to have reflected the church’s campaign to legislate lay morality and educate laypeople regarding the importance of the sacraments—in this case, confession and extreme unction—which also informed the late-medieval clerical promotion of infant baptism and the churching of mothers already described. The idea was strongly promoted in the fifteenth century through the proliferation of manuscripts, printed books, images, and sermons related to the “art of dying” (ars moriendi).53 Two main treatises circulated under this title, the more famous of which was organized around a series of images that showed a sick man on his deathbed alternately tempted by demons and comforted by angels. Many versions include a summary image of a good death—for example, Figure 1.3, from a late fifteenth-century German printed edition—in which the sick man, having confessed his sins, receives the viaticum from the priest, attended by victorious angels, one of whom swings a censer filled with incense that drives a lingering demon under the bed. This woodcut of a good death differs significantly from the painting of a good birth in Figure 1.1. Both are idealized portrayals, but the ideals represented are rather different. The birth scene is familial, social, and intimate; the mother and child are cared for by servants, female relatives, and friends. In the death scene, in contrast, family and friends are kept at bay; the dying man is attended only by the priest (not counting the two angels), and the well-appointed room is dominated not by domestic vessels and textiles but by the ritual objects required for communion on the bedside table. This woodcut reflects the austere clerical ideal of the art of death, which stressed the enormous difficulty of dying well, even under the best of circumstances, and the danger posed by relatives and associates of the dying person, who could not afford to be distracted from the task at hand by being pestered for last-minute instructions, offered food or medicines, or, worst of all, encouraged to put off the final sacrament in hopes of recovery. Despite their differences, however, the two images have one striking thing in common: Neither includes a doctor. The absence of any figure of medical authority is an important reminder that, under normal circumstances, neither birth nor death was medicalized in the Middle Ages, as they are in the modern West.

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FIGURE 1.3: A good death. Woodcut on leaf Aii recto, from Ars morie[n]di ex uarijs Scripturaru[m] sententijs collecta . . . (Leipzig: Conrad Kachelofen, ca. 1495/1498). Houghton Library, TypInc 2924.

The clerical ideology regarding the nature and importance of a good death, as defined in the Art of Dying, had considerable influence in the urban centers of late-medieval Europe. One result was the extension of the benefits of confession and absolution even to criminals condemned to execution. It is no coincidence that one of the strongest advocates for this new practice was the French theologian Jean Gerson (1363–1429), who was also the author of the

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treatise on the art of dying on which the woodblock illustration in Figure 1.3 was ultimately based.54 This new concern was reflected in the foundation, beginning in the early fourteenth century, of confraternities of pious laypeople devoted to ensuring a good death for criminals not only by providing them with the sacraments and a Christian burial but also by accompanying them to their deaths with prayers and religious images that drew explicit parallels between their impending executions and the martyrdom of the saints.55 These innovations in execution ritual had extraordinary resonance, transforming (at least in theory) what had been seen as one of the worst deaths imaginable into one of the best available to ordinary sinners: The criminal had not only full access to all of the sacraments and to any number of visual and verbal supports for his or her end-of-life conversion but also the highly unusual advantage of knowing the exact moment of his or her death—a grace previously granted only to visionaries and saints.

THE BODY AFTER DEATH Christian theology treated death as the moment of the separation of the soul from the body; until they were reunited at the Last Judgment, the soul—the primary focus of the clerical technology of dying—took its place in heaven, hell, or (temporarily) purgatory, while the body rotted in the grave, of relatively little practical interest or account. This was, however, a minority view. Many inhabitants of medieval Europe were less sanguine about the passivity of the corpse. Even among the learned, the continuities between living and dead bodies were enshrined in contemporary physiological theory. According to medical writers and natural philosophers, the physical process that shaped the body’s trajectory from birth to death was best expressed through the metaphor of an oil lamp, where the oil in the reservoir corresponded to the “radical moisture,” derived from the father’s seed, that permeated all the tissues of the body as oil permeates a wick. The functions of the living body depended on its natural heat, which fed on the radical moisture like the oil lamp’s flame. Aging was a process of drying and, ultimately, cooling, as this moisture became exhausted—a process that could be extended by temperate living and proper diet but only to a limited degree. Thomas of Cantimpré used this idea to frame his description of death as the final stage of human existence: “Indeed, death is the privation of life, as darkness is the privation of light. Life is warm and humid, and death is cold and dry. . . . And just as the heat of a fire can be extinguished sometimes by suffocation, sometimes by being blown out, and sometimes by the lack of oily moisture, so it is with the vivifying heat in a mortal animal.”56 The process of cooling and drying did not stop at the moment of death but continued as the corpse putrefied within the tomb; at least in its early stages, death was an

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ongoing physical process as well as a physical state. The final outcome of that process was the skeleton: the body reduced to its dry and bony core. Although Thomas’s account was based on ancient authors, many laypeople shared this view of death as a material process, believing that the body’s life force dwindled for months after burial, so that the corpse continued to feel and even move. Multiple beliefs and practices testify to this idea, including the notion that corpses bled in the presence of their murderers and the disinclination to tend gravesites, so as to let the departed rest.57 But perhaps the best evidence for the difference between clerical and lay views concerning the vitality of the recently dead body was the widespread belief that under the right circumstances corpses might rise from their graves and walk among the living, often with dire effects. Nancy Caciola has collected numerous medieval stories of corpses that rose from their graves to terrorize their communities, including several recounted by the early thirteenth-century chronicler William of Newburgh, an English contemporary of Caesarius of Heisterbach.58 The most elaborate of William’s stories involved a jealous husband who spied on his philandering wife by climbing up onto a beam in her bedroom. Catching her in the act with a young neighbor, he became enraged, fell to the ground, and in his fury refused to accept the last rites. He received a Christian burial, though William was quick to note that “it didn’t do him any good,” since that night he rose from his tomb and wandered through the town, while the “air infected by his decaying body . . . filled all the houses with illnesses and death.” After many such outings, when the town had been virtually depopulated, two young men decided to take action against the corpse. They exhumed it, attacked it, extracted its heart, and burned the remains. This calmed the epidemic, wrote William, as if “the air, which had been corrupted by his pestilential movements had been purged by the fire.”59 The last sentence here is telling; whereas the young laymen believed they had rid the town of its curse by burning the offending corpse so that it could no longer prey on the village, the learned cleric William suggested a naturalistic interpretation: The fire itself had cleared the air. Furthermore, he rejected the idea that a corpse might move of its own accord, attributing its wandering to “the work of Satan” rather than to its own lingering animation.60 William was typical of many learned clerics in insisting, in line with Christian theology, that corpses could be animated only by demons, not by the persistence of the indwelling human spirit. Nonetheless, belief in the latter phenomenon was widespread, especially among northern Europeans, and was reflected in a variety of funerary practices intended to immobilize particularly dangerous corpses by staking them in their graves.61 Burchard of Worms, the author of an eleventh-century penitential compilation, condemned women who staked the bodies of children who died without baptism, on the grounds that “if they didn’t the infant would rise up and could harm many people,” as well as the bodies of mothers who had died in childbirth without being able to

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deliver.62 Virtually all such wandering corpses belonged to those who had died badly, like parturient mothers and their children or William of Newburgh’s jealous husband. For the most part, their deaths were sudden and untimely, depriving them of the sacraments while their unexhausted vitality continued to animate their corpses until the process of putrefaction had wholly stripped the moist flesh, locus of animation, from the dry bone.63 Fear of these wandering corpses should not be confused with a general belief in corpse pollution, according to which any contact with dead bodies was seen as dangerous and impure. In fact, medieval Christians differed dramatically from Greek and Roman pagans in their rejection of this idea, due in large part to their belief in an afterlife and their veneration of the saints. Saints were understood to be present in their mortal remains, and their corpses, far from being sources of pollution, were reservoirs of protection and magical power. From relatively early on, Christians welcomed the dead into towns and cities and moved their cemeteries from the periphery to the center of their settlements, as the religion increasingly organized itself around the corporeal relics of the martyrs and the dying and mutilated body of Christ.64 One result seems to have been a comfort with the manipulation and even fragmentation of corpses that had few parallels in other cultures and religions, including medieval Judaism. Caroline Bynum has described the increasing enthusiasm with which European Christians pried into the human corpse in the later Middle Ages, “studying it, severing it, distributing and scattering it.”65 The bodies of saints were parceled out to various locations to multiply their miracle-working power; secular and ecclesiastical princes had their corpses divided and interred in various locations to reinforce territorial claims and increase their proximity to saintly relics (which were themselves usually fragments of corpses); while crusaders who died in the Holy Land had their bodies boiled and the bones repatriated, to be buried in familiar soil. Bynum has emphasized the theoretical and symbolic dimensions of these procedures, but there were practical reasons as well. Precisely because Christians chose to bury their dead in the middle of towns and cities, rather than in extramural locations, it was inevitable that the limited space available in urban cemeteries would fill up, so that the skeletons of previous occupants would have to be exhumed and stored in charnel houses in order to make space for further bodies.66 Similarly, the most effective form of embalming, which became increasingly common over the course of the later Middle Ages, involved opening and eviscerating the corpse. This was critical to the propagation of the cults of “new saints”— living holy women and men (as opposed to long-dead martyrs)—whose preserved corpses became the foci of popular devotion. Thus the practice was encouraged by local religious authorities and municipal leaders, whose institutions and cities stood to gain wealth and prestige from the presence of a saintly relic.67

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The practice of embalming seems in turn to have enabled and encouraged the practice of medical autopsy to determine cause of death. The first references to autopsies in which the corpse was actually opened, rather than externally inspected, appear in the late thirteenth century, in and around the northern Italian city of Bologna, which was home to one of the most important medical faculties in Europe.68 It was a short step from autopsy to the institution of human dissection as an element in medical instruction, intended to illustrate and supplement the reading of medical texts.69 As Bynum emphasized, such practices could evoke strong reactions on the part of contemporaries, given concerns about not only the fate of the resurrected body but also the potential sensitivity and residual animation of the corpses of the recently dead. It is largely for this reason that autopsy and dissection flourished first in Italy, where there is little evidence of this fundamentally northern European idea.70 It took considerably longer for these practices to take root in northern universities, where sensitivities to the vulnerabilities and dangers of dead bodies were more acute, despite the practice of funerary partition—another indication of the diversity and multiplicity of medieval European views regarding both birth and death.

CODA: THE BODY REBORN Despite their differences, however, most Christians believed that death and putrefaction in the grave were not the ultimate fate of the human body. Rather, this would be reborn at the end of time, at the Last Judgment, when the soul of every human who had ever lived would be reunited with its body, to take up eternal residence in either heaven or hell. It was clear that the resurrected body—the eighth stage of human existence, to extend Thomas of Cantimpré’s seven-part schema—would be dramatically different from its earthly version, since, as the apostle Paul had explained, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”71 The exact nature of this new, immortal human body was difficult to determine, although medieval theologians and natural philosophers spent time and energy on the problem. How old would it be? Would it have a sex? In what sense would it be the same as the earthly body, once its nature had changed? Like medieval theological debates concerning the fetal body, these were not followed in detail by lay Christians, and it is difficult to know how they imagined the resurrected body. Insofar as they imagined it at all, their views were probably consonant with the images of the Last Judgment that decorated many churches, which portrayed the body’s resurrection as a rewinding or reversal of the process of death and burial, as in the middle register of one of the portal reliefs of Rheims cathedral, which shows the dead prying open and emerging from their tombs (Figure 1.4).72 The body parts

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FIGURE 1.4: The resurrection of bodies. The Last Judgment (relief, north transept, Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Rheims), mid-thirteenth century. Wikimedia Commons, http:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reims-Portail_Nord-Jugement_dernier.jpg.

of those who had lost members or whose corpses had been devoured or dismembered would be reassembled, and the bones of those who had rotted in the grave would be reclothed with flesh. Shrouds and winding sheets would be discarded, to reveal the body as naked as when it came out of its mother’s womb. For those who had died badly, this rebirth was bad as well; their new, incorruptible bodies ensured that they would suffer the tortures of the damned for all eternity. For those who had died well, however, this was the best of all rebirths—to bodily felicity and the communion of the saints.

CHAPTER TWO

Health, Disease, and the Medieval Body ann g. carmichael

Diet and environment shape the physical health and disease risks of human populations. Because people in the Middle Ages accepted different notions and concepts of health and disease than we hold today, it can be confusing to build an understanding of their actual afflictions from written records. We must also locate their experience within a reconstruction of the larger material world. The traditional temporal divisions of early, middle, and late Middle Ages helpfully distinguish different regimes in the health and disease experience of Europeans.

THE MEDIEVAL DIETARY REVOLUTION The year 1000 c.e. falls just in the middle of enormous changes within the medieval society and economy. What people were supposed to eat was among the issues most at stake, and how that food would be obtained rebuilt European landscapes. Throughout the entire Middle Ages, 85 to 90 percent of all Europeans were agricultural producers, and the underlying health and well-being of these farmers reflect important aspects of the “medieval body” to which elite medieval observers offered scant attention. The transformative character of the millennium’s dietary revolution flows from the changes made to the prospects of humble people.

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Eating like Monks Believing that most lay Christians should emulate monastic habits, the church gradually imposed dietary restrictions across the liturgical calendar: Bread, fish, and wine were the biblical foods important to the Christian narrative. To convert Europe north of the Alps to this essentially Mediterranean diet required considerable effort, a process that R. I. Moore describes as the cerealization of agricultural production. Cerealization helped to relax prior constraints on population growth, as well as secure new sources of wealth for those who had controlled land and labor with the sword. Around 1030, Rudolfus Glaber told the story of Saint Maiolus (d. 944), an early abbot of the great monastery at Cluny, who was captured and held for ransom by Saracens. Cluniac legend held that he refused to eat food to which he was not accustomed, but because Maiolus’s captors observed his saintly demeanor, one rolled up his sleeves and cooked bread for the monk “hygienically,” on a washed shield. For Glaber’s home audience the story served to celebrate monastic purity and self-denial, a hallmark of the reform movements orchestrated by Cluny and other monasteries in the tenth century. It shows us that baked bread was already the monk’s standard. It was not yet the preference of the warrior aristocracy, whose unrepentant meat eating was only minimally constrained by reformist monks.1 Later, rich Benedictine monks adapted their order’s dietary habits to the diet of the secular aristocracy. Even before the eleventh century, Benedictines had started fussing with the old rules, busily inventing hand signals at the table: The Rule of Saint Benedict dictated silence during meals. The rule had also proscribed meat consumption by healthy monks, and Pope Gregory III (d. 741) further forbade all Christians to eat horsemeat, a pagan practice.2 In the eleventh century Cluniac (Benedictine) monks still ate only fish, milk, cheese, and oils, in addition to a few types of beans and fruits—all, of course, in addition to their baked bread. But monks by the twelfth century parsed the guidelines further, distinguishing between “flesh-meat” and “meaty dishes.” Stipulating new locations within the monastery where eating could take place permitted technical compliance with a rule now half a millennium old. By the later Middle Ages they were eating prodigious quantities of meat and fish, amounts imaginable today only among wealthy Westerners on a high-protein fad diet.3 Transforming the Land Monastic demand for loaves and fishes led to early and distinctive medieval technological breakthroughs, which were quickly appropriated and adapted by nascent urban centers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Monks idealized aristocratic Roman preference for wine, which partly succeeded among the nobility; even among the privileged, however, wine never replaced beer. Nevertheless, viticulture, like cerealization, became an important component

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of new land management and landscape transformation and thus had a significant ecological impact. Clerical views of what good Christians should eat and drink created general demand and taste for bread, fish, and wine. Eating fresh fish demonstrated religious dietary observance as well as high social status; most town dwellers or prosperous free farmers had to be content with salted, dried, or otherwise preserved fish on days when meat was proscribed. The church significantly enhanced the status of fish in the European diet, while defining fish as “anything that swims.”4 Archaeological evidence supports both this bizarre definition of fish and the increased demand: Refuse heaps at a Flemish monastery contain more fish bones than secular sites at the same time and place, and some pits contain unsettling evidence of monks consuming fetal rabbits.5 Meanwhile, the evidence of long-distance, commercial distribution of marine fish appears within a few decades of the year 1000.6 Throughout the High Middle Ages most ordinary Europeans in towns and cities ate “white fish” (usually from the cod family) rather than “fatty fish” (for example, salmon and eel). Only the latter offered greater nutritional advantages to the hungry—fat, oils, vitamins, and calories. Entrepreneurial Benedictine monks by the tenth century undertook extensive land clearance, deforestation, swamp drainage, and intensification of cereal and fish production. Novelties included “barrier fishing,” with mill dams and stocked ponds, in part to serve their domestic needs. By the twelfth century Benedictines were comfortably situated, and the next group of monastic reformers, the Cistercians, literally broke new ground. Monks effected some of the most novel and original hydrological innovations, although early treatises on fishing technology and estate management do not appear until the period after 1300.7 The growth of towns and cities along waterways was equally important to the development of secular, interregional trade in marine fish. By the later Middle Ages, marine commercial fishing, approaching industrial scale, further secured the staple place of fish in urban diets throughout western Europe. Medieval fishing altered Europe’s hydrological landscapes with artificial ponds for stocking and storing fresh fish until it was ready to eat.8 Unless dried, salted, or pickled, fish had to be eaten quickly after catching: The stench of rotting fish is proverbial. Fish thus had its greatest impact on urban environments, which had to rely on local production and storage strategies. The ecological consequences of baking bread were also significant. Baked bread required finer milling, thus better mills and ever more fuel. Aggressive land management gobbled up European woodland, which steadily disappeared. Forests were felled by the expansion of arable land and the demands of building and industry, and by the late thirteenth century coal and peat came into routine domestic use across northern France, Flanders, the Low Countries, and many places in England.9

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Multiplying Human Numbers More than pious compliance with particular dietary restrictions, food security was crucial to the health of the great majority of medieval people. Over the earlier Middle Ages, from the sixth through the tenth centuries, an era of recurrent plagues and barbarian incursions gradually quieted.10 At the same time, modest climate warming may have created better conditions for agriculture. But, apart from Anglo-Saxon Britain, demographic recovery was slow. By the tenth century the predatory behaviors of warring aristocrats became the greatest threat to the dietary security of early-medieval farmers. To an extraordinary level all farmers’ resources and investments were at risk of destruction by the pillaging, plunder, and mayhem of tenth-century armed, militant aristocrats, who capriciously destroyed harvests and draft animals, seizing the pigs and other foraging animals on which many free farming families relied. Clerical interventions on behalf of their own estates tipped the balance toward cerealization. Well before the millennium, strong regional variations in staple foods existed. Early-medieval farmers added barley, rye, and oats as secondary cereal crops, in part because climates north of the Alps did not permit reliable wheat harvests and in part because growing wheat was labor intensive. Throughout western Europe the poorest relied on sedentary pastoralism, which gave even the powerless access to the natural products of forests and streams. Stability in cereal production and improvements in market distribution led western Europe into a period of dramatic population growth. Between 1000 and 1300 c.e. Europe’s population trebled.11 The adoption of a grain-based diet increased the number of human lives that could be minimally supported. Because grains are more easily digested by young children, more survived to sexual maturity. The resulting broad cultural changes did not necessarily produce better health at the population level, however, because these changes also led to deterioration of the legal status and dietary options of once-free farmergatherers. Lacking fundamental freedoms, peasants’ baseline nutritional status probably worsened, even though their overall numbers increased and their long-term food security improved. Episodic undernutrition (hunger, famine) seems to have been the more important demographic constraint in the period before 1000. Nevertheless, the general healthiness of peoples living before the cereal revolution is still much debated. Kathy Pearson doubts that hungry people would have consumed sufficient calories from grains, pulses, vegetables, and fruits.12 Moreover, she argues that the fiber content of high fruit and vegetable intake would have produced uncomfortable levels of flatulence and chronic constipation alternating with diarrhea. Michael McCormick instead emphasizes that recurrent famines offer us evidence of Carolingian-era population growth.13 In his view, harvest shortfalls eclipsed the rapidly expanding capacity of transportation; ro-

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bust market networks provide evidence of growth in bulky long-distance trade well before the millennium. Famine retreated with the expansion of markets. Finally, Massimo Montanari focuses broadly on food entitlements.14 Before the great changes of the 950 –1050 period, Montanari claims, famine was either an “agricultural famine”—a harvest failure from whatever cause—or a “forest famine”—an inability to access the many products of the forest that helped to sustain the lives of humans when grain or other crops became unavailable. Access to forests and streams provided a safety net against starvation, as they offered plant and animal sustenance that balanced human diets. Famines were mostly local, only occasionally regional. Skeletal materials suggest that in the earlier Middle Ages northern Europeans were nutritionally better off than they would be in the richer late Middle Ages. In aggregate skeletal populations early-medieval people are overall several inches taller than counterparts from the preindustrial period between 1450 and 1750. In fact, according to the long view of human heights that Richard Steckel has provided, earlier-medieval Scandinavians were as tall as or taller than in the early twentieth century, reinforcing myths of Viking giants.15 Final adult height is determined by both nutrition and genetics, and so aggregate height at the population level to some extent reflects social and economic conditions as well. But not all agree that the mean height of “skeletal assemblages” reflects any “cumulative penalty” on final adult height for a child surviving famine.16 Dietary deficiencies and other aspects of malnutrition may nonetheless reinforce the health costs of steadily widening social-class divides among medieval people.

Diet and Divisions by Social Class There is historical consensus that the later Middle Ages were governed by a very different dietary regime than that which dominated the period before 1300.17 And later-medieval people were, on average, shorter. Within the framework of postmillennium stability, differential access to food and notions of appropriate dietary consumption according to social status governed health patterns for centuries. Significant nutritional divides separated Europeans: rich from poor, urban from rural. Grain production served the elites, both secular and clerical, by allowing feed security for their horses and by ensuring the transfer of small farm animals from the peasants’ gardens to the elites’ tables. Through a variety of economic and social mechanisms, lords and rich townsmen secured high protein consumption without using the sword. Changing diets, especially by social class rather than by geography or climate, shaped medieval perceptions of disease. In a millennium-long perspective, from late antiquity to the era of global maritime trade, health for the many was shaped by cultural mechanisms that reinforced dietary divides between

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rich and poor. Assumptions about what constituted adequate nutrition and especially perceptions of disease reported in medieval documents reflected great social divides, although not always in ways typical of our modern era. Meat was quintessentially the aristocrats’ fare; secular aristocrats who refused meat even became suspect of heretical affinities. Germanic peoples also preferred fermented grains to wine, and ale remained a more popular beverage for all classes in transalpine Europe. Beer production rose dramatically in the later Middle Ages with the spread of hops cultivation; long-distance beer trade was possible because hopped beer did not spoil quickly.18 Well before the year 1000, the ancient exotic spice and aromatics trade expanded, adding novel substances (e.g., cumin, galingale, camphor), all in ever-increasing quantities.19 By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, early cookbooks show how important the far-flung spice trade had become. Aristocratic tastes demanded expensive spices, which throughout the medieval centuries displayed one’s social status. Aristocrats of earlier centuries took game-laden meals as a way to demonstrate social distance from mere farmers and artisans, the pig eaters. When deforestation made reliance on the hunt difficult to sustain, spices and ever-costlier, exotic medicines came to serve this same purpose. Here, too, wealthy clerics shared the status values of their secular peers. Spices were redefined as medicines appropriate (as was meat) for the ill to consume, and thus lavish expenditures could be morally justified and made compatible with a vow of poverty.

DREAD DISEASES IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES Popular histories of the High Middle Ages showcase a cluster of bodily afflictions. Saint Anthony’s fire, shown in woodcuts with a sufferer’s hand aflame; “king’s evil” with grossly disfiguring, weeping, pustular neck glands, a disease assigned to medieval centuries, though mostly a phenomenon of later times; and, not least, leprosy, with its associations of autodissolution of the body, were dreaded diseases; none was common. Plague, the most spectacular of all, was intermittent and appeared only in the later medieval centuries, but it was the only one of these feared infections to have a demographic impact. Commonplace, ubiquitous infectious diseases were the rarely discussed, customary killers, shaping larger health and disease patterns throughout the High Middle Ages. The dread diseases instead follow the contours of great socioeconomic transformations: With cerealization the fire flares and then burns out; with urbanization “king’s evil” merges with leprosy, which then drifts steadily downward along the social hierarchy, losing all connection to royalty. Plague appeared in a time of quickening long-distance trade, increasing constraints on available natural resources, and poorly tended sanitary infrastructure. Catastrophic mortality crises, then, challenged long-maintained boundaries of status and privilege.

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Fire, Famines, and the Millennium The great dietary changes of the eleventh century were accompanied by severe, multiregional famines. One such episode had an epicenter near Cluny and was vividly recorded by Glaber, even as he was revising his history of Saint Maiolus. A small section of his account captures one grim scene: [In 1031–33] something was attempted in these parts which, as far as we know, had never been done before. Men dug out a kind of white earth, rather like potter’s clay, and they mixed it with whatever they had of flour or bran in order to make bread and avoid death by starvation; it was their hope of salvation, but it was a vain one. Faces were pale and emaciated, and the skin of many appeared inflated with air; men’s very voices, reduced to extreme thinness, piped like those of dying birds. None the less, wolves gorged themselves at that time on the corpses of the dead— which lay all around, too many to be buried—after a long interval once more preying on men.20 These horrors were not new, however. Glaber’s apocalypse-oriented contemporary, Ademar of Chabannes, had assembled earlier historical examples of famine descending into cannibalism, using the evidence to issue a warning about starving people who did not trust in the powers of saints.21 Modern historians have even harvested early-medieval accounts from the sixth century on to show peasant knowledge of various kinds of “famine bread,” such as Gregory of Tours’s description of breads and gruels being made from grape seeds, hazelnut blossoms, or weeds. In the eleventh century such choices were seen as rational responses to hunger and were widely acknowledged and respected; cannibalism was instead irrational and a sign of the coming apocalypse.22 Famines that extended beyond a regional level were relatively common between 750 and 1100, averaging one every twelve years. In the transition to “manorialism,” great lords hoped to realize windfall profits from hunger years and thus exacerbated harvest disasters. By the twelfth century, towns and a monetary economy provided secular lords other ways to pursue economic advantages.23 The eleventh-century famines were associated with the first distinctive medieval epidemic: Saint Anthony’s fire. France suffered twenty-six general famines in the eleventh century alone, and monastic responses to hunger created a new place for understanding diseases of the famished.24 Initially wanting to protect their own expanding agrarian interests, monastic landowners orchestrated the Peace, or Truce, of God movement in the eleventh century.25 Peace synods were occasioned by famines and famine epidemics, seen as a new disease among the rural poor. Early-medieval records seldom describe the hordes of hunger-driven sufferers from ignis sacer (“holy fire”) that we find in the great

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open-air healing events of the eleventh century. As farmers became peasants, the saints replaced the forest as their refuge in times of famine and epidemic. Today ignis sacer is typically ascribed either to ergotism26 (a fungus infection of maturing rye grasses) or to erysipelas (a rapidly progressive skin infection with virulent streptococcus bacilli). Both modern causal explanations are plausible.27 On the one hand, rye cultivation surged in transalpine Europe during the early Middle Ages, because yields were high and growing rye required less labor than growing other crops. Moreover, rye grew best if presprouted, and this process would have enhanced the growth of the fungus Claviceps purpurea as well.28 Erysipelas, on the other hand, could be transmitted quite easily among throngs of hungry peasants seeking relief. It is difficult to assess the demographic importance of these epidemics, for most seem to have been local and associated with weather-induced harvest failures. Yet it is significant that by the beginning of the thirteenth century accounts of ignis sacer as an epidemic phenomenon almost disappear, not reclaiming a presence in healing traditions and novel artistic representation until the late fifteenth century.29 As agricultural production expanded, the severity of local and regional famines declined. Lords and great religious houses began to effect an economic integration of staple food markets. The sociohistorical effects of ignis sacer were long-lasting. Its significance lies in the strong link between saints, disease, and the healing role of monastic communities. From the late eleventh century on, epidemics were managed with the designation of a protective saint and the creation of monk-staffed hospitals for the stricken. The descriptions of the malady by that time include dramatic accounts of feet, hands, and even limbs blackening, rotting, and dropping off. The 1070s saw the beginnings of a typically medieval containment strategy— assigning Saint Anthony the Great as the victims’ protector and creating a dedicated healing order.30 Brief monastic descriptions of epidemics of ignis sacer in the twelfth century also describe hallucinatory manifestations, which has tended to encourage greater modern medical affinity for the ergotism diagnosis. The hagiographic legends of Saint Anthony, a third-century desert hermit, emphasize the apparitions that terrorized him before his wounds and pain were attended.31 In a larger context, the nobility, especially monks and clerics through their aggressive interventions, acquired new obligations to the poor. Older explanations of famine and epidemic held sin as their underlying cause.32 Assuming responsibility for curing, the church was assuming an expansive welfare role among growing numbers of urban poor.

Medieval Leprosy The transformation of a mass disease problem that developed suddenly into a social and religious containment strategy is even more dramatic with the

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quintessential medieval disease: leprosy. Where did it come from? McCormick, building on Grmek’s concept of pathocoenosis (the set of diseases present within a population), argues that leprosy in a modern biomedical sense was one of three emergent epidemics of late antiquity, diseases that accompanied a slow but relentless economic decline. Along with virulent malaria and recurrent bubonic plague, leprosy’s appearance signaled a new pathocoenosis.33 Leprosy became destructive in formerly prosperous northern Syria only during the seventh century. The temporal progression of this chronic infectious disease into western Europe is less clear. One possible link to its spread lies with earlymedieval “king’s evil” (morbus regius), a ghastly ulcerous infection of the skin. To some extent this polymorphic affliction was the aristocratic counterpart of ignis sacer. The lesions on limbs caused gradual, not rapid, wasting and were lighter than the fire-stricken peasant limbs, much like the difference between the peasants’ and the nobles’ bread. Leprosy to be seen, described, and feared needed its moral framework. Before the thirteenth century, literary presentations of affliction with morbus regius confusingly conflated medical accounts of jaundice and leprosy and pestis and thus did not refer to the scrofulas and glandular swellings of later centuries, when king’s evil became a disease that true royalty would cure by mere touch.34 The earlier morbus regius began to recede at the same time as the cereal revolution, when lepra was used as a metaphor of moral pollution among the clergy.35 The intent of the Gregorian reform movement of the late eleventh century was both to remove the association of clerics with immorality and to constrict the powers of kings in realms of the sacred. These reforms were not entirely successful. Germanic kings partially retained their ancient, sacred powers to heal, either directly through their actions or occasionally through the thaumaturgical power that their bodies retained postmortem. Leprosy changed its character as it ascended to public consciousness in the twelfth century, and it became the next epidemic problem that the church had to define and control. Medieval skeletal remains provide strong evidence that true leprosy (Hansen’s disease, caused by Mycobacterium leprae) existed in many localities by the central Middle Ages.36 More significant is that leprosy came to occupy an important place in the clerical redesign of medieval society.37 Leprosy is an important disease throughout the Bible, and the book of Leviticus provided clergy with the rationale for diagnosing, and then expelling, those within the society who were deemed unclean. But biblical stories of leprosy also included the problematic status of Job, a good man stricken merely as a test of his faith, and the direct actions of Jesus in healing a leper with his touch or even his shadow—thus providing the obligation to pursue healing if one would imitate Christ. Specialized hospital buildings for sufferers of particular diseases became the legacy of twelfth-century leprosy. Social and economic resources needed to be invested for the isolation and care of its victims, the logical consequence, given biblical teachings, of clergy making that diagnosis.38

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As a social and disease phenomenon, leprosy, in contrast to ignis sacer, was not contained solely by spiritual/clerical interventions. As a bodily affliction, leprosy lasts. One suffers from it slowly and requires sustained care for quite visible lesions. Thus leprosy elicited both medical discussions and theological reflections on the meaning of long suffering and the Christian obligation to care, whether or not the disease could be cured.39 Saint Francis of Assisi based his model of Christian service on devotion to the sick, including practical physical help to lepers alongside prayer and compassion, “washing their feet and bodies with his [own hands] and challenging his own fastidiousness by wiping away the effluence from their ulcers and the putrefaction of their limbs.”40 And even though Francis himself was something of a spiritual environmentalist, urging attention to the forests, fields, and streams, his followers found their missionary fields in the mushrooming towns of the thirteenth century.41 The flare of leprosy, in contrast to ignis sacer epidemics, was urban. Urban built environments altered medieval health and disease regimes as profoundly as deforestation reshaped the rural world. Disease and disability in medieval records provide commentary on either the fortunes of the privileged or the intermittent problems of the vast majority of the population. Some, but not all, great epidemics crossed the social and environmental chasms normally mediating risks and exposures. For the most part, ignis sacer and leprosy did not cross great sociocultural divides as plague would in the fourteenth century. Similarly, ignis sacer was a disease of the rural world, leprosy an affliction noticed largely in urban contexts. Initially, plague disrespected the social divides of human health maintenance and disease risk management that governed the High Middle Ages, but before the Middle Ages ended, plague would prey on the poor.

CUSTOMARY DISEASE ENVIRONMENTS OF THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES Health and disease experience in the central and later Middle Ages varied in urban and rural settings not merely along socioeconomic divides but also along conditions created by built environments. Written documents about disease in the Middle Ages reflect best the experience of town dwellers, where literate physicians and other record keepers clustered. Towns and cities were the true beneficiaries of the cereal revolution, partly because they became a locus for realizing profits from agricultural production, partly because insuring the profits of market economies required reliable access to food. Many of the emerging towns, and most of the future great cities, were clearly market centers by 1100. Thousands of new towns were established as settlement pushed westward. Many towns of 20,000 existed in 1300, where two centuries earlier most did not exceed a population of 5,000. In 1300 a few fed more than 100,000.42

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Some old diseases, such as leprosy, were seen more clearly in towns or at least were numerically more important. Other diseases, long familiar, became commonplace town miseries over the course of the central and later Middle Ages.

Urban Diets: Constraints and Novelties The obstacles to sustainable urban population growth included three with considerable importance to health and disease. First, cities had to import and store grain, and grain storage multiplied rat and mice populations.43 Second, towns and cities needed to secure grain from regions far beyond the terrain that they could directly control.44 Finally, both towns and cities confronted, effectively or not, challenges of water and waste management. These limits to growth were evident by the end of the thirteenth century, when many towns reached population ceilings.45 The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when rapid population growth occurred, were in some respects healthier for the poorest urban dwellers. Life expectancies did not overall change greatly during the long boom period. Increased agricultural production permitted urbanization and profitable outlets for agricultural surpluses. In turn, rural population growth provided immigrants to the emerging towns. Agricultural production and landscape transformation fueled impressive changes in the dietary prospects of urban elites. Market centers also provided greater absolute access to food variety, and the diets of wealthier urban people increasingly incorporated novelties. At its peak population in about 1300, medieval London fed between 80,000 and 100,000, one-quarter of whom relied on charitable distributions, largely in the form of bread and ale. The firewood needed to cook even these basic foodstuffs totaled over 140,000 tons per annum.46 Indeed, firewood—its accessibility, transportation costs, and the need to extend the city’s control over remote woodlands—posed the greatest constraint on urban economic development before industrialization.47 The different health vulnerabilities between rich and poor starkly emerged only in moments when the poorest could afford nothing these markets offered. In years of prosperity the contrast between urban and rural fare was notable. New to the tables of privileged urban dwellers were pastries and pies, for example, and both fresh meat and fish markets expanded dramatically.48 Though spurned by influential academic dietetics, fresh fruit was similarly successful in urban food trade. Bread was even more fundamental to cities than it was to idealized monastic diets—and cities preferred the monks’ baked bread rather than the peasants’ porridges and gruels. Control of the price and quality of urban bread became fundamentally important to the peace, harmony, and good governance of towns and cities until the modern era.49 The dangers of fire from cooking in urban dwellings also encouraged community support

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of professional bakers. City growth also increased the numbers of poor day laborers and widows who lived on upper stories where cooking food was not possible, even could they have afforded the fuel. Most cookshops served this urban underclass, offering early versions of “fast food.”50

Deadlier Urban Spaces Urbanization created small-scale environments where the disease fortunes of rich and poor were not easily separated. The poorest, most recent immigrants lived outside the town walls, while others juggled for space near the market center. Textile workers, butchers, dyers, tanners, and others dealing in animal products clumped close to the town walls. Decades to centuries of accumulated filth thus tended to keep the richer, city-center residents at higher risk.51 Waste disposal was typically an afterthought during the rapid twelfth- and early thirteenth-century town growth period, except to relegate it to those whose livelihood involved great quantities of discarded animal and fish by-products. Most cities relied on traditional practices for carting human waste outside the city.52 Moreover, private ownership of land typically tilted the balance of legal and legislative actions against public access to water. Only when navigable rivers and streams became clogged with refuse, blocked by encroachments, or silted up did public clamor lead to collective action. Towns with some connection to ancient Roman settlements, or those that were planned settlements, were typically situated near running water, which happily aided the washing away of much noxious material. Where ancient pipes existed, priority usage was for fresh water delivery, not sewage disposal. The energy and commercial demands of growing cities governed urban water supplies, rather than any hygienic worries or fear of pollution.53 While wealth permitted some urban dwellers to expand the comfort of their furnishings, personal dwellings, attire, and protection from cold, very few city elites acknowledged the necessity of investment in sanitary infrastructure. The persisting quasirural nature of town life dictated the omnipresence of both domestic and large animals, together with their waste. Municipal statutes began to attempt some constraints on “nuisances” of all sorts only in the thirteenth century, at the earliest. Most early statutes were modeled on Roman law and practice, and thus sanitary legislation appeared earliest in Italy, southern France, and eastern Spain. Obscuring the water supply or blocking drainage ditches was a common cause of complaints to city governors and typically the arena in which sanitation problems were in any way addressed.54 Often, governors tried to contain the accumulation of human wastes within specific areas in the town, much as the sick were contained within hospitals. English cities had easement alleys, ordure streets, and public latrines; French cities identified similar streets as “dirty” (sale) or “shitty” (merde or merdeux). Paris

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had a “Stinking Hole.”55 London relied on “dungboats” filled with the wastes collected by rakers and “surveyors of the pavement” (also called scavengers), who brought their bounty to the banks of the Thames.56 Every available recess or alley might be used as a latrine. In Italian cities the comprehensive nature of waste and water management could be impressive, even before the Black Death.57 But in most towns, the greatest burden of any sanitation, however rudimentary, fell on householders. Cemeteries were another strong whiff within the urban olfactory largesse, if not a direct contribution to disease prevalence. Cemeteries often lay near the marketplaces of rapidly growing towns, in part because older burial spaces were appropriated when new markets were needed.58 But cemeteries did not necessarily present a direct health hazard. When the human body dies, pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms) die back with the host, thus presenting little danger of disease transmission. Moreover, the insects that contribute to the cadaver’s decomposition are not the vectors that transmit disease from one human to another. Certainly the taste of the well water and the stench readily identified urban cemeteries to passersby. Those who died in hospitals, those in monasteries and convents, and many other groups were increasingly buried in separate, nonpublic spaces. During the Black Death the horror of mass graves, the possibility of being taken to the wrong parish church for burial, and lapses in social distinctions attending funeral and burial rites became a common theme in the accounts of wealthy survivors. Concerns about health and disease do not seem to have been the most important consideration governing changes to death rituals. Finally, we should briefly take note of the growing presence of sulfurous coal in London, Belgium, and the Low Countries. Forests accessible to wood merchants began to disappear by the late thirteenth century, and coal steadily replaced all aspects of the urban fuel economy that it could. Complaints and proclamations about the rapid decline in air quality appear at this time.59

City Safety Nets Cities had a few other distinct advantages over rural settings in the management of overall health and nutrition. A kind of health security was provided in the elaboration of urban institutional health care, both secular and religious. Market centers provided greater access to medical and nursing care, and medieval medicine could capably address some of the routine, background disease problems. It was easier in the city to find a bonesetter, a general surgeon to care for ulcers, fistulae, and other ubiquitous problems. Cities offered greater access to drugs and herbal preparations, many of which may have added crucial vitamins to vegetable-poor medieval diets. Larger urban settings provided hospitals and corporate artisan alliances (such as confraternities); residents of

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smaller villages tended instead to retain strong connections to family in the countryside as their social safety net.60 Urban corporations knitted together a number of strategies for preventive health maintenance, aligning themselves with a protective saint and a particular parish church and forging professional contracts with individual physicians, surgeons, and clergymen. In a study of the skeletons of over 1,000 poorer, likely artisan-class individuals from York (1100 –1500 c.e.), A. L. Grauer found that fractures to legs and arms were relatively uncommon but often healed well. The skeletal population also showed that iron-deficiency anemia and chronic infections were both common and increasingly severe as individuals aged. There is even tentative evidence of endemic syphilis in this poorer community.61 Those outside the umbrella of corporate protections came to rely on ever more restricted handouts from older monastic houses and the new enthusiasm for hospice care among mendicant and militant monastic orders.

COLLAPSE Between 1300 and 1500, the European population collapsed, showing few signs of recovery until late in the fifteenth century. Cities began to experience famine and epidemic shocks different in character from those of earlier centuries. Some, especially the great famine of the 1310s in northern Europe and the more universal Black Death of 1347–1353, were massive. While immigration tended to repair the cities’ losses through much of the fourteenth century, eventually cities and towns reequilibrated, often with only 40 –50 percent of their peak population levels. Paris seems to have been the single hardest-hit urban region. Convulsed in chronic warfare with the English, reeling from recurring pestilence, Paris declined from a population of over 200,000 in 1328 to around 30,000 in the 1430s.62 Exogenous factors have long been attractive inclusions when explaining this dramatic demographic reversal, because Malthusian models cannot explain the basic evidence: As the population fell, resources became more available, but population numbers did not recover. Even the trade and transport of bulky goods, including food, expanded impressively. Forces out of human control are favorites among causal factors, because we assume that there was little that medieval medicine could cure in ways that make modern medical sense, and because the timeline of collapse was accompanied by the novel appearance of extraordinarily lethal recurrent plagues. A great unheard-of emergent disease or the determining caprice of planetary climate change seems an oddly more reassuring explanation within popular histories than is a more complicated economic, ecological, and demographic collapse. The weight of evidence and scholarship, however, points toward complexity. The substantially worsened disease situation of the later medieval centuries is the most important aspect of the changing health-and-disease regime governing medieval human bodies, and endemic warfare further compromised

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the security of agricultural producers. Nonetheless, there is considerable, often heated interdisciplinary debate about the causes of the population decline leading to demographic stasis, for this is a time when many were much richer and were creating new economic infrastructure.63

Warming and Cooling Many climate historians of the 1970s and 1980s interpreted the postmillennium food stabilization as a by-product of a so-called Medieval Warm Period. The dramatic reversal of demographic growth that began in the late thirteenth century, together with an almost-biblical famine in northern Europe in the 1310s, was thus attributed to worsening climate over the northern hemisphere generally. More recent multidisciplinary investigations of medieval-era warming have not provided robust support for such climatic determinism. Estimated warm-era temperatures rose only around 0.2 degrees centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit). Similiarly, the later “Little Ice Age” (ca. 1580–1830 C.E.) northern hemisphere summer temperatures only dipped 0.5° centrigrade (less than 1 degree Fahrenheit) below averages across the last two millennia. Furthermore, warming was not uniform across western Europe either temporally or spatially. Generally, the periods from 1010 –1040, from 1070 –1105, and from 1155–1190 were the warmest intervals over the entire period.64 British and Dutch historians point often to the stormier, wetter weather patterns that compromised Atlantic and North Sea coastal regions during the later fourteenth century, but such changes relate only to this one region.65 At the same time, the exploitation of northern Atlantic fishing grounds expanded and dramatically increased urban fish supplies.

Warfare Medieval Europeans were not peaceable, and their bellicosity might be summoned to explain periods of slow population recovery. The clerical Truce of God back in the eleventh century solved only part of the devastation that aristocrats inflicted on free farmers with their incessant warfare and land hunger. The Crusades in part externalized such war making, exporting violence outward, away from the European mainland, during the prosperous twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Military failures in the Middle East returned Europeans to internecine strife by the fourteenth century. Securing the food supply of cities and towns required ever-greater territorial dominance, thus increasingly organized warfare. Italian chroniclers initially took little notice of the unfolding great pestilence of 1347–1348, because most were focused on the diplomatic efforts to minimize the local costs of passing armies or retainers of great lords. Since cities ate first, the rural producers reflected environmental stresses earliest. Italy especially, and the urban Mediterranean more generally, experienced

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stagnation and population loss first, beginning during the late thirteenth century. A massive multiyear famine north of the Alps, encompassing every region with access to the Atlantic Ocean and the Baltic and the North seas, convulsed the 1310s and literally decimated the rural population. William Jordan’s work shows that those starving, who were also in the path of uninterrupted internecine warfare among the nobility, for the first time in centuries resorted to the horrors of cannibalism, murder, and suicide.66 Great estates were more insulated than smaller ones, where city markets could exert their power over crops to claim whatever harvest survived. Hydrologist André Guillerme makes the interesting argument that gunpowder warfare, beginning in the fourteenth century, was responsible for further deterioration in the health and disease profiles of urban Europe. Arguing that northern France and the Low Countries were healthier overall in the High Middle Ages, because the hydrological infrastructure of towns and cities was built to sustain wool production and support trade, Guillerme holds that a much more fetid, miasmic later Middle Ages was produced as a response to gun warfare.67 To defend against cannons, even when the weapons themselves were still relatively crude and unreliable, city governors blocked water courses and created marshes and stagnant-water moats that would literally bog down enemy horses and matériel. Meanwhile, the gradual change from wool to linen cloth put these periurban marshes to use, as vast areas where linen could be stretched, bleached, and dyed. Areas around the city walls, already the loci of heaviest growth in the thirteenth century, especially collecting poorer immigrants, became even more squalid. Chemical production of gunpowder, and to a more limited extent some dyes, required quantities of urine and feces, which were stored and sold from the basement hovels of the urban poor. Guillerme thus sees the later medieval centuries as operating in a “fungal economy.”

Plague The most striking feature of the great pandemic that is now summarized with the lugubrious name Black Death is the nearly ubiquitous high mortality, as it rarely killed less than 30 percent in any locality. In most of the Mediterranean regions where the pestilence first struck, urban notarial and administrative records reflect the expectation of a more commonplace epidemic, at least at the plague’s beginning. Most of this region had suffered dire and protracted famine conditions during the years leading up to the plague, and the privileged may have simply braced themselves for another sweeping mortality. Marseilles’s governors, for example, held regular meetings until the stench of the nearby cemetery overwhelmed them. Notaries throughout the Mediterranean region rallied to the uptake in business from those wanting to make their wills.68 But even north of the Alps, where the Black Death struck later, order and routine

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held surprisingly well. London cemeteries excavated during the past two decades reveal that cadavers and burial spaces in newly created pits were nonetheless laid out in orderly rows. Epidemiological archaeology of the bodies shows something not common in other, nonplague medieval epidemics: high losses in every age group.69 Ordinary epidemics took the young and the old in greater proportion. Europe might have recovered, chastened perhaps, had the plague made just the one devastating pass. But pestilences returned too frequently, on average at least once every generation to most populated regions, and recurrent intervals of high risk and loss prompted new family strategies. Social readjustment to the new mortality regime produced demographic stagnation.70 The absolute mortality levels, far higher in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than in the preceding boom period, also supported new medieval understandings of disease, health, and the human body. Even by the second pandemic of plague in the 1360s, most eyewitnesses and survivors associated this epidemic with one distinctive bodily feature: bubonic swellings in discrete corporeal locations (the groin or inguinal region, the axilla, and what modern biomedicine calls cervical buboes—behind the ear or in the neck). Consensus that plague could be easily recognized on a moribund or deceased individual strengthened over the later Middle Ages, even if the early signs of an epidemic were difficult to ascertain.71 Plagues continued to exact extraordinary numbers of victims compared to all other epidemics. And so the tendency to pay close attention to bodily appearances at or near death increased. The lethality and the bodily signs of plagues in the later Middle Ages support the modern diagnosis of Yersinia pestis infection as an important component of recurring plague, and plagues never became epidemics that mostly targeted children. Always killing many young and middle-aged adults, even modest plague visitations caused a greater percentage of deaths than did the great famine of the 1310s, when losses were around 10 percent. Nevertheless, over the past two decades a number of medievalists have argued that peste remained a generalized term for a great mortality, and some have specifically denied that modern bubonic plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, could have been responsible for these murderous recurrent epidemics.72 Doubtless, deaths in epidemics resulted from many different causes. No alternative explanations or causal hypotheses have yet emerged, however, for the universal observations of bubonic swellings as a hallmark of plague, the affliction that set in motion an expanding range of social and medical responses. Innovative public health strategies began to change the structure of risks during plague times, gradually leaving those without social and economic resources no refuge during epidemics. By the later fourteenth century the experience of plague was not uniform across Europe, either geographically or temporally. Plagues remained unpredictable and could still capriciously subtract 20 to

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40 percent of a population in six months’ time, but over time the well-to-do adopted strategies that seem to have worked well in minimizing their personal risk of dying in a plague. For both urban and rural elites, survival relied partly on the piecemeal development of surveillance systems, alerting them to the identification of cases of plague within their geographic, social, or commercial spheres. Without doing much more than gathering such information, the wealthiest could move from place to place, even within a city, and be relatively safe from bubonic plague. Urban middle classes meanwhile elected strategies of containing plague, first trying to exclude it from their midst by turning out persons regarded as dangerous in some way, then trying to isolate and segregate local victims. The basic behavioral reactions to plague were longstanding, but discussions of both the logic of particular methods and the ways of identifying plague alongside other diseases transformed this important area of medical discussions about the human body.73 The high costs of plagues motivated investment in surveillance, and in northern Italy the first permanent pesthouses and public health boards appeared after 1450. In central France urban administrators with fewer resources and higher exposure to chronic warfare tried to manage some of their risks in plague by securing the purity and reliability of water supplies for towns, thus tacitly accepting a greater role for government in urban sanitation. In both cases experts emerged—public physicians and surgeons, itinerant hydrologists to advise on well digging and drainage trenches—to manage plague emergencies. The paradox, still not fully explained, is that neither riskmanagement strategy effectively contained or reduced the high mortality of the explosive phase of great plagues. The good times led to only tentative demographic recovery in the second half of the fifteenth century. The full force of the Little Ice Age was in the future, from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.74 Whatever their cause or causes, recurrent pestilences were connected to a very different disease and demographic regime in the later Middle Ages. For many individuals in the later Middle Ages, the standard of living was dramatically higher. Certainly this was an era of extensive importation of luxury goods, and it was, after all, coterminal with the early phases of the Renaissance. Protein consumption rose dramatically, for example.75 How wealthy individuals spent the wealth at their disposal changed, and, as we have noted, their consumption of expensive spices, fish, and massive quantities of meat certainly reflected this prosperity. The rich could also afford more physicians and other well-educated attendants; universities prospered and numbers of graduates increased. They did not, in other words, behave like the improvident humans that Malthus depicted, reproducing prodigiously until supporting resources collapsed. Neither did trade diminish, disconnecting urban centers from rural production of food and fuel. Accordingly, some strong proponents of Malthusian explanations

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for great demographic changes in a population have advocated a strong “neoMalthusian” position, acknowledging an independent, or “exogenous,” role for lethal infectious-disease epidemics, precisely because Malthusian models cannot explain demographic stagnation across western Europe.76 Other neoMalthusians suggest that infant mortality may have remained quite high, at a time when women became important contributors to the wage-labor force.77 Higher levels of exposure to routine infectious diseases, together with periodic, severe plague epidemics and incessant warfare undermining rural agricultural production seem the most likely reasons for population stagnation.78 Great wealth insulated the urban and rural elite—they ate more, drank more, traded more widely, and made merry. We enter the Renaissance.

CHAPTER THREE

The Sexual Body ruth mazo k arras and jacqueline murray

To think about “sex” in relation to the body in medieval Europe could mean two different things: differences among bodies of different sexes (the sexed body) or the role of the body in sexual activity (the sexual body). Both of these concepts would have been understandable to medieval people, although they would not have used the same term for them. In medieval culture the sexed body meant more than the reproductive organs and secondary sexual characteristics that distinguished men and women; men and women were also believed to have different balances of the humors in their bodies. As a result, there were differences between male and female temperaments, behaviors, and intellects. These sex differences also affected how men and women used their sexed bodies. While sexuality did not necessarily involve bodily activity—desire was also an important component of sexuality—many medieval churchmen believed that it involved a desire for the things of the body rather than those of the spirit and thus led to sin. Other medieval commentators, such as medical writers, considered sexual desire to be natural and morally neutral. Certainly the majority of medieval people were sexually active and suffered neither divine nor human punishment, nor even, apparently, guilt. Nevertheless, sexual activity occurred against the backdrop of a dominant moral discourse that deeply distrusted both the sexed and the sexual body, especially the female one. It is important to remember, as well, how closely the sexual body was tied to reproduction in a society in which there was no reliable contraception. The sexual body and the reproductive body were nearly identical; the line between different kinds of sexual activity, which in some cultures is drawn,

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for example, between homosexual and heterosexual, in the Middle Ages was drawn between reproductive and nonreproductive. The sexed body is discussed in chapter 7, but it is touched on in this chapter because it is not possible to separate completely the sexed body from the sexual body—the body as used in (or withheld from) sexual activity. Modern scholars have distinguished those differences between men and women that are biological (“sex differences”) from those that are cultural (“gender differences”). In this schema, the fact that women lactate and that men can control the direction of their urination are sex differences, whereas the fact that women care for children and men do heavy outdoor work are gender differences. More recently, scholars have begun to question this distinction and argue that all the differences between men and women are based on cultural evaluation. Only certain people can give birth, but the fact that we think this is significant, and consider them a class of persons on this basis, is a culture-based distinction. Indeed, we classify as female many people who, in fact, cannot give birth. Medieval people, too, would have found this distinction between the biological and the cultural difficult, although for very different reasons. For them, the physical body was created by God, along with a host of other individual characteristics. Many characteristics that we consider to be the result of nurture rather than nature, or culture rather than biology, or at least believe to have a strong cultural component, medievals thought of as inborn, as part of the body. Masculine behavior was the direct result of having a male body and feminine behavior the result of a female body. This was true for all kinds of areas of activity but was especially marked in the realm of sexuality. Consequently, the sexed body and the sexual body were closely related. When people behaved in a manner inappropriate to their gender, it was considered unnatural. Men were considered active and women passive because that was part of their biological nature, not only in areas of sex and reproduction but also in other areas of life. This did not mean that women did not experience sexual pleasure, but rather they were conceptualized as being acted upon, while men were the actors. There is an irony inherent in this, because this idea of female passivity coexisted with the belief that women were more lustful than men and were always ready to engage in sex. Nevertheless, to be penetrated was feminine and to penetrate was masculine. This understanding of the relationship between the gendered body and the sexed body explains why medieval people did not think of homosexuality and heterosexuality in the same way as do modern people. Homo- or heterosexuality denotes sexual-object choice: Does a person desire a partner of the same sex or the opposite sex? Medieval people would have framed the question differently: Does a person desire to be sexually active or sexually passive? A man who desired to be active or a woman who desired to be passive was

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acting in accordance with nature; a man who desired to be passive or a woman who desired to be active was not. For such people, there was a disconnect between their bodily configuration and their behavior. This could, however, be explained by the individual variations of heat and cold, wetness and dryness that characterized all people. This worldview allowed the potential for sex and gender slippage, for men to become feminized or women masculinized, although this is not to suggest that anomalous behavior was condoned. A man who was the receptive partner in sex with other men was said to engage in sex “as a woman.”1 The twelfth-century Latin writer Alan of Lille wrote that “the essential decrees of Nature are denied a hearing. . . . Venus wars with Venus and changes ‘hes’ into ‘shes’ and with her witchcraft unmans man.”2 Such statements were metaphorical: Medieval people understood that a passive man was still a man, but he was a feminine man. A man who had sex with other men in an active role, in contrast, was not considered to be feminized by his sexual-object choice. As the example of same-sex relations indicates, medieval medical theory considered sexual behavior as strongly influenced by the physical characteristics of the body, but those in authority in medieval culture often considered that behavior threatening to the social order. Because our culture has inherited much of the medieval attitude that sex, even within marriage, is somewhat suspect, we may overlook the different attitudes that were found among other cultural and religious groups in medieval Europe. For example, within the Eastern church, which praised virginity and condemned the sinfulness of much, if not all, sexual activity, married men nonetheless continued to be ordained priests.3 While Islam restricted women’s sexual activity outside of marriage as much or more than Christianity did, sex within marriage was not condemned, and Muslim men were permitted sexual relations with prostitutes, concubines, or slaves. According to Judaism, not only was marital sex not a sin, but it was incumbent on married couples to engage in sex, although some Ashkenazic rabbis, perhaps influenced by the surrounding Christian culture, cautioned against excessive sexual pleasure, and Maimonides, too, had doubts about the value of that pleasure.4 In Western European Christianity, however, there was a marked tendency for the church to treat all sexual use of the body as potentially disruptive. From the twelfth century on, secular authorities, and especially the church, attempted to structure and shape their society by developing and implementing new legislation and regulations. Sexual behavior was only one of the areas; others included heresy and the conduct of war.5 R. I. Moore has famously argued that the regulation of behavior in various spheres was less a response to particular problems than an attempt by authorities to establish their own jurisdiction and to demonstrate their power and effectiveness by their ability to enforce their regulations.6 These efforts were also part of a wider movement

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toward systematization that extended beyond government and the institutional church. This tendency was apparent, for example, in the universities of the thirteenth century, where Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica is only the most famous example of a widespread movement to organize all of human knowledge. The simple statement that both secular and religious authorities were involved in the regulation of the sexual body understates the complexity of jurisdictions. For example, many late-medieval town governments had their own regulations governing sex between men. Florence, Venice, Cologne, Bruges, Augsburg, Basel, and Zurich all implemented penalties ranging from light fines to capital punishment.7 The church also produced long theological analyses of sodomy, as well as canon laws that were enforced by ecclesiastical courts. It is important not to underestimate the complexity hidden by the term church, because there was no such thing as a monolithic church but rather multiple religious jurisdictions with varying approaches to sexual offenses. Theologians’ fulminations did not always find their way into canon law, and canon law was implemented differently through synodal decrees in different regions, and different kinds of penalties were applied in different courts. Moreover, there was no consistent understanding of exactly what constituted sodomy (as discussed in the following), although it most commonly referred to sex between men. Canon lawyers, who studied the extensive corpus of church law, had one perspective on sexual relations between men, and theologians, who studied Christian scripture and its interpretation, had another, although canon lawyers did not discuss the topic at length.8 (The medical and scientific writers who also discussed the physiological causes of these desires were usually churchmen too.)9 These same groups attempted to organize and regulate many other sexual activities as well, from prostitution to the use of contraception. Moreover, other religious groups living in Europe, in addition to those who adhered to the Roman church—Eastern Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those who came to be classified as heretics—had their own legal, theological, and medical teachings about sexual activities. According to Christian teaching, sexual transgressions were sinful because they involved the misuse of the body, which was God’s good creation. Bodily sins such as gluttony or lust could also be interpreted in a spiritual sense: heresy or idolatry, for example, was often considered to be spiritual fornication.10 Many theologians agreed with Peter Abelard’s view that people’s intentions, rather than their behavior, made an act sinful.11 For example, if a woman had sexual intercourse with a man she believed to be her husband, when in reality their marriage was not valid, she would be considered innocent and the sin would be imputed to whomever had misled her. Similarly, a man who experienced a nocturnal emission did not thereby sin if the cause were physiological, whereas if he had indulged in sexual fantasies before going to sleep, he was in-

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deed culpable.12 Moralists believed that only the purest man, who had brought his body under control through fasting and other acts of penitence, could avoid experiencing such emissions. A similar question of culpability, or consent to sin, could arise in the case of rape: Was a woman who had been raped guilty of a sin? Was it a sin if she had experienced sexual pleasure during the rape? For example, some commentators argued that it was possible for a woman to resist rape completely on the level of her reason and will but nevertheless experience sexual pleasure on the lower, carnal level.13 These were real questions with which medieval moralists struggled, and such questions helped to shape their conceptualization of the relationship between sin and the body. They were also questions on which theologians and medical writers did not always agree because they had different perspectives on the extent to which the body could be controlled through the exercise of the will. Yet, while some religious authorities focused on the individual’s intention, others found physical bodily acts repulsive in a visceral way, and some believed that all sexual activity was inherently sinful. On the one hand, God had commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28). Augustine, perhaps the most widely influential church father, considered reproduction one of the three goals of marriage, the others being mutual fidelity and participation in a sacrament. On the other hand, the apostle Paul had praised virginity and continence as superior to marriage and had considered marriage a concession to human weakness (1 Cor. 7:1–2). Medieval theologians agreed that when they were in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve could have had sexual intercourse without sin because they did not experience concupiscence. As a result of the Fall, however, lust and desire entered human experience and to some extent stained all sexual activity with sin. Most theologians agreed that sex within marriage, when undertaken for pleasure or even for the purpose of avoiding fornication, was sinful, although some considered it only a venial sin and easily repented. Others argued that marital sex, if motivated by lust, was as serious a fault as fornication and therefore a mortal sin. Sex performed with the intent to procreate was not generally believed to be sinful in itself, but many theologians agreed that even if the purpose were correct, some sinful pleasure in the act was unavoidable.14 Thus, although God had created the sexed body, and specifically the sexual organs, sexual intercourse was nevertheless the result of the Fall and so was inherently sinful. For Western Christians, marital sex was acceptable because it could result in conception and the production of children. Indeed, this was such a fundamental value that the church condoned sexual relations even when not expressly for the purpose of procreation or even if the couple were infertile or too elderly for conception to be a realistic possibility. The only requirement was that nothing be done to impede the possibility of conception. In the Middle Ages, the most effective means of preventing pregnancy was what medieval

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authors described as “semen spilled elsewhere than in the place deputed for this,” that is, nonvaginal sex.15 Other methods of contraception, which today might be considered unreliable, such as coitus interruptus or primitive barrier methods, or herbs believed to bring on menstruation or expel a dead fetus, were considered sufficiently effective that people used them. Jewish law, although it valued fertility very highly and allowed a man to divorce an infertile woman, or a woman to force her impotent husband to divorce her, permitted the use of a contraceptive sponge if a woman’s health, or that of a fetus or child she was already carrying or nursing, might be at risk from pregnancy or childbirth.16 Islamic moralists permitted the practice of coitus interruptus on the grounds that it was not infallible, and God would cause conception to occur if he wished it.17 According to Christian doctrine, such contraceptive practices were always unacceptable, because the possibility of procreation was the only means by which the sinfulness inherent in sexual activity could be mitigated. The distinction between reproductive and nonreproductive sex had many implications for the sexual body. Many of the body’s sexual possibilities were foreclosed; for example, homosexual relations and nonvaginal heterosexual relations were utterly forbidden. Indeed, by the thirteenth century, such nonreproductive acts as anal or oral sex between a man and a woman, masturbation, and bestiality were all gathered under the rubric of sodomy, along with samesex sexual activity for both men and women. It was not heterosexuality per se that was privileged, because that category did not really exist, but rather reproductive sex acts. When a man and woman had intercourse, the semen had to be deposited in the appropriate “vessel,” that is, the vagina, and this had to be done in the appropriate position, which was believed to promote conception, specifically with the man superior. Other positions, even if they involved vaginal penetration, were deemed to be “unnatural.” The thirteenth-century writer William Peraldus considered intercourse with the woman on top, or the man behind the woman, to be contrary to nature: “as when a woman mounts or when this deed is done in the manner of beasts, but in the appropriate receptacle.”18 The only exception to these restrictions was if some physical reason, such as illness or obesity, prevented a couple from using the prescribed position, and so they used a variant to permit intercourse or promote conception. What medieval Christian writers meant by the terms natural and unnatural is complicated and did not correlate with activities found, or not found, “in the world of nature.” Certainly, medieval writers were well aware that most animals do not copulate face to face with the male on top, and, in fact, as Peraldus indicates, adopting positions used by animals was considered to be unnatural. For Christian writers, natural meant “in conformity with God’s intent,” although this begged the rather large question of exactly what God intended. Nature was not “what comes naturally”; it was what was consistent

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with reason, an ideal toward which people should strive.19 Most medieval people believed that the natural aligned with fertility and procreation, and natural acts were those that promoted the continuation of the species. Although the line that distinguished reproductive from nonreproductive sex was the most important, especially from a theological point of view, it did not always correspond to what was permitted or forbidden by either canon law or secular law. Fornication, that is, sex between a single man and a single woman, for example, was a breach of canon law even though it had the capacity to be reproductive and might adhere to the “natural” position. Sex outside of marriage had the potential to cause both moral and social disruption and be a source of scandal to the faithful who obeyed the laws of church and society. As a result, the church courts developed procedures to call before them men and women suspected of committing fornication. If found guilty, the couple could be required to perform penance, for example, by being whipped three times around the local church or marketplace. Neither ecclesiastical nor secular authorities condoned sex acts that could result in illegitimate children or social disruption. For a sex act to be approved by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities, it needed to conform to divine law by being reproductive and to support the social order by taking place within marriage. One of the potentially most disruptive sexual activities in medieval society, then, was adultery. Like fornication, adultery could involve natural and reproductive sex acts. Nevertheless, according to the church, it was illicit and a mortal sin. In another sense, adultery was unnatural because marriage, or at least monogamous pair bonding, was dictated by the law of nature.20 Adultery also threatened the social order, and so it was controlled and punished by secular authorities as well. The disruptive potential of adultery was due to a wife’s embodied nature as a reproductive vessel. If a married man had sex with a woman who was not his wife, his actions would not call into question the parentage of his own children with his wife. However, if a wife committed adultery, her husband could never be completely certain that the children she gave birth to were his progeny. The legitimacy of children was of particular concern to the upper ranks of society, where people wanted to ensure their wealth and property would pass down to “heirs of their bodies,” as stated in English law. To be certain he was indeed the father of the children borne by his wife, a man needed to be absolutely sure he alone had had sexual access to her body Thus, a woman’s adultery could lead to property being alienated from legitimate heirs, an issue that could lead to court cases, violence, or even military action. Preventing women’s adultery was critically important to the upper ranks of society, although less so among the common folk, who had limited investment in the concept of lineage. The records of English manor courts reveal that accusations of adultery and bastardy did, in fact, disrupt village life and

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traditional land-transfer and inheritance practices.21 Moreover, pregnancy could occasionally reveal adulterers to the wider world if, for example, the woman’s husband were away for long periods of time. Such a concern is revealed in the testimony that Béatrice de Planissoles gave in 1320 during Jacques Fournier’s inquisition into the heretics of Montaillou, a village in the Pyrenees. Béatrice was engaged in an adulterous relationship with the parish priest, Pierre Clergue, and expressed concern lest she become pregnant and be disgraced. The court record reports that Béatrice said, I had said to him at the beginning of our relations, “What will I do if I become pregnant by you? I will be dishonored and lost.” He answered that he had a good herb which, if a man wears it when he is with a woman, he cannot engender nor can the woman conceive. I said to him, “What is this herb? Is it not the one that the cheese makers put on their pots of milk into which they have put rennet and which prevents the milk from curdling as long as it is on the pot?” He told me to not bother trying to know what kind herb it was but that it was an herb that had this power and that he had some. Since that time when he wanted to take me, he wore something rolled up and tied in a piece of linen the thickness and length of an ounce or of the first digit of my little finger, with a long thread which he passed around my neck. And this thing which he said was this herb hung down between my breasts to the base of my stomach. He always placed it thus when he wanted to know me and it remained on my neck until he rose. And if sometimes during the same night this priest wished to know me two or more times, he asked me, before we coupled, where this herb was. I would take it by finding it by the thread which I had at my neck and place it in his hand. He took it and placed it before the base of my stomach with the thread passing between my breasts. This is how he coupled with me, and no other way.22 This passage is particularly useful for a number of issues. The language indicates how the woman, clearly a willing participant in the sexual activities, nonetheless conceptualized her own role in the sex act as passive. It also reveals a self-conscious desire to practice contraception, however ineffective such a method must have been. Finally, Béatrice’s testimony permits us to see a relationship as it was lived by a man and woman. Although secular society was much more concerned with controlling women’s behavior, and although the prevalent discourse presents them as passive and silent, this passage reveals a man and a woman both actively involved in the relationship. It indicates the validity of the church’s perspective that adultery and its attendant sin pertained equally to the man and the woman.

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Many of the ways society tried to control the uses of the sexual body reflect the law of man rather than the law of God. We say man here advisedly, to highlight the fact that laws were made not by humans generally but by men specifically. This is clearly demonstrated by the variance between ecclesiastical and secular views of adultery. It is also evident in attempts to exercise social control over the bodies of women who were not under the direct control of men. For example, municipal authorities introduced regulations to control prostitution because they believed it contributed to social disorder. The prostitutes’ customers were likely to drink and brawl, but the greater concern was the fact that the women themselves were unlikely to be under the control of a husband or father. Consequently, in many places, prostitutes were consigned to licensed brothels. Some medieval authors, following Augustine, argued that prostitutes were a necessary evil: Overall, they actually helped to preserve social order because they provided a sexual outlet for men who would otherwise harass or seduce respectable women. According to this perspective, prostitutes would certainly be damned for their sins (unless they genuinely repented), but on the whole, society did better to tolerate and regulate prostitution than to eradicate it.23 According to religious authorities, a prostitute was no worse than any woman who fornicated with many men. Receiving payment for sex did not necessarily make it more a serious transgression than other misuses of the body. Some moralists even suggested that a prostitute deserved her payment because she was performing a service, even if her work was sinful. However, if a prostitute committed fraud—and moralists suggested that this included even common practices like dyeing her hair or using makeup to appear younger—then the client did not have to pay her.24 Thus, the prostitute’s body was perceived in two ways: first, as for all women’s bodies, in terms of the physical attractiveness that allowed her to seduce men and, second, as a body that provided a sexual outlet for male desire. When prostitutes were considered more sinful than other fornicating women, it was not because they were professionals but rather because they were considered responsible for the sins of the men they were believed to seduce: ironic given the prevailing view of women’s passivity and society’s utilitarian attitude toward prostitution. While the church considered prostitutes much the same as any fornicating woman, and while secular society considered them useful to maintain social order and reduce the incidence of rape and harassment, some medieval medical writers thought that the bodies of prostitutes differed from those of respectable women. This was based on the medical belief that prostitutes did not become pregnant as easily as other women because they engaged in such frequent intercourse that they received so much semen that their wombs were slippery and the seed could not implant itself.25 Others argued that, according to the logic of the two-seed theory of conception, it was possible that prostitutes did not

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become pregnant when they were working because they did not experience the sexual pleasure necessary to emit their own seed, although, with their husband or lover, they would be able to conceive.26 There are no data, of course, from which to assess the birthrates for prostitutes compared to other women. If prostitutes did indeed have fewer children, it may have been because they had better access to contraceptives or abortifacients, or they may have been prone to infections that reduced their fertility, or perhaps they practiced nonvaginal intercourse. Given the medieval understanding of the reproductive purpose of sexual activity and the importance of controlling women’s bodies, we might well assume that women’s sexual pleasure was considered even more suspect than that of men and that good women were not expected to enjoy sex. In fact, good women were not supposed to lust after men; the perfectly virtuous woman, like the perfectly virtuous man, would not feel sexual desire. But, according to some medical writers, both parents needed to provide seed for conception to occur. The two seeds would mingle in the uterus to create a fetus. Therefore, some medical texts did not reflect the prevalent antisensual bias and indeed served almost as sex manuals, providing detailed instructions on how a man should sexually excite a woman to ensure she experienced the orgasm necessary for her to emit her seed. While it is tempting to view this emphasis on the role of female sexual pleasure as leading to a kind of sexual reciprocity, it had some decidedly negative implications as well. For example, if a woman became pregnant as a result of rape, the logical conclusion was that she must have experienced sexual pleasure in order to have emitted her seed. Consequently, the woman must, on some level, have consented to the rape. Medical writers did distinguish between the pleasure that resulted from bodily stimulation, which could occur against one’s will, and the pleasure that resulted from voluntary mental consent. Lawyers and theologians, however, did not always agree with the conclusions of medical authorities, and many would have considered a pregnant rape victim to have been complicit in the rape.27 While this two-seed theory of conception, which medieval scholars knew primarily from the medical writings of Galen, was widely accepted in medical circles, it competed with an alternative one-seed theory derived from Aristotle. According to this theory, the woman provided formless matter and a place for the fetus to grow, whereas the man provided the seed that gave shape to the fetus. As a result, women did not need to have an orgasm or emit anything, hence their sexual pleasure was not crucial to conception. Those who espoused the one-seed theory recognized that women could and did take pleasure in sexual intercourse, but they believed that women’s pleasure came from receiving men’s seed. This was true according to the two-seed theory as well, which argued that women experienced a double pleasure, one in receiving seed and another in emitting it.28

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The discussion of the differences between male and female pleasure requires us to return to the sexed body. Sex solely for pleasure was wrong, but pleasure, as a coincidental result of reproductive sex acts, was not considered sinful by all medieval thinkers. Medieval medical writers, in particular, were influenced by the ideas presented in the treatise De coitu (On coitus), which circulated in a translation by Constantine the African (before 1098/1099). This treatise argued that the purpose of sexual pleasure was to make people (and animals) want to procreate.29 The idea that women receive pleasure from the reception of seed as well as from their own emission underscores the distinction between active and passive roles in sex. Every sex act was different for the two participants: One of them acted, and the other was acted upon. The idea of the man as active and the woman as passive affected the way people thought about marital sex. Medieval theologians developed the doctrine of the “marriage debt,” which made it incumbent on both spouses to have sex at the other’s request. This doctrine was based on Paul’s teaching that “the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Cor. 7:4–5). Again, the body is equated with its sexual capacity but in this instance more as an outlet for sexual desire than for reproduction. One who refused his or her partner’s request for sex could be held responsible for any sin committed by the spouse who found an alternative sexual outlet. This doctrine, in its theoretical elaboration, was reciprocal. Both husband and wife owed the debt to each other equally. The power dynamics of medieval marriage, however, and the notion of female sexual passivity as closely linked to a good woman’s modesty, chastity, and honor, meant it was more likely that a husband would demand the marriage debt from his wife than a wife from her husband.30 For a woman like the mystic Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–1438), the obligation to be sexually available to her husband was so distressing that she was willing to go to great lengths to avoid it. Her memoir records the conversation with her husband that eventually freed Margery from paying the conjugal debt: “Grant me that you will not come into my bed, and I grant you that I will pay your debts before I go to Jerusalem. And make my body free to God. So that you never make any claim on me requesting any conjugal debt after this day as long as you live.”31 There are fewer examples of men who sought to escape the obligations of sexual intercourse with their wives, in part because the need to provide heirs added to the imperative for them to have intercourse.32 Although the husband was the most likely to demand the marriage debt, however, medieval writers acknowledged that the wife might wish to as well. John of Freiburg (d. 1314) counseled that a husband must render the debt to his wife when she asks him explicitly, but he must also be sensitive to her moods and desires and make the first move if his wife is too modest to ask him but seems to be experiencing an unarticulated

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desire for intercourse. This consideration of the wife’s desires, of course, could also provide yet another excuse for the husband to initiate sex.33 While a husband was within his rights to demand sex from his wife, especially if he did so to avoid committing fornication or adultery, the conjugal debt needed always to adhere to the rules governing appropriate reproductive sex. Augustine had written that it was less sinful for a man to commit illicit sexual acts with a prostitute than with his own wife: “That use which is against nature is abominable in a prostitute but more abominable in a wife. . . . When the husband wishes to use the member of his wife which has not been given for this purpose, the wife is more shameful if she permits this to take place with herself rather than with another woman.”34 The prostitute was already polluted, but the wife was considered a chaste vessel, and the husband who demanded sex in an inappropriate fashion would be guilty of polluting her. For the wife, this perspective presented a double bind: It at once reinforced her sexual passivity by assuming she would not want to engage in such activities and at the same time placed on her the responsibility to prevent such acts, a responsibility that she did not have the power or authority to exercise and that was presumably contrary to her passive feminine nature. In medieval Judaism, the doctrine of a sexual obligation within marriage worked quite differently. The obligation, called onah, was owed by the husband to the wife and was not reciprocal. This requirement did not develop from a concern that a wife be sexually satisfied but more likely reflects the importance of childbearing in a woman’s life. No husband could deny his wife her right to have children. If a woman refused to have sex with her husband, however, she could be labeled a moredet (rebellious woman), and he could divorce her. So, while the norms governing marital sex differed in the Jewish community, they may, in practice, have resembled the Christian doctrine of the conjugal debt. The centrality of the conjugal debt, and the importance of children to women’s lives, was also reflected in the physical requirements needed to contract a valid Christian marriage. Both the man’s and the woman’s bodies had to possess the physical capacity for sexual intercourse, although they did not need to be fertile. Consequently, an impotent man, or a woman with an obstruction that prohibited vaginal penetration, was unable to contract a valid marriage, and if they had exchanged vows unknowingly, the union could be annulled. As a result, the sexual body was subject to judicial scrutiny and physical examination. Wise women—midwives, local matrons, or even prostitutes—might examine either the man or woman to ascertain the suitability of the organs for sexual activity. If the woman were still a virgin, this supported the allegation of male impotence. The man’s genitals would be inspected to ensure they were not deformed or lacking testicles or in some other way incapable of achieving erection and penetration. In one extraordinary example from the ecclesiastical

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courts of York, the impotent husband was put into bed, and a group of women not only examined him but advised him how to initiate sex with his wife. When all else failed, the women began to stimulate him with their hands, but the man’s penis continued to “remain lifeless and as if dead.” The women cursed the impotent man, and in subsequent court proceedings, the wife was granted an annulment based on her husband’s impotence.35 While most physical examinations and evidence presented in court were less dramatic than in this case, it does serve to illustrate the extent to which the sexual body could be assessed, examined, and discussed in public or semipublic fora. The sexual body was not strictly a personal and private matter; its ability to fulfill its natural function was an issue of social concern. For men, who were expected to be sexual actors, the inability to fulfill their social roles as husbands and fathers threatened their place in society at large. One of the reasons that the conjugal debt was given such prominence was the belief that a man deprived of a legitimate sexual outlet would turn to sodomy. By the thirteenth century, the category of sodomy was so broadly defined that it crossed all the prevailing evaluative distinctions: reproductive/nonreproductive, licit/illicit, and natural/unnatural. Sodomy became known as the “sin against nature’ or the “unmentionable vice.” The term could theoretically refer to “unnatural” sexual positions between men and women, but most frequently and unambiguously it referred to sex acts between men. Sodomy could involve either anal or interfemoral sex acts (there are very few references to oral sex in medieval texts) but would also include mutual masturbation. In his testimony to the Inquisition in 1323, Arnold of Verniolles confessed that “he committed sodomy with Guillaume Ros and Guillaume with him,” indicating that whatever the exact sex act, it was something that only the active partner committed, although they could take turns as the active partner.36 The Middle English poem Cleanness discusses the men of Sodom who “found filth in fleshly deeds / and contrived contrary works against nature / And made excessive use of each other.”37 So, again, while the poem refers to sex acts between men as sodomy, it does not specify what those acts entailed. Sodomy was also understood more widely and metaphorically to refer to spiritual sins. Peter Damian coined the term sodomy in the eleventh century, as a deliberate analogy to the spiritual sin of blasphemy, the explicit denial of God.38 Thus, both sodomy and heresy were perceived to be forms of rebellion against God’s laws, and people who engaged in one form of unnatural act were, over the course of the Middle Ages, seen as likely to engage in the other. For example, when the king of France sought to ruin the Knights Templar (1307– 1314), they faced allegations of both heresy and sodomy. Ketzerei (“heresy”) became a slang term for sex between men in late-medieval Germany. Like same-sex intercourse, masturbation was nonreproductive and therefore sinful. In one sense, masturbation could have been considered worse than

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other sexual sins because the sinner could not claim to have been seduced by another but bore full personal responsibility for the sin. Certainly, the seriously sinful nature of masturbation was emphasized by its inclusion under the rubric of sodomy when that category was widened by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.39 Interestingly, it was exactly because masturbation involved only one person that it was considered the least serious species of sodomy. As a solitary act, it had no legal consequences, so canon lawyers did not discuss it, but in confessors’ manuals, priests were urged to interrogate penitents about masturbation with such regularity that it appears to have been considered a common sin, especially among young boys and unmarried men.40 Yet, in the early thirteenth century, in his treatise for confessors, Robert of Flamborough departed from his dialogue format and, instead of providing sample questions, urged confessors not to be explicit but to speak only in generalities, in order not to plant new ideas in the penitent’s mind. Nevertheless, he also indicates that strenuous questioning should be employed to extract a confession of masturbation from male and female penitents alike.41 The distinction between the active and passive sexual roles had profound implications for those people who rejected sexual activity. The meanings of chastity and virginity were radically different for men and women. For men, chastity meant restraint and the ability to control sexual desire. Various metaphors of binding, bridling, holding back, and so on were used to describe how men controlled their bodies. For women, the same language was used, but, in addition, virginity meant restricting access to the female body. The metaphors involved walls, unbroken panes of glass, and the like, although these metaphors became less common in the later Middle Ages.42 Because a woman’s body was penetrated during the sex act, female virginity was thought to be much more a physical state (although it did not necessarily have to do with an intact hymen, of which there is relatively little medieval discussion). Generally, the notion of the intact and uncorrupted body was a less significant marker of male virginity, but there are occasional glimpses of how physical virginity could apply to men. In the late twelfth century, in his work The Jewel of the Church, Gerald of Wales discussed the case of a monk who so struggled with lust that when he was praying “an evil spirit approaches him, places its hands on his genital organs, and does not stop rubbing his body with its own until he is so agitated that he is polluted by an emission of semen.” The abbot who was soliciting advice referred to the monk as a virgin. In his response, however, the bishop, Hildebert of Le Mans, asserted, “I do not know by what reason I could call him a virgin who you affirm is polluted by an emission of semen through masturbation.”43 Thus, at least for Hildebert, masturbation—in this case disguised as a supernatural snare—was a sufficient violation of the sexual body and a breach of chastity that it removed a man’s virginity, even without active intercourse.

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Virginity, however, was as much a spiritual state as a physical condition, and the state of the soul was ultimately far more important than the state of the body. This was particularly important for women, whose sexual bodies were far more vulnerable than those of men, especially given the violence of the period. Rape, including the rape of nuns, was a standard weapon of war and a means by which men asserted their superiority over other men. Moreover, the doctrine of the conjugal debt made it virtually impossible for a wife to maintain her chastity without the explicit permission of her husband. So, for example, Margery Kempe lamented the loss of her physical virginity, saying, “Ah, Lord. Maidens are now dancing merrily in heaven. Shall I not do so? Because I am no virgin, lack of virginity is now great sorrow to me.”44 For men, too, physical virginity, once lost, could not be recovered, but there was no external marker for men comparable to that for women. Some religious writers, both scholastic theologians and writers for a wider audience, argued that virginity was a state of mind more than of body and that someone who led a holy life could be equally virtuous, despite having been sexually active at one time, to someone who had always been chaste. Nevertheless, a strong current of thought that equated purity with intactness endured throughout the Middle Ages. Some scholars have argued that the chaste—monks and nuns in particular— were a third gender, that they were neither fully masculine nor fully feminine.45 We might ask as well whether the chaste or virgins were a third sex or somehow had transcended the sex completely. Did they have sexed or sexual bodies? Did they feel bodily sexual desire? Or, through fasting and mortification of the flesh, were they able to alter the complexions of their sexed bodies? For some medieval holy people, chastity was a constant battle against the desires of the flesh; they were continually aware of their bodies, as a force that needed to be tamed.46 This struggle was gendered masculine, so the monk or hermit who subjected his flesh to punishments and fasting was considered to be exhibiting great virility and manly strength. In a similar way, chaste women, such as the twelfth-century holy woman Christina of Markyate, who successfully overcame the temptations of the flesh, could be called manly in so doing. Christina and a cleric with whom she stayed felt sexual desire for each other: “And though she herself was struggling with this wretched passion, she wisely pretended that she was untouched by it. Whence he sometimes said that she was more like a man than a woman, though she, with her more masculine qualities [virtute virili], might more justifiably have called him a woman.” Eventually, Christ “granted her the consolation of an unheard-of grace,” appearing to her as a small child and extinguishing forever the fire of lust within her.47 It was precisely this battle to overcome desire that purified both men and women. Through struggle, they proved themselves worthy of God’s grace and were able to overcome the insistent desires of their sexed and sexual bodies. In this process, women became more virile, hearkening back to Jerome’s admonition that

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women should embrace chastity and shed their feminine bodies and become male.48 The evidence reveals differences between the ways men and women were understood to feel sexual temptation and bodily desire. Men specifically desired women, and they were tempted by demons in the shape of women, while women’s desire was sometimes for men but other times was a more generalized lust.49 Medieval attitudes toward the sexed and sexual body were manifold and varied according to context, sex, and perspective. Even the holy people who chose to repress and deny the urges and pleasures of the sexual body did not reject embodiment as such. The body was the marker of humanity as so profoundly demonstrated by the incarnate Christ.50 Modern scholars have suggested that the representations of the tortured bodies of the saints and martyrs, particularly those of women, were imbued with a kind of eroticism, whether tortured by persecutors or through their own acts of self-mortification.51 Male saints also linked physical pain and pleasure. When the monk Edmund of Eynsham was subjected to corporal discipline by his fellows, he felt pleasure and with each stroke wanted to experience another.52 But it is important, in trying to understand how acts of religious heroism or excess were experienced by the holy person or perceived by their hagiographer and devotees, to remember that medievals found pleasure in the experience of pain and bodily suffering because it offered an approach to God. For example, Radegund (ca. 525–587) was referred to as a tortrix ([self-]tormentor) because of the severity of her self-inflicted pain, including burning her flesh with hot irons. Nevertheless, her hagiographer states, “Thus did a woman willingly suffer such bitterness for the sweetness of Christ!”53 Other representations of embodiment stress the positive aspects of the sexed body as God’s good creation. Late-medieval and Renaissance art used the motif of the naked Christ, sometimes depicting him with an erect penis.54 This does not imply that medievals believed that Jesus might have been sexually active. Rather, it focused attention on the significance that Jesus took on a human body that was sexed male. Although he was frequently described as exhibiting conventionally feminine qualities, ultimately the human flesh was male: Jesus became man, with all that being male entailed.55 The representations of the embodied Christ were paralleled by representations of his mother. While many images perpetuated the motif of the chaste and passive, almost asexual virgin of the annunciation, others portray Mary in her sexed and sexual role as a woman who has just given birth, as a mother nursing her infant, engorged breasts dripping with milk.56 Thus, by means of erection or lactation, even the holiest figures of Christianity were acknowledged to have bodies that revealed their sexual attributes and potentialities. In the Middle Ages, then, there were multiple levels of distinction in the understanding and evaluations of the sexual body and its activities. Sex acts

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might be distinguished according to multiple sets of binaries: active/passive, natural/unnatural, reproductive/nonreproductive, licit/illicit. The nature and evaluation of sexual activities also varied according to an individual’s status and condition and that of his or her sexual partner: male/female, married/ single/vowed to chastity, rich/poor. But to be human was to be embodied, and the way one experienced the sexual pleasures of that body or repressed its sexual desires was central to the experience of being human.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Body Inferred Knowing the Body through the Dissection of Texts fernando salmón

During the thirteenth century the craft of medicine underwent an important change. Medicine became one of the four branches of institutional knowledge taught and learned at European universities. Many social and intellectual battles were fought to secure its acceptance as a respectable part of academic wisdom. Among other requirements, medicine, like any other academic discipline, needed to define a proper subject to which the investigative method that dominated university studies could be applied. As medieval physicians used to emphasize rhetorically, the subject of medicine was the human body, a subject of a special nobility that endowed this particular branch of knowledge with its dignity.1 However, in the Middle Ages, institutional knowledge about the human body was far from restricted to medicine. Natural philosophy also had its say about the form and workings of the bodies of women and men as well as about any other animals and all things possessed of life. Theology further enlarged the field, with discussions not only about the living but also about the bodies of the dead and those of the resurrected. Lay knowledge about the body was not so distant from that promoted by the learned tradition, and interchange of ideas and practices was common.2 But the body shaped in the medical schools was presented in different clothing at the university and at the bedside. In the

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academic setting, the body, as defined by physicians, was emphasized as the site of health and disease, and the importance of mastering knowledge of it was rhetorically justified as the prerequisite to performing the healing act according to sound medical principles. At the bedside, in contrast, the “medical body” needed to be convincing and authoritative over the experienced body of the patient, yet not so conceptually detached from the lay understanding of its workings as to make communication impossible. In this middle ground, a particular body was shaped, both internally and externally. It was not an invention de novo, and it did not depart greatly from the one that was formed from the remnants of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine that were available in the West in Latin translations from the earlier Middle Ages. But from the thirteenth century on, a body created by physicians for physicians’ use acquired a more complex development, linked with the beginning of medicine at the university.3 To modern readers, a story of the specifically medical body must be told in images. Diagnosis through image dominates the biomedical model prevalent in the West. Judging by the growing public demand for image-driven medical technology, it seems that the promise of seeing inside proves as comforting to the worried well as to the seriously ill. Seeing the inside directly supposedly inhibits the possibility of confusing speculation, of the uncertain meaning of words, of contradictory opinions. Seeing has been for a long time the landmark of objective scientific knowledge, and the subjective experience of our bodies as healthy or diseased can be supported or challenged by the images of those parts of ourselves that we cannot see unless we accept the mediation of experts. The popularity of fictional and nonfictional accounts of the workings of our body is based on this confidence in the basic epistemic truth of what is seen.4 Looking backward, it seems that this aim has always been behind the Western medical tradition, and the failure to fulfill this dream had to do more with technical problems than with alternative systems of approaching the body in health and disease. A history that enjoys seeing the present as the culmination of the past can find many examples in the past that will corroborate this idea. The fact that the direct observation of the body through anatomical dissection emerged gradually from the late Middle Ages can be understood as the first step in a long, ongoing project guided by an immutable goal. The establishing of medical dissection as part of the regular activities developed by the newly created medical schools of the thirteenth century, and their masters’ claim about the importance of knowing the inner parts of the body if the best form of the art was to be performed, apparently supports this interpretation.5 Outside the medical schools the private practices of embalming done in funerary rituals, of autopsies in the service of justice, and of the cutting open of dead pregnant women to extract the living fetus all showed the growing cultural acceptance of dissecting human bodies from the Middle Ages on.6

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However, it would be wrong to assume that people in the Middle Ages were thinking about anatomical knowledge and its uses and about dissecting human bodies in the way in which we think about these today. In fact, cutting up someone’s body, even if it is a dead body, is in no way a necessary consequence of the desire for a better knowledge of disease or the human body. It is not so in medical systems still in use today (such as traditional Chinese medicine), and it was not so historically7—especially if the conceptual framework that underpinned the healing practices was based in humoralism, a holistic medical system in which health and disease are conditioned by a balance or imbalance of some components of the body called humors, which are of a fluid nature.8 Here, seeing the inside of the body was not only a technical impossibility but a useless aim. Even if in some places the introduction of public human dissection was established for teaching purposes, as part of the academic duties of the medical schools, it is nevertheless unlikely that this practice would have served to modify the accepted anatomical knowledge. Dissections were scarce and were built from a reading, or from a memory, of what the texts of the ancients said.9 Furthermore, notwithstanding some beautifully illuminated medieval manuscripts extant in our modern libraries, the visual representation of the body parts was not central to medieval medicine. In fact, the use of the term medical illustration for the images that appear in medical manuscripts can be a deceptive anachronism.10 Medical knowledge about the body in the Middle Ages was based not in the corpse or in images but in words. Words were conveyed in texts, and a history of medical knowledge about the body in the Middle Ages cannot be separated from a history of textual traditions and their use. Texts were the material foundations of the body that were explored in the medical schools: texts that had incorporated oral and written knowledge about a body named and conceptualized in Greek, and then renamed and ordered in Arabic and later in Latin; texts that were put into circulation and used in various modified versions and under genuine or fantastic attributions; texts that were eagerly fetched, arranged, and commented on by various groups of people crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries, among them the Christian physicians who ran the medieval medical schools.11 The texts through which the medical body was inferred were read using the tools—authority, logic, and experience—that characterized the investigative method that dominated the university at the time: the scholastic method.12 In what follows I explore how this method of approaching nature through texts was applied to the human body in the medieval medical schools. Despite differences in detail, a general account of the form and the function of the body in the medieval university would have much in common with that described by the ancients and taught (even when accompanied by anatomical dissection)

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FIGURE 4.1: The image depicts the so-

called nerve man. It repeats an iconographic convention that might have its origin in pre-Islamic Alexandria and that had a wide distribution up to the fifteenth century. The illustration was not intended as a visual representation of the body but as a diagrammatic mnemonic device. Anatomical texts, Wellcome Ms 49, fol. 37r, ca. 1420– 1430 Wellcome ref.: L0029308.

at medical schools up to the seventeenth century. The chapters in this collection that cover premodern medical knowledge give a detailed account of this. Therefore, my contribution centers not so much on describing what university medical masters knew about the body in the later Middle Ages but rather on showing how they obtained and handled this information in the classroom. Analyzing what happened in the classroom is important because it was the main site of diffusion of an increasingly influential medical model and also the

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place where the physician-to-be was socialized to approach nature in a particular way. In the medical schools the student was exposed to a process in which words acquired a physical condition, being translated into bodily parts that did not need to be seen or represented artistically to be visible. Unseen structures were given material plausibility by logical inferences. Strange as it must seem to modern readers, we must remember that a system of thought conditions not only the answers but also, most important, the questions to be asked. In this respect it might be helpful to think that nature is not what is naturally out there but the result of a complex interplay of material, social, and cultural conditions.13 The intention of this chapter, then, is to explore a method of work that was a typical medieval invention and to analyze how it was used to sustain a particular reading of the body. To do so, I focus not on the body as a whole but on a particular organ: the eye. The study of the eye and how its form and function were taught in the medical classroom can provide a telling example of what was entailed in developing a specifically medical body using the technology provided by scholasticism. But it would be misleading to think that the eye was just a topic of medical interest. In the medieval West the eye was ranked highest among the organs of the senses, and it was common to admit that while vision may not be necessary for life it is nevertheless essential for the full development of human potentialities. Vision both furnished religious experience and also informed discussions about the mechanics of human cognition. Knowledge about the eye broke disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and theologians, natural philosophers, and physicians alike shared and deviated from various explanatory models about its structure and function.14 The eye can be used synecdochically to stand for the body as a whole. As with the rest of the human economy, the morphological description of the eye that would suffice for the modern student would not for the medieval one. In the Middle Ages, to know a part was to know teleologically what that given anatomical structure was for. The part’s form, function, purpose, and dignity were indissoluble elements of that knowledge. The hierarchical ordering of the body’s various components was also important in the characterization of its physical structures. The eye, commonly accepted as the noblest sense, provides fertile ground to explore this aspect of the question too. The minute description of the structures of the body, like that which can be found with particular detail in the case of the eye, had only a limited significance in healing activities. Prognostic advice and therapeutic decisions did not depend on knowledge about fixed anatomical structures but on mastering other components of the body—ones of a fluid nature. However, investigation and development of the ancients’ anatomical wisdom was important for promoting academic medicine as a healing system based on true causality

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and not on chance, a claim that vindicated its superiority over other forms of healing.

THE TEXTS TO BE DISSECTED AT THE MEDICAL DESK In 1267, Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar and one of the founders of the growing interest in light and vision in the West, strongly advised those who studied perspective to pay more attention to the anatomy of the eye. After recognizing that its study was in the hands of natural philosophers and physicians, he recommended this knowledge as necessary if perspectivists wanted to know how vision takes place. By anatomy, the friar understood the description of the structures of the eye that the ancients had set up through dissection, in which the anatomized flesh had become written words.15 In the medieval classroom, the medical student was obtaining knowledge about the eye also from dissection but from a very special sort of dissection, the subject of which was not a human body but a text. For a medieval student anatomizing—physically dissecting—the eye made little sense. And it was not a matter of the lack of technical skill at the time but a methodological stance. For someone trained under scholasticism, knowledge about the eye meant understanding what the ancients had said about it and being able to give a logical rationality to its parts and functions. The medical knowledge about the body that was used and developed in the classroom originally derived from lecturing on a canonized selection of texts that, from the twelfth century on, were established around a collection of five or seven treatises, the so-called Articella—“the little art.” To these were added a number of works of Arabic origin and, later in the thirteenth century, some of the most complex treatises on pathology by the second-century physician Galen. It is remarkable that his main works on anatomy were absent from this selection or simply not used.16 One of the components of the Articella collection that enjoyed an extensive tradition of commentaries was the Isagoge, a Latin reworking of an Arabic introduction to Galenic medicine attributed to Hunain ibn Ishaq (d. 873 or 877)— the Latin Johannitius. It provided the medical student with a basic account of the anatomy of the eye, which was described as one of the “composite” parts of the body, like the heart or the kidneys, in opposition to those parts that were termed as “simple,” like the muscles or the nerves. According to this text, the eye was composed of seven tunics and three viscous substances, called humors.17 When the Isagoge was commented on in the medical classroom, its sketchy information was supplemented by other sources. The descriptions of the eye in these other sources all drew from the anatomical model that Galen had

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expounded in book ten of On the Usefulness of the Parts, one of his main anatomical treatises.18 But in the Middle Ages, this work circulated only in an abridged version that does not include this book, and book ten was not translated into Latin until Niccolò da Reggio rendered the whole work in 1317.19 However, the medical student could have access to the content of book ten of On the Usefulness of the Parts indirectly, because it was the basis of a portion of the Ten Treatises on the Eye written in Arabic by Hunain ibn Ishaq.20 The Ten Treatises circulated widely in its Latin translation, De oculis (On the eyes), a work ascribed to Constantine the African—his translator—or to Galen himself.21 Other Arabic sources available in Latin translations were based on the same model, for instance, the Pantegni, a medical encyclopedia composed by Haly Abbas in the tenth century and translated into Latin in the eleventh century,22 or the increasingly influential Canon of the Persian physician Avicenna, a huge synopsis of medical knowledge translated in the twelfth century, which offered a similar account.23 With the information conveyed in these texts, the medical student was instructed about the eye in a way completely alien to our sense of what investigating the human body should entail. There was no direct inspection of the inner parts of the body or of its outer surfaces but rather an inspection of texts. Medieval study of the structure and function of the eye involved a true textual dissection of the works of the ancients, a dissection that carried with it the general description of their parts according to a fixed pattern, their dismembering into pieces, and the analysis of their more minute details.

LOGICAL INFERENCES AND PHYSICAL STRUCTURES When the ancients invented anatomical words, they claimed they did it through the performance of dissection. No one could have expected that, centuries later, their medieval inheritors would reverse the flow and create the carnal human body with their rational wisdom. On many occasions the ancients contradicted each other, and the medieval master had to decide whether it was worth paying attention to the contradiction and, if so, solve it convincingly.24 The medieval medical body was thus shaped by giving material authority to the sayings of the ancients and by solving their contradictions using the logical tools of scholastic reasoning. The very existence of the various constituents of the body and the definition of its physical characteristics resulted from agreed solutions based on the project of investigating the written word. The description of one of the components of the eye, the optic or visual nerve, serves to illustrate this point, which can be generally applied to the rest of the medieval economy of the body. The texts of the Galenic tradition that were available in Latin in the classroom described seven nerves that emerged from the front part of the brain.

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FIGURE 4.2: The main body of the text is placed in the center of the folio to allow

enough marginal space to incorporate the various commentaries that clarified its meaning. It represents a true textual dissection. This positioning can also be observed in some interlinear writing. Articella (Galen’s Tegni), Wellcome Ms. 85, fols. 20v–21r, ca. 1375. Wellcome ref.: L0019493.

The visual nerve, like all nerves devoted to sense perception, was soft in order to fulfill its purpose of reception and transport of sensible impressions. But it had a troublesome peculiarity: Its diameter was bigger than that of the other nerves. According to Galen, it was for this reason that some of the ancient anatomists called this nerve a canal.25 It is interesting to explore how the medieval master incorporated this supposed hollowness into the material structure of the body that the medical schools were constructing. Students were not invited to open up an eye socket to try to reach the canal and decide through physical evidence. And the reason they did not do so was not technical, because by the Middle Ages it was certainly possible to dissect an eye. Benvenutus Grassus, an itinerant eye doctor, wrote a treatise on eye diseases and their treatment at the end of the thirteenth century, and he reported his dissection of an eye.26 No similar reference can be found among medical masters who wrote on the same topic. So it is clear that knowledge obtained from direct observation through dissection seemed important for the practical doctor who treated wounds, tumors, ulcers, and so on but not so much for the university master, who had a different purpose, namely, the creation of a logical body that would serve as the foundation of the academic medical enterprise. Irrespective of the methodological stand, the modern reader can imagine that it was more

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difficult to work with an eye covered in blood than with minute handwriting on parchment. But it was not only nature that could be messy when put under scrutiny; the ancient texts could be sticky too. In fact, the Latin reader would be seriously uncomfortable when finding that in some of his works Galen affirmed that the visual nerve was the only hollow nerve of the human body, while in other works he claimed that the nerve of the penis was also hollow. It is illustrative of the scholastic approach to the human body to analyze how the problem was solved. The medical master did not instruct his students how to check by human or animal dissection whether the optic nerve was a canal or whether the penis has a nerve; instead, he instructed them how to resolve the contradiction found in the texts without putting into jeopardy the functional scheme that the anatomical descriptions supported. The teaching and research devices developed in the schools allowed the solution of these questions by reinterpreting the intentions and meaning of the words of the ancients at the medieval master’s will. We must remember that despite the medieval master’s sincere reverence for the ancients, they were all dead and all needed to speak through the voice of the medieval master. As happened in this case, the various expositors of Galen’s work explained to their students that when Galen called this nerve hollow, he never thought of it as hollow like a cane but instead as having an inner passage bigger than those of the other nerves, which were invisible.27 This bigger passage was needed logically to explain the functioning of the eye since sight was the most spiritual of perceptions and it needed a bigger amount of spirit to perform its function. So it seems that logical inference alone was powerful enough to decide convincingly on the extent of a physical structure.28

THE TWO BODIES: ONE FROM THE DEAD, ONE FOR THE LIVING The same texts that served to justify the existence of a visual nerve and its characteristics were responsible for supporting the description of the eye. But in the medical classroom it was not so obvious what an eye was. In fact, two eyes that ran in parallel can be detected: one layered and one complexional. Analyzing these two models gives us some insight about alternative conceptualizations of the body that coexisted in the medical classroom without conflict because they were created according to different criteria to fulfill different purposes. The “layered eye” represented an ideal anatomical structure, most of whose constituents were inaccessible to direct observation in a living human being. In this model the eye was isolated from the rest of the body, keeping only its connections with the visual nerve and with the brain. It had its origin in the dissections of the ancients that circulated, transformed into words and geometric diagrams, and were used in the medieval university. The layered

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eye supported the functional scheme that explained visual perception and its pathology. The “complexional eye” derived from the ancient understanding of the body as a balance of fluid constituents. It was also defined through words, but it was shaped by experience. It varied from individual to individual. It could be actually touched and seen. In this model, the eye was connected with the rest of the bodily economy as a whole. It provided the explanatory frame for diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic decisions about health problems that might arise in other parts of the body. The layered eye of the tunics and humors exemplified the creation of a standard body that existed only as an ideal construct. The complexional eye could exist only in a particular human being when alive. In the classroom the layered eye ran in parallel with the complexional eye. Their differences did not represent a conflict between text and nature. These differences would not disappear even if the layered body inferred from texts were to become a body cut up at the dissection table and directly inspected. In fact, the dissected body that would, centuries later, rule the medical knowledge about the body would actually be the culmination of the textual body without any discontinuity in its goals. Historians have been prone to follow in the Middle Ages the wake of anatomical dissection, and their findings have been of great interest for a history of the dead body. But following the complexional body might have been more useful in writing stories about the living in the Middle Ages.

THE LAYERED EYE The first thing that elicits our attention about the layered eye is the homogeneity of its description in the various traditions, irrespective of its disciplinary or cultural origin: Natural philosophers and theologians would have recognized this eye just as well as physicians.29 The eye was described as having three humors. They were three substances of different density, and they should not be mistaken for the four humors— blood, phlegm, melancholy, and yellow bile—that were the general constituents of the body. One was central, the lens; behind it was the vitreous humor, and in front it was the albugineous. There were also seven tunics. Considering the lens the center of the eye, three tunics were at the rear and four at the front. The back ones were the retina, the secundina, and the sclera. The retina, which had its origin in the visual nerve, embraced the vitreous humor to join the lens at the point where the two humors, albugineous and vitreous, entered into contact. The visual nerve was covered by two coats, one soft and heavily vascularized and the other hard. From the soft cover stemmed the second tunic, called secundina, which surrounded the outer surface of the retina. The hard cover of the visual nerves was the origin of the sclera. The front tunics

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included a very subtle web—the spiderweb tunic—that came from the retina covering the front of the lens. Another tunic had its origin in the secundina, and it had a hole in the middle, the pupil; it was colored and was called the “grape-like tunic.” From the sclera stemmed a tunic similar in its hardness to a horn, the cornea. The outer tunic came from the cover of the eye muscles, and it was called conjunctiva. Most of the structures described were not actually seen from inspection of the living eye but inferred from words and diagrams that were translated from the Greek into Arabic and from the Arabic into Latin. The relation between these elements of the eye was one of protection and nourishment.30 Variations of this model were built fundamentally on the evaluation of these tunics as real ones or not, such as whether the conjunctiva was not a tunic but a ligament, or independent, or whether the secundina and the grape-like tunic were two different tunics or just one. As in any other medical discussion about the structures of the body, the points of disagreement came from contradictions among the texts, when the medical masters decided to point them out.

FIGURE 4.3: Diagram of the eye representing the three humors and seven tunics. Galen,

De accidenti et morbo, Wellcome Ms. 286, fol. 142v, mid-fourteenth century. Wellcome ref.: L0020942.

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None of these possible variations seemed to worry the medieval masters, since they did not deserve much comment. However, there was a point that did draw their attention. As in the rest of the bodily economy developed by Latin Galenism, the parts followed a hierarchical structure, and to know the morphology of a part was also to investigate its position in that order. Within a composite part such as the eye, it should be clear which of its components was the principal one and which parts were there to secure the right performance of the principal one. It seemed that there was unanimity among the ancient authorities and contemporary authors in considering that the principal instrument of the eye was the lens.31

THE COMPLEXIONAL EYE Together with the explanations about the layered eye just described, the medical student was informed about another eye, one in which the important anatomical data to memorize were those of its “complexion.” Taddeo Alderotti (ca. 1210–1295), an influential master of the medical school at Bologna, posed a number of questions to his students about the eye that had to do not with tunics and humors but with other components even more inaccessible than these to direct observation: the elements. “Is fire—asked Taddeo—the dominant element in the eye?”32 To understand the question we must note that the medical student has been instructed previously that some of the components of the body were the “things natural” (res naturales). These were the elements, the complexions, the humors, and the parts, on the one hand—what we would call the “physical substrate” of the flesh—and the virtues, the actions, and the spirits, on the other. Some of these were perceptible to the senses, and some were not, most notably, the elements and the spirits. However, the presence of “subtle vapors,” as the spirits were defined in some medical compendia of the time, could be inferred through the right or wrong performance of the actions ascribed to them: the vital functions to the spirit generated in the heart and transported by the arteries, the natural functions to the spirit prepared in the liver and carried by the veins, and the animal functions, those of thought, sensation, and voluntary movement, to the subtler of the spirits transformed in the brain and transported by the nerves.33 To accept the presence of the elements—air, water, fire, and earth—as basic constituents of the human body was a matter of a different faith, a logical faith that supported the intelligibility of the human body as part of a rational creation. The elements were the link between the macro- and the microcosm, and medicine incorporated these axioms as part of its own theoretical frame. The elements had certain qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry that in various combinations characterized the complexion or temperament of the human body and each of its parts.

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The complexion was always a relative term that compared the individual to others and one part with another. It varied according to sex, external circumstances, aging, and geographic regions. The complexions, not the elements, were the terrain of medical action, since disease was thought to be an imbalance in the whole complexion of an individual or the complexion of a part, and therapy was the attempt to restore the balance.34 All the information about the eye contained in the Tegni, a basic component of the teaching syllabus, explored the balance or imbalance of the eye’s complexion with a clinical aim in mind—diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic. The complexion of the eye, the student was instructed, could be drawn from inspecting and palpating it.35 Both the layered eye and the complexional eye were created in the classroom through texts, but the layered eye had its origin and end in words while the complexional owed only its origin to written words, being developed further in sensual experience. In the complexional eye, size and color were the important anatomical data. Dryness and moistness, temperature, and the direction of the eye movements were the important functional information—information, the medical student was instructed, that varied from individual to individual, giving the complexional body an evocative experiential dimension.36

FIGURE 4.4: Inflamed eyes. The paleness or redness of the eye was important to establish its health or pathology. The variations were interpreted as variations in the complexional equilibrium. Miscellanea Medica XVIII, Wellcome Ms. 544/4 (Glossulae Quatuor Magistrorum), fol. 25r, early fourteenth century. Wellcome ref.: L0037335.

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The lay public might not know why the complexion of the eye was similar to that of the brain—cold and moist—but complexional anatomy was not just knowledge mediated by texts and by experts; it could actually be felt. It is true that it is difficult to explore how individuals in the past actually experienced their bodily self, but it seems reasonable to assume that the complexional eye could be felt more easily than the layered one. And it could be felt as part of a whole that connected the eye with the rest of the economy of the body, including movements such as food digestion or emotions. A complexional understanding of the eye allowed one to understand that a heavy meal could produce an excess of vapors that, ascending to the brain, would affect vision or that a strong emotion such as wrath produced an excess of heat that would likewise induce blurred vision. The metaphorical armory that supported these connections was full of domestic processes such as cooking, boiling, filtering, and so on.37 No doubt this complexional understanding of the body derived from a common experiential ground where subjective experience was still granted authority as a source of knowledge. And it is not by chance that in the medical school, most of the teaching on prognostication, one of the main parts of the healing encounter, referred to this complexional body and not to the anatomical one privileged by historians.

THE PHYSICALITY OF INTENTION AND DIGNITY To a modern medical student the description of the structure of a part of the human body and the understanding of its functioning would be enough to fulfill her desire of knowing that part. For a medical student trained under scholastic medicine, knowledge of a part of the human body meant understanding what the part was for, and therefore the morphological and functional description of the part under scrutiny needed to explain why the Creator had endowed it with the material features it had. This Christian reading of the body easily incorporated the teleological understanding of the ancients, whose provident Nature could be translated in the medical schools into a Creator God without much trouble.38 Intention, or God’s purpose in creating a part in a certain way, involved also a question of ordering. A hierarchical principle of ordering dominated both the society and the production of knowledge in the Middle Ages. In the medical classroom, this principle linked the intention of the bodily part with an evaluation of its dignity. Intention and dignity were far from abstract notions, and they had an impact on the material definition of the bodily economy. Sight allows us to explore this relationship. According to Galen, “The purpose in creating the head is not the brain, not hearing, not the sense of smell or taste, not the sense of touch either; all these powers and their organs can be found in headless animals. But, the purpose

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in this, is to secure the best disposition for the eyes.” These were the opening words of the book 3 devoted to the pathology of the different parts of the body in the highly influential Canon of Medicine.39 The quotation from Galen that Avicenna offered in his medical compendium fit nicely with the medieval evaluation of the eye. The prominence of the sense of sight that the Creator (or Nature) recognized by giving it this anatomical position was not only physical. Vision was paired with knowledge and with light, pointing in this way toward a continuum that linked humanity and divinity.40 Vision, in other words, was of primary importance in perfecting human beings’ intellectual capacities, and in this respect it was the first sense. By 1300, university-trained physicians could incorporate a hierarchical ordering of the senses that bore the imprint of Neoplatonic influences from various sources commonly used in the medical classroom. These included Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts (in its abridged form) and his On the Internal Parts, as well as various texts from the Salernitan tradition, including the Pantegni, and some basics of the teaching syllabus like the Isagoge. In the classificatory system that derived from these texts, a system that reflected ancient ideas about macro- and microcosmic correspondence, each of the five senses was related to one of the four elements as their basic material constituents. Vision was paired with fire, hearing with air, smell with a vapor that derived from air and water or air and earth, taste with water, and touch with earth. The purpose of vision was the noblest because it enabled the perfection of human nature, and thus it was logical to pair it with the subtlest of the elements: fire.41 In this reading, the material composition of the body was inferred from the dignity of the part, which was itself established by its final purpose. However, the inference posed some problems. If we work within the ordering principle of hierarchy that dominated medieval academic research, it makes sense to affirm that the dominant element in the eye was fire. However, the anatomical description of the layered eye as composed of seven tunics and three humors did not give much credit to fire as the basic constituent of the eye. The same was true in relation to the complexional eye. The proximity—both physical and in the dignity of their functions—of the eye to a brain of a cold and moist nature made the pairing of the eye with water rather than with fire more logical. The tension between the dignity and the purpose of the part, and its morphology and function, did not escape notice in the medical classroom, and it was solved in different ways, none of them involving the dissection or external inspection of an eye. The medical masters were aware of the various medical and philosophical traditions involved in deciding this question.42 Some chose to be loyal to the fire option, without any justification, but by the Late Middle Ages, the fire that dominates the eye was far from the fire thought of by Plato, and it was instead a quality of brightness or a fire that does not burn. Others,

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following Aristotle and his Christian and Muslim commentators, preferred instead to pair the eye with water on the basis that this was the nature of the lens. Some would find a middle path. It is interesting to note how the distinction (distinctio), which was such a resourceful tool of the scholastic method, allowed a solution to the issue. According to some authors, both positions—the one that defended the pairing with fire and the one that defended the pairing with water—were right, because the eye could be taken in a twofold manner. In one way, the eye was understood according to its material composition, and in this respect the dominant element was water since the humors were of a watery nature. In the other, the eye was understood as a synecdoche for its mover, that is, for the visual spirit that made vision possible. In this reading, it was correct to affirm that the element that dominates the eye was fire, because the visual spirit that circulates through the optic nerve was as bright as fire.43 The distinctio, as part of the technology used by medical scholasticism to investigate human nature, allowed the creation of a rational body in which the morphology answered satisfactorily to the intention and to the dignity of the part. In this example, the nobility of purpose conditioned the ultimate decision about the material basis of a bodily part.

PATHOLOGY AND THE SHAPING OF THE HEALTHY BODY The body structure not only was dependent on the needs of teleological order and intention but was also shaped by the physical consequences of disease and by the framework developed for its understanding. On the one hand, disease could physically mark the body, transforming the normal appearance and constitution of its parts. On the other, in the medieval university it was recognized as valid to infer logically from pathology the existence of structures that could not otherwise be known.44 However, sometimes pathology proved painful enough to challenge the accepted body structure, forcing more precise definition on it and even modifying it. We have seen so far how the anatomical parts were shaped to answer to the rationality of a certain body structure; we will now analyze how some modifications of the anatomical description of a part were made in order to sustain a logical explanation for the pathological conditions that affected that part. Various examples could be brought to illustrate this point, but I focus on an extreme case: seeing when there was nothing to be seen. The experience of seeing flies or sparks when there were no external objects placed in front of the eyes of the viewer was a well-known phenomenon in the Middle Ages, linked not only with disease but with common daily life situations such as awakening or even rubbing one’s eyes. The incident was less disturbing for those who experienced it than for medical authors, because it seemed to challenge the two main models that were used to explain visual

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perception—two models that, while they differed on the agency and passiveness of the object to be observed and the observer, nevertheless shared the same anatomical framework and technical vocabulary. In both, the visual spirit that circulates through the optic nerve conveyed the impressions of the external objects to the brain, and both stressed the need for a transparent medium and a proper distance between the thing seen and the seer in order for vision to take place.45 In the medical schools it was thought that vision could happen in the absence of an external visible object due to a problem in the anterior part of the brain or some affection of the stomach, but it could also happen with changes in the density of the albugineous humor. And this cause is the one that is of interest for our story. The albugineous was one of the three humors that constituted the eye. It was described as a transparent humor similar to the white of an egg, hence its name. It was placed in front of the lens and had the function of keeping it moist. It could suffer changes in quantity and in quality. Changing the quality of the humor could affect its density or its color or both at the same time. Variations in color made the whole image that was being seen take on the color of the changed humor. Variations in density could affect the whole humor or be focused in one point or dispersed in various points.46 The effect of the dispersed condensations of the albugineous humor was not a diminution or complete cancellation of the normal function but what the Galenists called a corruption of the function, that is, a change in the usual performance, such as seeing sparks, hairs, flies, mosquitoes, or even flying birds when nothing of this sort was in front of the eyes.47 Irrespective of the origin, the possibility of seeing objects that were not in front of the observer posed a troublesome question for medieval thinkers, and some medical masters had a say on the topic.48 The medical student of the late thirteenth century learned that Galen had admitted the possibility of seeing internal objects in his commentary on the Hippocratic Prognostics and in his two main treatises on pathology, On the Internal Parts and On Disease and Its Symptoms.49 The treatise On the Eyes, attributed to Galen or to Constantine, confirmed the same phenomenon.50 Patients’ narratives and daily experience also seemed to support it. However, all of the functional models used in the medical classroom to explain how vision took place accepted the Aristotelian premise that all perception needs a medium and that the sensible object over the sense organ does not produce any sensation.51 Experience, too, was called in to support this statement: an object placed on the eye could not be seen. The anecdotal seeing of flies flying challenged both textual traditions on sense perception and its pathology and sensual experiences. The medieval solution proposed for the problem gives us some insight into how the medical body

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that emerged from the university classroom was not a fixed entity but the result of a manifold negotiation, one that needed to adapt its physical and functional characteristics to the new problems posed by the ongoing project of investigation based on the ancient texts. There is no doubt that in the medieval medical school, the starting point for discussing whether something that was inside the eye could be seen was a text—one by an author to whom the academia had granted authority. It was very unlikely that a personal observation from medical practice would have provoked the same effect. When facing the text, we must remember that one of the first possibilities that the medical master had at hand was just to ignore the point where the problem seemed to arise. He could even ignore obvious contradictions between authorities. Conflicting bodies, such as the one in which the observer is the agent in perception versus the one in which the observer receives passively the form of the sensible object, did not arise self-created by objective contradictions found in the writings of the various canonical authorities. The bodies that emerged from the texts of the ancients did not have a voice of their own. It was the medieval master who decided what to take, what to dismiss, and, generally, what for and where to use the authority of the ancients to define what belonged to the normal and the pathological body. Deliberate misreading and difficulties in understanding a complex set of narratives on human nature played a larger role in negotiating the body that emerged from the medical classroom than the simple availability of texts or their defective translation.52 So we have some medical authors in the thirteenth century who, when facing Galen’s statement about the possibility of seeing internal objects, just skipped the problem. Others preferred to add precision to Galen when expounding some of his medical works in the classroom, following the pattern that characterized the scholastic lecture. For scholastics, to read a text by an authority was not a meditation on its words but an active questioning of its meaning.53 By the time that medicine formed part of university teaching, a technique had been developed with which to discuss all ranges of topics: the questio. There is no doubt that the structured question (questio) was the landmark of scholastic investigative thought. It has a dialectical structure that typically began by developing the arguments against the position that the author wanted to defend. Later, the arguments in favor were offered, and it finished with a conclusion where the arguments set out against the favored position needed to be solved logically.54 Authority, logic (namely syllogisms), and recourse in a variable degree to experience were used in defending the pro and the contra positions. The application of this logical apparatus to the investigation of the human body was just a particular example of how Aristotelian logic was applied to the physical world, a basic program of scholasticism.55

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It is illustrative of this method of work, so alien to our own culture of investigating the body, if we follow the solution to the question about the possibility of seeing objects that were not placed outside the eye. In the medical schools some explanation was offered to solve the apparent contradiction that seeing internal objects posed to the accepted perceptual system for vision. It was agreed that for vision to take place, a medium and a distance between the object and the sense organ were needed. However, according to most of the authors dealing with the topic, in this case, there was both a medium and a proper distance. But how could this position be defended when it was obvious that not only was the object not placed at a minimum distance but it was even inside the eye? It was done by redefining what the medium for vision was, adding some new physical and functional characteristics to the albugineous humor, and restricting the concept of sense organ to its principal instrument. It was decided that the medium in this case was not an external medium such as air, but any transparent material such as the viscous albugineous humor. The albugineous humor was physically redefined to act both as the object to be perceived and as the medium in front of the lens. It was also agreed that the sense organ was not the eye anymore but was to be equated with the lens. Adding this precision allowed the argument that there was indeed a distance between object and sense organ, because the albugineous humor and the lens were separated by the weblike tunic!56 Thus, the need to explain logically the pathology of a body part forced a refinement of its physical and functional characteristics. The medical student learned how the physical materiality of the human body could be reshaped to adjust it to the needs of a teleological ordering of nature and an explanatory model of disease based on causal principles. And this reshaping was done not with new investigative findings obtained from a more detailed inspection of the body, dead or alive, but with the findings that emerged from an investigative project that dealt with the words of the ancients and that applied to them the logical tools of scholastic reasoning.

MEDICINE AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE BODY The opening words of Avicenna’s Canon linked medicine with the knowledge of the body: “Medicine is the science by which the dispositions of the human body are known.” However, the quotation would be misleading if its last part were skipped, because it openly set that knowledge apart with the following words: “so that whatever is necessary is removed or healed by it, in order that health should be preserved or, if absent, recovered.”57 Avicenna’s goal might seem reasonable to a modern reader but impossible to achieve by the investigative project on the body just outlined. The lack of interest in visualizing the

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structure of the body is at odds with our idea of what is entailed in studying our material selves. And it might also seem even more difficult to understand how the theoretical subtlety of the scholastic debate on unseen structures of the body could be of any interest for the physician-to-be and, more important, for the actual performance of medicine. In this respect the anatomical projects of the Renaissance—based on human dissection and beautifully illustrated— seem more appropriate to fulfill the aim outlined in the Canon. However, if we reflect on the practical consequences that these investigative projects based on the corpse, and on visualizing, had on the handling of contemporary patients, the answer would be similar to that obtained from questioning what clinical consequences were brought about by their medieval counterparts: none. Therefore, our modern uneasiness about accepting the medieval investigation of the body as a valid project that obtained a true understanding of the physical structures of men and women should not be justified by the evidence of its failure to improve the health of the individuals of the time. It would be wrong also to analyze it as a primitive step in an evolutionary story in which the uselessness of a project based on texts is beaten by the practical usefulness of a project based on nature that, once established in the Renaissance, would dominate the Western world from then on. Knowing the body was relevant in both projects, irrespective of the fact that they were based either on words or on the materiality of the flesh. But they were aimed at knowing and at using that knowledge differently from each other and differently from us. Leaving aside preconceptions of what the knowledge of the body is for us today and what role it plays in the performance of medicine allows us to understand better the apparent contradiction between the effort to define so meticulously the various body parts in the medieval medical schools and its poor practical use at the bedside. Historical evidence shows that for universitytrained physicians it was important to prove that their healing activities were based on true knowledge about the inner parts of the body and their workings. In fact, this claim structured the discourse they developed to justify their aspiration to control and monopolize the healing market.58 Anatomical knowledge learned at the medieval schools was not thought to be important because it promoted different and more efficacious therapeutic procedures than those offered by healers not trained at the universities. In the fourteenth century university-trained surgeons did not claim, for example, that they could treat cataracts more successfully because they knew the detailed structure of the eye’s seven tunics and three humors better than the itinerant eye doctor did. The argument that supported the superiority of academic medicine over other forms of healing was not based on the clinical records of success and failure but on the rationale behind their understanding of the disease.59 And, as stated in contemporary trials against non–university-trained healers, only those who mastered the anatomical wisdom of the ancients as expounded in the class-

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room could claim to base their healing procedures on causal reasoning and not on trial and error or mere chance.60 Accustomed as we are to the mediations of machines in order to see and understand our bodies and their workings in health and disease, it must seem strange to think about the scholastic method of research as a tool to find answers about the morphology and functioning of the medieval body. However, we must remember that a system of thought conditions not only the answers but, most important, the questions to be asked, and it seems that scholasticism as a method of research applied to the body satisfactorily answered the medievals’ contemporary demands.

CHAPTER FIVE

Bodies and the Supernatural Humans, Demons, and Angels anke bernau

In the Middle Ages, the human body was understood to exist within a complex web of interior and exterior influences that acted on and affected it in various crucial ways. From the twelfth century on, medieval medicine and natural philosophy, drawing on ideas made accessible through the translation of classical and Arabic texts, imagined the human body as fundamentally interconnected with the world and universe around it: If it was understood as an individual microcosm, it was one that was nonetheless heavily influenced— even determined—by the macrocosm it inhabited: the stars, seasons, and elements. As Michael Camille notes, The traditional microcosmic model of the universe, especially popular in the twelfth century, had described influence working in both directions with man as a minor mundus or “lesser world”, often illustrated at the centre of things in splendid cosmological diagrams.1 This intimate relationship is exemplified in a hugely popular question-andanswer narrative, which circulated in a wide range of European vernaculars, the fifteenth-century Sidrak and Bokkus, which links the creation of specific parts of the human body to corresponding planets. Thus, for instance, Jupiter

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is said to “shape the head and the face”; Mars, the body; Venus, the limbs; Mercury, the testicles and penis; the moon, nails and hair. The sun causes the human body to grow, as it does all other natural things. Once “the limbs of the body are thus fully shaped,” God adds the soul.2 The entire process is then briefly summed up: And therefore the body is made first, Before any other thing is brought thereto; And when it is thus completely made As God ordained and commanded, He then puts into it soul and life, And then it is made as it should be.3 But cosmic networks were not the only ones within which human bodies were understood to be constituted in the Middle Ages; there were also those of a more terrestrial, human nature, whose power meant that individual bodies were, for instance, “the site of intense visual scrutiny and surveillance by the Church, . . . [as well as] subject to the bonds of feudal lordship.”4 In other words, bodies came into existence and were understood through and within a range of frameworks and natural, social, religious, political, and cultural relationships. In addition to these multiple (and sometimes conflicting) claims made on the individual human body by forces both earthly and cosmic, there were those made by the supernatural—those various beneficent and maleficent powers, such as angels or demons, that surrounded humans and were believed to play a vital and active role in their everyday lives, as well as their life after death. This chapter is concerned with such agents. It focuses in particular on how demons, whose ubiquitous and potent presence fascinated, troubled, and entertained medieval writers and audiences, interacted with human bodies and what such interactions reveal both about spirit and human bodily nature as conceived in medieval thought. To every man there are assigned two angels, the good for protection, the evil for trial.5 Human interaction with the supernatural was a prominent theme in many genres of medieval writing, both secular and religious. It played a central role in religious practice: Next to the visible, mundane, material world—and certainly not separate from it—was the world of supernatural influence: saints, angels, demons, elves, ghosts. All of these (and more) had to be reckoned with and, respectively, petitioned, appeased, resisted, or avoided. The human body was open and vulnerable to their powers, which were, however, sometimes also actively sought to help the petitioner through illness or misfortune. At other

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times humans became their more or less unwitting victims. As one critic concludes, For medieval people the world teemed with spirits, some good, most not. . . . Minor spirits were responsible for most of life’s misfortunes large and small: bad weather, bad crops, fire, sickness, insanity, accident, annoyance, even soured milk.6 Such beliefs and associated practices cut across the strata that made up medieval society, and evidence of them is found in a wide range of written sources and genres: drama, hagiography, romance, philosophy, medicine, and sermon stories (exempla), to name some.7 Such variety also suggests that an interest and belief in supernatural powers existed among the majority of the population, regardless of social class or gender. Recent scholarship has pointed out that any distinction between an “elite” and a “popular” culture, if these terms are understood to refer to clearly delineated spheres, is in any case deeply problematic and flawed and that many beliefs and practices were in fact shared by wide sections of the populace.8 In any case, medieval orthodox Christianity repeatedly asserted and confirmed the existence of spirits both good and evil in its writings, art, and practices. Supernatural forces were thought to take part in human life, both in dramatic and in everyday ways, from the moment a child was born (some writers argued that this was so even while the infant was still in its mother’s womb) until—and beyond—death. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in particular, saw a heightened interest in angels; indeed, “angels were ubiquitous.”9 As is explained in one of the most popular and widely disseminated texts of the medieval period, Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century collection of hagiographic information and narratives, the Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend): To every man, indeed, two angels are given, one a bad angel to try him, the other a good angel to guard him. The good angel is deputed to guard him at birth, and in the womb, and immediately after his birth, and during his adult life; for in each of these phases of his life, man needs the wardship of an angel.10 Whereas good angels were seen to be “intercessors and mediators” as well as guardians—therefore constituting “an important link between the supernatural and natural worlds”—demons were their negative counterparts.11 Keck argues that, even though “theoretically, the most regular frequent [sic] contact between Christians and the angels came when angels protected them against the temptations of their maligned counterparts, the demons,” it was “Lucifer and his minions [that] seem to have generated far more concern and interest

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than Michael and his celestial armies.”12 While both were viewed as important and as inevitably connected to one another, it is noticeable that popular sermon stories and hagiographic accounts seem to focus more frequently and with greater intensity on demonic influence or visitation. As already stated, angels and demons were believed to participate in the lives of humans from (before) birth to (after) death; their presence in an individual life cycle reflected their role in the larger eschatological frame, in which angels and demons were also held to be active until and on the Day of Judgment. Demons (or devils) were angels who had fallen from heaven, following Lucifer in his prideful rebellion against God. In the late-medieval pageant from the Chester cycle of plays, The Fall of Lucifer, this transformation is given dramatic utterance and visibility. One moment Lucifer is proclaiming his own beauty: “I am peerless and the prince of pride, / For God himself does not shine so brightly”; “All Angels turn to me, I command, / And to your sovereign kneel on your knee!” And the next he and his followers are nothing but miserable demons, blaming each other for their reduced state: “You have brought us this wicked way, / Through all of your might and pride, / Out of a joy that lasts forever, / To abide evermore in sorrow.”13 The existence of the devil and his legions was maintained and perpetuated with great seriousness: What homiletic tracts and their exempla conveyed about the devil was received literally; Satan and his minions were actual beings belonging to an invisible nether world, but capable of interacting with people in their daily lives in the visible world just as the Evangelists had described in the Gospels.14 As the Monk instructs the Novice in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s didactic and much-cited thirteenth-century Dialogue on Miracles: “There can be no doubt of their existence, since they can be seen, heard and touched by men.”15 The existence of the devil and of demons is already affirmed and discussed by Saint Augustine (fourth to fifth century c.e.), in his hugely influential Concerning the City of God against the Pagans. For Augustine, the devil is an integral part of the Lord’s creation: “For there is nothing in nature . . . which is not brought into being by him, from whom comes all form, all shape, all order.” God did not, however, create his evil: “Thus, when the Devil, who was good as God created him, became bad by his own choice, God caused him to be cast down to a lower station and to become a derision to the angels of God.”16 In the Dialogue on Miracles, the Novice exclaims that it seems to him that there “must be many more demons than wicked men,” since they seem to be lurking everywhere. The Monk replies that the exact number of demons is not known but that the story of the angels’ fall, which states that “the tenth part of the angels fell and became demons” suggests that, at the end of the world,

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there will be many more angels than demons, even while it is clear that there are many more wicked men than good men.17 Yet their own great number should be no comfort to wicked men, for while they may be more numerous than the demons, the demons are so powerful that they can still inflict immense—disproportionate—pain and harm: Nor may the wicked take any comfort from the fact that they will be far more numerous than the demons; for so great is the natural power of the latter, so concentrated their malice, so intense their love of inflicting pain, that one will be enough to torture many thousands of men.18 Other writers, however, emphasize the overwhelming number of such spirits: Not only do demons exist, they surround people in multitudes. One tells that they “fly above in the air as thick as motes in the sun,”19 another that they are “swarming like flies,”20 and Caesarius confirms that “they are always near us and about us.”21 The Golden Legend informs its readers that God’s design permits them to come down to try us, whence, as has been revealed to certain holy men, they ofttimes fly about us like flies; for they are innumerable, and fill the whole air like flies. Hence Haymon says: “Philosophers have taught, and our doctors agree, that the air is as full of demons and evil spirits as a ray of sun with specks of dust.”22 It is, therefore, not surprising that Thomas Aquinas concluded that “everything that visibly occurs in this world can be the work of demons.”23 Equally, it explains why the stories in sermon literature concerning demons and devils are also “ceaseless.”24 But what is the relationship between angels, demons, and humans? What are their ontological differences, and are there similarities between them? The angels’ fall precipitated a fundamental change in their place of habitation and very being. No longer living in heaven, they had to content themselves with the “middle air between heaven and hell,”25 an intermediary position that caused them unhappiness twice over, from both above and below. As Jacobus de Voragine explains it in his account of Saint Michael: When Lucifer sought to be equal to God, the Archangel Michael, standardbearer of the heavenly host, came forward, and cast the rebels out of Heaven, imprisoning them in the dark regions of the air until the day of judgement. They are not permitted to dwell in Heaven, which is the upper region of the air, and is bright and pleasant; nor with us on earth, lest they molest us excessively. They abide therefore between Heaven and earth, that they may suffer when they look upward to the glory which

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they have lost, and may be tortured with envy when they look downward, and see men ascending to the heights whence they themselves have fallen.26 In accordance with their demotion to inferior regions, their bodies also changed. Augustine argues that while the bodies of angels are ethereal, those of demons are aerial,27 with the former term denoting a purer and more celestial condition than the latter. As Dyan Elliott points out, “according to Augustine’s view, demonic bodies were transformed as a result of the fall, after which they were drawn from the lower and coarser air.”28 There is, therefore, a hierarchy of bodies, in which the bodies of angels and demons are both less material—or certainly less earthly—than those of humans, with angels at the top of the pile and humans at the bottom. As one twelfth-century thinker concludes, “Angels have ethereal bodies, demons have airy bodies, and humans have terrestrial bodies.”29 That the bodies of demons are not the same as those of humans is what makes them in some ways superior to humans and in others inferior. In Concerning the City of God, Augustine explains the distinctive nature of demons: Their rational mind they share with the gods and with mankind. Their eternity they share only with the gods; their liability to passions, only with men, while their body of air is their own peculiarity.30 In the process of explaining this difference between demon and human, Augustine also gives an insight into how human nature is to be understood, particularly the relationship between body and soul: Now every living being, or “animal”, consists of a soul and a body. Of these two constituents the soul is certainly better than the body, however faulty and weak it may be, better even than the healthiest and strongest body, because its nature is more excellent, and the blemishes of vice cannot make it inferior to the body—just as gold, even if dirty, is valued above silver or lead, however pure.31 Sidrak and Bokkus reiterates the idea that body and soul are intimately intertwined; emphasizing, however, that the facilities of the body are animated and made possible only through the soul: “The body has no power / of itself, that is certain / [no power] to speak, nor go, nor do anything / Except for that which the soul tells it to do.” It adds that the body is nothing but a covering for the soul, a “foul carcass” without it.32 Augustine notes that demons, too, have a body and a soul:

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They have their body, the lower part of their being, in the company of the higher powers, while their higher part, the soul, is with the lower creatures; united with the gods of heaven in virtue of their subordinate part, they are united in misery with men on earth in respect of the part which should command. It is this particular conjunction of higher corporeal and lesser spiritual natures that seals their miserable fate, rendering any hope of change or salvation null and void: Hence even if one supposes that the demons share eternity with the gods, because their souls are never sundered from the body by death, as happens with terrestrial creatures, one should not think of their body as the eternal instrument of beings advanced to honour, but as the eternal chain that binds the damned.33 Not only do their bodies condemn them to eternal damnation, but their souls, being like those of humans, are weak and subject to the passions that cause human unhappiness:34 demons, “though being without flesh . . . were capable of feeling pain, both physical and psychic.”35 In contrast, humans enjoy a greater “moral goodness” and are, through Christ, ultimately also “destined for bodily immortality”; this immortality can, unlike that of the demons, be a glorious one: “the immortality for which purity of heart is the preparation.”36 In one of Caesarius’s examples, it is thus the very lack of a human body that is lamented by a demon, since penance done in the human body can bring a soul to the joys of heaven. As the demon has no such body with which to do penance, he can never hope to alter his situation. This demon explains to his interrogator: “If . . . there were a column of burning iron set up from earth to heaven, and if it were furnished with the sharpest razors and blades of steel, and if I were given a body capable of suffering, most gladly would I drag myself up it from now till the Day of Judgment, . . . if only I might at last win home to the glory in which I once dwelt.”37 What this story of demonic anguish and regret expresses is the orthodox view that “the [human] body, though transmitter of original sin and frequent instigator of sin, was nevertheless a privileged zone in which the penalty for sin could be alleviated prior to death.”38 It must be added, however, that this kind of repentance is not typical of demonic behavior, which is more frequently characterized by an overweening and obstinate desire to do evil, signaling their irredeemable sinfulness and malice.

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Views regarding the nature and being of demons and angels were not monolithic and did not remain unchanged throughout the Middle Ages. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for instance, Augustine’s view persisted in some quarters but was also modified, particularly by the vanguard of scholastic thinkers. A change in attitudes toward demonic and angelic bodies emerged at this time; attitudes concerning demonic nature, “already fissured and uneasy,” now began to “dissolve.”39 This debate came to a peak with the writings of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, who articulated the view that “matter was solely an attribute of bodies.” This meant that angels and demons “were established as pure form,” while they could still take on “bodies of condensed air.”40 Jeffrey Burton Russell summarizes the range of opinions on demonic bodies in this period as follows: The traditional view that angels and demons have bodies of ethereal or aerial matter persisted among some scholastics, Bonaventure, for example, but was rejected by Albert the Great and Aquinas, who argued that they were purely spiritual substances on the grounds that spiritual but contingent creatures were needed to fill what the scholastics perceived as a gap between God (pure spirit and uncontingent) and humans (spirit/ matter and contingent).41 Thus, while one faction of thirteenth-century scholastics, led by Saint Bonaventure, argued that “all creatures, even spirits, are composed of both form and matter” and that, therefore, angels were to be thought of as “in some sense, ‘material,’ ”42 others, whose position is represented by the view of Thomas Aquinas, disagreed, arguing instead for a pure immateriality.43 Still others tried to tread a middle path. Although medieval art offered many depictions of demons and devils, written texts emphasized how very dangerous it was for a human being to encounter a demon, whether in his own or in an assumed shape. Caesarius suggests at one point that it is impossible for humans to see demons as they really are, with “the eye of the body,” because of the difference in their material natures: “The devil is a spirit, and a spirit can only be seen by a spirit, as is the opinion of nearly all authorities.”44 Nonetheless, he acknowledges that demons do appear to humans, warning of the deleterious effects of such encounters: “So dreadful and so poisonous is the sight of demons that it not only makes healthy men sick, but sometimes even kills them.”45 And while they are sometimes innocuous, or deceptively beautiful, in the forms they assume, they are more often terrifying and awe-inspiring. An example of this is found in the thirteenth-century Middle English life of Saint Margaret, when the demon who is preying on her is revealed after she prays to God to show her the enemy:

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That evil creature glistened as though he was all covered in gold. His hair and long beard gleamed with gold all over, and his gruesome fangs seemed of black iron. His two eyes, big as buckets, more blazing than stars or gemstones, stared out of his horned head on each side of his high, hooked nose. From his disgusting mouth fire sparked out, and from his nostrils billowed smothering smoke, terrible to taste. And he darted out his tongue, so long that he swung it round his neck, and it seemed as though a sharp sword shot out of his mouth, which flared like a flame and set everything on fire.46 Considering this description, it is not surprising that encounters with demons are almost always shown to cause illness, madness, and sometimes death, even if they appear in disguise. The ability to appear in an infinite variety of shapes and forms caused demons to be described as the ultimate shape-shifters. This mutability reflected and reinforced their falseness and was used unscrupulously to further their main aim: causing harm to humans. As the demon tells Saint Margaret, “If you want to know why we most attack righteous people, I answer you: from envy, which continually, forever eats our hearts. We know that they’ve been made to rise to the place we fell from, and it seems a mockery to us and quite against reason, so that anger inflames us, and we go mad with rage.”47 In their vengeful zeal they stop at nothing, and one must be ever watchful, anticipating their wiles and deceit at all times. The thirteenth-century Middle English guide for anchoresses, the Ancrene Wisse, warns, The traitor makes himself into a true advisor—never trust him! David calls him demonium meridianum (Psalm 90:6), “the bright shining devil”; and St. Paul angelum lucis (2 Corinthians 11:14), that is “an angel of light,” for as such he often disguises himself and shows himself to many. Regard any vision you may see, whether in dreams or waking, as mere delusion, for it is nothing but his guile.48 The power of demons is underlined in this warning, for so great is their power to confuse and lead astray that they are able to take on the appearance of angels, making evil seem holy. Thus Caesarius’s Monk tells the Novice that he has heard of a recluse, a “pious and saintly woman,” who, “for a long time, as a result, I was told, of a lack of discretion, . . . had received an angel of darkness thinking him to be an angel of light,” and includes the warning offered to her by a certain brother Herman: “Be careful, my sister, because the

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messenger of Satan often transforms himself into an angel of light, seduces many and sometimes mocks even the holiest men.”49 But there was no clear consensus among writers that all demons were to be considered equally evil. Some maintained that some demons did not actively consent to Lucifer’s rebellion but stayed neutral and are therefore capable of feeling regret or even of aiding humans.50 Caesarius relates a couple of stories that feature demons who prove to be exceptionally faithful servants, concerned for the spiritual well-being of their masters. When one such master, a knight, asks his servant, who has been revealed to him as a demon, how it can be that he is so loyal, the demon replies, “It is my greatest consolation to be with the sons of men.”51 In another story, the spirit becomes domesticated, living with a family for three years, reproving them for bad behavior, talking to them on a daily basis, as well as causing minor “mischief, knocking over jugs of ale and other pots, and now and then causing other nuisances.”52 Despite such well-meaning—or at least harmless—demons, the overall message from the numerous sources dealing with demonic activity is that humans suffer—often terribly, sometimes fatally—as a result of interacting with them. As we have seen, demons’ “airy” bodies allowed them to appear to humans in all sorts of guises. This ability also, of course, enabled them to take on human shape, and they tended to do so in two ways: First, demons are actually able to mimic the physical appearance of living humans to deceive their kin and friends more effectively. Thus, in one story from a fifteenthcentury English translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum (An Alphabet of Tales), demons take on the shape of well-known neighbors—“in the form and likeness of men and women”—in order to confuse their acquaintances.53 Second, more gruesomely, they can animate human bodies that are already dead: Caesarius tells “of a cleric whose body a devil quickened instead of a soul.” When the demon is adjured and leaves the body, it immediately “collaps[es] and becom[es] putrid. Then all knew that body had long been abused by the devil.”54 Another way of interacting with human bodies is through sexual intercourse. Women, whose bodies were perceived to be more open than men’s and whose natures were seen as more carnal and lustful, could become objects of special demonic sexual attention or violation.55 In one tale a virgin whose husband has died is locked in the attic by her father, who is afraid for her chastity because of her great beauty (presumably the husband died before the marriage could be consummated). The devil, however, contrives to appear “to her in the likeness of a man, and spoke words of love to her.” Eventually he has his way with her, and she, suspecting she has been “deceived by a fiend,” tells her father. With a heavy heart, he sends her far away, so that she may escape the attentions of the devil; he, however, is angry at the disappearance of his “wife” and strikes the father so forcefully that he dies from his injuries. This account is

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followed by another, shorter one, relating how a woman had sex with a demon disguised as a knight every night for six whole years, at the end of which she made her confession and the demon did not return.56 Why it took her six years to confess these trysts is not discussed. In some stories, women are even impregnated by such intercourse, usually with dire consequences, either for themselves or for others. In a German account, a woman is visited by a demon who has taken on the appearance of her husband. She has sex with him and bears three monstrous children: “One monster had teeth like a hog’s, the second had a startlingly long beard, the third had one eye in its face . . . But the mother, after the birth of these children, died.” Her body, in death, also reveals the aftereffects of demonic influence: She is so swollen that the coffin cannot be closed.57 In other accounts, demonic paternity causes particularly evil or powerful offspring. A popular and well-known story of demonic parentage was that told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (1130s). Here it is told how King Vortigern questions Merlin’s mother, a nun, as to who her son’s father is. She replies, “By my living soul, Lord King . . . and by your living soul, too, I did not have relations with any man to make me bear this child. I only know this: that, when I was in our private apartments with my sister nuns, some one used to come to me in the form of a most handsome young man. He would often hold me tightly in his arms and kiss me. When he had been some little time with me he would disappear, so that I could no longer see him. Many times, too, when I was sitting alone, he would talk with me, without becoming visible; and when he came to see me in this way he would often make love with me, as a man would do, and in that way he made me pregnant. You must decide in your wisdom, my Lord, who was the father of this lad, for apart from what I have told, I have never had relations with a man.”58 Thus demons found their way into many legends and romances dealing with national origins or history. Another example of this is found in a very popular legend from the fourteenth century, which recounts the origins of “Albion.” Here, we are told that a band of sisters, banished from their homeland in the East (there are two versions, one set in Syria, the other in Greece) for plotting to murder their husbands, arrive at an empty island after being set adrift in a rudderless boat. They name the island Albion, after Albina, the eldest sister, and live happily in a rather Edenic setting. What they do miss, however, is male company, and their intense desire for sex alerts the devil, who is only too happy to oblige. One chronicle relates that in order to mate with the women, the devil travels to many different countries, collecting the semen of human

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men. He then arrives in Albion and, using this semen, has sex with all of the sisters, with their consent.59 The women bear monstrous giants as a result of these copulations, who rule Albion for several hundred years, before Brutus and his men arrive and vanquish them. Because demons do not possess—and cannot achieve—true human corporeality, impregnation is a tricky and rather convoluted process. Although the chronicle does not tell us how the devil collected the human semen, other accounts of sex between demons and women explain that the demon first has to become female itself (succubus) to seduce a male human and so harvest his semen. This achieved, the demon becomes male (incubus) once more, and the gathered human sperm can be used to impregnate a woman. As shown earlier, the demons’ physical mutability underlined and aided their main objective, which was to cause harm and to deceive: “Diabolus mendax est et pater eius (John 8:44)—‘The devil is a lie and the father of lies.’ ”60 In this way, demons, like the devil, do their work by attacking both the human soul and the human body. Yet the human body and soul cannot be entered or assaulted as though they were of the same essence. According to Caesarius, “when the devil is said to be within a man, this must not be understood of the soul, but of the body, because he is able to pass into its empty cavities such as the bowels.”61 The human body can be thought of as a vessel, or container, which can be entered by a virtuous and holy spirit or by a demonic and evil one. The body is particularly vulnerable to the devil when it is “empty” of virtues; as the Fasciculus morum, a late-medieval handbook for preachers, explains, “We read that the devil entered man, that is, the house of his body, when he found it swept with the broom of sins, that is, emptied of virtues.”62 The thirteenth-century allegorical text Sawles Warde, which offers advice on how to guard the soul against the attack of vices, explains this relationship by likening the human body to a house, whose precious contents must be protected from thieves: This house must not be robbed, because inside there is a treasure for which God gave himself, that is, the human soul. There is many a thief about, by day and by night, to break into this house after this treasure, which God bought with his death, and gave up life on the cross—unseen spirits with every wicked quality. . . . Their chief is the devil, who commands them all.63 While the human body is at constant risk from demonic interference, the difference in demonic and human bodily natures also affects the remit of demonic influence, for Caesarius tells us that while demons can enter the human body, they cannot enter the human soul, even though they seek to confuse or seduce it into sinful thoughts and actions. Only the Holy Spirit can enter the human soul:

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It is not possible for the devil to be within the human soul, according to what is laid down by Gennadius in his book Dogmas of the Church, where he says: “We do not believe that by any energy or operation a demon can pass in substance into the soul, but that it can be united to it by contact and pressure. To pass into the soul is only possible for the Creator, because His substance is incorporeal by nature, and so is adapted to enter His own creation. Thus the devil and his ilk need to work more ingeniously, drawing humans into sin gradually, step by step: The devil enters, fills or inspires only so far as he draws the soul to a desire for evil by deceiving it. And here is the difference between the approach of the Holy Spirit and that of wicked spirit, that the Holy Spirit is properly said to pass into the soul, and the other to inspire it.64 It is only once the soul has been seduced successfully that the devil continues the process of deception and transforms himself, now into an angel, now into a man or a woman, now into other creatures, now [on] horses, now [on] foot, sometimes even at tournaments and jousts, sometimes . . . at dances and other games. By all of these he deludes in many ways the soul of a wretch whom he has captivated through his credulity.65 Once the soul acquiesces, the body inevitably follows. In the Dialogue on Miracles, for instance, Caesarius relates the story of one secular priest called Charles, who, “following the counsel of the demon,” gave in to the “gratifications of gluttony and the flesh.” As a result, he is constantly “pretending sickness, feigning to limp, and lying long in bed.” His capitulation to the demon’s urgings manifests itself in both body and soul, for he “pamper[s] his body and neglect[s] his soul.”66 The Fasciculus morum sums up the process thus: The devil “makes himself grievous and harmful to mankind in . . . different ways: first, from the front, by trying to make us swerve from our good intention; second, from behind, by persuading us to return to the earthly desires we have given up; third, from the right side, by stirring us to feel proud in prosperity; fourth, from below, by inciting and tempting us openly.”67 Demonic influence works by lulling the victim into a false sense of security, by attacking through the five senses. In this way, humans are separated from that which could help them: They are rendered dumb and incapable of confession, blind to sin, deaf to God’s word, insensate through absence of virtue, without the capacity to smell the stench of evil. This closing down of the

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senses is likened to the shutting of a window, which prevents the light from flooding in, with the result that “Christ, who is the true sun of justice, or else his grace and mercy, which are its rays, cannot come to enlighten him.”68 Thus the human soul and body are closely connected in sin. As Caesarius’s Monk explains, “sin is often punished by more sin, and in many mental pride is humbled by some lapse in the flesh.”69 Sin can enter the soul from without, but it can also originate within the heart. For the author of the Ancrene Wisse, human beings are tested in two ways: through pain and through pleasure. These, in turn, come in two varieties: as outer temptations and as inner temptations. Outer temptations can affect us both without and within, and they include such things as “humiliation, misfortune”; “every bodily suffering that afflicts the flesh” or, conversely, “bodily health” or “every ease of the flesh”; “grief of heart, outrage”; and happiness derived from people’s praise, popularity, or flattery.70 These kinds of temptations, the text tells us, come from God, who is testing us; they can be recognized as being caused by others outside us: our family, friends, or enemies or the conditions we live in. In contrast to these, there are temptations that come from within; these are “various vices, or the desire for them, or treacherous thoughts which nonetheless seem good.” They originate with “the devil, the world, and sometimes from our flesh.”71 As Savage and Watson note, the “broad distinction” that is being made here is between “two sorts of temptation: outer temptation (i.e., testing by misfortune or fortune) [which] is sent directly or indirectly by God; inner by the devil and his accomplices.”72 The inner temptations also come in two guises, “bodily and spiritual: bodily, as in lechery, gluttony and sloth; spiritual, as in pride, envy and anger, and also covetousness.” In other words, the “inner temptations are the Seven Deadly Sins and their foul offspring.”73 Perhaps one way of understanding the distinction being made here is that demons can harm people only if they consent to do evil in their hearts, thereby showing the psychological workings of desire and its physical manifestations to be inextricably linked. In the York Judgement Day play, a “wicked soul” laments the sins it committed, referring to them in terms that relate them to both body and “heart”: Before us plainly are brought forth The deeds that shall damn us; What ears have heard, or heart has thought, Since any time that we can remember.74 While demons are everywhere, and the individual must constantly be on her guard, the harm is done when the will assents to the “wicked desire” that they tempt humans with.75 As the Fasciculus morum explains, “man is so strong that he cannot be forced by the devil to sin against his will.” All the devil

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can do is “hold up pleasing objects to our senses. If man accepts the offer, he himself is the cause of his death.”76 As a result, the devil combats humanity’s power by using deception and trickery, as outlined earlier, by making something evil appear good, or at least desirable. Inner disposition is so central to both virtue and sin that even a virgin cannot rest assured in the knowledge that her intact body is uncontaminated by sexual experience unless she is equally pure in mind. As one writer warns, “But though you, maiden, are still whole in body, if you have pride, envy or anger, avarice or weak will deep in your heart, you prostitute yourself with the devil from hell.”77 When the Novice in the Dialogue on Miracles asks whether the “devil [can] harm a man just as he wills,” the Monk replies forcefully, “Certainly not; never at all without God’s permission, and then only in the body . . . Never can he injure a man in the soul, i.e. never can he induce him to sin unless the man consents with his heart.”78 Yet there are also accounts in which individual assent to sin or interaction with devils is not the reason why people suffer from their malice. In these cases, a person is seized by a demon because another has—often carelessly or unthinkingly—wished them to the devil. One such example from a popular collection of moral stories, the Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), tells the tale of a father who, fed up with the crying of his infant daughter, wished that the devil might take her. He promptly does so, to the man’s distress. Years later, the demons let him know that they are tired of her and wish to return her. When they do, he sees that she has been horrifically transformed by her stay with them: Her eyes were wild and wandering, and her bones and sinews were scarcely covered with skin. Her horrible countenance revealed no sign of sensibility; and, ignorant of all language, she scarcely could be acknowledged for a human being. The girl’s desolate state is evident both in her ravaged body and her inability to communicate through human speech; she is so altered that the fundamental question of her human identity is thrown into doubt. The didactic lesson of this frightening story is that one should be careful of “rashly committing [one’s] fortunes to the power of demons,” for the devil “will slay those who are given to him.”79 In another, a woman is possessed by a demon because her husband tells her to go to the devil, at which point the demon enters her body through one of her ears.80 In this instance (and this is a feature of many other stories) it is not the individual will that assents—or, rather, not the will of the person taken by the evil spirits; it is in the power of someone else to wish us to the devil, with serious consequences. In the Fasciculus morum, the section entitled “Those Who Go against the Faith” suggests that the deviation of focus

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from the power of God to attributing power to other forces is the most sinful. It is about willfully choosing the wrong influence: But, alas, in our days both men and women attack and go against this faith when they, contrary to the rule set by God and the Church and under the impulse of the devil, attribute to creatures what belongs to God alone, the Creator of all, namely the ability to know and predict future events and to bring health and sickness by laying on made-up charms.81 The effects of such a choice are presented as going beyond the individual involved: The “banner of the demons is said to be ‘mortal sin,’” and this sin affects not only the sinner but also those around him or her: family, community—even “all creation.”82 One can see how such beliefs gave rise to accusations of evildoing and conspiracy of humans with demons—claims made not just against individuals but also against social or religious groups that were perceived as different and therefore as threatening, such as Jews or heretics. Such accusations could—and did—spill over into violence and persecution of those suspected of being in willing coalition with the devil and his minions. Apart from individual encounters and struggles in this world, demons have a larger eschatological role to play. Demons, like angels, recognize and obey God’s law and fear his wrath. In the legend of Saint Margaret, the saint prays to God, claiming that all of creation—sun, moon, stars, tides, winds, storms, woods, serpents, wild beasts, angels, and demons—recognizes His law, all, that is, except humanity.83 This means that their evil fits into the order of things as willed by God; their power is not arbitrary. As already suggested, demons cannot assert their powers outside the parameters set by God’s law. As Sidrak and Bokkus explains, their knowledge is great but nonetheless circumscribed: Demons have very great knowledge; And therefore they are more spiritual Than man, who has a body, Therefore they know more than man; Also they originated earlier. But of the things that are yet to happen They know nothing. Of things that I have done, or you, They know well enough. But of evil will and evil thought, Of these things the devil knows nothing Nor does anyone except God alone, who knows The secrets of every heart.84

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While they tempt the individual to sin, seeking ultimately to betray those who follow their temptations, they also become instruments of righteous punishment, thereby inadvertently confirming God’s order. One story that highlights this relates how a proud woman entered a church dressed in ostentatious clothing. When a priest sees her, he is taken aback by the many demons that he can see sitting on her fashionable skirts: “They were as small as dormice, and as black as Ethiopians, grinning and clapping their hands and leaping hither and thither like fish in a net; for in truth feminine extravagance is a net of the devil.” The priest calls together the congregation and adjures the devils; the woman waits, terrified. As a result of his prayers, all are granted the ability to see the demons, and the woman hastens home, chastened: “and thus that vision became an occasion of humility both to her and all the other women.”85 In another story, when a demon who has possessed a woman because her husband wished it is adjured to leave her, he replies that he cannot do so yet, for the “Most High,” that is, God, does not want him to.86 The demons’ role in God’s plan becomes clearest in relation to death and Judgment Day, for devils are said to keep an impeccable record of each sin committed by every individual. Like hunters, they stalk their prey, never letting them out of their sight.87 They haggle with angels over the souls of the dead on the deathbed, holding out the evidence of sin they have collected and carefully noted down in their black books. As Fear explains to Caution in Sawles Warde, “I tell you, wherever she [Death] comes she descends with a thousand devils, and each one carries a great book completely full of sins, written in small, black letters, and a huge red-hot chain of fire to bind and draw into innermost hell whomever he can convict with his book—where each sin a person did in thought and deed in their whole life is engraved.”88 In Sidrak and Bokkus, the answer given to the question, “Are devils always spies / Seeing the misdeeds people commit anywhere?” is unequivocal: Devils are always ready, Wherever a man acts wickedly; And they have many ministers, That walk about night and day And who never shrink from Tempting men and bringing them to sin; And when man has done so, They tell their master about it immediately.89 Exempla, moral, didactic stories, frequently featured benign and maleficent powers battling over the body and the soul of an individual. In another

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example from the Alphabet of Tales, a knight, brave but “corrupt in manners,” is dying of a terrible sickness. Two beautiful youths appear to him at the head of his bed, bearing a book inscribed with gold letters. They proceed to look for any mention of him in this book, but, apart from a few minor references, there is nothing to be found. Next, two “foul fiends” appear at the foot of his bed, carrying a black book recounting the knight’s many evil deeds. Based on this evidence, the demons stake their claim on him, while the youths, who are angels, must admit that they have a weaker case and disappear. The demons lose no time in attacking the sick knight’s body. He describes this attack as it is happening in “real time”: “These fiends are cutting me asunder with two sharp swords; the one begins at my feet, and the other at my head, and now they are striking my eyes, and I have lost my sight, and now from my feet they come to my heart.”90 However one sees it, one can never be too careful, or think any situation too unimportant or mundane and therefore safe from demonic contact. In the Alphabet of Tales, one story serves to warn its audience, for instance, that one must always remember to bless one’s food. Here, a “holy maiden,” dedicated to the religious life and living in a monastery, is overcome with the desire to eat lettuce. She promptly does so, forgetting to bless it before consuming it. She is instantly possessed by a demon, who, when adjured by a holy man to leave her body, complains rather querulously, “Alas what have I done? I sat on the lettuce, and she came and picked me up and ate me.”91 This example demonstrates how even the most innocuous activity can leave the body open and vulnerable to supernatural influence (and catch demons unaware as well!) and how taking the correct precautions—in this case blessing the food one eats—offers protection from harm. The human body could also serve as a kind of stage on which the battle between good and evil was dramatized and made visible, emphasizing how the cosmic war was constantly being played out in this microcosm. As tangible or visible evidence of the existence of demons, Caesarius’s Monk, for instance, reminds the Novice of demoniacs, those possessed by demons: “Let those who doubt the existence of demons wait till they see demoniacs, for in them the signs of his presence are clearly shown, in the way that the devil speaks through their mouths and rages most cruelly in their bodies.”92 Another example from Caesarius shows how the human body serves as “proof” of the existence and validity of both good and evil powers. The Monk relates the story told by the superior of a convent of nuns, of a “spiritually-minded woman” who was possessed by an “unclean spirit.” Tormented by this demon, she goes to a holy man for help. He produces a relic—fragments from Christ’s

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crown of thorns—and holds them over the woman; this causes the woman to cry out. When asked why she is calling out, the demon in her replies, “That which once rested upon the head of the Most High, even that is now weighing down my head and piercing it with stabs.” Those around her are “greatly edified,” for this reply meant that “they had unmistakable proof of two things, namely that the thorns were genuine, and that the woman was undoubtedly possessed by the devil.”93 As these examples show, symptoms of madness were frequently read as evidence of demonic possession and were to be cured by recourse to Christian rituals and sacraments. Stories recounting such incidents make for poignant reading and serve to confirm the curative powers of the true, orthodox faith. The Book of Margery Kempe is a fifteenth-century account of the life— particularly the religious concerns and experiences—of a woman from the Norfolk town of King’s Lynn, relating her transformation from a wealthy, worldly wife and mother to a chaste follower and confidant of Christ. The Book recounts how Margery fell very ill after the birth of her first child; when she tries to confess a sin that is weighing particularly heavily on her mind to the priest, his curt manner frightens her into silence and madness. Torn between fear of hell on the one hand, and fear of the harsh cleric on the other, Margery loses her mind and is oppressed by “spirits” for “half a year, eight weeks and several days.” During this time, she has terrifying visions of devils with burning flames coming out of their mouths, who threaten and torment her night and day. They demand that she should deny “God, his mother, and all the saints in heaven, their good works and all good virtues, her father, her mother, and all her friends.”94 In addition to slandering those near and dear to her at the demons’ behest, she also harms her own body, tearing at her skin savagely with her nails. Once Margery’s mind is distressed and weakened by her illness and the priest’s lack of compassion, the demons have easy prey. It is telling that they primarily urge her to abjure her faith and to turn from the rites and doctrines of orthodox Christian faith; much of the Book is concerned with Margery’s attempts to secure the approval of representatives of the church for her visions—the very real threat of incarceration or death should she be found guilty of heresy is therefore also a constant presence in this account. What Margery’s episode of madness shows is that demons were thought to be instrumental in leading the faithful astray—that she does their bidding in this period is made visible not just through her temporary actions and behavior but also, more permanently, on her body. She does not just scratch herself but also bites herself so violently that the scars remain visible for the rest of her life. She is healed only when Jesus Christ appears to her in her first vision, after which her sanity is immediately restored. She now becomes visible proof of Christ’s power and mercy; neighbors visit her to see for themselves how she has been healed by Christ. Evil power is countered and overcome by holy power;

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madness is replaced by reason; and the human being—in both body and soul— functions as the object on and through which these powers act. The efficacy of Christianity in countering destructive and unholy influences is further highlighted in another story, in which we are told of a woman who repeatedly tries to kill herself because of the “evil spirit” that vexes her. After several unsuccessful and foiled suicide attempts, her sister tells her that confession will help her; by the time the sister returns with the priest, the woman has succeeded in stabbing herself “through the stomach all the way to her back three times.” Finding herself still alive, she then “trie[s] to yank out her heart” and “pull[s] out her intestines.” The priest goes to her and urges her to confess and trust in God: [G]aining confidence, she confessed and was given suitable penance, received viaticum in good faith, and lived for three more hours. At last she died, forsaking great hope in earthly things and choosing God’s mercy, which is always at hand for those who seek it.95 Although it is too late to save the body, the woman’s soul is healed. We are told at the story’s conclusion that it serves to warn those slow in doing penance— the correct way of cleansing oneself of one’s sins and rendering the devil and his minions powerless. The Ancrene Wisse uses the image of a written record of sins (which, as we saw, was also mentioned in Sawles Warde, above) to warn its anchoritic audience that they should confess even the least significant of their sins every week: For none of these is so little that the devil has not written them on his scroll. But confession scrapes it off and makes him waste much of his time. However, all that confession does not scrape off, he will certainly read on Doomsday to accuse you with. Not a word shall be missing there.96 Confession and penance are mentioned again and again as particularly efficacious remedies to demonic possession as well as a means of “erasing” one’s sins from the devil’s black book.97 But they are not the only way. In Dialogue on Miracles, the Monk tells the Novice that “Almighty God has devised different medicines against the different attacks of demons.” While some can be kept at bay through confession, others can be fought with “the words of the Lord’s annunciation, to wit, the Ave Maria, some by the word Benedicite and many by the sign of the Cross.”98 As we have seen in a previous example, holy relics also torment and drive demons out of the bodies of those they have possessed. The most powerful “medicine” of all is arguably the Eucharist—understood as the actual body and blood of Christ himself. The devil Belial tells Saint Juliana, “Those who are so strong that they see the truth cast out of their hearts with

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strength the wicked desires I cast into them, and cry eagerly after God’s grace for help and salvation—most of all when the priest in the mass takes God’s body, which he took from that innocent maiden.”99 The purity of the Virgin’s Mary intactness, as well as Christ’s suffering human body, taken on and sacrificed in pain and humiliation for the salvation of humankind, are here evoked as the most devastating powers that demons face. The absolute centrality of Christ’s human body in orthodox medieval Christianity— that which connected him so potently and passionately to all other humans—is reiterated in much medieval writing, as well as both clerical and lay devotion, and is vividly depicted in A Song of Praise to Our Lord: May the strong streams and the flood that flowed from your wounds to heal humanity clean and wash my sinful soul. Through your five wounds, opened on the cross, driven through and sorrowfully filled up with nails, heal me, sorely wounded with deadly sins through my five senses; and open them, heavenly king, toward heavenly things. . . . Be my shield and my protection against every side, against the darts of the devil which the deceiver shoots at me from every side. May your passion quench the sinful passions which dwell within me, your torments protect me from the torments of hell, and your precious death from that death which never dies—so that your death may deaden the deadly desires of my body and the laws of my limbs.100 Christ’s suffering body here becomes the means through which the human subject can identify her own suffering, hope for aid, and ultimately find peace, by modeling the “laws of my limbs” on his. In addition to such aid, humans could also remember the “good angel” that was believed to be assigned to each person at the beginning of his or her life. While “Mary, Christ, a relic, or a prayer were more frequently seen to ward off the evil one,” angels were also meant to protect humans against demons.101 In the entry on ‘Saint Michael the Archangel’ in the Golden Legend, it is stated that we must “commemorate and honour all the angels” because they are “our guardians, our ministers, our brothers and fellow citizens.” Angels protect us from the first moments of our lives until our deaths; they are a sign of God’s love for us; the chosen ones among us will join the heavenly hosts after death; they carry our souls up to heaven; they “present our prayers to God” and “plead for us”; and they “console the afflicted” by offering them comfort and strength, patience and calm.102 Finally, coming full circle, the individual human body itself is an important tool in the array of weapons available in the battle against the evil ones. In the life of Saint Margaret, the demon tells the saint, “These are the weapons that wound me worst and keep them unblemished, and empower them most strongly against me and against their

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weak lusts: eating simply and drinking ever more so; keeping the flesh in some need, and never being idle; and holy people’s prayers for them— along with their own prayerful thoughts, which, as they pray, they must think against the evil thoughts I’ve struck in them.”103 If chastising and disciplining the body through fasting, meditation, and prayer are not enough, the Ancrene Wisse recommends “St. Benedict’s remedy”— the scourge—as a last resort.104 Suffering in this very physical way not only emulates Christ’s passion but also focuses the mind on penance, preventing the kinds of wayward thoughts that make the individual open to the devil’s influence. The human body, as we have seen, was thought to exist in an ongoing state of mutability, at the crossroads of a wide range of both malign and benign influences. These supernatural powers did not exist at a remove from humans but were encountered on a daily basis. Christianity’s understanding of the body reflected this diversity in its own ambivalence toward it. On the one hand, the body was clearly considered inferior to the soul and deeply suspect due to its openness to sensual stimulation and temptation. The marks of the Fall—pain in childbirth, hard labor, illness, and, finally and inevitably, mortality—were inescapable, shaping every human life, a ceaseless reminder of what was lost. This frailty, the punishment for disobedience, was thought to be ontological, passed from parent to child, and so each body was a living reminder and continuation of that initial susceptibility to the devil’s malice. On the other hand, the human body was also a sign of special privilege and therefore of hopeful possibility. Christ took on human form when he lived, suffered, and died on this earth, thereby investing that materiality with immense symbolic as well as real potential. By redeeming humanity in human form, Christ’s message of love was linked inextricably—if ambiguously—with bodiliness. This connection between Christ and each individual Christian, confirmed especially through the sacrament of communion, raised the human body from its lowliness and promised the possibility of radical transformation. It could go either way.

CHAPTER SIX

Beautiful Bodies montserrat cabré

Studying the history of human beauty is a difficult endeavor as it was a complex aspect of medieval experience. It is not uncommon to think of beauty as a set of positive, desirable, and historically determined ideal traits forming a canon. Frequently, the subject is not studied as a meaningful element of medieval culture but as an insignificant, even frivolous topic irrelevant to social life. However, the theme is loaded with rich nuances that generate a series of important questions such as the manipulation of bodies to re-create sexual difference, the social relations between women and men, the capacity of humans to embody moral authority, or the malleability of cultural norms by individuals. In the Middle Ages there were many discourses of the beautiful, probably as many as there were subjective perceptions of corporeal aesthetics and shared ideals of the self. As a result of this diversity, the traces medieval beauty has left are of very different kinds and can be either of a descriptive or practical nature, of philosophical or religious character. Some of these discourses are extensive and coherent and address beauty directly; most are fragmented or scattered into thematically irrelevant digressions. If we were to look at them together, these discourses might even contradict each other. A few took direct issue with rival visions; many lived geographically in parallel or intersected without facing opposition. Others simply coexisted closely without entering into dialogue or competing for preeminence. What may or may not be seen as beautiful in an English leprosy house does not necessarily meet the standards of Icelandic warriors or those commonly appreciated within the walls of a castle in Provence. What counts as beautiful

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in a palace in al-Andalus may have been different from what a Jewish community or a Cistercian nunnery envisioned. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) approached the embodiment of beauty in a different vein than twelfth-century Salernitan women, who may have differed from Irish farmers in their practices and opinions. What precisely constitutes the embodiment of human beauty differs according to time, social circumstance, and place, as well as the impact that sexual difference had on all those. Neither can the willingness of individuals to embody beauty be taken as a universal principle. Nevertheless, there are significant features that broadly define how beauty was understood in medieval culture. Most medieval philosophers—Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—agreed that beauty was an intrinsic potential quality of all existent things and beings, proportional to their degree of effective perfection. Beauty was the result of a state of harmony with nature. Beauty could manifest itself—and be perceived—in material entities as well as in spiritual substances; human bodies were an expression of both the inner self and the outer appearance of individuals. As a general definition, medieval beauty was conceived as aesthetic pleasure and ugliness as aesthetic distaste. Nonetheless, ugliness was not opposed to beauty even if both qualities were mutually exclusive. A face without badlooking features resulting from skin illness might have been closer to perfection but was not necessarily considered to be beautiful. Latin Europe inherited a rich vocabulary to name beauty and ugliness, and the two comprehensive concepts were associated with moral qualities.1 Generally speaking, Western cultures conceived beauty as the aesthetic aspect of pleasure and the good; in contrast, ugliness embodied aversion but also wickedness. This connection is made concrete, for instance, in the dedicatory preface of an anonymous thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman text on cosmetics for women. Its composition is justified by explaining that women need to preserve and improve their beauty since they had lost its enduring condition as a result of divine punishment over their giving in to diabolic temptation.2 This moral framework welcomed literary and iconographic images that emphasized the beauty of the body of the Virgin.3 Nevertheless, the path from perfection to imperfection was a gradation composed of many layers, and the association of physical and moral qualities was not fixed in one direction but malleable in practice. In one of the most compelling instances, suffering filthy bodies could be described as beautiful.4 In such cases, it was the moral goodness inherent in the imitation of Christ’s passion that expanded to the physicality of the body expressing beauty. And this was not the case only in religious contexts. Lay literature also provides examples of how worthiness took precedence over ugliness when both qualities were present in a single individual, as Sylvia Huot’s chapter in this volume shows. The embodiment of signs of male heroism could also be seen as alluring, and bleeding, wounded knights adorned

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with battle scars were found especially beautiful.5 The positive value of good behavior extended to the perception of corporeal appearance, and the same was the case with ugliness: The Arthurian giant of Mont Saint-Michel’s is ugly because he is bad.6 An example of how unthinkable the association of beauty with wickedness was is found in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale (ca. 1380s– 1390s). A knight who had been forced to marry an old and ugly woman is given the chance to change the situation. Through his spouse’s magical powers he can decide whether she will change to become young and beautiful—but unfaithful and bad behaved—or remain old and ugly but loving and faithful. Since he could not bear to make a decision, he returns to his wife the power of resolution: After such a generous move, the wife determines to be both good and beautiful.7 Besides the moral aspects accorded to the appearance of medieval bodies, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures shared three basic principles or criteria with which to judge physical beauty: light, proportion, and clarity. Although clarity was often associated with bright colors, particularly in Christian traditions, it was a more comprehensive concept closer to cleanliness. In fact, a copious amount of medical texts in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic—as well as all

FIGURE 6.1: Ugly features: head and torso of a naked man covered with spots. London, Wellcome Library, Miscellanea Medica XVIII, Ms 544/4 (Glossulae Quatuor Magistrorum), fol. 25r (detail), early fourteenth century. Wellcome Image number L0037335.

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other vernacular languages—explained to health practitioners and laypeople how to clean the surfaces of human bodies from all kinds of imperfections, as a main way to embellish their appearance.8 A diversity of notions also shared an understanding of beauty as a quality of youth; the physical traits of the young body would necessarily go through a gradual process of decay. Especially characterizing the path to old age were wrinkles and white hair, as well as the loss of teeth, skin dryness, and the growth of hair in the ears; these were considered signs of the spoil of beauty in both women and men. Slowing down the inevitable decrepitude of the body was seen generally as a valid concern that included the care of the skin and hair in order to retain as much as possible a young look.9 If there was not a single medieval canon of beauty, the diversity of contemporary notions understood the perception of corporeal beauty as an experience apprehended through the senses; accordingly, seeking to have a beautiful body involved the goal of pleasing those senses. Although sight was privileged as the most comprehensive, all of them were involved in the process of aesthetic judgment. Only smell could appreciate odors, which constituted a significant aspect for measuring beauty, while touch could evaluate the softness of the skin. Hearing felt the voice, a highly valued physical trait in the Middle Ages, and taste could also be at work, since sweetness was often praised as a feature enhancing the beauty of lips.

BEAUTY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE The experiencing of beauty through the senses was also a fundamental medium to create and re-create sexual difference. Medieval bodies were basic vehicles to construct identity as well as malleable sites of both the most visible and the most intimate of human experiences. Beauty was the result of a negotiation between self-construction and outer perception where the individual and social dimensions cut across. Central to such negotiation was sexual difference, as beauty was part of, and contributed to shaping, the different social roles that women and men played. As a potential quality of human beings, beauty had different symbolic value depending on whether it was embodied by men or women. Women’s worth was often associated directly with beauty, as an essential feature of their social existence, whereas men’s honor was primarily related to features of moral character.10 While writing to praise the city of Salerno in southern Italy in the 1090s, William of Apulia celebrated how feminine beauty abounded in that region, opposing this feature to the plentiful probity that epitomized Salernitan men.11 The same is true of ugliness, as the close connection between wickedness and the lack of beauty considered inherent to old age was formulated clearly for women (the vetulae) but not for men, particularly in the misogynis-

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tic traditions arising from the thirteenth century on. Whereas old women were portrayed as ugly, bad, and dangerous, old men were depicted as worthy and honorable and their physical traits described more neutrally.12 This close connection between women and beauty is found in allegorical literature as well. The personified Beauty in the popular part of the Romance of the Rose (ca. 1230) by Guillaume de Lorris was portrayed as a most worthy and beautiful lady whose qualities rightly attracted the God of Love.13 In fact, beauty was intimately associated with love and erotic desire in the courtly tradition. Andreas Capellanus started the first chapter of his book on love— written between 1174 and 1186—defining that extreme feeling of affection as a “certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace.”14 Indeed, love for a particular individual could have the effect of preventing the appreciation of beauty in other people. This idea was behind courtly culture and was reflected in the poetry of male and female troubadours who sang the worth and beauty of their beloved. Medieval physicians explored the pathological conditions presented by certain noblemen who suffered from lovesickness or excess love, an affliction caused by the diseasing effects of an unreasonable apprehension of beauty, among other circumstances.15 Beyond gaze, nonvisual forms of beauty could also be at the center of male heterosexual arousal. The power of the female voice was seen as an able weapon to arouse men; this notion was adduced in theological debates against the appropriateness of women’s preaching in public. Also, it was feared that the exposure of women’s beauty and the gracefulness of their movements could lead a man to desire a woman sexually, although as Henry of Ghent (d. 1293) and other theologians ascertained, “it is chiefly the sweetness of her voice and the pleasure of hearing her words that does this.”16 Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures shared patriarchal ideals that considered female beauty more fragile than male beauty and thus in need of special care. In the words of Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), “manly beauty is the truer, the more solidly established, and of higher excellence, since it can endure, and that without shelter.”17 While sharing a common aesthetic ground, every culture produced different models of male and female beauty that are embedded in literary sources as well as in texts dealing with the care of the body. Literary sources portray ideals of individual beauty while judging as positive the physical features of the characters that play the lead in the stories, usually people from the high ranks of society. A beautiful noble warrior from England or northern France, for instance, had pale skin, long and curled hair, and a tall, strong, and well-proportioned body. Nonetheless, it was not uncommon in fictional texts to portray the physical features of individuals of low social status as opposed to the beauty of those of higher ranks; therefore, nonnoble

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FIGURE 6.2: Beauty and sexual difference. The female body as fragile and available.

Granada, Biblioteca Universitaria, Universidad de Granada, Codice C-67 (Fragments of a Latin version of Ibn Butlan, Tacuinum sanitatis), fol. 110ra, fifteenth century.

peasants of the period were portrayed as dark skinned with coarse, disproportioned features.18 Icelandic family sagas honored masculinity by favoring strength and fair skin but considered short hair to be the standard of male beauty.19 Descriptions of ideal female beauty are much more detailed and frequent than of male beauty—with the exception of Icelandic culture, which privileged the literary visibility of the male body—and could also differ according to status. As for men, white skin was generally highly valued for aristocratic women; however, there may be exceptions to this since popular literature from southern Europe seems to portray brunette girls in positive terms, associating their exposure to sunlight with their working conditions.20 From the twelfth century on, when depictions of an ideal beautiful woman start to appear regularly in literary texts of the courtly tradition, descriptions vary in length but are quite consistent with the following canonical traits: fair hair; pink and white face; tender and soft flesh, free from spots or sores; radiant forehead; arched brows; eyes widely and properly spaced; straight and well-formed nose; bright eyes; full-lipped mouth; sweetly scented breath; red lips and gums; wellproportioned neck; and small, round, and firm breasts; and a well-formed and slender body; a woman would also appear nicer if elegantly well dressed. This basic literary canon derived from classical models, but it was subject to cultural, ethnic, and regional adaptations.21

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Health-care texts of a practical nature also inscribed the relationship between beauty and sexual difference, offering a great variety of possibilities to intervene on body surfaces with the aim of keeping or improving beauty. They were of nonnormative character and did not insist on a fixed canon, either for women or for men. For instance, they listed a wide range of beautifying recipes that often led to the attainment of contrary goals—for example, dyeing hair black, red, or blond. Many of the recipes were clearly intended to be applied to both sexes, as attested by multiple preparations for skin care or for the improvement of bodily odors that populate medical and surgical texts without being addressed to a particular sex. Likewise, certain features of ideal body shapes were similar for women and men. For example, small breasts were highly valued in women who were not expected to breastfeed, and cosmetic tracts regularly contain poultices to reduce them; ideal male breasts were also small, and some surgical texts (particularly in those of Arabic influence) included operations to reduce both testicles and male breasts.22 In fact, compared to other traditions, Arabic medicine and surgery were significantly concerned with human beauty generally and embraced the care of the appearance of the male body prominently, and through their reception via Iberia and southern Italy, they influenced Western cosmetic practices and texts. Nevertheless, beautifying procedures were often aimed at either women or men, whether the gendered audience was addressed straightforwardly or indirectly, defining what was beautiful and desirable for each sex. Generally speaking, men were advised to clean their bodies, comb their hair, wash their hands, and clean their teeth and nails, but they were directly instructed not to paint their face or wear makeup since, as the Romance of the Rose states, “only women do that, and those [men] of evil reputation who have unfortunately found an unlawful love.”23 Male homoerotic behavior— considered unmanly—came together with beautifying practices portrayed as the propriety of women to the extent that the men who took interest in them were called “similar to women” (effeminate). But the most comprehensive instance of the sexed character of beauty is body hair. Male ability to grow hair was understood as the physiological result of men’s higher stage of completion, and it was considered a mark of masculinity; on the contrary, the absence of hair signaled femininity.24 Men’s use of fake beards and their care of the hair of the head and face is well attested—including dyeing gray hair—whereas women were concerned with depilating every body surface except the head. Medieval physicians and natural philosophers understood the distribution of the hair on the body as an expression of a basic physiological distinction between male and female complexions, explaining hair in males as a result of their specific way of concocting naturally the superfluous bodily substances that women processed through menstruation. While literally hundreds of depilatories were aimed at women, preparations to grow beards were thought

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to be only for men. If there was a lack of harmony with nature and men had too little and women too much hair, as was often the case, beauty was legitimately pursued with the help of human artifice. However, determining what was considered an appropriate use of the beautifying arts was the subject of debate. Tensions ran particularly high concerning the intensity of women’s involvement.

NATURE VERSUS ART OR THE ALLIANCE OF ART WITH NATURE Human beauty was conceived of as a state of harmony with nature; beautiful and desirable bodies belonged to people who acted appropriately and according to their inner character. When personified, Nature herself was presented as a beautiful goddess or lady, depicted as a dressed and well-arrayed female figure holding moral authority. This notion of beauty as harmony was behind philosophical, religious, and medical views that considered nature the source, judge, and enforcer of right living; she dictated norms to look after and nurture such accord. Proportion, balance, and order were valued but fragile qualities of nature, and moderation was a treasured attitude needed to maintain them. Inherent qualities might be disguised but could not by definition be altered in a profound way.25 Within this framework, the artful pursuit of human beauty was thought of as both legitimate and unlawful, depending on how, why, and by whom it was sought. Supplementing beauty to the extent of surpassing one’s place in the natural order was considered illicit in the medical and theological traditions.26 Nonetheless, if the art was used to promote or enhance what were considered to be natural qualities or to perform functions ascribed to them by nature, aids to maintain and improve beauty were considered appropriate— like caring for body hair according to what was appropriate for one’s sex. For married women, the alliance between nature and art could be desirable, if with beautifying practices they prevented their husbands from falling into the sin of adultery, as Thomas Aquinas argued.27 The beauty of women and men embodied the honor and status of those whom they served. This capacity of bodies to express both self-dignity and the dignity of others they were related to allowed some religious women to make extensive rightful use of artificial adornment. In the twelfth century Rhenish abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) conceived her nuns’ bodily embellishments as a service to God since they embodied His divine goodness and beauty.28 However, if beautifying artifices were considered to be used to contravene or cheat the natural order— God’s creation—they were thought to be illegitimate. This tendency to threaten nature was regularly ascribed to women, particularly in the misogynistic traditions that reemerged in thirteenth-century Europe.

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The tension between the natural and the artificial expressed patriarchal anxieties over the maintenance of a natural order defined in male terms, since diatribes against the improper use of adornment and cosmetics with the aim to embellish their bodies were thoroughly directed toward women. Together with misogynistic literature, from the thirteenth century on, conduct books for women written by male authors regularly taught them how to care for their appearance, although the limits that the authors proposed differed considerably.29 Anxieties encompassed deceit, often perceived as the result of women’s strategies of disguise to attain certain instances of self-control. The most compelling association of cosmetics with immoral deceit concerns prostitution, albeit similar arguments were made regarding marriage relationships. Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) and Thomas of Chobham (ca. 1160–1236) agreed that prostitutes who faked beauty with makeup should not be allowed to keep their earnings since they cheated their clients. Cheating was also at the heart of certain descriptions of the use of cosmetics by able-bodied beggars “who simulate bodily infirmity by applying herbs or ointments to their bodies in order to make swollen wounds.”30 Manipulating the appearance of their bodies, beggars controlled what they meant to society by presenting themselves as unable to work and thus appealing not to beauty, leading to desire, but to piety, leading to charity. From the patristic age through scholasticism and early humanism, Christian authors associated both bodily adornment and public silence with women; preaching theorists linked them with ornateness and superficiality, qualities

FIGURE 6.3: Personification of Pride (Superbia) as a female figure beautifying herself with mirror. London, Wellcome Library, Ms 49/4 (Moral, theological and symbolical extracts and ‘exempla’), fol. 49v, ca 1420–1430. Wellcome Image number L0023291.

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of eloquent speech that did not transmit the truth of Christianity.31 In line with this association was the idea that rejected embodiment as a proper representation of men—an idea also rooted in ancient thought. Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) recounted an anecdote in which Socrates, meeting a young, beautiful boy who remained silent, asked him to speak, for it was words, not his face, that made him visible.32 Women, instead, were regarded as visible through their physicality and urged to remain silent. Christine de Pizan (who was born in Venice in 1364 and died in Poissy in about 1431) stands as the first medieval woman who explicitly and directly disrupted this opposition. In her 1405 works The Book of the City of Ladies, a prose allegory in defense of women, and The Treasure of the City of Ladies or the Book of the Three Virtues, a conduct book for women, she took issue with those who maintained that beauty was an ideal sought exclusively by women. In the City of Ladies, Christine ascribes bodily adornment to both women and men and separates this practice from the terrain of seductive behavior. While considering extended criticism toward women, Christine shows herself to be preoccupied with the general opinion that women who adorn themselves do so to seduce men. She engages in a conversation on the feminine love of adornment with Lady Rectitude, one of the three allegorical characters that construct the narrative dialogue of the text together with the authorial voice. The conversation begins with a consideration that wise women (“qui ont aucun sçavoir”) should avoid passionate love, since it could turn out to be dangerous and harmful to them: My lady, you were quite right before when you said that passionate love was like a perilous sea. From what I’ve seen, women with any sense should do everything they can to avoid it, for they only come to great harm. Yet, those women who want to look lovely by dressing elegantly come in for a lot of criticism, because it’s said that they only do so in order to attract attention from men.33 The answer she obtains does not deny that adorning oneself is indecent but does deny that is a feminine vice, as well as asserting that women who do it are not necessarily trying to seduce men: My dear Christine, [says Droiture], it’s not my business to try and find excuses for those women who are too fussy and obsessive about their appearance, for this is no small failing in a person. Wearing clothes that aren’t fitting to one’s station in life is particularly reprehensible. However, whilst I’ve no intention of condoning such a vice, neither do I want anyone to think that they have the right to lay more blame than is strictly

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necessary on those who make themselves beautiful in this way. I can assure you that not all women who do this are interested in seducing men. Some people, not just women but also men, have a legitimate taste and natural bent for taking pleasure in pretty things and expensive, elaborate clothes, as well as in cleanliness and fine array. If it’s in their nature to behave like this, it’s very difficult for them to resist, though it would be greatly to their credit if they did.34 With this statement, Christine breaks with the idea that improving one’s own beauty is nothing but a strategy of enticement that women use to please men, as well as a type of individual behavior attributed exclusively to them. In fact, in order to deny the inevitability of the relationship between adornment and seduction, Christine uses the story of a holy man who dressed sumptuously, the apostle Saint Bartholomew. She does not consider this practice as a sin of vanity but as a natural instinct without direct connection to the sex of its practitioner. According to this, adornment should not be judged in moral terms, since only God can make such judgments: Wasn’t it written of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, a man of high birth, that he spent his whole life draped in fringed robes of silk which were hemmed with precious stones, despite the fact that Our Lord preached poverty? Though such behavior is usually rather pretentious and ostentatious, Saint Bartholomew can’t be said to have committed any sin because it was in his nature to wear expensive clothes. Even so, some do say that it was for this reason that Our Lord was content for Bartholomew to be martyred by being flayed alive. My reason for telling you these things is to show you that it’s wrong for any mortal creature to judge another’s appearance; God alone has the right to judge us.35 To support her opinions, as is usual in the City of Ladies, Christine offers as examples events from the lives of women in the distant past. Citing Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Valerius Maximus (fl. 30 c.e.), Lady Rectitude summons the Roman Claudia, a patrician woman who dressed sumptuously and who was very desirous of beautiful ornaments. This inclination meant for her fierce opprobrium to her virtue, until a miracle by the great goddess Pessinunt proved the critics wrong. During the Second Punic War, the sailors of a ship on the Tiber could not get it into the harbor: Claudia, who was well aware that her behavior had been misconstrued because of her appearance, knelt down before the statue and prayed out loud to the goddess. She declared that the goddess should know that

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her chastity was intact and her purity unsullied and so should grant her the favor of letting her pull the ship into port by herself. Trusting in her virtue, Claudia took off her belt and tied it to the rails of the vessel. To everyone’s amazement, she then towed it in as easily as if all the sailors in the world were rowing it to shore.36 Christine makes it clear that chastity and beauty are not incompatible and that purity and love of adornment may both inhabit a virtuous woman, as they could accompany masculine proper conduct. In line with disrupting the association of male heterosexual desire and feminine adornment so dear to the misogynistic traditions, she explains how men’s attraction toward women is not always related to female coquetry and seductive behavior. This statement is important, since as a result women’s efforts to improve their sex appeal through their appearance would not be necessarily successful: Even supposing that the reason women put such efforts into making themselves beautiful and seductive, elegant and alluring, were because they wanted to attract male attention, I’ll prove to you that this does not necessarily mean that the men who are decent and sensible are going to fall more quickly or more heavily for them. On the contrary, those men who value integrity are more readily attracted to women who are virtuous, honest and modest, and love them more deeply, even if they are less glamorous (moins fussent belles) than flirts such as these.37 Christine frees women from being responsible for how men treat them, no matter whether they are virtuous or find pleasure in adorning themselves. As much as love of adornment is neither sexed nor intrinsically imbued with a negative moral judgment, the practice of modesty may also attract men sexually toward women. She illustrates this reflection with the example of Lucretia, a Roman matron who was desired by her husband’s friend Tarquinius Sextus because of her modesty and virtuosity, not for her investments in beautifying her image. In the absence of her husband, she refused Tarquinius’s approach but was nevertheless raped, an act that caused her great misery and distress.38 Christine concludes that it is not what women do that determines male behavior: Now, some might retort that, since it’s a bad thing to appeal to men in the first place, it would be better if those women who used their virtue and modesty to catch men’s eyes didn’t in fact possess such qualities at all. However, this argument is utterly worthless: one shouldn’t refrain from cultivating things which are good and useful just because some idiots use them unwisely.39

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Once it is made clear in the City of Ladies that adorning oneself is not necessarily related to seduction and that any human creature may be involved in such behavior, the Book of the Three Virtues is concerned with giving women practical advice on how to properly care for their appearance. In the turmoil of the political crisis in France in her day, after having created a strong defense of women’s worthiness, Christine intends to restore feminine authority through education, offering a guide of conduct to the next generation of women expected to rule the French kingdom.40 While exposing the temptations that a princess might have, Christine does not leave aside jewels, ornaments, and capricious dress as part of the pleasures to which a woman may surrender.41 Her critique includes men and women who do not limit their dress to match their status and considers the appreciation of adornment to be a French feature, unknown in other places. She particularly warns about the perils that it may provoke in domestic economies when the boundaries are not properly kept.42 Christine also considers that women’s interest in adornment might have negative consequences for women’s alliances, since it might arouse envy among them, leading to the rejection of potentially beneficial friendships. In this line, she opposes the influence that husbands might have on their wives if they encourage them to engage excessively in beautifying themselves, since it may deprive them of profitable relationships with other women while being instrumentally used as a standard of male power: But what makes it even worse is that the wicked husbands (for there are such) get them started and actively encourage them in this folly. Or alternatively, if they do not do that, they grow angry with their wives, thinking, “I have a greater claim to nobility than a certain other man, so my wife should take precedence over his.” And the other will think in his turn, “But I am richer, or hold a higher post (or something like that), so I will not stand for his wife taking precedence over mine!” Good Lord, what presumption and what senseless! Such outrageous behavior absolutely ought not to be allowed among Christians!43 In the Book of the Three Virtues, Christine’s insistence that women should maintain themselves within the margins of what is acceptable within the dominant gender system should be related to her commitment to look for strategies that not only acknowledge but also sustain feminine authority. Christine insists on the notion of balance as the key to maintaining order and sums up five reasons why women should avoid extravagant appearance: It is a sin and displeases God to be so attentive to one’s own body; it is not a source of praise but of demerit; it is financially impoverishing; it is a bad example to others, tempting them in their zeal to excel; and, finally, a woman wearing an inappropriate or extravagant outfit may rouse in another woman envy

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or a longing to dress above her station, which is a thing that displeases God very much.44 Her arguments on adornment coincide partially with those given by male natural philosophers, theologians, and canonists, inasmuch as they shared the idea of harmony as the key to maintaining health in bodies, both political and physiological. But unlike them, her notion of natural order embraced feminine authority, and women’s bodily dignity was rooted in their own worth rather than subjected to men’s desire and control.

WOMEN’S KNOWLEDGE ON BEAUTY The strong association of medieval women with beauty extended to another aspect. In a wide variety of sources—including misogynistic texts—women were portrayed not only as particularly prone to embellishing themselves but also as experts on how to maintain and attain beauty. Monica Green has noted that women’s prominent role in cosmetics was unique compared to any other area of body care.45 Women were perceived as knowledgeable agents of cosmetic procedures and as authors of texts to aid the promotion of human beauty. The recognition of women as authors of cosmetic literature was rooted in antiquity. Whether they literally wrote on this and other topics of medical concern has been the subject of scholarly debate, since remaining sources about women writers and their works are few and unclear. However, beyond the difficulty of identifying historically individual authors and their texts, late antiquity left to the Middle Ages a rich heritage of recognizing the authority of women in the cosmetic domain. The Greek physician Galen (129–ca. 217 c.e.) acknowledged Elephantis as an expert in cosmetics, and various medical sources from the second century on—including Galen himself—mention a woman named Cleopatra as the author of a cosmetic treatise that has not been identified to the present day.46 During the early Middle Ages the name Cleopatra functioned as a figure of authority in medical matters concerning women, and the name came to be identified with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII (69–30 b.c.e.). A Latin tract on gynecology—known in two versions—and a collection of pessaries, unrelated to any cosmetic treatise, were also spuriously ascribed to her, and the texts and their attribution to Cleopatra enjoyed a certain degree of popularity.47 For most of the Latin Middle Ages, Cleopatra’s name as author was associated only with gynecology, but the Arabic tradition kept alive the ancient ascription to her of a cosmetic treatise. The Cordoban _ _ author Avenzoar (Abu Marwan b. Zuhr, ca. 1090–1162) acknowledged her as a predecessor in his cosmetic compendium.48 Ibn al-Jazzar (b. ca. 898 c.e.) _ _ _ mentions her authorship, and Qust¸a ibn Luqa (ca. 830–910) explains that he himself used her work “devoted to enhancing women’s beauty” in a text

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known in the Latin West from the twelfth century on.49 By the first half of the fifteenth century, scattered references that associate Cleopatra with a cosmetic tract reappear in learned literature, probably as the result of the transmission of the Arabic and Galenic traditions.50 During the Renaissance, an influential author of a cosmetic treatise acknowledged her as an ancient authority on beauty to the extent of wondering before his readers whether the anonymous source he used to write his text, identified only as the work of a Greek queen, could be attributed to her.51 The medieval connection between ancient texts, queenship, and women’s authority over beautifying procedures took yet another vein. A Greek compendium on women’s conditions ascribed to a certain Metrodora is known in a single twelfth-century copy but was probably written originally in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages.52 Metrodora’s text consists of a compilation of recipes for gynecological matters followed by a section of cosmetic recipes on embellishing the female breasts, face, hands, and feet and improving bodily odor with perfumes. The text states that one of the recipes devoted to the care of the face was used by Berenice, the Egyptian queen also called Cleopatra, a significant mention as there are no other authoritative references for the cosmetic procedures described in the text. But the textual and contextual connection between these two women went further. The gynecological part of Metrodora’s compendium closely resembles a Latin text from late antiquity or the early Middle Ages, On the Diseases of Women (De passionibus mulierum), known in two versions. The actual author of this text is unknown, but it was ascribed in the Middle Ages to various medical authorities, including Cleopatra.53 This is, in turn, similar to the medieval gynecological treatise that circulated under Cleopatra’s name, and its Renaissance editor ascribed it to her. By the sixteenth century, then, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra had become the author of a gynecological compendium—part of which had been in fact the work of a Greek woman named Metrodora—as well as of a lost text on cosmetics whose first ancient mentions ascribe it to a Cleopatra, without reference to her status or birthplace. But the steadiest medieval attribution of a cosmetic text to an individual woman originated in twelfth-century southern Italy, and from there it soon spread widely throughout western Europe. The city of Salerno was a lively center of medical learning, and its geographic location favored the confluence of different peoples, cultures, and traditions. The strong influence of Arabic medicine and its distillation of ancient lore acted as intellectual stimuli for the composition of new texts that eventually had an important impact in Latin Europe. One significant product of such an atmosphere is the treatise entitled Women’s Cosmetics (De ornatu mulierum), a practical description of cosmetic preparations presented in a head-to-toe order. This text originally circulated in an anonymous manner, and the earliest known versions present clear traces of

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male authorship. In the thirteenth century Women’s Cosmetics was compiled together with two other texts written by different authors, as Monica Green has demonstrated. The compendium was called The Trotula, a name that derives from Trota, a medical authoress active in twelfth-century Salerno, and then that title was misunderstood as the alleged authoress’s name. Women’s Cosmetics was the most far-reaching medieval text on cosmetics and circulated extensively as the work of a woman’s pen. In the sixteenth century one of its editors questioned the Trotula’s authorship in favor of an ancient male slave, opening up a long debate that lasted until the manuscript sources were studied in depth.54 But in the Middle Ages, as the accompanying image vividly shows, Trotula functioned as a female figure of authority on the global care of the female body. Either as the title of Latin and vernacular texts on women’s medicine or as the embodiment of a woman writing on women’s physical concerns, Trotula was associated with authoritative knowledge on women’s health. A meaningful instance of how the Middle Ages understood that knowledge about beauty belonged to the domain of women’s health is a late fourteenth-century Catalan text entitled Tròtula, intended to give women practical medical advice. Unlike other Latin and vernacular texts dealing with cosmetics, master Joan’s treatise is clearly addressed to women to aid them to care for themselves—not to health practitioners involved with women’s health— delimiting what could be conceived as a sphere of ordinary self-care.55 It is also significant because it presents the treatment of the female body as a comprehensive enterprise including gynecological concerns, guidance for heterosexual coupling, and recommendations for healthy living in the form of a regimen of health. Maintaining and enhancing beauty is by far the lengthiest of the topics considered; probably commissioned by a woman of the Aragonese royal family, the text shows both noblewomen’s interest in having extensive collections of written recipes as well as how health practitioners—first physicians, and later surgeons and barbers—were ready to assign to cosmetics an important place within their working notion of women’s health. Neither in the learned medical literature nor in treatises addressed to laymen is it possible to find analogous interest in cosmetics on the part of men or in any operative notion of male health.56 Female figures embodied authority in cosmetic writings; however, most medieval recognitions of women’s knowledge pertaining to beauty were given in an anonymous or generic form. Most often the acknowledgments are very general, for instance, “there are women who do it,” followed by a specific recipe explaining how to make a certain ointment, poultice, oil, or water to apply on a surface of the body or the hair to pursue a desired effect. But cosmetic texts sometimes also mention particular women, referring to them by the place they were born or lived rather than by their personal or family name. It is

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FIGURE 6.4: Trotula as a female figure of authority on women’s health. London, Wellcome Library, Miscellanea Medica XVIII, Ms 544/5 (Trotula minor. De ornatu mulierum), fol. 65r, early fourteenth century. Wellcome Image number L0015682.

important to note that the bulk of these mentions are of Muslim women, particularly acknowledged as beauty experts in cosmetic literature. In his original rendering, the male author of the Salernitan Women’s Cosmetics refers several times to the practices of Muslim women as his own source, even claiming to

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have seen one of these knowledgeable women undertaking her art in Sicily.57 Following this pattern, later vernacular authors also ascribed to Muslim women certain cosmetic procedures. A Saracen woman from Messina is mentioned on six occasions as an expert on cosmetics in a text that also acknowledges Trota, as well as Salernitan and other Italian women. Although Jewish women may occasionally also be called on, Christian authors of cosmetic texts attributed knowledge about beauty to Muslim women, writing down recipes that—whether copied from earlier texts or not—they claim to have learned from them.58 This may have been a marketable strategy to validate certain recipes and exotic styles considered precious since we know that Christian women mirrored Muslim women’s fashions, at least in western Europe, and women’s interactions related to beauty knowledge across religious lines seem plausible.59 But it clearly shows an openness to valuable beauty knowledge coming from Middle Eastern cultures. Arabic medicine embraced cosmetics within its learned tradition, a tradition that largely influenced the medieval West. If the works of reputed Arabic physicians and surgeons were admired in Latin Europe, Christian sources also unambiguously distinguish Muslim women’s expertise in the art of beauty treatments. Women were hence portrayed not only as the final receivers of cosmetic recipes to be applied on them but also as active producers of the collective knowledge that the texts recorded and disseminated, often through male authors. Nevertheless, the most common way that knowledge on beauty was transmitted in the Middle Ages was not through lengthy written texts but oral communication and hands-on learning face-to-face. Although this is a difficult sphere to trace, women’s collections of cosmetic recipes in the context of household practice emerge in the late Middle Ages, as well as instances of recipe exchange, witnessing the extent to which beauty knowledge was produced, valued, and shared among women in the course of their ordinary lives.60 Medieval notions of beauty envisioned it as a moral quality that people embodied in different ways. Pursuing beautiful bodies involved creating and re-creating sexual difference, since aesthetic canons for women and men differed. Human beauty was legitimately sought by women and men, whose willingness to embody beauty through adornment and body care was perceived to help maintain harmony with the natural order. However, beauty had different symbolic value in women and men. Beautiful male bodies were more dependent on moral features, whereas female beauty was physically embodied: Men were culturally visible through their use of the public word, women through their appearance. Moreover, women’s looks were deemed to represent male dignity and honor rather than to epitomize the women themselves. Anxieties over women’s adornment expressed tensions over controlling these sociosymbolic functions, and they were contested explicitly at length by Christine de

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FIGURE 6.5: The queen Semiramis with her courtesans in a beautifying scene that had

a significant iconographic tradition. Flemish Tapestry, Honolulu Academy of Arts, ca. 1480. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QueenSemiramis2.jpg.

Pizan. But male control was also ordinarily challenged by women’s practices of embellishing themselves as well as by their extensive production of knowledge on human beauty, whether transmitted orally or—no doubt much less often—in written form. No other area of expertise on the body has a history of acknowledging female authority and women’s authorship that is as steady as actions and texts intending to bring forth beautiful bodies.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bodily Essences Bodies as Categories of Difference monica h. green

Each of us experiences our body from the inside: its aches and pains, its warmth or chill, its euphoric highs and depressing lows. But we also experience our bodies in the ways others perceive us and treat us: whether they ignore us because we’re short, snub us because we look aged or infirm, or attempt to subdue or even persecute us because we belong (or seem to belong) to a group deemed inferior. The creation of these categories of distinction is grounded in time and space. It may well be that the distinction between “internal” body concepts and “external” ones has been irrevocably blurred in the modern world, with its ever-present mirrors and cameras that incessantly reflect back at us the external views that others have. But the physical image is itself largely neutral: The cultural weight that is put on certain features is what determines whether specific kinds of bodies are to be embraced or shunned, beaten or revered. Here we examine the “marked bodies” of the Middle Ages. The notion of “marking” comes from grammar. Words are neutral—they just “are”—when they have no delimiting marker that signals their plurality, tense, or subordination to another object or action. Words do not function, of course—they don’t convey meaning—unless they are put in relation to other words. Even an “unmarked” word, therefore, is marked by absence. Yet functionally, in systems of hierarchy, the unmarked seems the norm, unlimited in its potentiality. The notion of marking is fruitful, therefore, for it shows the ways in which certain bodily characteristics were looked for and isolated to signal social status,

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legal rights, and moral worth: Was this particular body to be granted limitless freedoms or not? In looking for categories of bodily distinctions, of course, we must keep in mind that populations in medieval Europe were far smaller than we are accustomed to today. A moderately sized town might have only 5,000 to 10,000 people, meaning that residents were likely to know one another by face. The generic categories of gender, race, class, age, and disease or disability may have been less functional than those of family and social position, which were well known in a face-to-face society. Nevertheless, it is clear that medieval society did use certain physical characteristics to mark individuals and treat them differently. In some cases (as in medicine), such categorization was assumed to have its benefits because it allowed individualized treatment. In others, marking was a way to segregate, stigmatize, and shun. The bodily difference most important to medieval societies was sex, and the bulk of this chapter is devoted to that topic. I also explore, however, the categories of disease and disability to tease out a sense of how much those notions of difference functioned. I defer to the following chapter discussion of medieval notions of race, both because they have important connections with notions of geographic diversity and because race was in fact a less potent category for social division than ethnicity. Ethnicity could also be “embodied,” of course—most obviously in the practice of male circumcision by Jews and Muslims—but it often worked at the level of language, clothing, or behavior and so was less grounded in the physical body itself. Marking extended to the covering of the body, of course, to allow differentiation by class or profession: Laws regulating dress were intended to ensure the social classes remained distinct, while the enforced marking within Christian society of Jews, Muslims, and prostitutes by yellow stars or striped sleeves was intended to remove any doubt among Christians as to how they should interact with these individuals socially, legally, and sexually. For reasons of both law and morality, age mattered, too, but it was not a category with ambiguous boundaries. Yes, there were certainly legal cases in which an individual’s age was in doubt (almost always because of a question of majority and inheritance). And age was a crucial issue when determining eligibility to be betrothed or married (in Christian society, girls could marry at twelve, boys at fourteen). Otherwise, however, age and its manifestations in the body seem to have exercised neither the learned classes nor other elements of medieval society other than as passing medical interest in the diseases of children or the process of aging.1 There was one final way in which the body served as a social cipher. The ancient science of physiognomy, that aid in assessing character, had its own distinctly medieval efflorescence, and it served to inform the astute observer of traits at the core of others’ souls.

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THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE: SEX When discussing resurrection in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) returned to a question that had engaged Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430) several centuries earlier: whether the bodies of women will retain their sex after resurrection. Aquinas had already concluded (as had Augustine) that everyone will return in the vigor of adulthood, not in the incompleteness of childhood or the decrepitude of old age. Resurrection for Aquinas even improves on one’s actual physical state in life: In terms of stature, “all will not rise again of the same quantity [they had in adult life], but each one will rise again of that quantity which would have been his at the end of his growth if nature had not erred or failed.” This idea of resurrection improving on actual life (we might call it reaching one’s genotypic perfection rather than the phenotypic imperfection of a life compromised by malnutrition or illness) raised a problem in the case of women. Augustine, who concluded that women will remain as they are, interprets the issue entirely as a question of whether women’s bodies will infect the afterlife with the sin of lust. (They will not, he concludes, since all lust will have vanished.) Aquinas, in contrast, takes a different tack. He had already admitted, following Aristotle, that females are by nature “misbegotten males,” even if, in their souls, they are equal in the eyes of God. If “all error will be removed at the resurrection,” the objection goes, then “the female sex [which] is produced beside the intention of nature, through a fault in the formative power of the seed,” would not rise again. Aquinas ends up agreeing with Augustine in the end, though only after some logical sleight of hand: “Diversity is becoming to the perfection of the species,” he claims, and so women will remain women to show the perfection of God’s creation.2 Although the Aristotelian language of women as “misbegotten males” was not used universally in the Middle Ages, sex difference as the essence of social identity was fundamentally embedded in all three medieval religious communities and their societies. Moreover, medical and scientific explanations of these differences were remarkably uniform across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; despite a wide variety of opinions, all three traditions drew their understandings of physical sex difference from an ancient core of Hippocratic, Aristotelian, or Galenic views. For example, most educated persons in the medieval world would have agreed with these basic views on female physiology found in a series of Latin questionand-answer texts composed around the beginning of the thirteenth century: Question: What is menstruation? Answer: Superfluity is contained in the body of the woman: thus the menses are so called because of the superfluities of every part of the

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body. The menses are certain superfluities from different parts of the body attracted to the womb by the force of nature, and through heat and spirit they are expelled for the sake of maintaining the woman’s health. And just as in trees the flowers precede the fruit, so the menses the fetus; it is because of this similarity that they are called by the appropriate term “flowers”.3 Question: Why are they called “menses”? Answer: Because this purgation ought to occur in the new moon from month to month. The menses thus derive their name from “month” [mensis] because they come every month. Question: How are the menses created? Answer: Every woman is of a cold complexion by nature; with her frigidity counteracting the heat, the food in her stomach is not able to be perfectly concocted and there remain certain superfluities which nature expels each month, whence they are named “menses”. But when conception has occurred, the heat from the fetus increases, and so the food is digested better and so fewer superfluities result; from those which remain the infant is nourished in the uterus, for it grows out of the menstrual blood. Therefore the blood which ought to be emitted to the outside is retained within as food for the fetus. It is for this reason that pregnant women do not menstruate.4

As can be seen, menstruation is not simply a physiological process confined to the uterus but a mechanism of purgation that has systemic relevance to the whole body of the woman. Except during pregnancy or lactation (in which case the normal excesses are channeled to new purposes), if a woman was not menstruating, then she was on an inevitable course toward severe ill health. Failure to menstruate was the root cause of uterine suffocation (a kind of epileptic fit), heart problems, and breast abscesses and cancer. (In this last case, the unexpelled menstrual blood was diverted up to the breasts through special veins that connected them to the uterus, thus causing lesions and morbid growths.) The drying up of the menses at the time of menopause was also the cause of the evil eye in women; although the idea of the evil eye was not universally accepted, there was little countervailing medical argument that menopause brought any benefit to women.5 In texts on women’s medicine— whether in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, or the European vernaculars—there was virtual unanimity on the centrality of menstruation to women’s health. Indeed, when we find random collections of gynecological recipes, they will almost always contain, first and foremost, mechanisms to bring on the menses. One could, in fact, say that physiology was more important to the medieval definition of “woman” than anatomy.

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Anatomical views of the female body were not dissimilar, grosso modo, from those we have today. A late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century English writer succinctly laid out an understanding of female anatomy by comparison with the male: There are five differences between man and woman. The first difference is above their forehead, for there are some men who are bald, but women are not. The second difference is that some men are thick-haired on their beards [i.e., their chins], but women are smooth. The third difference is on the breasts, for men have only little warts but women have long paps. The fourth difference is between their legs, for men have a penis with other appendages, but women have an opening which is called a “bel chos” [pretty thing] or else a “weket” [gate] of the womb. The fifth difference is inside the body of the woman between her navel and her vagina, for there she has a vessel that no man has, which is called the “merres” [matrix] and because it is inside the woman where no man may see it, reason demands that I should tell you about it.6 The author then goes on to explain how the uterus is made up of sinews, how it is shaped, and how it is divided into seven cells that account for the production of males, females, and hermaphrodites (a topic we return to in due course). It is particularly interesting that this text was addressed to a female audience: This is what the author wished women themselves to know about their bodies. In formal anatomical texts, probably read primarily, if not exclusively, by learned males, the uterus is generally considered to have two cells—an idea based on ancient dissections of ungulates. Such learned texts also refer to the “female testicles.” First described by the ancient Alexandrian anatomists, these “seed-generating” organs were assumed to be analogous to the male testicles, only smaller and softer. As such, it was assumed that they functioned identically, releasing seed upon orgasm. (This understanding contributed to the idea that a woman could not get pregnant from forced intercourse unless she experienced climax, and therefore enjoyment. See chapter 3.) Beyond recognizing the uterus, vagina, and “testicles,” medieval anatomists said little further about the anatomy of the female sexual organs. The hymen, for example, was not assigned a distinct name in anatomical or gynecological texts in the central Middle Ages, even though recipes found in the Trotula texts and elsewhere for “restoring virginity” (in addition to the common notion of “deflowering” a woman upon first intercourse) show recognition that some structure that we would call the hymen existed. It was generally recognized that the vagina could be closed by excessive tissue formation. If this growth was so thick as to prevent sexual intercourse (or, in extreme cases, even block menstruation),

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surgical intervention was recommended. Although the labia were recognized as anatomical structures outside of the vagina, no mention of the clitoris appears in medical writings until surgical writers in the late thirteenth century (drawing on their Arabic sources) mentioned “excessive size” of the tentigo as a situation demanding surgical intervention. While the normal-sized clitoris remained invisible to the medical gaze, popular understandings of sexual anatomy and sexual functioning may have been more articulate than formal medical writing. A French editor from the fifteenth century suggests that the male practitioner use euphemisms so that female patients will name their anatomical parts “more readily without being ashamed.” He proffers the term pignon (“pine nut”) for what he says is regularly called “the tongue” (la langue).7 If, as I have argued, there seems to be ample evidence that medieval people perceived anatomical and physiological differences between the sexes, how do we explain an idea floated in 1990 by the historian Thomas Laqueur that in the premodern world only one “sexual type” was recognized, what he calls the “one-sex body”?8 According to Laqueur, when subject to “environmental” influences (what he identifies broadly as “gender”), this sexually neutral body would develop into either a masculine or a feminine body. This process primarily happened in the womb: When there was the proper amount of heat, the genitals would be pushed to the outside to form a man; if the individual was too cold, the genitals would remain inside, and she would be a woman. But “relapse” was constantly possible, leaving even adult bodies open to change. Katharine Park has challenged Laqueur’s views on a variety of grounds, not least because statements that would support belief in the one-sex body are rarely found, and then often only in passing, in writings from antiquity to the later Middle Ages.9 Park shows that the Greek anatomist Galen of Pergamon (ca. 129–ca. 217 c.e.) had mused on the notion of complete homology between the male and female as an “idea to think with,” not a theory that drove his medical views more generally. Park also shows that this section of Galen’s work had a very spotty transmission history; although alluded to by the Persian writer Avicenna (Ibn Sina, d. 1037 c.e.) in his great encyclopedia, the Canon of Medicine, the work was not translated into Latin until 1317 and then had only a limited circulation through the early sixteenth century. One European writer who had access to this rare translation (in his case, probably a copy in the papal library, which was then housed in Avignon) was the fourteenth-century French surgeon (and physician to several popes) Guy de Chauliac (d. 1368). Guy picks up on the Galenic homology and compares all parts of the female genitalia to the male body: The uterus “is like a penis reversed and placed inside”; it has two upper cellulated branches with testicles “like the sack of the [male] testicles”; it has a hollow neck “like a penis”; the clitoris (tentigo) is like the male prepuce; and so on.10 Guy’s adoption of the Galenic homology in fact seems to have therapeutic implications. On several

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occasions, he mentions in one breath conditions (like lesions or ulcers) that afflict both the male genitalia and the vagina or uterus; since he offers no distinct treatment for the female, one is to assume that women are to be treated no differently.11 In fact, the only other medical writers who, prior to Guy, adopt the vaguer homological comparisons from Avicenna are likewise surgeons.12 This is probably no coincidence. Already around 1300, physicians in northern Italy and southern France were claiming new expertise in treating infertility, while surgeons were expanding their claims to be able to intervene in conditions of the female genitalia and obstetrical emergencies.13 For physicians, diagnosing and treating infertility required use of the logical analytical skills that they were already honing in their theoretical training into the “hidden causes” of disease. For surgeons, however, while they, too, relied on increasing analysis of their Arabic textual sources, a lot of their new knowledge came from clinical empiricism. For the male genitalia, such new knowledge arose from surgical interventions, especially the increasingly elaborate treatments for inguinal hernia.14 I suspect that their adoption of the Galenic homological discourse was a way to make up for their relative lack of information on female pelvic anatomy. Guy himself claims that “the diseases of the parts of the pelvic region which properly pertain to surgeons” include “diseases of the uterus, such as obstruction of the vagina and its enlargement, enlarged clitoris [tentigo], extraction of the foetus and the afterbirth and the [uterine] mole; . . . and prolapse of the uterus.”15 To deliver on such claims, however, they had to act as if they knew what they were doing. The bluff (if such it was) worked, and male involvement in women’s medicine continued on an upward trajectory for the next 200 years. As Park has shown, intense curiosity about female anatomy would be a driving force behind the development of anatomical investigation at the end of the Middle Ages.16 If there is any sense in which we can talk about a one-sex body in the Middle Ages, it is in terms of visual representation. Even here, though, the evidence is mixed. There is only one medieval iconographic tradition focusing on genital anatomy. As we see in the abstract images of the genitalia in the Wellcome Apocalypse manuscript (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2), there is nothing homological about the male versus female organs. Aside from the testicles (whose parallelisms were widely noted) and the teardrop-shaped cross-sections of the supporting muscles (lacerti), neither in structural form nor in terminology do these two images set up a one-to-one equivalence between the male and female organs. Turning to other medical illustrations, we find two types of images, in both of which the male predominates. First, we have the male body serving as the “generic human” in such images as the phlebotomy man, the wound man, and the zodiac man (see Figures 0.2–0.4). But as I have argued in the Introduction to this volume, these figures were themselves diagrammatic, not strictly representational. The fact that the figure is male—that is, endowed

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FIGURE 7.1: Male genitalia from Wellcome MS 49 (Wellcome Apocalypse), fol. 37v (detail).

with a penis and testicles—is incidental and irrelevant. It is “unmarked.” All other medical depictions of the genitalia show therapeutic interventions. Here again, the male representations vastly outnumber the female. Since the male is again the unmarked category, females would presumably be depicted only when the condition itself was “marked,” that is, specific to the female body. As we have already seen in the Introduction, there was no regular tradition of

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FIGURE 7.2: Female genitalia from Wellcome MS 49 (Wellcome Apocalypse), fol. 37v

(detail).

depicting visceral organs. Since the main reproductive organ of women was the uterus—never seen in living patients by any practitioner, male or female, unless it prolapsed—it is not surprising that it should receive no more visual treatment than other viscera. The often-reproduced fetus-in-utero images (found in the Wellcome Apocalypse manuscript as well; see Figure 7.3) are not meant to show the uterus; they are meant to show the different ways the fetus might malpresent at birth. Hence the uterus here really is nothing but a container.

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Again, these images are diagrammatic, not representational. Male physicians, whose involvement with women’s gynecological conditions focused on assessing fertility and menstrual problems, needed to “infer the body” (see chapter 4) when dealing with gynecological conditions in the same way they did for all internal conditions. The second reason we find so few images of the female genitalia hinges on the differences between physicians’ and surgeons’ practice. The latter took as their purview treatment of the body’s surface. Conditions of the male genitalia were always part of the surgeon’s practice. And when we do find illustrated surgical texts, interventions on the male genitalia (hernias, pustules, etc.) are liberally illustrated, with no apparent embarrassment or coyness.17 The situation with women was different. The female breasts were treated regularly by male surgeons and were unproblematically depicted in surgical texts. Yet even when the female genitalia began to elicit male surgeons’ attention in the

FIGURE 7.3: Fetus-in-utero figures from Wellcome MS 49 (Wellcome Apocalypse),

fol. 37v (detail).

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late thirteenth century, no visual tradition of depicting such interventions developed. Here, it may well be social notions of sexual propriety as well as surgeons’ hesitant knowledge of female pelvic anatomy that prohibited such images from being developed. In fact, I know of only two surgical manuscripts that show the naked female genitalia, and both of these are rather late and show no detail of anatomical structure.18 It is not until the sixteenth century that we get detailed (sometimes pornographically so) depictions of the internal and external female genital organs, ones that show both the anatomy of the organs and, in the case of one German surgeon’s manuscript of surgical procedures, methods to intervene in their diseased conditions.19 In sum, there are plausible explanations for the paucity of visual representations of the female body in medieval medicine that in no way demand recourse to a one-sex body theory and an assumption that female difference was so insignificant that it need not, or even could not, precipitate its own representational traditions. In fact, what proved to be the only really popular medical image of the female body—the so-called disease woman—seems to use the female body as the generic human. The first known disease woman is really just a standard image of the muscle system with breasts drawn on her chest and a uterus with a fetus inside. The image matured, however, into a veritable synopsis of nosology in the fifteenth century, where it is extant in twelve different copies, including the English copy shown in Figure 7.4. It does have specifically gynecological disease labels attached, but it also itemizes such generic diseases as gout and arthritis in the joints, and mania and frenzy in the head. The disease woman served a rather mundane pedagogical purpose of teaching clerics (like the one for whom the Wellcome Apocalypse manuscript was made) and marginally learned practitioners some medical basics. The disease woman was not, in other words, a sophisticated summation of learned anatomy even in its heyday but was rather a crib sheet of information on basic pathology for the medical nonspecialist and lay practitioner. With the advent of print, it was immediately incorporated into a handbook for surgical practitioners and barbers, the popular Fasciculus medicinae (Handbook of medicine), published repeatedly from 1491 on. As a field primarily concerned with the dysfunction of an organ that was never seen except when it prolapsed or was dissected at death, gynecology remained a field where the mental imagination of disordered processes was more important to diagnosis and treatment than was detailed visual representation. As our fifteenth-century English writer said about the uterus, “because it is inside the woman where no man may see it, reason demands that I should tell you about it.” Gynecological texts were concerned with the physiological differences that made the female body unique: disorders of menstruation, uterine growths or fluxes, infertility, and difficulties of birth. Many did not even bother to include sections on anatomy, since the anatomical differences between the

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FIGURE 7.4: Diseased woman from Well-

come MS 290, ca. 1470–1480 (probably London), fol. 52v. Wellcome L0045159. Wellcome Library, London.

sexes were largely taken for granted. The existence of the uterus was a given; the female “testicles,” even if acknowledged to exist, were irrelevant diagnostically and therapeutically and therefore almost never mentioned outside of anatomical texts. And while surgeons developed a more precise sense of the structure of the vagina, the hymen, the labia, or the clitoris in the later medieval centuries—by the fifteenth century, the vaginal speculum had come into fairly regular use—they did not capture that knowledge in images. But all medieval medical practitioners, I believe, understood sexual difference to be real. Physicians and anatomists of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries did not “discover” female difference but rather increased their visual scrutiny of those differences as traditions of anatomical practice, visual representation, and therapeutic responsibilities changed over the course of the postmedieval centuries.

Male Menstruation If, as I have suggested, sex difference was not questioned, how do we explain two ideas in medieval thought that blur the line between the sexes: the notion of male menstruation and the explanations of hermaphroditism? The full narrative of the surprising view that some men menstruated has yet to be worked out, but it is clear that the concept collapses several different ideas. One, already formulated by the late twelfth century, is the notion that regular hemorrhoidal bleeding in some men is salubrious and should not be “corrected” by therapeutic intervention.20 The male body as well as the female body needed to

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keep a proper balance of humors flowing in the body; if there was an excess, then it should be eliminated. This was the basic rationale for periodic bloodletting of both men and women. If the body itself perceived “the problem” and automatically initiated a purgative process (in this case, bleeding hemorrhoids), it was not to be interfered with. (Similarly, nosebleeds in a woman who was not menstruating were seen as salubrious.) Thus, bleeding hemorrhoids in men could be seen as analogous to menstruation in women, but the term was not used. Surprisingly, this notion evolved later into the idea that Jewish men, because of their particularly melancholic (cold) disposition and the strange foods that they ate, produced a chronic excess of humors that resulted in regular “menstruation.” In an intriguing thesis of Peter Biller, this new direction of speculation occurred because of the circumstantial intersection of several different lines of thought at precisely the time that the “Jewish question” became of urgent political concern with the expulsions of Jews from Gascony, England, and France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century.21 But what did it mean, after this anti-Semitic twist developed, when a Christian man “menstruated”? Gianna Pomata traces the idea into the early modern period, where she finds that positive views toward male menstruation continued, thereby mollifying, to some extent, anti-Semitic assertions that this process was unique to a certain group of already-stigmatized men.22 Whatever its genesis, this idea of the “menstruating man” only nominally supports Laqueur’s thesis that men’s and women’s bodies were on a single morphological continuum. Indeed, even hermaphroditism did not trouble this fundamental sense that the distinctions between male and female were absolute.

Hermaphrodite The phenomenon of hermaphroditism is currently understood to involve several possible levels of genetic, hormonal, anatomical, and physiological development. It is estimated from modern data that some sort of hermaphroditism occurs in about 1.7 of every 100 live births.23 If the same level of incidence obtained in the Middle Ages, then it would not have been an uncommon occurrence. How hermaphroditism was handled as a social phenomenon differed quite radically between the Muslim and Christian worlds. Because one’s identity as a male or female was crucial to Islamic practices of prayer, care for the dead body, and so forth, it was of great concern to Muslim jurists to be able to determine whether or not an apparent hermaphrodite was “truly” male or female. Prior to adolescence, such determination was not critical; the simplest determination was made by how the individual urinated. Upon adolescence, such signs as growth of facial hair or ability to have penetrative sex with the penis proved the individual

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to be male; for a woman, growth of breasts, onset of menstruation, or ability to have vaginal sex were decisive. (It is interesting in this regard that Arabic surgical writers included fatty male breasts, “which nature abhors,” as a condition demanding surgical intervention.)24 If no determination had been made by adolescence, however, the individual was deemed a khuntha mushkil—an ambiguous hermaphrodite—and jurists expended considerable effort working out the legal ramifications about where this individual should pray, whether s/he could marry or inherit property, and how s/he was to be prepared for burial. As Paula Sanders has noted, “a person with ambiguous genitalia or with no apparent sex may have been a biological reality, but it had no gender.”25 That is, the hermaphrodite had to be assimilated into either the category of male or that of female. In Islamic society it could not be both. In the Western Christian world, hermaphroditism was acknowledged legally only by the terse statement in Roman and canon law: “Hermaphroditus an ad testimonium adhiberi possit, qualitas incalescentis sexus ostendit” (Whether the hermaphrodite is able to give [legal] testimony is determined by the quality of its incalescent sex).26 This legal dictum became, in a subsequent codification of English law, “Hermaphroditus comparatur masculo tantum vel feminae tantum secundum praevalescentiam sexus incalescentis,” which has been translated as “a hermaphrodite is classed with male or female according to the predominance of the sexual organs.”27 Yet the unusual Latin word incalescens in fact means “warming up” or, here, “arousable”; thus, sex is determined by ability to perform the male (penetrative) or female (receptive) role and not by any other anatomical or behavioral sign. Ability to perform sexually as a male or female likewise informs two of the handful of cases in which hermaphroditism has been historically documented. An early fourteenth-century account tells that in a town near Bern . . . a woman lived for ten years with a man. Since she could not have sex with a man, she was separated [from her partner] by the spiritual court. In Bologna (on her way to Rome), her vagina was cut open by a surgeon, and a penis and testicles came out. She returned home, married a wife, did hard [physical labor], and had proper and adequate sexual congress with her wife.28 A similar case from Catalonia in 1331 tells of a woman who “could not fulfill her conjugal debt nor conceive nor bear a child”; she was examined, in the presence of a lady of the town, by a male surgeon. She was found to have a male penis and testicles, as well as other abnormalities of her genitalia, though in her case we do not learn whether she was “rehabilitated” into a male life. This comparison between Muslim and Christian attitudes toward hermaphroditism is instructive. Once sex was assigned under Islamic law, it was per-

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manent, whether or not new signs (such as the growth of breasts) seemed to contradict the original assessment. Under Christian law, sex could be “changed” provided that the necessary adjustments were made in marital arrangements so that the “marriage debt” could be paid “naturally” (see chapter 3). Did the hermaphrodite in Christian Europe constitute, then, “a third sex,” a being that is at once a mixture of male and female and yet neither?29 Answering this brings us back to the question of what constitutes male and female. Is it the nature of the seed itself that confers sex or some other factor? The answer is that, in most views of generation, it is some kind of combination of factors. Already in Greco-Roman antiquity, the idea was widely accepted that males are associated with the right side of the body and females with the left. The Alexandrian anatomists saw that the sheep and other animals they were dissecting had bisected, two-celled uteruses and assumed the human uterus was similar. Several centuries later, the Greek physician Galen expanded this anatomical understanding into a full-fledged physiology of reproduction: The right side of the uterus was indeed nourished by warmer, more purified blood than the left, hence producing (warm) males on the right and (cold) females on the left. As we have seen, this highly intricate explanation did not circulate widely in Latin Europe. Rather, a more simplified view held. Again, our Salernitan questions: Question: In which part of the womb ought the man to be created, in which the woman? Answer: When the seed has been deposited in the womb and its mouth shut tight, if it settles in the right part near the liver, the fetus becomes hot; because it is nourished by better and hotter blood, the fetus is made male. If it settles in the left, it is colder [and becomes] a female. On the other hand, if it settles in the right but is turned a little bit to the left, it becomes an effeminate man; if in the left but a little toward the right, a masculine woman.30 In the twelfth century, a new theory began to circulate that there were seven cells within the womb. Early in the century, a text on the anatomy of pigs (whose dissection served to teach physicians-in-training) posited that the pig had a seven-celled uterus. In the middle of the century, another anatomical writer, positing four cells in the womb, also added that if the seed falls into neither the two right cells nor the two left ones but rather settles into the middle of the uterus, it will generate a hermaphrodite. This may have been no afterthought, for the author goes on: “Although [the hermaphrodite] has both sexes, according to the decrees of the princes it has the privilege of whichever sex it uses more and in which it takes [sexual] delight.”31 This echoing of the language of Roman (and now canon) law suggests that it may have been the legal revival of this period that induced natural philosophers and physicians to

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ponder more concretely than they had done before how hermaphrodites were generated. The theory of seven cells was thus even more useful, since it could explain the maximum number of fetuses that could be generated at one time, and it could explain where and how fetuses were sexed. This view remained popular through the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in works by clerics and in vernacular literature. Nevertheless, more complex views could also be found in such theorists as Albert the Great (d. 1280), who believed that the hermaphrodite’s body simply reflected a “monstrous” excess of flesh or some other material defect at the time of conception. He, too, tells the story of a “girl” with retained testicles and penis who was found to really be a male when the closed lips of her “vulva” were cut open to prepare her for marriage.32 The involvement of surgeons in the three cases of hermaphroditism is part of a general medicalization of society and law in the later Middle Ages. Surgical statements about hermaphroditism, taken over directly from Arabic medical texts, were nonchalant, approaching hermaphroditism simply as a matter of removing what was “excess” on the body. In the early modern period, in contrast, as with other notions of anatomy, we find a marked shift in attitudes toward the hermaphrodite. Those attitudes had their own culturally specific genesis—as much to do with Ovid’s poetry as the new culture of anatomical empiricism— and we ought not assume they had any direct medieval corollaries.33 The lack of anxiety over hermaphrodites in western Europe reinforces what we have already learned about the sexual body: It was what one did with one’s body that mattered and not so much how one perceived that that body was structured or even how one perceived one’s own identity.

Disease and Disability Disease and disability also marked medieval bodies, though we should not assume that they did so with the same effects that we observe today. A study of notarial records in fourteenth-century Marseille, for example, showed that individuals were far more likely to identify themselves, and be identified, by where they lived than by any physical characteristics.34 But as noted by Ann Carmichael in chapter 2, medieval Europe and the Mediterranean basin shared a group of infectious diseases that would most decidedly leave their marks on the human body. Just how prevalent smallpox was in this period is not yet clear.35 Probably the two diseases that most regularly left their visible marks on medieval bodies were tuberculosis and leprosy. Tuberculosis (TB), the microbial disease we now ascribe to the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, had no single name or disease concept in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, we know from paleopathological studies that it was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin and Europe.36 The symp-

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toms of pulmonary TB (the most common manifestation) included low-grade fever, chills, coughing, weight loss, and general fatigue—all of them too unspecific to distinguish TB from all the other diseases that would have generally been classed as “fevers” by physicians. Tuberculosis no doubt contributed generally to debilities that diminished individuals’ potential to engage actively with their societies. Most of its damage to the body is internal, but tuberculosis could also have visually disabling effects. When TB infects the spine, it can cause a characteristic condition called kyphosis (now also known as Pott’s disease), which, because some of the spinal vertebrae collapse, produces a crooked back, difficulty in walking or standing, and impaired breathing. For leprosy, the paleopathological evidence is especially important since leprosy did not kill—it only disabled. Distinctive features are loss of sensation in patches of skin; resorption of the bones of the feet and hands, leading to the characteristic clawed hands; and resorption of the nasal cartilage and recession of the bone between the nose and upper lip, leading to loss of the central incisors, all producing the characteristic facial changes of leprosy: the facies leprosa. These deformities are then compounded by various lesions caused by injury or other infections due to loss of sensation. Because leprosy leaves distinctive marks on the skeleton, it is possible for modern bioarchaeologists to detect its presence quite accurately. Although not every individual afflicted with Mycobacterium leprosae (the pathogen that causes clinically defined Hansen’s disease) will display such bone lesions, when they are found they are diagnostic. A recent study of a cemetery from southern Germany in the early Middle Ages found that as many as 16 percent of individuals buried there had some kind of leprous involvement on their bones; in Scandinavia in the High Middle Ages, it has been estimated that as much as a quarter of the population was afflicted. Some studies show it to have been more prevalent among men than women.37 Obviously, people in the Middle Ages did not have our modern bacteriological understanding of the disease. Given that we find leprous individuals buried outside of leprosaria cemeteries and nonleprous people buried within, it is obvious that no strict segregation of the leprous was achieved. The religious brothers and sisters who ministered to lepers, for example, would also have been buried in the leprosarium’s cemetery. And it may well be that those who had skin diseases and other afflictions that would not now be classified as Hansen’s disease might have been erroneously diagnosed. But recent studies suggest that, especially toward the later Middle Ages, methods of diagnosis may have been more accurate—or at least more cautious—than we might initially suppose. One intriguing finding from later-medieval Denmark is that those showing signs of leprosy who were buried outside leprosaria cemeteries tended not to have the facial lesions associated with the disease. In other words, if leprosy

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did not manifest on the face—where it was most visible to others—then one was less likely to be deemed leprous and so be sequestered.38 In the Muslim world, leprosy was considered both contagious and hereditary. Sometimes those deemed leprous were confined to hospitals or leprosaria. But, more often, they had freedom of movement. One surviving medical certificate, apparently signed by two Muslim doctors, declared that a Jewish male living near Cairo “has been affected by such black bile as has caused him to develop leprosy, and that fact is such that it debars him from mixing freely with the Muslims and from earning his living.” It may be that the Jew had himself requested this document, perhaps in order to receive charitable support. Other evidence shows that leprous Jews had freedom to travel through Muslim territories to bathe in the waters of Tiberias in Palestine.39 Attitudes toward leprosy in the Christian world seem to have been quite harsh in the early Middle Ages, though once documentary evidence becomes more readily available in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we see a modulation of opinion.40 The Salernitan questions, for example, repeated the common notion that leprosy could be caused congenitally by corrupt seed. Other theorists (as we saw in chapter 3) put a more moralistic overtone on its causation, seeing leprosy as the result of “unnatural” sex by the child’s parents. Yet recent work suggests that medieval European attitudes toward leprosy were perhaps not as heartless as we have supposed. The clapper so distinctive of images of lepers was, we used to think, used to warn approaching healthy individuals to keep their distance. Newer interpretations see clappers and bells instead as a means to attract people to lepers trying to beg: One of the cruel symptoms of Hansen’s disease is that it causes loss of the voice, making some alternate method of “speaking” necessary.41 The famous attacks on leprosaria in France in 1321 and the practice of segregating lepers are well documented. But most leprosaria were right on the edge of town and earned the attentions of religious brothers and sisters who dedicated their lives to attending to the inmates because in giving such care they themselves earned salvation. Medical practitioners tended to be cautious in their pronouncements, sometimes deferring judgment when the signs seemed ambiguous. As the famous Montpellier physician Bernard of Gordon stated, “no one should be judged leprous unless disfigurement is manifest.”42 Visibly disabling conditions could be due to congenital problems and to accidents suffered during life as well as to infectious disease. How were such people treated by society? It has been argued recently that while there was clearly a great deal of “impairment” in the Middle Ages (the physical condition of not having full use of a bodily part or function), there was very little “disability” in the sense of being limited socially by that impairment.43 As with leprosy, associations of disabling conditions with sin, although common in the Bible, became less frequent as the Middle Ages progressed, largely being lim-

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ited by the twelfth century to blaming some congenital defects on the parents’ sexual misconduct. And, as we have already seen, according to Aquinas physical impairment was not assumed to constitute one’s identity: Whereas one’s sex would be maintained after the resurrection, all impairments would disappear. Yet the one most important source used by historians of disability—medieval saints’ lives and canonization proceedings—testifies that neither “impairments” nor “disabilities” were inconsequential: the fact that healing miracles often make up the bulk of a potential saint’s claim to sanctity is itself witness to widespread suffering. Yes, medical practitioners were certainly sought after, and their social prominence increased enormously in the later Middle Ages. But part of what patients wanted from their healers was an honest assessment of their prognosis: Everyone knew the limits of medicine, and (as we saw in chapter 1) a “good death” was one that had been prepared for in advance.

Character: The Use of Physiognomy In medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, social class was indicated by all the “markers” examined in the preceding, on top of which there was the even more immediate and prominent marker of clothing. But one’s status in society could also trump other considerations: A leper could be king, a woman—even a menstruating one—could be queen and overlord. Class, then, is perhaps too broad a category to localize exclusively in the body. Nevertheless, individual “character” could be marked on medieval bodies and therefore mapped. There was a whole subdiscipline of knowledge, called physiognomy, that helped one judge an individual’s character and fate by his or her hair color, the shape of the chin, or even the appearance of the genitalia. This area of natural knowledge had its origins in ancient Greece, where one of the most popular medieval texts—in Byzantium and the Islamic world and (in a redacted form) in Latin Europe—was composed. As noted by Joseph Ziegler, physiognomy “was a rhetorical tool devised by men, for men, and against men, who were praising or defaming each other in the political arena.”44 A late-antique Latin text offered a distillation of this ancient Greek science: It needs to be established what physiognomy promises: it promises that it examines and perceives the quality of the mind from the quality of the body. Loxus [a physician from whom our Latin author is allegedly drawing], for example, established that the blood is the dwelling-place of the soul, and moreover that the whole body and the parts of it which give signs give different signs according to the liveliness or inertia of the blood and whether it is thinner or thicker . . . But others think that just as the soul is the shaper of the body, so the soul derives its appearance from the quality of the body,

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just like liquid in a small vessel which derives its appearance from the vessel and just like air breathed into a pipe, aulos, or trumpet: for although the breath is uniform, a trumpet, pipe, and aulos make different sounds.45 In Latin Europe, physiognomy took on a new life in the later Middle Ages, in part because it became even more ambitious in its coverage of the body. Whereas the ancient texts and the works that circulated up through the thirteenth century generally confined themselves to the face, head, hair, and skin of the limbs, in the later Middle Ages writers began to explore the significance of the appearance of the genitalia, too. Medieval physiognomic writers also turned their attention to the female body in ways ancient physiognomy never had. Close physiognomic analysis could offer useful information about the potential fertility of an individual—a critical skill when making marriage negotiations, for example. One need not even examine the genitalia directly to make these inferences: The size of a man’s nose and his penis were directly correlated, hence obviating any need to undress. For a woman, one had to examine her foot. Physiognomy could also readily provide information on virginity in either sex or effeminate sexual inclinations in men. While it is clear that in later-medieval physiognomy, authors actually envisioned learning much of a man’s character from direct examination of his genitalia, for a woman all that was learned was her openness to sex. How much such disquisitions resonated beyond the learned classes is unclear, though we can certainly find echoes of such opinions in popular literature and sermons. And again, just as there was not a particularly pronounced tradition of visually portraying anatomy, so physiognomy was, in the Middle Ages, a textual genre almost entirely devoid of images. The words of physiognomy texts themselves were meant to be sufficiently evocative of character.46 Only chiromantic texts—treatises explaining how to discern character from lines on the hand— were regularly accompanied by images, and these were really diagrams highlighting the different lines and what they signified (see Figure 7.5). Interestingly, here too we find gendered differences in analysis: The right hand of a male was to be read preferentially, the left hand of a female. Whereas physiognomy seems to have stayed largely the province of learned males, in late-medieval England, at least, two texts on chiromancy were written specifically for female recipients.47

The Consequences of Marking Marking the body could be both voluntary (as in the Muslim and Jewish practice of male circumcision) or enforced (as in strictures that Jewish women in Italian towns pierce their ears).48 But all markings, whether one was born with them, acquired them accidentally, or was forced to take them on, were culturally loaded. Indeed, that was their purpose. That women, Jews, Muslims,

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FIGURE 7.5: Hand diagram. Wellcome L0015603 Credit: Wellcome Library.

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slaves, or even the leprous or impaired at times challenged and contested their social categorization is not in doubt. Several decades of scholarship have shown myriad ways that individuals falling into all these “embodied” categories acted to assert themselves. Still, we are left to wonder if, given the opportunity, they might not choose to cast off their markedness. Medieval instances of crossdressing—in any direction—are illustrative of how, on occasion, individuals attempted to use the readily adoptable markings of clothes to further their ambitions. Many court cases about illicit sex across religious boundaries in Spain have come to us because Jewish and Muslim males were allegedly not wearing the garments prescribed for their station and took advantage of this “anonymity” to engage in sexual relations with Christian women.49 There is no doubt that a male prostitute in London and the female “sodomite” in Nuremberg both used cross-dressing to further sexual aims.50 But, importantly, that male prostitute also lived as a woman: He engaged in needlework as one of several methods of earning money. Cross-dressing was probably most potent in its possibilities (and dangers) for women. Joan of Arc is certainly the most famous medieval crossdresser, but one wonders how many other women there might have been like a female university student in Kraków, who (so a unique story tells us) “passed” as an adolescent scholar for two years before being discovered by a soldier traveling through town.51 Marking had consequences that were as real as life itself. Like trumpets or pipes making different sounds from the same air, bodies shaped the expression of ambitions and the fates of souls, even if all three medieval religious traditions recognized those souls as equal in the eyes of God.

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The Diversity of Human Kind monica h. green

The idea that the extent of the world was huge, together with the idea that human character and physical nature were shaped by the environment, allowed for expansive conceptions of the range of human variability in the Middle Ages. The ancient Greeks and Romans had already incorporated much lore about North Africa and central Asia into their understanding of the natural world and its peopling. But that world grew even bigger in the Middle Ages. It was expanded first by the intermingling of the Mediterranean cultures with Germanic and Celtic cultures from the north, then by the connections that Muslims and Jews created with the cultures surrounding the Indian Ocean. In subsequent centuries, the medieval world grew even further with the increasing flow of goods and knowledge between central and east Asia and the West and, finally, with the forays that Portuguese and Spanish mariners made into the Atlantic and along the coasts of sub-Saharan Africa. All these places were filled with human bodies. But were they fully “human,” or did they partake only in some partial way of the character of humanness? To answer this fully would demand engagement with a vast array of medieval theories and practices of geography, trade, diplomacy, and science. My questions here will be limited to these: To what extent did medieval conceptions of the natural world allow or predict the existence of human variation? What was the limit of the human in terms of the physical body? At what point did it stop being human and become something monstrous or even bestial? And,

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finally, in what ways did differences on the surface of the body—most obviously, that of skin color but also differences “in the blood”—signify physical or moral differences that demanded certain practices of social organization? In other words, was there a medieval concept of race?

INHABITABLE PLACES At least among medieval Europeans with a modicum of learning—among men with university training, certainly, but also anyone with access to basic encyclopedias of knowledge—there was no delusion that Europe was the center of the world. The center of the world, according to any contemporary map, was the Mediterranean, mare nostrum (“our sea”) as the Romans had called it. With increasing emphasis as the Middle Ages progressed, the center of the world shifted to the holy city of Jerusalem. The classic T-O maps (see Figure 8.1) that were common in Latin, Greek, and Arabic books showed the Mediterranean (which connected to the Black and Red Seas, thus forming the “T” at the center of the map) as the great waterway at the center of a tripartite landmass: Africa to the south (on the right side of the map), Asia to the east (here, on top), and Europe to the north (here, to the left). Other texts (and some maps) further refined this understanding of the world’s landmass by showing how those continents spread across the regions of the earth’s globe. (Yes, “globe,” for it is only a modern myth that the world was thought to be flat in the Middle Ages.)1 The different horizontal zones that cut across this globe divided it into regions that were either habitable because they were temperate or uninhabitable because they tended toward the extremes of heat (at the equator) or cold (at the polar regions). The worldview developed by the ancient Greeks and systematized by the geographer Ptolemy (90–168 c.e.) held not only that the world was spherical but that it had seven parallel, horizontal climatic zones. Not only the poles but also the equator were uninhabitable, the former due to its cold, the latter to its excessive heat. Thus, the “known world” for them really extended only to that edge of the Sahara that they knew of from reports. If there was any landmass in the southern hemisphere of the world (an issue debated in antiquity as well as the Middle Ages), it was not necessarily inhabited. Some thought it was all ocean. The crude features of the classic T-O maps were modified and elaborated in various ways in the centuries after the first millennium. As these maps developed, so, too, did knowledge about the peoples in their various regions. The ancient Mediterranean societies had long had trade contacts that extended to India. These commercial ties grew exponentially in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries as Jewish and Muslim traders plied the Indian Ocean and overland routes (such as the Silk Road) to create several interconnected regions

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FIGURE 8.1: A T-O map of the world, from a twelfth-century copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. In many maps of this type, Jerusalem would have been prominently labeled at the cross of the T, while in others Paradise would be added in the far east (the top of the map). The parts of Africa listed are the same as those recognized in antiquity. London, Wellcome Library, MS 372, fol. 65v. Wellcome image number: L0024508 Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Manuscripts: WIHM Western MS 372.

that effectively united the Eurasian and North African landmasses. At the same time, the northern Eurasian landmass was made newly visible to the Muslim and Christian worlds with the rise of the Tartars (Mongols) and their invasions into central Europe, reaching nearly as far as Vienna. The existence of the lands of northern central Asia had always been hypothesized in the traditional cartographic visions of the known world. But maps as well as descriptive accounts took on amazing new levels of detail once specific knowledge of new peoples became available.2 “Habitability” now included areas reaching all the way up to the Arctic Circle. Similarly, the Portuguese and Spanish expansion into the Atlantic added knowledge of the Canary Islanders to anthropological

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lore once they were rediscovered in 1336. (The Romans had already known of their existence in the first century, and Muslim contact is documented from the tenth.) There is evidence that Christian thinkers, at least by the thirteenth century, were aware that there existed populations of sizes hitherto unimagined. The Dominican theologian Albert the Great (d. 1280), for example, was well aware that “there are [now] many large cities which did not exist” in the time of Caesar.3 It was not the expanding girth of European cities that pushed this observation home most emphatically, however. Once the Mongols completed their conquest of Cathay in 1276, a path was opened for Westerners (primarily missionaries) to travel to China under the Mongol peace. Whereas the reports of Tartary in the 1230s and 1240s had described it as a virtual wasteland, a land without cities despite the large numbers of warriors it was able to produce, reports from Cathay at the end of the century (including the famous accounts of Marco Polo) showed it to be a vastly urbanized society. The population of Canbalec (Beijing), which the Mongols took as their capital, could be gauged, Polo says, by the number of its prostitutes, whom he estimated at 20,000. Cansay (Hangchow) was estimated to have 1,600,000 hearths, with several times that many people.4 It is not surprising, therefore, that in 1332 a Christian writer who claims to have preached among the infidel for twenty-four years avers that Latin Christians, confined to a very small part of the inhabited world, did not constitute even a tenth part of its population. Indeed, since he himself had crossed the equator, he knew that it, too, was habitable, meaning not only that the Antipodes might have human inhabitants but that Christians perhaps made up less than a twentieth part of humanity!5

THE CLIMATIC BODY Embedded in the ancient concepts of the geography of the world were notions about how human bodies varied in different climates and environments. One of the earliest treatises that laid out a theory of how human bodies differed according to climate—whether, for example, its water came from melting snow or wells, whether the wind blew from the north or south—was an ancient Greek medical text called Airs, Waters, Places. Although its two Latin translations circulated poorly, echoes of its environmental theories of human character and health could be found in a variety of contexts. Whereas the science of physiognomy examined subtle differences in coloring or facial features of individuals (see chapter 7), notions of climate were used to explain the differences between whole groups of people. The theory was straightforward: Temperate climates produced temperate bodies and characters, while extreme geographic locations produced bodies and characters that pushed the limits of the human. This system could explain character, humoral disposition, anatomy,

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and freedom from (or susceptibility to) aging and disease. True, it needed some slight modification from the ancient precepts that had been inherited; after all, much of western Europe was found in what the ancient Mediterraneans would have deemed “extreme” zones. In articulating questions about the normal human life span, for example, Christian thinkers focused on three themes: life span as documented by stories from the Old Testament, the differences in life span among people living in different climatic regions, and the differences between men and women. They disagreed with Aristotle in his belief that those living in warm regions lived longer than those in cold ones. Surely, they thought, he must have meant “temperate” rather than warm and “extremely cold” instead of just cold. For, of course, their own existence in the occasionally quite frigid climes of Germany and northwestern Europe proved that humans could survive quite well in such climates. They were, like Aristotle, however, perfectly willing to opine about life-span possibilities in those areas they had never been: In the south, they felt sure, black men did not live beyond thirty.6 The idea of blacks—the idea, that is, that the human skin could range in natural tone all the way to a deep brown or even black color—was not, in fact, foreign to medieval Europeans. The legend of Saint Maurice—whose earliest known depiction, from the cathedral at Magdeburg in Germany (see Figure 8.2), shows him as very recognizably sub-Saharan African—as well as the idea of the black third Magus who visited the Christ child, regularized the concept of blacks in the western European imagination.7 For most Europeans north of the Alps, blacks remained just that: an object of wonder mentioned at certain times in the liturgical cycle or cited as exotic characters in works of romance. Increasingly (as we will see in the following), blacks became regular fixtures of European households as their presence in the slave market grew toward the end of the Middle Ages. Well before that, however, in the thirteenth century, blacks became the object of speculation by university men. Scholars were momentarily fixated on speculating about the physiology of black women, particularly their sexual physiology and the quality of the breast milk that they produced. Peter Biller, who discovered this peculiar train of thought, locates this discourse in Paris around the year 1300.8 The question of black women’s breast milk originated in antiquity with Aristotle. In his History of Animals, Aristotle had stated simply that the milk of darker women is healthier for children than that of lighter-skinned women. In the medieval Latin translation, this was rendered as “The milk of black women is better and more plentiful food than that of white women.” This statement was then provided with a rationalization in accordance with medieval theories of the temperaments and the role of heat in physiology: Whereas white women produced milk that remained very watery, black women, because of their extra heat, could concoct their milk to a greater degree, producing higher-quality milk. Although this discussion occurred

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FIGURE 8.2: Saint Maurice in the Cathedral of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany, next to

the grave of Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor. The cathedral is actually named “cathedral of Saints Catherine and Maurice” after Saint Maurice and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The sculpture was created around 1250 and is considered to be the first realistic depiction of an ethnic African in Europe. Unfortunately, the figure is no longer complete and is missing the lower legs and an item in the right hand, presumably a lance. Wikimedia Commons.

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principally in texts circulating only within the narrow confines of the University of Paris, the theory also made its way into one of the commentaries on the widely circulated Secrets of Women, a work that disseminated a variety of influential beliefs about female physiology to diverse audiences. The premise that black women were naturally hotter than white women also underlay ideas about black women’s sexuality. Questions were raised whether black women desired sex more than white women or took more pleasure in it and whether they desired black men as their sexual partners or whites. Albert the Great, the Dominican theologian, was the most explicit in describing how black women’s hotness made them good sexual partners. Indeed, he seems to have been particularly fascinated with the whole question of how blacks differed in their physiology from whites, devoting a entire chapter of his text On the Nature of a Place as Determined by Its Latitude and Longitude to the topic. Why was this German theologian, who may have never directly encountered a black person in his life, so interested in this? The answer is not clear, though the fact that Albert and a variety of other white intellectuals were so intrigued by these questions is further evidence of how European intellectuals pushed beyond the texts they inherited from antiquity and the Islamic world and forged their own anthropological views on the world.

ON THE EDGES OF THE NATURAL WORLD Elsewhere in this volume we have heard of bodies that pressed the edges of what it meant to be human: werewolves, the undead, even angels and demons. But the generic category of “monsters” was also very fully populated in the Middle Ages. Although both Jewish and Muslim societies had their beliefs in supernatural beings—jinn, golems, and so forth—Christians in western Europe seem to have been especially fascinated with monsters of all kinds. The edges of human nature were linked with the furthest reaches of the world: The Christian tradition of mapmaking, based on the ancient geographic tradition, intersected with theories about monstrosity in ways not paralleled in either Jewish or Islamic culture.9 But “monsters” could also exist close at hand. Whether far or near, all raised questions about human nature. Both Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and, following him, Isidore of Seville (d. 636) wrote that monsters are so called because what they do is monere, “warn,” and monstrare, “show.” That is, they exist both to warn away from sin (“Look what will happen if you have unnatural sex!”) and to show the breadth of God’s power in creation. Monsters were not necessarily to be feared, at least not if they lived off on the edges of the world. Lore inherited from antiquity peopled the edges of the world with figures like Anthropophagi (cannibals), Cynocephali (dog-headed people), and Griste (a group that makes clothes from the skins of their enemies). We know them now as the “Plinian

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races,” so called because they had been described by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (d. 79 c.e.).10 Animal hybrids populate the texts and the margins of countless medieval books, but it was these “human” races that most captivated medieval readers and viewers. Britains—themselves an ethnic stew of Picts, Scots, Angles, Saxons, Danes, and more—were fascinated with monsters at least since the Anglo-Saxon period. The one extant copy of the monsters’ tale Beowulf occurs in the same manuscript as a world map and a text entitled The Marvels of the East, which gathered and elaborated on all the lore from Pliny and other ancient writers. A Latin treatise simply titled The Book of Monsters, composed probably in Britain in the seventh or eighth century, lays out a convenient catalog of monsters.11 It clearly divides “human” monsters (“those things which differ by a rather trifling amount from humankind”) from those that are fully animal forms or types of serpents and dragons. Human monsters include hermaphrodites, giants, those with extra digits, and Ethiopians (“whom the flaming sun continually burns with excessive heat”) but also satyrs, sirens, centaurs, and various Plinian races. The Plinian races had taken on iconographic reality in illustrated manuscripts of Pliny and his fellow naturalist writers like Solinus and Isidore of Seville in the early Middle Ages. In addition, in maps directly descended from the T-O and climatic maps already discussed, the British mapped the monstrous races directly into human geography, putting them on the opposite edge of the circumference that they themselves inhabited in their northern climes. (It has been suggested that this may reflect their own anxiety about possibly being “monstrous” due to their distance from the holy center of Jerusalem.) Initially, starting around the first millennium, just the names of the Plinian races were added to the edges of a world map. From then on, the images that had previously embellished the written texts of natural wonders now migrated onto the maps themselves. The Duchy of Cornwall map, produced near the end of the thirteenth century by an artist associated with the court of King Edward I of England, shows in its one extant fragment the southwestern part of Africa with several of the Plinian races on its edge; they are also found on the largest extant world map, the Hereford Map, which was likewise produced in England in about 1300. For a time, England produced more maps than anywhere else in western Europe.12 Did viewers of these maps take the Plinian races seriously? Or were they merely amusing trifles in the same way monstrous hybrids and other drolleries graced the margins of medieval manuscripts? It is generally understood now that all marginalia had their uses: to subvert, to distract, to affirm the messages of the main text. Often, the monstrous races were fingers wagging at the morals of Europeans themselves. This seems to have been particularly the case in the females that were depicted. Some maps depicted the women of the Psylli on

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the southern rim of Africa, whose fidelity was tested by their husbands’ exposing their newborn babies to snakes. The Amazons (or Amazon-like groups, like the Pandea people of India) were at once “both fascinating ideals and frightening curiosities.”13 But the Plinian races were also objects for the contemplation of human nature. Augustine had already opined that the monstrous races, if indeed they did exist, had human souls. In Christian Europe, therefore, the question was less “Were they human?” than “Were they all among the saved or those who could be saved?” One of the most famous sculptural depictions of the Plinian races is on the central portal of the narthex at the basilica of Saint Magdalene at Vézelay. Dating from the middle of the twelfth century, it depicts Mark 16:15 when Christ charges his disciples to preach “to the ends of the earth.” Not surprisingly, missionaries did initially look for the Plinian races when they traveled beyond the bounds of the Mediterranean. In the ninth century, an earlier missionary had asked for advice on how he should engage the socalled dogheads (Cynocephali) should he encounter them in his evangelizing of Scandinavia. Were they descended from Adam’s stock, or did they have the souls (animas) of animals? Despite their doglike appearance, the answer came, they show such human attributes as living in villages, practicing agriculture, and wearing clothes. All these attributes distinguish humans from animals, for “knowledge of technical skills is granted only to the rational soul.”14 In short, the body is irrelevant; it is only rational behavior (or the potential for it) that makes one human or not. Missionaries were still looking for the Plinian races in the thirteenth century, though having now reached the “edge of the earth,” they were willing to admit they could not be found. One Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck, who visited the Mongol capital of Karakorum in 1254, recounts that “I asked about the monsters or monstrous humans that Isidore and Solinus tell about. . . . They said to me that they had never seen such beings, wherefore we wondered very much whether it were true.” Eight decades later, John de Marignollis hunted for the Plinian races in India, which he visited following several years in China: “Never was I able to track down such peoples in the world in reality; instead, people asked me whether there were such creatures.”15 Such encounters clearly dashed these travelers’ high expectations, but in John’s case (and in many others) they were replaced by a kind of rationalization that sought to explain where the stories had come from in the first place. For the so-called monopods, one-footed beings who would lie down in the sun and use their oversized feet as shades, John postulated that “because all the people of India commonly run around naked, they always carry in their hand a cane with a small tent which they call cyatyr, just as I have when in Florence, and they put it up against the sun and the rain whenever they wish.”16 It is no coincidence that the heyday of the world maps with monstrous races on them was in the thirteenth century,

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the last point when Europeans were completely ignorant of eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The maps most characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the portolan charts that were meant for actually navigating the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic—had no fantastic images on the edges save whales and other sea creatures. Despite modern scholarly fascination with the fantastic monsters on the imagined edges of the world, monsters were not “always elsewhere.”17 The reality of fetal teratogenesis showed that God could create humans in a variety of ways, just as he could effect all manner of wondrous things. But monstrous births, far more than hypothetical encounters with monstrous races, raised real problems for Christians. Should deformed infants be baptized? Could “monsters” marry or be ordained? Augustine had wrestled with monstrous races, but many other questions remained to be worked out by later theorists. One surprisingly vigorous debate beginning in the second half of the thirteenth century was the humanity of “pygmies.” Mentioned first in the Aristotelian Problems, pygmies became a new object of discussion after Albert the Great raised the question whether they should be considered human or not. (Several contemporaries claimed to have seen these pygmies themselves, though it is possible they were in fact reporting sightings of monkeys or apes.) Albert believed that pygmies occupied some level between monkeys and humans; true, they were bipedal and had the use of their hands and even language. Another writer, Pierre of Auvergne, conceded that they practiced agriculture and even religion. In the end, though, they were deemed to lack reason and the ability to speak of abstract concepts. Pierre, as well as at least one other writer, oddly claimed they were just too small to be human. A Franciscan writer, however, contended that if human embryos could be considered “ensouled” at merely forty-six days of gestation, then size could never be used as an argument to rule out human nature in another being. Pygmies, of course, were exotic in the same way the Plinian races were. But teratological questions were inherently urgent, since these were cases that any priest might have to confront in his local parish. On the question of how to assess the humanity of a malformed baby, the central criterion was whether it had a fully formed head. If it did, it could be baptized. The shape of its other limbs did not matter. Siamese twins, however, presented the opposite problem: Was this one soul or two? To avoid a superfluous (and potentially sacrilegious) double baptism, the priest should give a real baptism to one child and a “provisional” one to the second. Siamese twins also potentially raised questions about marriage: Could each twin contract a marriage on his or her own? Answers to these questions seem to have been hypothetical (it was acknowledged that such twins rarely lived long), but the fact that they were debated shows the extent of theological concerns about how to define human identity.18

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Looking back on the late-medieval eclipse in belief in the Plinian races (by the time we get to Shakespeare’s Othello, they are nothing more than a trope to suggest the exotic),19 we might be inclined to think this an example of progressive rationalism, a move away from gullible naïveté toward an engagement with fact. The historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have suggested that “monsters elicited wonder at its most iridescent, linked sometimes to horror, sometimes to pleasure, and sometimes to repugnance.”20 There is no doubt that medieval tales of monstrous races had these effects, serving both as entertainment and as a reserve for moral exhortations. The same audiences that had been fascinated by tales of Anthropophagi and cyclopes in their encyclopedias made Marco Polo’s tales of his travels to Cathay a medieval best seller. But in approaching medieval wonders with the implicit (modern scientific) question “Why didn’t they investigate these phenomena?” Daston and Park miss the point that monstrous races and monstrous births were inducements to thinking about the human soul. Wonder did turn to curiosity in the thirteenth century when the world opened up for western Europeans in whole new ways. The same Franciscan and Dominican orders that sponsored the great encyclopedic works of Thomas of Cantimpré, Vincent of Beauvais, and Bartholomew the Englishman almost immediately sent missionaries to the Mongols and then Cathay as those new worlds opened up to them in the thirteenth century. And Franciscan brothers accompanied Portuguese sailors in their explorations around the African coast in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Those endeavors were premised on the assumption that these peoples new to the European imagination were human and had souls capable of salvation, if only they would accept the gospel.

THE RACIAL BODY: UNEASY COHABITATION But what of those peoples who were not new to the European imagination? Human diversity was recognized within the confines of Europe, too, but up through the fourteenth century religion and “ethnic” variations in behavior were far more significant in the context of western Europe than physical differences. A study of visual depictions has shown that most distinctions between groups either relied on textual signals (with no visual prompt) or distinctions in hair or dress—for example, turbans to indicate Muslims or long beards to depict Irishmen—not on distinctive bodily characteristics. Yet there were two important exceptions: Blacks were often shown not simply with dark skin but with hair and facial features distinctive of many sub-Saharan physiognomies, while Jews, though sometimes marked off by dress or adornment (the distinctive “Jewish hat” with a conical point in the case of males or, for females, earrings), were also often shown with prominent, hooked noses.21 As we have already seen here and in chapter 7, blacks and Jews received particular scrutiny

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from university theorists in the thirteenth century, who mused on the sexual and reproductive character of black women and the “menstrual” propensities of Jewish males. In other words, the distinctiveness of these two groups was “embodied” to a degree not documented for other categories of humans in medieval western Europe. Blacks and Jews were also uniquely involved in two developments toward the end of the medieval period, both particularly affecting the Iberian Peninsula, which served to solidify notions that embodied differences could and perhaps even should underlie decisions about legal status and social rights. First, shifts in the practices of slave trading caused a pronounced change in the geographic origin, and physical character, of the slaves coming into Mediterranean markets; by the fifteenth century close to half the slaves traded in some markets were black or mulatto. The second shift was simultaneous, though the timing seems to have been sheer coincidence: This was the beginning of the use of biological notions to refer to distinctions between “old Christians” and “new Christians” (conversos), primarily Jews who had converted to Christianity during and after the massive forced conversions of 1391. There has been a good deal of scholarly debate whether concepts of race existed in Europe prior to the age of European colonialism, or even prior to the development of scientific theories of race in the nineteenth century.22 Yet even if we call them only “protoracist,” it is clear that by the end of the Middle Ages, Christian notions of the diversity of humankind came to include ideas that inherited biological differences, whether apparent on the surface of the body or not, should be used to structure social relations. As we have already seen, the idea of black people was alive and well in western Europe, at least in learned circles, throughout the Middle Ages. Yet the thirteenth-century elaborations of the “nature of blackness” that we surveyed in the preceding may well have been done in complete ignorance of real black people. The Dominican theologian Albert the Great is known to have studied in Padua and Bologna early in his career, yet he spent the rest of his life in modern-day Germany and France. Likewise, the mendicant encyclopedists Thomas of Cantimpré, Bartholomew the Englishman, and Vincent of Beauvais (who readily gathered stories from returning Crusaders and missionaries) spent their careers north of the Alps. Even the text Secrets of Women circulated primarily north of the Alps. In Mediterranean regions, in contrast, contacts with the Islamic world, whether through trade or through the Crusades, meant that interaction with peoples of various hues was quite normal as a result of the vast networks of trade across the Sahara and with southeastern and central Asia. That trade included traffic in humans. In the European context, slavery was premised on the accidents of fate (the bad luck of being captured in war or even while engaged in such innocent pursuits as fishing) or individual guilt

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(especially among Muslim subjects in Christian Spain, who were punished for their crimes with enslavement). Skin color or any other preexisting physical characteristic was irrelevant. There were far more Caucasians (literally, from the Caucasus) and other peoples from central Eurasia who were enslaved in western Europe in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries than blacks. Likewise, many slaves came from recently conquered areas of Muslim Iberia and would not have differed significantly in skin color or physiognomic aspect from Christians. Black slaves were not unknown, but up through the fourteenth century they remained rarities. With the Portuguese explorations and nascent colonization of the West African coast as well as the rediscovery of the Neolithic peoples inhabiting the Canary Islands in the mid-fourteenth century, the use of black slaves grew significantly as the Spanish and Portuguese established sugar plantations in the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands.23 In the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Turks’ blockade of the Black Sea region cut off the traditional source of supply for light-skinned slaves from central Eurasia. The trading networks that the Spanish and Portuguese had set up in the Atlantic made up for that deficit by delivering black slaves directly into Mediterranean European urban markets. The Spanish city of Valencia, for example, had a very active slave market throughout the fifteenth century. In the early decades, captive and penally enslaved Muslims, Greeks, Tartars, Russians, and Circassians dominated the market. By the third quarter of the century, black Africans comprised as much as 40 percent of the slave population there, with the percentage of new black slaves coming into its markets rising to 70 percent by the last decade of the century.24 As noted in the Introduction to this volume, slavery was largely a feminized phenomenon in medieval Europe; university scholars’ abstract theorizing about black women’s milk could therefore potentially have had real-life implications as more women of African origin came into the slave market. Echoes of Aristotle’s views can be found in a Castilian text on the medicinal properties of foods, though here the focus is not on black women but animals: “the milk of black animals is much better than that of white animals and is more completely concocted in the breasts.”25 Animal milk was understood, then as now, to be unsuitable nutrition for neonates. Every child had to be nursed either by its own mother or by another woman who had recently given birth. Biller assumes that canon law prohibitions against wet nursing across confessional lines (enacted as early as 1179) would have rendered moot the question of black women (coming from non-Christian lands) nursing white babies. But in Mediterranean Europe, where the practice of female slavery was most common, the question was by no means hypothetical. Although Christian preachers as well as medical writers argued that maternal breast-feeding was the best thing that any woman could offer her child,

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two forces in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries conspired to induce even middle-class urban women to employ wet nurses for their children.26 First, since sexual intercourse was discouraged by the church during lactation, prolonged breast-feeding had consequences for marital sexual relations, putting the woman in a conflicted position between obligations to her child and the fulfillment of her “marriage debt” to her husband.27 Second, as urban merchants established a greater basis of wealth, there was a corresponding desire to reproduce more frequently to ensure male heirs to inherit the patrimony. The use of wet nurses resolved both these concerns by shifting the biological burden of rearing infants onto lower social classes. Some of these wet nurses were other free Christian women, who hired out their services for payment. Yet female slaves (who may in fact have been impregnated by their masters or other males in the household) were also used to provide this service. Medical literature in circulation in southern Europe in this period emphasized that the wet nurse should look as much like child’s mother as possible, and this preference seems to have played out in the way slave women were used as wet nurses in the thirteenth century. Sales contracts from Perpignan list whether a woman is a Muslim or a convert and describe her as having white, olive/mulatto, or black skin. All of the baptized slave women mentioned in sales contracts whose skin color is listed are white.28 Whether there was an increased tendency to baptize white slave women so that they could serve as wet nurses is not clear, since the contracts do not state whether they were pregnant or lactating at the time of sale nor has any other definitive evidence been found for a bias based on skin color. Nevertheless, the differential in baptism seems striking. Since baptism did not automatically convey freedom, the master or mistress suffered no loss from the conversion, yet it rendered the slave woman available for wet nursing should her services be needed. Whether or not this apparent avoidance of black women for wet-nursing purposes continued into the fifteenth century, when blacks constituted an increasing percentage of the slave population, is unclear. Christian preachers were still exhorting women to breast-feed their own children, yet use of wet nurses, including slave women, seems to have been even more pronounced than in the thirteenth century. Indeed, Debra Blumenthal has found that in fifteenth-century Valencia masters paid higher premiums (as much as 35 percent above the average price) for women who were pregnant or lactating.29 No study has yet been done to assess attitudes toward black women breast-feeding white children. Still, it is interesting to note the pronounced differential in the sale prices for black female slaves: On average, they sold for from 84 percent to as little as 65 percent of the average price of white female slaves.30 Could it be that white female slaves’ ability to provide “white milk” kept their price high?

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The question is by no means trivial since it was generally believed that the nurse’s milk conveyed moral qualities to the child, not just physical nutrition. And the character of the new black slaves seems to have been suspect. In a close study of legal records from the Spanish city of Valencia, Blumenthal has perceived a subtle change in tone over the course of the fifteenth century as the character of the slave population shifted. Whereas earlier records had shown an emphasis on having slaves “confess” to their condition of slavery by acknowledging that they had legitimately been captured in a “good war” or that they were “enemies of the [Christian] faith,” records from later in the century show an impatience with the “very uncivilized” character of the black Africans or Canary Islanders whose speech could not be interpreted by court reporters. Indeed, the term uncivilized (boçal) seems to occur solely in describing these peoples. Most significantly, these records demonstrate a new emphasis on the slave’s appearance as proof of “infidel” character. True, their appearance was cited alongside other differences, such as language, to prove that they came “from the land of Saracens and infidels” (obviously, a convenient fiction) and so were enemies of the Christian faith.31 And no evidence has yet been found for any universal denigration of the physical aspect of all persons coming from West Africa or the Canary Islands. Yet statements can be found suggesting that all blacks shared certain negative intellectual or moral characteristics—“defective,” “vile,” “despicable.”32 The exotic beauty of some black slave women was prized by members of the Spanish royal courts, yet they were clearly “exotic” in the same way as lions and ostriches in the royal menagerie might be.33 In 1494 –1495, the German traveler Hieronymus Münzer seems to have picked up immediately on the local sentiments of whites when he described the Canary Islanders he saw for sale in the Valencian marketplace: “Their women are beautiful, with long and strong limbs,” he acknowledged, but their customs were bestial.34 Indeed, it might well be that engrained ideas coming from the Arabic-speaking world, particularly the western Sahel region, which associated blacks with slavery, may have been passed on to the Europeans, who relied on Muslim traders for the initial capture of most of the enslaved.35 Interestingly, black Africans and Canary Islanders—both groups coming from far outside the orbit of Islam, which for centuries had united quite disparate groups under the common bond of the Arabic language—may have started to see themselves as a race or at least as some sort of social entity. Having been gathered into slavery from many different ethnic backgrounds, they were united more by their color and their status as slaves than by language or shared ethnic traditions. They tended to attempt escape somewhat less than their Muslim counterparts (who by language as well as complexion and custom could blend into the extensive local Muslim populations), and when they did try to escape, they often did so in pairs, presumably because in the absence

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of any black outside community they could turn to, they had to rely on each other.36 Even if they were emancipated, black Africans did not find the same avenues toward assimilation that their fairer-skinned counterparts did. Silversmiths and cobblers, for example, legislated that no member could admit to their guilds a “black man nor a man the color of quince jelly, a former slave, nor the son of slaves of a similar color, nor a Moor” on the grounds that their presence would lessen the prestige of their trades.37 Besides economic disadvantage, black ex-slaves also encountered social disability, being distrusted as thieves or presumed to still be slaves simply on account of their skin color. In Valencia, they created a Casa dels Negres (“House of Blacks”), a fraternal organization that offered loans, collected funds to purchase certain individuals from slavery, and even provided health care for freed blacks who had no other communities of social support.38 Even if they had not been enslaved because they were black, their skin color proved a social liability and continuing stigma. Cut off from their natal families, languages, and cultures, they had no identities other than those Christian society imposed on them or which they crafted anew by themselves. In contrast, it was Jews’ overabundance of culture that made them subject to an emerging racist ideology, that is, a rationalized system of belief that some (negative) characteristics are grounded in biology and passed on from generation to generation. Several historians have suggested that anti-Judaism—the denigration of all things connected to the Jewish religion and the people who practiced it—was already turning into anti-Semitism by the fourteenth century. Anti-Semitism, they suggest, was characterized by an increasing focus on the physical attributes of Jews: the shape of the nose, the color of the skin, the texture of the hair. Those physical characteristics then signified the moral turpitude within. Yet, as we saw in chapter 7, it was precisely because Jews (and Muslims) couldn’t be readily distinguished from their Christian counterparts that laws had been enacted that non-Christians must wear distinguishing clothing. The cohabitation of Christians and Jews that had been worked out (fitfully) over the course of the central Middle Ages broke down on a massive scale at the end of the fourteenth century. In 1391, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Seville and then spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Mass conversions followed and continued in waves during the fifteenth century. Instead of ameliorating concerns about difference, the waves of conversions of Jews and Muslims in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries exacerbated them because of fears that such conversion was only superficial. These fears led up to the formal establishment of the Inquisition in 1481 to root out false converts and the edict of 1492, which banished all remaining Jews who refused to convert. Discerning “true” Christians from suspect ones therefore took on enormous import, and by the end of the Middle Ages various Spanish institutions had imposed laws on “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre)—“the idea that the reproduction of

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culture is embedded in the reproduction of the flesh”—in order to ensure cultural and religious purity and keep the children and grandchildren of converted Jews and Muslims from ascending to royal offices and higher authority in the church.39 It has been noted that “words like raza, casta, and linaje (and their cognates in the various Iberian romance languages) were already embedded in identifiably biological ideas about animal breeding and reproduction in the first half of the fifteenth century.”40 When these terms started to be used, beginning in the 1430s, for conversos, what had previously been positive concepts of cross-generational transfer of “noble character” in animals became loaded with a sense that “pure blood” was continually in danger of corruption by the impure. In shifting thinking about difference from culture to biology, sexual mixing presumably generated new levels of anxiety. Traditional concerns about miscegenation had focused on transgressions across religious lines and not those of skin color or race. It was the sexual contact itself, not necessarily any mixed offspring that might result, that was of predominant concern. Even prohibitions against wet nursing across religious lines, though similarly grounded on the most intimate of physical contact, were largely concerned with the opportunities such contact might present for the corruption of religious practice and belief.41 At what point did such concerns also become “biological”? There is a magnificent irony, of course, in the fact not only that the new religious unity Christians thought they had established by expelling the Jews and Muslims fell apart under the force of the various Protestant movements of the sixteenth century but also that all this came right at the moment when Europeans would be forced to add a whole new dimension of humanity to their world map. The Antipodes they had long assumed to be empty were in fact inhabited. And not by Sciopods or Cynocephali, but by peoples who, in their skin color, languages, and cultural traditions, differed from Christian Europeans in much the way the darker-skinned Canary Islanders and West Africans had. The debates about the humanity of the peoples of the New World made the medieval speculations about the size, inhabitants, and nature of the world urgent in a way not dreamed of in any earlier philosophy.

CHAPTER NINE

Cultural Representations of the Body samantha riches and bettina bildhauer

All bodies are culturally represented insofar as they are always perceived from inside a culture, through its religious, social, scientific, aesthetic, and medical values and categories. They can be used to show distinctions of power, gender, communities, sexual availability, age, ethnicity, and social status in culturally intelligible ways. Medieval rulers, for example, asserted their power through displaying their distinguished bodies in specific ways, while courtly and religious rituals were based on physical gestures and choreographed movements. The king sitting on the throne, the priest holding up the eucharistic host, the knight kneeling before his lord, the lady throwing herself onto a corpse: They all used a bodily language understood within their culture to represent power, the presence of Christ, submission, or grief. Bodies are also ubiquitous in cultural representations in a narrow sense: Art, literature, nonfiction writing from medicine to theology, drama, and, to some extent, music and architecture all have the human body as one of their most common objects of depiction and description. Indeed, much of what we know about actual medieval bodies comes from such cultural representations. This chapter focuses on the representations of bodies in fiction and art and shows some pertinent themes that strike us as characteristic of medieval representations of bodies across these different media, bearing in mind some of the ways in which medieval conceptions of the body differ from those of twenty-first-century Western culture. Just as current avant-garde research,

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art, and thought question the fiction of the self-evident body as we know it, so the historical observation that the body has not always been conceptualized in the same way highlights its contingency. The perceived distinctions in the continuum of existence—between a body and a soul, a subject and an other, an embodied subject and everything outside it, human and other bodies, normal and abnormal bodies—were made at some point in the history of humankind. It is often presumed that people in the Middle Ages had an understanding of the body that was radically different from our own nuanced and contextualized conceptions of our bodies. They allegedly saw the body either as a holistic unit whose coherence was guaranteed by Christian faith or, alternatively, as a sinful, grotesque “prison of the soul,” hindering the spiritual progress of Christians. But, in fact, medieval concepts of the body were, of course, as varied and complex as modern ones. The following discussion is restricted to European Christian models, but even in this limited ambit there is considerable differentiation of cultural contexts, regions, times, and genres.

THE BODY AS A LOCUS OF SALVATION One of the most widespread misconceptions about the understanding of bodies in the Middle Ages is that they were seen dualistically, as sinful “flesh” separate from the soul, with the potential to seduce humans into deviating from the rightful path to heaven. Historians of Christianity, like Caroline Walker Bynum, have done much to challenge this view, though in turn they have often postulated an idealized view of a perceived unity of body and soul. But many medieval religious models combined the idea of the body as earthbound and distinct from the soul with an understanding that the body could access the transcendental and was in actuality inseparable from the soul.1 Martyrs, for example, used their physical suffering to atone for their own and others’ sins. Mystics’ bodies allowed them to physically feel the presence of God, touch him and embrace him, and in some cases even breast-feed him or have sex with him.2 But ordinary people could also interact with others’ frail bodies to attain salvation. The concept of the seven corporal works of mercy, for example, relies on the notions of the body as both earthbound and transcendental. Here, the body appears as the locus of suffering, which takes particular forms, such as hunger, thirst, and sickness; these needs provide an opportunity for acts of Christian generosity by another person, who would be rewarded at the Last Judgment, and in this sense the body simultaneously functions as a place of suffering and another’s route to salvation. Six of the seven corporal works are set out by Christ in the Gospel of Matthew 25:35–36, in the midst of the parable of the sheep and the goats.

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He states that his followers have the duty to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, offer hospitality to strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and comfort those in prison. The seventh corporal work, burying the dead, is derived from the book of Tobit 1:20, where the eponymous hero is described as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and being careful to give burial to the dead. The corporal works clearly fell within the ambit of the medieval layperson, in contrast with their counterparts, the seven spiritual works of mercy,3 and this understanding informs visual depictions of the concept, for the corporal works were usually shown being carried out by laypeople—often laywomen—for example, in medieval English wall painting. Indeed, the commissioning of this kind of imagery can be identified as a positive encouragement to laypeople to think about the bodies of others as a potential route to salvation that does not require the mediation of a priest. Figure 9.1 shows a detail of ministering to the sick from a mid-sixteenthcentury Flemish oil painting of the corporal works of mercy that is demonstrably based on medieval precedents. The subject focuses on the vulnerability of the suffering body, both through the obvious wounds and sores but also through the simple fact of naked flesh, an aspect that is particularly emphasized by the contrast with the richly clothed almsgiver with his fur collar. In the background the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) is represented: The poor, naked Lazarus suffers humiliation as his sores are licked by a dog, while the rich Dives sits oblivious and uncaring, feasting in the room beyond. There is a clear message that the wealthy need to emulate the almsgiver in this image rather than Dives, since otherwise a similar fate to that man’s eventual suffering in hell will befall them. Another significant aspect of this image is the gender of the object of charity: In common with all documented medieval versions of the corporal works of mercy, the suffering figure is male. This may derive from a convention that the default form of the human body is male, a reading that correlates with an understanding that the emphasis is on the person performing the act rather on the recipient, but another interpretation suggests that the figure is male— and seminaked—because it embodies the suffering Christ. This concept derives directly from Matthew 25:40: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” If images of a suffering male body did indeed have a mnemonic function, reminding viewers of Christ, it seems likely that this role could be extended to real bodies, both male and female; the suffering bodies of the poor could thus provide a constant reminder of the Passion of Christ as well as an opportunity for salvation through good works. Furthermore, the implications of charitable interaction with these bodies meant that they had the potential to offer a form of quasisacramental contact with Christ himself, with each poor, suffering body standing as a type of the Godhead in human form.

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FIGURE 9.1: Corporal Works of Mercy (panel painting, Flemish, mid-sixteenth century), from Wellcome Trust site V0017623.

Evidence from medieval English wills tells us that there were very practical ways of acting on the generalized concern for the body indicated in this kind of imagery. Wills frequently include clauses providing specific sums of money to be distributed in alms—either as coin or as food—to the poor on the day of the testator’s burial. Thus, for example, the inventory and accounts of Andrew Kilkenny, dean of Exeter Cathedral, which were drawn up in the period 1302– 1315, show that £12 15s 11d was spent on bread for distribution to the poor at his funeral.4 This generosity by Kilkenny, or his executors, was undoubtedly aimed at securing salvation for his soul, both through the performance of good works and in relation to the concept of ministering to the suffering Christ through the bodies of the suffering poor. However, there was also an implicit expectation of quid pro quo, in that the recipients of his largesse were expected to pray for the speedy passage of his soul through purgatory. In this sense the bodies of the hungry poor offered a locus for the generosity of their patron while simultaneously providing a means of converting food into prayer—and the prayers of the poor were generally acknowledged to be the most powerful in the sight of God. Body and soul were thus simultaneously distinct and related in medieval Christian spiritual practice.

THE LIMITS OF THE BODY If the dividing line between body and soul was often blurred in medieval thinking, so was the one between the body and the outside world. Bodies were the

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locus of identity or selfhood in the Middle Ages as much as today. Concerns about the limits of selfhood, and the distinction between self and other, were thus often negotiated via the limits of the body, the skin separating self from the outside world. While the body can in most situations be defined as the area enclosed by skin, this is by no means an absolute external boundary. Humans cannot live without taking in food and air and expelling waste, substances that move from “outside” to “inside” and vice versa. Where exactly the body ended spatially, for example, caused considerable concern to medieval theologians, philosophers, and scientists. They debated, among other issues, whether food became body or ceased to be body when emitted and whether cut hair, nails, and spilled blood belonged to the body. The fact that ancient and medieval physiology holistically imagined the body as a microcosm, in direct communication with the planets and the weather, bound inside and outside even more closely together. Today, many anxieties about the external boundary of the body seem to focus on eating, but medieval culture never tired of reenacting the drama of wounding and healing—of Christ, martyrs, knights, warriors, criminals, and innocent women and children—in its art and literature, thereby questioning as well as reconfirming the outer boundary of the body. Much of the secular literature produced at medieval courts, for example, is centrally concerned with attacks on the body. The main genres—love lyric, romance, and heroic epic—all frequently describe physical injuries. The main plot of a romance usually involves a knight fighting in the service of a lady and getting injured in the process as a sign of his bravery. In love lyric, injury is used metaphorically to describe the lady’s power over the knight. Epics as a genre are also to a large extent concerned with men fighting with each other and tend to delight in particularly violent descriptions of injury, with characters regularly said to be “drowning in blood” or “hacking” each other to pieces. But equal attention is usually given to the healing process in which the body is returned to a state of wholeness. Most Arthurian heroes, for example, receive gruesome wounds and meticulous treatment, as a brief survey of the classical Arthurian romances in German, dating from the decades around 1200, immediately demonstrates. Gawain in Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Parzival, for instance, after healing a “pierced” knight by removing a blood clot through a hollow straw, is himself severely wounded by the stones, arrows, and lion unleashed on him in the magical bed of the Marvelous Castle. The skillful treatment of his wounds at the hands of the old queen who turns out to be his grandmother is described at length.5 Gottfried of Straßburg’s Tristan receives a wound with a poisoned sword that only his enemy’s sister can heal, which she does in a long treatment during which Tristan meets and teaches Isolde.6 Hartmann von Aue’s Erec likewise takes weeks to recover from his nearly fatal wounds, with the help of his wife’s special wound dressing developed by Morgan La Faye.7 Hartmann’s Iwein is even cured of psychological

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problems through a magic salve, recovering his identity and name through its application.8 The audience could have read these stories either as demonstrating the vulnerability of the body or as reaffirming its coherence, but the outer limits of bodies were clearly a significant literary topic.

BODY PARTS AND FRAGMENTS If the external boundaries of the body were negotiated in stories about wounds and healing, similarly, the coherence of the body was discussed in tales of internally fragmented and reassembled bodies. Stories about fragmented bodies allow the authors and readers to play out both the dissolution of the body and the loss of control over its individual parts, and its reunification in the safe space of cultural representation. This approach can be found in both religious and secular contexts. To a greater extent than in modern fiction and art, body parts were represented as acting independently of the body as a coherent whole. Relics of saints’ bodies, for instance, were believed to contain the qualities of the entire body. The corpses of saints were often cut up and the parts distributed to or appropriated by various churches and individuals to confer to them the power of the saint. Similarly, each eucharistic wafer was believed to possess the salvific power of Christ’s body. On a more prosaic level, fiction also created body parts acting independently of their owner. Late-medieval short stories known as fabliaux contain an abundance of grotesque mobile body parts. In the early fifteenth-century “The Nuns’ Tournament,” for example, a jilted lady persuades her inconstant lover to cut off his penis, because it allegedly scares the ladies.9 He does so and is miraculously healed with a special cream, but then he is beaten and chased out of town by the women and finally dies after thirty-four years as a hermit. Meanwhile, the penis, having been hidden in a nunnery, is also very unhappy on his own in his cold and drafty hiding place under the stairs and decides to offer himself up to the nuns leaving the morning service. But rather than killing him, as he had hoped, the nuns are delighted to see him, and each wants to keep him for herself. They resort to staging a tournament with the penis as a prize, but this descends into an undignified scramble for the penis. At the end, the penis is stealthily carried away into an uncertain future, while order is restored in the nunnery. The penis is here clearly presented as an integral part of the man’s body: Its artificial separation from the body to which it belongs brings suffering and mayhem to all parties involved. But, at the same time, the male member transcends its status as a body part: It acts as an independent character in the story, with its own agenda, agency, and desirability. In some ways related to but not limited to its biological function, it here appears as a phallus, a conveyor of masculinity that the women can never claim for themselves and men cannot do without.

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Similarly, depictions of saints can show body parts independent of a whole body. Saint Lucy, whose martyrdom involved having her eyes put out, is often depicted holding a dish containing two eyes, while her own eye sockets bear two perfect specimens. In the same way Saint Agatha, whose attribute, or signifier, is a pair of breasts usually held on a platter, again in reference to one of the tortures she endured during her martyrdom, is invariably shown as a restored figure in possession of two breasts in the conventional place as well as two more in her hands. Figure 9.2 is a fifteenth-century Spanish oil painting depicting both Saints Lucy and Agatha with their respective attributes. While Agatha’s rather loose robe and flat-chested appearance, which may well be the result of no more than the artist’s personal style, make it difficult to be certain whether she has breasts on her body as well as on the platter, it is impossible to mistake the fact that Lucy has two sets of eyes: one set on the plate and another in her head. How did people in the Middle Ages explain this apparent inconsistency? One possible solution is that it was believed that God would repair the fragmented bodies of his saints when they were taken to heaven or perhaps even issue them new, perfect versions. However, there was considerable concern expressed about corporeal integrity at the Day of Judgment: Would bodies that had been dismembered, or had limbs amputated during life, be restored to fullness? What of cut hair and fingernails, or indeed of aborted fetuses?10 In fact, it can be argued that the ritual humiliation of those found guilty of high treason through quartering the body after death and sending the parts to the various ends of the kingdom, as was certainly practiced in medieval England on William Wallace in August 1305, for example, is evidence of a belief that God could not be relied on to restore all bodies at the Second Coming and that, by separating the members in this way, the state was ensuring that the bodily integrity of serious transgressors could never be regained. Another explanation of the doubling of body parts in Figure 9.2 is an understanding that for medieval people it was possible to think of body parts having a separate existence, largely discrete from the body as a whole, with their own set of significations, as we have seen in the fabliaux. Figure 9.3 provides another good example of this type of cultural construction: the thirteenth-century “penis tree” wall painting at the public fountain in Massa Marittima, Tuscany.11 It shows a tree covered in phalluses, with a number of eagles flying around it and several women underneath. How are we to interpret these “disembodied” genitals? The most obvious explanations are that this is either some kind of oddly located erotic art or that the image is concerned with fertility: The fact that the penis tree is located above a public source of water, a substance that is essential to life and hence has particular associations with the concept of fertility, would tend to support this assertion. However, it has

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FIGURE 9.2: Saints Lucy and Agatha (panel painting, Spanish, fifteenth

century), from Wellcome Trust site L0004992.

been convincingly argued that these phalluses actually have a subversive political significance that relies on a reading that is the very opposite of fertility and its positive overtones, an opposition that is underlined by the fact that some of the phalluses that have fallen, or been taken, from the tree are being deployed for sodomy and other “unnatural” practices elsewhere in the picture. The key to this understanding is the presence of the eagles, which were the symbol of the Ghibelline faction in medieval Italy, who were broadly in alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor and opposed to the Guelph faction, who were identified with the papacy. The juxtaposition of the Ghibelline symbol with an image of penises growing on a tree—an unnatural occurrence, and hence against the

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FIGURE 9.3: Penis Tree (fresco, Italian, ca. thirteenth century). Credit: Foto Bruno,

Photographer: Sig. Marcello Pepe.

will of God—forms an effective, if rather coarse, criticism of the Ghibellines: It is no surprise to find that Massa Marittima was allied with the Guelph party at the time that the image was created. The mural forms an explicit warning of the dangers that the town’s political rivals could bring if they were ever to seize control. However, the penis in this representation is not entirely divorced from its function as a constituent part of the body. Some of the phalluses are being deployed in sexual ways, for example, in acts of sodomy, but none seems to be used in a way that is entirely unsexualized, such as to stir a cooking pot or to poke a fire. In the penis tree of Massa Marittima, then, as in “The Nuns’ Tournament,” part of the body is shown to have a separate existence from the body itself, although it cannot quite shake off its relationship to the body: A penis is still a sexual organ, even if it is the unnatural fruit of a tree.

VULVAS AND WOUNDS: THE NATURAL AND UNNATURAL FEMALE BODY When we turn to consider female genitalia, the situation is equally complex. There seem to be no exact comparatives to the phalluses growing on the penis tree, but it certainly can be argued that for medieval people the vulva could

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be invested with meanings that were distinct from its form and function in the real human body. In particular, it was associated with a wound in several medieval contexts.12 Any cut or tear in the body could be instinctively linked to the vulva; this association was profoundly important in a range of understandings of the significance of external female genitalia and the passage into and out of the body that is connoted. First, the wound in Christ’s side was often compared to a vulva. Some medieval mystics felt they could enter into Christ’s body through the wound in his side and take refuge like a child in the womb of a mother. The exegetical tradition since Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430) had also seen Christ’s wound as vulvalike in that it gave birth to the church. This interpretation, declared official dogma at the Council of Vienne in 1311–1312, interpreted the gospel verse on the piercing of Christ’s side so that blood and water flowed to mean that the church was born out of Christ’s side as Eve had been born from Adam’s side.13 The side wound of Christ is also shown and invoked in textual amulets worn in childbirth.14 Medieval artistic conventions about depictions of the vulva also made the connection to a wound. While images of male human genitalia outside medical contexts are by no means unknown (as the Massa Marittima wall painting shows), they outnumber depictions of their female equivalents. This may indicate that female genitals were understood to be qualitatively different from, and perhaps more dangerous to depict than, male genitals. This reading is certainly suggested by the images that we do find. For instance, the best-known medieval depiction of the vulva is a subject known as the Sheela-na-Gig (see Figure 9.4), which is found in various locations in Europe (though largely confined to Ireland and England) and usually dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The classic form is a sculpted naked woman who crouches down to display a massively oversized orifice, often holding it open with her hands. While this subject does appear in some secular locations, such as on the stable wall at Haddon Hall (Derbyshire), it usually occurs as part of the architectural decoration of churches, most famously on the tower of the twelfth-century church at Kilpeck (Herefordshire). There are a number of explanations of the meaning of this image, such as that it is a relic of preChristian goddess worship, a symbol of fertility, or a warning against lust, but one particularly interesting theory relies not on any sexual or subversive qualities but is based on an understanding of the female genitals as apotropaic. There is widespread evidence of belief in the innate power of the exposed vulva to quell storms, frighten evil spirits, and deter both carnivorous beasts and human warriors, and it was commonly claimed that if a woman met a demon, her best defense was to lift her skirts.15 By extension, a sculpted image of a woman displaying her genitals may well have had the same role of protecting a building from the devil.

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FIGURE 9.4: Sheela-na-Gig. Image released by John Harding of sheelanagig.org. Credit:

John Harding and www.sheelanagig.org.

Aside from the Sheela-na-Gig form, it is quite difficult to find visual depictions of human female genitalia, but their shape (and also their function) is the subject of several literary treatments. Once again, fabliaux provide some useful examples. In the story “Barat,” credited to Jean Bodel, two peasant women discuss the female pudendum, and one describes it as “like an axe slice abutting a round hole.” The title of another tale, “Le con qui fu fez a la

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bresche” [The cunt that was dug with a shovel], carries the same implication of a wound, in this case specifically a ditch that the devil cuts under instruction from God to complete the creation of woman. In a third example, “Berengier au long cul” [The knight with the long ass], a noble wife disguised as a knight makes her husband kiss her ass to humiliate him. He comments that it is the longest ass he has ever seen. In these literary treatments it is apparent that the cultural representation of the shape of the vulva insists on an elongated, cutlike form that plays on the link between vulva and wound but also arguably reflects the shape of the external labia rather than corresponding with the orifice itself, which is routinely represented in many cultures as a shape formed by concentric ovals or, more obliquely through apparent reference to the pubic area, as a downward-pointing triangle.16 This elongation also occurs in images of the genitals of demons, dragons, and other monsters, and in this context the emphasis on the pudenda—literally, the shameful parts—seems to correlate the display of genitalia with baseness, a concept that is apparently played on within the scatologically comic fabliaux. Figure 9.5 shows a version of the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Martin Schongauer, dated to roughly 1480 –1490. Two of the grotesque creatures assailing the saint have visible genital orifices, and both have an enlarged aspect. The figure on the upper right side is easier to interpret, as only one orifice can be seen. This is a slit that runs laterally across the creature’s tail, significantly indicated by the pointing index finger of the left hand of the saint. The figure on the lower right is more complex; is the prominent orifice above the base of the tail, presented as both wide and long, to be read as an anus or a vulva? What of the fleshy area immediately between the legs? This could be either an indication of vertically aligned outer labia, or it could be read as a pair of testicles. We cannot be sure what Schongauer’s intentions were, but it is arguable that in both cases—and almost certainly in the upper figure—the artist has labeled the creatures as base and sexual by endowing them with prominent genitals that correspond to literary and visual rather than biological models of their size and shape. The figure on the lower right is also endowed with prominent breasts and nipples; this apparent gendering of the creature is probably part of an attempt to define it as an overtly sexual creature rather than simply as female. The strong connection between female sexuality and sinfulness is evident in medieval visual culture, and this is often formulated through the presentation of a specific voluptuous body type with a pronounced, rounded belly and breasts. Figure 9.6 is a late fifteenth-century image of the classical hero Hercules dreaming about the two paths of vice and virtue. Each concept is personified as a woman: The virtually naked, overtly sexualized woman on the left is strongly contrasted with the modestly dressed matron on the right, not only in the nature of their clothing but also in the body shape that is revealed or hidden. The rounded belly and breasts of the figure of vice also appear in a range of depic-

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FIGURE 9.5: Martin Schongauer, Temptation of Saint Anthony (engraving, late fifteenth

century), from Wellcome Trust site L0013706.

tions of other “bad” women and female monsters.17 Schongauer’s treatment of the monsters is arguably influenced by this formulation, but he goes further with his monsters—perhaps because there is greater license to show genitalia in relation to animal or monstrous bodies rather than human bodies. Returning to the presentation of human bodies in art in the light of these artistic conventions, it is possible to detect oblique references to female genitalia within images that are ostensibly concerned with other parts of the body.

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FIGURE 9.6: Dream of Hercules from Jodocus Badius, The Ship of Fools (woodcut, fifteenth century), from Wellcome Trust site L0011155.

The example of reading the wound in Christ’s side as a form of vulva has already been noted; another location for the “movable vulva” can be detected in Figures 1.2 (see chapter 1) and 9.7, which show two late-medieval images of Cesarean section. The first, from a central European Apocalypse of around 1420 –1430,18 shows a “conventional” Cesarean birth, where the operation

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has been performed after the death of the mother in labor to save the life of the baby. The second, in contrast, is an image of the birth of the Antichrist from a late fifteenth-century edition of a late seventh-century text by a Syrian writer known as the Pseudo-Methodius. The author gives an account of how the Antichrist will be conceived and born: The Antichrist is described in the book of Revelation as a necessary precursor to the Second Coming of Christ, and a number of medieval tracts comment on how, when, and where he will appear. In this illustration the mother seems to be alive, although she is conventionally presented as dead, but in other respects this treatment is typical of images of the birth of the Antichrist.19 For our purposes, the crucial factor here is the incision shown in the belly of the mother. In both Figures 1.2 and 9.7, it appears as a long wound, which allows it to be read as a perverted and displaced vulva. The fact that the wound runs longitudinally rather than laterally may seem to contradict this reading, but in many visual examples of monsters with a vulva, such as the gendered dragons sometimes fought by Saint George,20 the orifice runs along the length of the lower body or upper tail, rather than laterally as Schongauer depicts it. Crucially, the vulva is never visible in medieval images of conventional vaginal childbirth, other than in a few medical texts: Many depictions claim to show the birth of an individual—most obviously, the nativity of Christ himself, although the births of saints are also commonly depicted—but the subject matter is always the time soon after the birth, when the mother is resting and the baby is being bathed or nursed. So the presence of the vulva-signifying wound underlines the oddity of the presentation, and hence it seems that what is being signified is that Cesarean birth is by its very nature an unnatural event. The fact that the Antichrist is predicted to be born in this way is, of course, a concomitant of the unnaturalness of this form of birth. The prophecies are established to make this creature the opposite of the true Christ; thus the events of the life of Christ are inverted in the life of his antithesis. Even though we are never shown the genitals of the Virgin Mary, we know that Christ was born through them, and, crucially, the birth was effected without any physical perforation of the sealed vessel of her body.21 Thus the polar opposite must be true of the birth of the Antichrist: Not only is he not born through the actual vagina of his mother, but a false orifice is brutally created by the demonic midwife, perforating the body in an obvious way. The incisions shown in Figures 1.2 and 9.7 both seem to play on the idea of the vulva as a wound as well as an orifice. Their placement may reflect contemporary medical techniques: We know that Cesarean section was beginning to be practiced in western Europe from the thirteenth century, to allow the baptism of a baby when the mother had died in labor.22 The only medieval visual evidence we have seems to relate to the births of Julius Caesar, the classical hero Asclepius, and the Antichrist: There seems to be no surviving

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FIGURE 9.7: Birth of Antichrist from Pseudo-Methodius (woodcut, 1498), from Well-

come Trust site M0011650.

representation of the procedure as an aspect of the midwife’s or surgeon’s craft, so it is impossible to know exactly how it was carried out. However, it is clear that the longitudinal alignment allows the incision to “point” in the direction of the actual vulva. The placement of the sheet in Figure 9.7, so reminiscent of the drapery across the figure of vice in Figure 9.6, cannot

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help but draw our mind’s eye to what lies beneath. We have, in effect, a false vulva that reflects and points to a real vulva, one that is hidden from view in accordance with medieval conventions about the display of the female body. When we recall the contemporaneous trope of the “wandering womb”23—the motif of the uterus’s ability to move freely around the body—the idea that the vulva could move, or be moved, does not seem so extreme.

PENETRATED BODIES, MARTYRDOM, AND GENDER The concept of the vulva as a wound can also be observed in accounts and images of martyrdom where a penetrative attack is indicated. If female gender is often defined as being more penetrable than the male, then the situation is interestingly complicated by the images of penetrated male martyrs. Figure 9.8 shows a late-medieval version of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, a popular saint who was particularly associated with protection from the plague, apparently because of the similarity between plague spots and arrow wounds. Interestingly, the saint is not understood to have been killed by this torture: His legend indicates that he was actually beaten to death, but this episode never seems to be shown in imagery associated with him. Rather, he is always presented in a state of near-nudity, being shot with arrows, and often, as here, with clothed torturers close by him, loading and firing their crossbows. In common with the standard form of both written accounts and visual imagery of martyrdom dating from the medieval period, Saint Sebastian does not react to the pain being inflicted on him and hence forms a model of forbearance for the medieval Christian. There are several readings that can be mapped onto this image, none of which is necessarily exclusive of the others. Initially, we should note the nearnudity of the saint. In part, this is again due to a desire to present Sebastian’s suffering as a clear reflection of the Passion—the concept of the imitatio Christi was an important aspect of medieval Christian thought that called on all believers to model themselves on Christ. However, the display of the body, whether the body of Christ himself, a saint, or any other human, is potentially freighted with meaning beyond this simple concept of reflection and imitation. Specifically, the saint’s state of undress is emphasized by the contrast with the clothed bodies around him: This is a consistent motif in medieval martyrdom imagery, echoing written accounts where the saint is stripped before the torture commences. The stripping reveals the body, making the flesh vulnerable to the gaze of the onlooker as well as to the weapons of the torturers. These weapons take various forms: In medieval martyrdom stories there are accounts of beating, flaying, boiling, raking, burning, and many other imaginative attacks, but a consistent idea is that the margins of the body are perforated. Sometimes the penetrative aspect of the assault is underlined: Saint Sebastian’s arrows are

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FIGURE 9.8: Saint Sebastian (woodcut, German, fifteenth century), from Wellcome Trust

site L0016638.

an obvious example, and they can be equated with knives that stab, nails that pierce, and, above all, the spear that wounds Christ’s side, the vulval aspect of which has already been noted. It has sometimes been argued that the penetrative aspect of the torture of saints necessarily feminizes the martyr, but a more persuasive reading claims that the paradigm is multierotic rather than specifically heteroerotic, meaning

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that there is an active penetrator, arguably coded with an aggressive masculine role, and a submissive subject whose gender role can be either masculine or feminine but is essentially passive.24 Saint Sebastian has often been discussed in a homoerotic context, but this quality of passivity and penetrability is by no means confined to him: It is clearly shared with a number of other martyr saints, both male and female, and crucially with the crucified Christ. All of these figures can be read as eroticized, a process that is evidenced in medieval texts as well as in contemporary thought, but it is equally possible to see these acts of bodily penetration as a means of coding the perpetrators in a negative sexual way, with little or no reference to the gender role of the object of the attack. According to this reading the meaning of the motif is actually a commentary on the torturer, using sexualized imagery to define him—and it is always male figures who act as torturers in medieval saints’ legends—in a role clearly labeled negatively. In this sense the presentation of the torturer is similar to the presentation of vice in Figure 9.6: Sexual codes are used to define the figure even though the context is not explicitly concerned with sexuality. Although sexual coding can be discerned within the presentation of male martyrs, it is far more explicit within the narratives, both literary and visual, of female martyrs. Tropes of the forced display and mutilation of the female body are inevitable features of this tradition. Furthermore, these particular female bodies are invariably young, beautiful, and virginal. While male virginity was a subject of concern for some medieval writers, far more emphasis was placed on women’s sexual state, and this is reflected in saints’ legends. There are a number of reasons for the discrepancy, particularly the belief that women are preternaturally more inclined to sin (especially sexual sin—hence the coding of vice as a sinful female figure in Figure 9.6); the contention that female virginity is more easily tested, and the loss of it more apparent, most obviously through pregnancy; the belief that female bodies are inherently more penetrable and hence more likely to be subject to the loss of virginity by force; and also an understanding that female bodies can and should imitate the sexual state of the Virgin Mary. Hence it can be argued that although sexuality was an area of concern for medieval people in general, this concern attached itself disproportionately to women’s bodies because they were culturally positioned as more susceptible and at the same time were offered an unequivocal model of appropriate behavior. So what should we make of the treatment of Saint Sebastian and other male martyrs in medieval texts and images, a presentation that seems to be more in accordance with understandings of female than male bodies? One important point is that medieval understandings of gender seem to have been much more complex than the simple binary form we might assume (male and female, discrete and distinctive). There is good evidence that medieval gender roles were complicated by issues of dress, behavior, age, and social status,

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so that a nexus of possible roles was created for both men and women to adopt or have mapped onto them. The suffering of the martyr’s body presented such an opportunity for mapping: A passive role was allotted to the saint, just as an active, aggressive role was allotted to the torturer. This could be read as a simple binary division of feminized (saint) and masculinized (torturer), but a more persuasive interpretation claims that the saint is actually depicted in an act of transcendence over earthly gender roles, just as he transcends the pain inflicted on him. Given that Sebastian is acting in imitatio Christi, he also highlights the transcendence of both gender roles and the flesh that was achieved by Christ. Not only is Christ understood to have lived an ascetic and celibate life, but he also overcame the pain of the Passion. This involved a number of penetrative acts, including scourging, the crown of the thorns, the nails of crucifixion, and the spear piercing his side, and in consequence it can be argued that he transcended his human flesh and its sexuality and gender codes through his suffering and death. Through the examples of Sebastian and other martyrs, and their ultimate model Christ, we can see clear evidence of a positive coding of assaults on the body, especially penetrative attacks, because they provide an opportunity for demonstration of transcendence.

BODY AS METAPHOR So far, we have discussed some of the most pertinent features of medieval bodies as represented in art and writing: their intricate relation to the soul; the concern with the outer boundaries of the body; the worry over the fragmentation of the body into parts; the dominance of artistic conventions over lifelikeness; the utility of the body and its elements in the expression of religious and moral values. As a final step, it may be worth reminding ourselves that representations of bodies in art and literature were not necessarily concerned with real human bodies. Bodies could also be used as metaphors or signifiers standing for a variety of other concepts and entities. For example, human bodies are often employed to describe “social bodies” in the sense of social groupings. In theology and popular devotion, the church and Christendom were commonly referred to as the “body of Christ.” In political theory, the state could also appear as a metaphorical body with many members, most famously in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159), where the prince is envisaged as the head, the senate as the heart, and the peasants as the feet of the “body politic.”25 Medicine in the ancient Greek tradition saw the cosmos as mirrored by the body and vice versa. Families were also represented as bodies, for example, in the German law code Mirror of the Saxons (ca. 1220 –1235), where the family is described as a body with the man and wife at the head, the children as the shoulders, the grandchildren as the elbows, and so on until the seventh genera-

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tion reaches the fingertips.26 In the images accompanying and clarifying the text in a lavish manuscript, the family appears as a naked body with a man’s and a woman’s head, like a hermaphrodite, and red spots to mark the joints that allow one to count down degrees of kinship. That such bodily metaphors for social groups were credited with a high degree of likeness is clear, for instance, when a social body was believed to be united by the same blood, just like an individual body. “Blood relations” were seen to literally carry the same blood, and all Christians to have inherited and partaken in Christ’s blood (especially when described as having been born from Christ’s side, as discussed earlier). If the body could be used as a metaphor for social groups, the distinction between actual bodies and textual representation could be blurred further when bodies were used as metaphors for texts themselves. Christ’s body was the word made flesh and was depicted as such, for instance, in the illustrated and commented Bibles of the Bible moralisée tradition. Christ’s presentation to the world as a child in a manger is interpreted as an allegory for how his theology is exposed to the world, and this is illustrated by showing the Christ child lying in a book in preference to lying in the manger itself.27 Christ’s body here stands in for the “word of God.” The Charter of Christ, a primarily English motif, similarly shows and describes the crucified Christ’s body as a piece of writing, a contract with the believers, with his skin as parchment, his blood as ink, and his wound as the seal.28 Not only Christ’s body is used as a metaphor for texts: Die Heilige Regel, a mid-thirteenth-century Cistercian manual, presents itself as Mary’s body, divided into chapters corresponding to her body parts.29 Again in the Bible moralisée, the Old Testament story of the raped and murdered woman whose distraught lover cuts her corpse into twelve parts and sends them to the twelve tribes of Israel (to show them that she has been murdered and must be avenged) is interpreted as an allegory of the twelve patristic books being distributed among the twelve apostles, with pictures visually juxtaposing the dismantled body and the multiple books.30 Underlying is again the idea that just as each part of the body contains the whole message of murder and incitement to revenge, each book contains the whole truth of Christian belief. The connection between body and text is even less extricable when actual bodies were inscribed with text. Christian devotional texts often report that believers “wrote” sacred words like the name of Christ into their heart. That this metaphor can again be taken literally is apparent in the case of the martyr Saint Ignatius, whose heart, according to the fifteenth-century Alphabet of Tales, was cut open after his death to find that it was indeed inscribed with Christ’s name in golden letters.31 The mystic Heinrich Seuse takes the merging of body and text one step further when he writes in his Exemplar (ca. 1362/1363) that he wrote the name of Christ, IHS, into his heart. When on the manuscript page designed by him “IHS” is drawn in big red letters, it is

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unclear whether the heart is a metaphor for the book here, or the book stands in for the heart. The parchment of the manuscript page becomes in any case very closely aligned with his heart. Where there is such a degree of commonality between body and text, the concept of the “real” physical body becomes almost indistinguishable from its cultural representation. While the examples cited here are extreme, they underline the extent to which bodies and their cultural representation coincide. Indeed, we hope to have shown that attempts to discover clear distinctions between body and soul, body and world, body and image, body and text, seem doomed to failure: They are essentially artificial distinctions that sit uncomfortably on these closely related phenomena.

CHAPTER TEN

Self and Society sylvia huot

In a sermon for Ash Wednesday, the twelfth-century theologian and poet Alan of Lille explicates the three “books” in which human nature can be read. These are, he states, the book of knowledge, the book of experience, and the book of the conscience: Liber scientie scriptus aureis litteris; liber experientie scriptus plumbeis notis; liber conscientie scriptus tetris litteris. Liber scientie est sacra Scriptura, in qua homo suam naturam legit. Liber experientie corpus humanum in quo suam miseriam intelligit. Liber conscientie mens cauteriata in qua homo suam culpam agnoscit.1 [The book of knowledge is written in gold letters; the book of experience is written in leadpoint annotations; the book of the conscience is written in black letters. The book of knowledge is sacred Scripture, in which man reads his nature. The book of experience is the human body, in which he knows his misery. The book of the conscience is the chastened mind, in which man recognizes his guilt.] In Alan’s schema, then, the human being can be conceived as a metaphorical codex in which different texts are deployed and interlinked: a “master text” explicating the human condition, a record of individual sins, and a surrounding marginal or interlinear commentary of original sin and its squalid consequences. The body, as a gloss on the ethical tally of the conscience, explicates the soul’s propensity for sinful behavior by revealing not so much the individual experiences of a unique self but the wretchedness that is common to all of humanity:

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Adhuc considera, homo, quid in tuo corpore legas: ibi legis quod fuisti sperma fluidum, quod es vas stercorum, quod eris esca vermium; ibi legis quid fuisti nascendo, quid es vivendo, quid eris moriendo . . . cui natiuitas proponit culpam, vita assumit penam, mors concludit miseriam.2 [Consider then, man, what you read in your body: There you read that you were once flowing sperm, that you are a vessel of filth, that you will be the food of worms; there you read what you were at birth, what you are in life, what you will be in death . . . you whose birth betrays a sinful act, for which your life is the penance: a misery ending only in death.] It is solely the book of the conscience, written by the individual him- or herself, that reflects personal behavior and is subject to modification: Recole ibi quicquid ab ineunte etate scripsisti . . . Sed iam hoc dele per confessionen quod scripsisti per falsam loqutionem, dele per contritionem quod scripsisti per malam cogitationem; dele per satisfactionem quod scripsisti per prauam operationem.3 [Contemplate there, from the beginning, all that you have written. . . . But now delete, through confession, what you wrote through false speech; delete, through contrition, what you wrote through wicked thoughts; delete, through satisfaction, what you wrote through sinful deeds.] In Alan’s theological model, the body is the sign of that which is common to all of humanity, while the individual self is constituted spiritually through the introspective work of the conscience. Upon closer scrutiny, however, this opposition of soul and body is not as absolute as it might appear. By implicitly identifying the body as a gloss on the soul—or as carrying the information necessary to the ethical reading of the conscience—Alan presents the spiritual and the corporeal as complementary parts of an integrated whole. Moreover, the spiritual book of the conscience records not only thoughts but also bodily deeds, and its faulty text must be amended through both feelings of contrition and bodily acts of penance. The body is indispensable to any sense of self, both as a private entity and as a member of society. When we turn to secular literary texts, the status of the body is equally complex, and its role in the construction of identity is a question much explored. Is identity essential to the body, the corporeal manifestation of a self whose parameters are already fixed at birth? Or is the self—and indeed the body—a product of social conditioning? On the whole, medieval texts tend toward an “essentialist” concept of identity, determined by such categories as class, gender, and lineage, which are themselves seen as natural and absolute.

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Nonetheless, there is room for considerable ambiguity and ambivalence in literary treatments of identity. In Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose (ca. 1230), for example, the ruffian Dangier, whose job is to protect the Rose from her would-be suitor, is scolded for not living up to the traits that a member of his social class is expected to have: Vilains qui est cortois enrage, ce oï dire en reprovier, ne l’en ne puet fere esprevier en nule guise de buisart.4 [A peasant with courtly airs is just crazy, so I’ve heard it said, nor could one ever make a sparrow-hawk from a buzzard.] In Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Rose (ca. 1270), the Old Woman similarly notes that “Trop est fort chose que Nature, / el passe neïs nourreture” (14007–8) [Nature is a very powerful thing, surpassing even Nurture]. When the personification of Nature herself appears in the text, she seems at first— surprisingly—to contradict this idea of inherent personal quality. Noting that “Par moi nessent samblable e nu, / fort et foible, gros et menu” (18567–68) [through me all are born equal and naked: the strong and the weak, the great and the small], she insists that nobility is entirely a matter of personal behavior: “Nus n’est gentis / s’il n’est a vertuz antantis, / ne n’est vilains fors por ses vices” (18585–87) [no one is noble if he is not attentive to virtue, nor is anyone low-class other than through his faults]. Yet in the end Nature’s reflections support an absolutist view of social class, for she concludes by endorsing the notion that members of the aristocracy can naturally be expected to achieve a higher degree of virtue than those of the lower classes: D’autre part, il est plus granz hontes d’un filz de roi, s’il estoit nices et plains d’outrages et de vices, que s’il iert filz d’un charretier, d’un porchier ou d’un çavetier. (18856–60) [Anyhow, it is a greater shame for a king’s son to be foolish and full of vice and excess, than if he was the son of a carter, a swineherd, or a cobbler.] Nature also backs away from her earlier assertion that all are equal at birth, admitting that this equality has disappeared by the time of death: “La mort d’un prince est plus notable / que n’est la mort d’un païsant” (18868–69) [the death of a prince is more noteworthy than the death of a peasant]. If no single and uniform concept of personal identity emerges from a survey of medieval literary texts, however, it is possible to discern a range of

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perspectives on these issues. This essay examines the individual as both a private and a social entity, and the role of the body as a factor in individual identity, in a collection of medieval French texts from different genres: courtly romance, epic, and religious drama. In particular, I focus first on the question of gendered identity in the thirteenth-century Romance of Silence, the thirteenthcentury Song of Ide and Olive from the epic Huon de Bordeaux cycle, and the late fourteenth-century miracle play A King’s Daughter; and then on the even more fundamental question of humanity itself—as opposed to beast or fairy—in the twelfth-century Lai of Bisclavret and the late fourteenth-century romance Melusine. All of these texts are also concerned with a related question, that of privacy and the boundaries of the self, which must be negotiated in any social encounter but becomes particularly problematic in the intimacy of the marriage bed. The romance Silence was written in the second half of the thirteenth century by an otherwise-unknown author who calls himself Heldris of Cornwall.5 It tells the story of a girl born at a time when a royal decree forbade women from inheriting property. To protect their inheritance, the girl’s parents decide to raise her as a boy, naming her “Silence”: in Latin, “Silentius,” to be changed to the feminine “Silentia” if the secret ever gets out. Silence excels in the physical training that she is given, and no one suspects that she is a girl. At one point her own discomfort with the situation causes her to run away from home and live for a time as a minstrel, but eventually she returns to her chivalric training and is sent to the royal court. When the queen attempts to seduce her, Silence recoils in horror, citing her allegiance and kinship with the king. The humiliated queen retaliates by accusing Silence of attempted rape, and for a time Silence is sent abroad. Having returned to assist the king in a war, Silence is again accosted, and again accused, by the queen. This time, the king decides to rid himself of the troublesome knight by sending “him” on the mission of finding Merlin, something he knows only a woman can accomplish. Silence, of course, returns to court with the magician in tow, where Merlin proceeds to reveal not only that Silence is a woman but also that a nun in the queen’s entourage is a man and her lover. A mass removal of clothing confirms Merlin’s claims. At this, the king has the queen executed and marries Silence, who lives thereafter as a woman. Despite her female body, Silence is able to develop skills in hunting, jousting, and warfare. Once she commits herself fully to these pastimes, from about the age of twelve, she receives plenty of social recognition and acclaim for her athleticism, her military prowess, and her courtly manners. But this upbringing is unnatural for someone with a female body, as is stressed by the allegorical debates between Nature and Nurture that recur throughout Silence’s story. Nature complains that the toughening of Silence’s body is destroying her handiwork and that the lovely complexion she crafted is being ruined:

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Del blanc i mis a grant mervelle Qu’ele ne fust pas trop vermelle. Vermel i mis de grant valor Li blans n’i trasist en paor. Et or en ont fait un oir malle Ki ira al vent et al halle. (2285–90) [I put in a good amount of white, so that she wouldn’t be too red, and put in a large quantity of red, so that she wouldn’t be too pale. And now they have made a male heir of her, who will go out in the wind and scorching sun.] Nurture retorts that social conditioning is more powerful than anything Nature might be able to do: Jo l’ai tolte desnaturee. N’avra ja voir o vus duree. . . . Jo te desferai tolt ton conte. (2595–96, 2604) [I have completely de-natured her. She will always resist you. . . . I will undo all your work.] Nature tells Silence that it would be better to abandon boyish games and take up sewing; Nurture challenges this decision and brings in Reason, who reminds Silence that if she does so, it will be the end of her chivalric training. These debates are a way of portraying the conflict that Silence feels within herself. Though she feels that men have a better life and a higher social status and does not want to give this up for the inferior position of a woman, she is also tormented by the thought that her female body is ill-suited to the masculine life. This sense of betraying the body, and her fear that its female nature will be found out, is also expressed more directly in Silence’s own musings. Reflecting at one point on her timidity in joining rough physical games—for which she is teased by the other boys—she admits within herself: Se me desful par aventure Dont ai paor de ma nature. (2571–72) [Whenever I happen to get undressed, I am afraid my sex will be discovered.] Her upbringing means that she lacks feminine skills, and her body is partially masculinized; yet she is still female. The conflict between biological sex and social gender means that she lacks any clear sense of self. On the one hand, she clings to her male name as the only identity she has ever had: Donques sui jo Scilentius, Cho m’est avis, u jo sui nus. (2537–38) [Therefore, I am Silentius, as I see it, or I am no one.]

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But on the other hand, she feels keenly that this male identity is in conflict with the reality of her body: Silences forment s’enasprist, Car ses corages li aprist Ke se fesist par couverture. (2497–99) [Silence was deeply disturbed about this, for her conscience told her that she was practicing deception by doing this.] Unable either to reveal or to forget her female nature, Silence can never see herself as society sees her. The romance ultimately demonstrates that the female essence at Silence’s core—the feminine nature that is the very fabric of her body—can be masked but not eradicated by any amount of training or experience.6 And the older she gets, the more difficulty she has with social expectations of masculinity. The crisis erupts with the queen’s attempted seduction and subsequent rage. In her fury at being rebuffed, the queen concludes that Silence is homosexual: As vallés fait moult bele chiere Et a lor compagnie chiere. Herites est, gel sai de fi. (3945–47) [He likes young men a lot and really enjoys their company. He’s a fag, I’d swear to it.] Although it would clearly be inappropriate for Silence to have an affair with the queen even if she were male, her sexual coldness and the suspicions this arouses in the queen are a reminder of the difficulties she faces. As a dashing and heroic young knight, Silence will inevitably attract the attention of ladies, and she might well be rewarded for her services with the offer of a bride, just as her father was. But, of course, she will never be able to participate in love, marriage, or procreation as long as she retains her male disguise. As Nature reminds Silence during one of her tormented internal debates: .m. femes a en ceste vie Ki de toi ont moult grant envie Por la bialté qu’eles i voient, Car puet scel estre eles i croient Tel cose qu’en toi nen a mie. (2514–18) [And there are a thousand women in this world who are madly in love with you because of the beauty they see in you—you don’t suppose they think something’s there that was never part of your equipment at all?]

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Though her body can be masculinized to a certain extent, sexuality marks an absolute limit beyond which Silence’s body, and thus Silence herself, is inescapably female. Lacking a body that corresponds to the full range of societal expectations for a man, yet unable to assume a female identity in public, Silence is doomed to conflict both within herself and with the world at large. The dangerous trajectory hinted at in the tale of Silence—a girl married to another girl—is realized in the thirteenth-century Song of Ide and Olive and the late fourteenth-century miracle play based on that story, A King’s Daughter (De la fille d’un roy), where the heroine is called Isabelle instead of Ide.7 In Song of Ide and Olive, Ide, the only child of a widowed king, flees when her father decides that he wants to remarry and that only she is worthy of being his bride. She disguises herself as a young squire and enters the service of the emperor, where she rises in the ranks to become not only a valiant knight but also a trusted courtier. The emperor’s daughter Olive falls in love with the handsome young knight, and after Ide wins an important victory, she is rewarded with Olive’s hand in marriage. Unable to decline without incurring the wrath of the emperor, Ide accepts and, when it is time to consummate the marriage, explains her situation to Olive. Olive declares that she loves Ide and will protect her secret, but spies soon inform the emperor, who demands that Ide strip naked and join him in a bath. Upon confirming that she is indeed a woman, he is about to have Ide killed when an angel appears and Ide’s body is miraculously transformed into that of a man. The dramatic version of the story, A King’s Daughter, is similar up to this point; but here, instead of proclaiming the miraculous bodily change, the angel merely prevents the emperor from harming Isabelle. The marriage having been proved invalid, Isabelle marries the emperor himself. The emperor’s daughter is married to Isabelle’s father, who conveniently turns up at just that moment, full of remorse for his earlier folly. As in the story of Silence, the entry into active sexuality—feudal marriage or heterosexual flirtation and love—brings the cross-dressed heroine to the point of crisis. The body, with its anatomical specificity, can no longer be excluded from identity formation. Ide’s many accomplishments—military, political, feudal, amorous—indicate her successful assumption and internalization of masculinity. She enters into the marriage with considerable trepidation but decides against a second flight, preferring to accept the lucrative marriage that she feels is her rightful due. Moreover, having agreed to Olive’s request to delay the consummation of the marriage until after the guests have departed, when they will have greater privacy, Ide spends two weeks with her bride before the fateful revelation is finally made. During this time the couple pass their nights together in physical intimacy: “Dont ont l’un l’autre baisie et accollée” (7152) [Then they hugged and kissed each other]. Olive, who has been in love with Ide for some time, is as blissfully happy as any new bride. When asked by her

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father how she finds her husband, Olive replies, “Sire . . . ensi com moi agree” (7161) [Sire . . . very much to my liking]. With her marriage Ide has reached a point of no return, and the angelic messenger heralds divine approval of Ide’s chosen path. But the bodily change is crucial, for it reminds us that social gender and biological sex cannot be separated. On the one hand, the sex change is a radical act, requiring divine intervention. Neither Nature nor Nurture, neither the active and desiring self nor the influence of society, can turn a woman into a man: Only God can do that. But it is a conservative resolution to Ide’s identity crisis, affirming that knighthood, political advancement, and, most of all, marriage to a woman are possible only for one who is both masculine in behavior and male in body. The dramatic adaptation, in turn, is even more conservative in its message. Isabelle, it transpires, was successful on the battlefield only because she was already the recipient of miraculous support. Throughout the play, we see God taking a special interest in Isabelle’s plight. Two angels, first Gabriel and then Michael, are sent to assist her. In her marriage-bed confession to the princess, Isabelle attributes her military prowess entirely to divine intervention: Et Dieu m’a si bien soustenu Et donné de sa grace tant Qu’en lieu n’ay esté combatant Dont je n’aye eu la victoire. (2600–2603) [And God has sustained me so well, and bestowed such grace on me, that I have had no combat in which I was not victorious.] Unlike Silence and Ide, Isabelle still considers herself feminine in both mind and body. She makes no effort to prolong the marriage, confessing the situation on the marriage night itself and asking only that her bride allow her enough time to escape before reporting the unfortunate news. She offers the evidence of her body itself as proof of her femininity, telling the princess: Or savez conment il m’est, dame, Puis que je sui conme vous femme Et que j’ai mamelles: tastez. (2605–7) [Now you know how it is with me, lady, since like you I am a woman, and I have breasts: here, feel.] Isabelle’s male identity was purely a disguise to protect her until her father came to his senses, and although God is willing to enhance the disguise, he does not go so far as to alter the body itself. When there is not a fit between body and behavior—when the gendered body has to be a secret hidden from society—then the subject is tormented.

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While Isabelle is more straightforwardly a woman in temporary disguise, the cross-dressed heroines Silence and Ide are, in a sense, neither man nor woman. But for the medieval authors, there is nothing liberating about this dislocation of sex and gender. Although it does open up a space of subjectivity and introspection, the “self” that we see here is one forged in anxiety and conflicted desires, tormented by the mismatch between body and social role. Moreover, this self is not one that can participate successfully in the social network of personal relations. Though certain kinds of institutionalized relations are possible, emotional intimacy may require a sharing of the bodily secret, with dangerous consequences. And sexual intimacy is out of the question in a society that does not recognize female homoerotic love or desire. Silence, Ide, and Isabelle attract the amorous or sexual interests of women, yet the female body that has attracted that attention can be coupled only with that of a man—and not the sort of man who fancies other knights, either, since he, too, will desire a male body. At the same time, men who desire female bodies will be put off by the warrior’s decidedly unfeminine features. As Silence muses: Trop dure boche ai por baisier, Et trop rois bras por acoler. On me poroit tost afoler Al giu c’on fait desos gordine, Car vallés sui et nient mescine. (2646–50) [But I have a mouth too hard for kisses, and arms too rough for embraces. One could easily make a fool of me in any game played under the covers, for I’m a young man, not a girl.] Silence’s concern about her unfeminine body is resolved at the end when, before the wedding can take place, Nature spends three days restoring Silence’s body to its proper feminine appearance: Si prist Nature a repolir Par tolt le cors et a tolir Tolt quanque ot sor le cors de malle. (6671–73) [(Nature) spent the next three days refinishing Silence’s entire body, removing every trace of anything that being a man had left there.] There can be no place in the social network, no possibility of an unconflicted sense of self, until the issue of gender has been resolved. The message of these stories is clear: The body and the social role must be brought into accord. Does the body, then, define the limits and boundaries of the self? In the preceding examples, the onset of sexual activity finally reveals the truth of the body and in so doing either confirms or negates the socially defined persona.

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The sexual encounter, within or outside of marriage, allows for no anatomical secrets. But what about other kinds of secrets: the private desire, fear, or guilt; the hopes and memories that constitute the self as a psychic entity? Medieval writers often address issues of privacy, self-image, and self-definition in bodily terms and frequently, as in the example of Ide, through the motif of metamorphosis. Through such themes as the relationship between emotional and bodily intimacy, and the role of the body in reflecting inner character, medieval authors explore the status of the embodied self as part of a social network. One of the topics through which such issues are explored is the nature of the conjugal relationship itself. According to the Bible, husband and wife are one flesh. This doctrine is articulated with regard to the first marriage, that of Adam and Eve, in Genesis 2:24, and reaffirmed in the Gospel of Matthew 19:5–6: Non legistis, quia qui fecit hominem ab initio, masculum et feminam fecit eos? Et dixit: Propter hoc dimittet homo patrem, et matrem, et adhaerebit uxori suae, eterunt duo in carne una. Itaque iam non sunt duo, sed una caro. [Have you not read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female and declared, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become as one”? Thus they are no longer two but one flesh.] The bodily union of marriage is summed up in Adam’s words at his first encounter with Eve: “os ex ossibus meis, et caro de carne mea” (Gen. 2:23) [bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh]. Medieval writers were quick to point out that this bodily union implies a union of heart and mind as well. Silence’s father invokes this principle when he invites his wife to join him in the desperate plan to conceal their daughter’s sex: Biele, quant nostre cars est une, Soit nostre volenté commune. Le sanc avons nos als commun, Or aiens le voloir commun. (1721–24) [Since, my sweet, our flesh is one, let our will be one as well. Since our blood is one, let us be of one mind.] Silence’s father offers this argument in a spirit of loving companionship and mutual support, but the same idea is also placed in the mouths of wives in antifeminist texts that aim to show the dangers of excessive conjugal intimacy. In Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Romance of the Rose, for example, the allegorical personification Genius describes a conniving wife who uses precisely this argument to persuade her husband that he should have no secrets from

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her and that he should share all of his worries with her. At their marriage, she says, Jesus Christ nous fist deus estre en un char; et quant nous n’avons char fors une par le droit de la loi conmune, n’il ne peut estre en une char estre fors uns seus queurs a la senestre, tuit un sunt donques li queur nostre. (16408–13) [caused us two to be of one flesh; and when we have but one flesh by the communal law, then in one body there can be but a single heart on the left side, and thus our hearts are wholly one.] Having posited the necessary equivalence of corporeal and psychic union, the wife drives the point home with her sexual blandishments, breaking down her husband’s resistance until he confides in her. Genius’s point, however, is that such confidence is ill-placed, for it gives a wife power over her husband. Stressing the need to maintain an impermeable boundary even within a relationship of physical intimacy, Genius counters the wife’s biblical citation with one of his own (cf. Micah 7:5): “De cele qui te dort ou sain, / garde les portes de ta bouche” (16664–65) [from her who lies at your breast, bar the gateway of your mouth].8 The advice offered to men in this passage, in other words, posits a distinction between bodily union and emotional bonding. Similarly, the misogynist trope of the deceptive, treacherous woman rests on the understanding that bodily intimacy with such women must not be mistaken for emotional intimacy. Genius makes clear, in fact, that the very sexual union that forms the basis of the wife’s argument is itself one that does not dissolve her own barrier between outer show and inner self: Lors li debaille piz et chief, et le rebese de rechief, et pleure seure lui lermes maintes antre les beseries faintes. (16507–10) [Then she bares head and breast, and kisses him over and over, and weeps many tears over him, amid the feigned kisses.] Although cast almost entirely in negative terms, these texts do suggest a concept of the self that is at least partially separate from the body. Once again, however, we find an overall ambivalence, for other texts portray the distinctness and integrity of the self precisely in terms of bodily difference. This idea can be seen in texts where the body is magical or doubled;

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here, the monstrous body acts as a metaphor for the secrets of the self, for a subjectivity that is threatened in the intimate encounter and conjoining of marriage. Examples of such stories are the twelfth-century Lai of Bisclavret by Marie de France and the late-medieval romance Melusine by Jean d’Arras. In both cases—Bisclavret is a werewolf and Melusine a fairy whose body becomes partially serpentine every Saturday—a doubled, metamorphic body is the sign of a self that is divided between two natures. Bisclavret, we are told, is a well-respected knight whose only fault is that he disappears for three days out of every week.9 When his wife asks him to tell her where he goes, Bisclavret at first resists. But he then admits the truth: He is a werewolf and spends those days running wild in the forest. Horrified, his wife plots to steal his clothes during one such episode; without them, he is trapped in wolf form forever. Eventually, however, Bisclavret encounters the king out hunting in the forest and, despite his wolfish body, makes a show of fealty and obedience that causes the king to take him back to court as a pet. When the wolf later attacks his former wife, biting off her nose, suspicions are aroused and she is tortured into revealing the truth. Bisclavret’s clothes are restored, and he recovers his human form, while his wife and her new husband are exiled. Melusine, for her part, is the daughter of a mortal man—a king of Scotland— and the fairy Presine.10 As a condition of marriage, Presine extracts the promise that her husband will never enter the room of childbirth until she has completed her period of confinement. When he unthinkingly breaks that promise, she flees his presence, and Melusine and her sisters are raised in Avalon. Knowing that their father committed some kind of crime against their mother, they use their magical powers to imprison him under a mountain. Their mother responds by telling them that they would have outgrown their fairy condition to become mortal women, but due to their rebellion against their human parent, they are now cursed. Melusine’s punishment is that every Saturday, she will be a serpent from the waist down. If she can marry a man who will never seek to see her on Saturday, or ask her where she goes, she can still achieve mortality and die a natural death. But if her husband discovers and reveals her secret, she will be trapped as a mutating serpent-woman until the Last Judgment. Melusine marries and has ten sons, most of whom have some physical disfigurement such as huge ears, long tusks, or a third eye. One becomes a monk; one is so evil that he has to be killed at the age of seven; the rest are fierce warriors. Despite their odd appearances, the sons win great fame and marry well; Melusine herself is loved and respected by her people. But eventually her husband, Raymond, does discover and reveal the secret, consigning her to fairyhood until the end of time. Neither Raymond nor the anonymous wife of Bisclavret is wrong to suspect that something about their partner is not quite right. During his wolfish spells, by his own admission, Bisclavret’s behavior is wild and savage:

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En cele grant forest me met, Al plus espés de la gaudine, S’i vif de preie e de ravine. (64–66) [I plunge into the great forest, in the densest undergrowth, and I live by catching prey.] It is presumably not just the changes in bodily appearance that his wife fears but the implications of violence and bestiality that go along with that change. Melusine, in turn, really is a fairy. And her weekly metamorphosis is a sign of the sin that she committed against her father and, in a sense, against humanity itself. Raymond is not really mistaken when he concludes (p. 253) that his wife is “aucune esperite” [some kind of spirit] and that “c’est toute fantosme ou illusion qui m’a ainsi abusé” [she’s nothing but a phantom or illusion that has deceived me]. And, indeed, she has been something of a channel by which society has been disrupted: not only in the sometimes excessively ferocious behavior of her sons but also in the predations of the giant that her mother placed as a guard at the mountain where Melusine and her sisters imprisoned their father. At the same time, both Bisclavret and Melusine were successful at masking their magical side from the community in which they lived. Of Bisclavret, we are told: Beaus chevaliers e bons esteit E noblement se cunteneit. De sun seinur esteir privez E de tuz ses veisins amez. (17–20) [He was a handsome and worthy knight and he conducted himself nobly. He had his lord’s trust, and was on good terms with all his neighbors.] And when Melusine is unmasked and announces tearfully that she must now leave her human life forever, her people are distraught, crying: Nous perdons aujour d’uy la plus vaillant dame qui oncques gouvernast terre, et la plus saige, la plus humble, la plus charitable, la mieulx amee et la plus privee a la neccessité de ses gens, qui oncques feust veue. (257) [Today we’re losing the most valiant lady that ever governed any land, and the most prudent, the most humble, the most charitable, the best loved and the most sensitive to the needs of her people, that was ever seen.] Both stories show that the dark secrets harbored within the self may be kept in check by the presence of societal norms to which a person carefully conforms. The idiosyncratic foibles and transgressions that characterize the individual can be hidden beneath the veneer of social posturing. Like the Rose, Bisclavret

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and Melusine imply that the “carnal knowledge” afforded to the conjugal mate threatens the boundaries of the self. In the bodily intimacy of the marriage bed, the particularity of the self is both harder to protect and more shocking when it appears, challenging the ideal of “one flesh” and “one heart.” The final outcome of Bisclavret and Melusine is different. In Bisclavret, social perceptions and acceptance of a performance are enough to override the horror of the doubled body. Unlike the wife, the court is content to let the secrets of the body remain hidden beneath its clothing. As with Ide, social interlocutors can choose to engage only with the persona that is projected and staged. In these stories, the implication is that a wolf—or a girl—in man’s clothing is, in fact, a man as long as the role is played to perfection. The metamorphosis is, of course, necessary, for the body can never be irrelevant to identity. But the possibility of metamorphosis, however magical or miraculous, hints that the body itself may not be the essential and absolute determinant of the self but that it may be shaped by a self that is socially determined. In these stories, gender, class, and species are written onto the body rather than being produced by it. In Melusine, however, social influences are not enough to override the husband’s horror at his wife’s doubled body; nor is Silence able to maintain her masculine identity when her body is laid bare in the gaze of the king, her future husband. A further implication of these stories is that a woman’s identity is most truly revealed through the gaze of her husband, with its combination of social mastery and sexual desire, while a man’s identity is a product of his feudal and chivalric associations. Bisclavret is not ultimately doomed by his wife’s betrayal, because the king and his courtiers choose to believe in the wolf-man’s loyalty and his fundamental rationality. Melusine’s sons have marks of bodily difference that are almost as remarkable as her serpentine tail. These signs are publicly displayed and seen by all. They cause marvel and surprise but never any lack of respect. What matters is that these men are fierce warriors, brilliant military strategists, and capable rulers. The princess who later marries Melusine’s eldest son, Uriien, after considering both his odd appearance—different-colored eyes and huge ears—and his chivalric prowess, concludes that “bontez vault mieulx que beautez” (104) [worthiness is more important than beauty]. In this she is simply acquiescing to public opinion. Yet Raymond, in the end, is unable to live by this dictum himself. Melusine’s bodily difference torments him, and once he has publicly denounced her, there is no going back. A man, it would seem, negotiates his position in society himself, with or without the support of his wife; a woman cannot do so without the support, or collusion, of her husband. These texts all explore subjectivity and selfhood through the space between the body and the societal expectations and standards to which it is subject. The body may fail to measure up to standards of beauty; its biologi-

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cal sex may conflict with the gendered identity adopted by the individual in question; it may harbor disturbing signs or symptoms of private transgression or alterity. Though the texts examined here are very different in their treatment of the body, they all agree with Alan of Lille in seeing the body as a kind of gloss on a morally constructed self. The corruption of the human body—its capacity for lust, greed, sloth, illness, death—is a manifestation of original sin. As a result of this defining act of disobedience, enacted by our original parents but passed along at conception to each new generation, humans face a constant struggle to impose rational behavior on their bodies and to conform to moral law. As Augustine puts it, in the state of prelapsarian innocence, the body did not yet “give proof of man’s disobedience by a disobedience of its own.” With the Fall, however, there ensued an “insubordination of the flesh, the punishment which was a kind of evidence of their disobedience.”11 Similarly, Melusine’s “insubordinate” and hybrid body is a sign of her own defining sin—of daughter against father and of fairy against humanity—and of the difficulties she faces in conforming to human society. Somewhat like original sin, her bodily “corruption” is linked to her own father’s original transgression against his wife and is passed along to her sons. The equally hybrid, semimasculinized bodies of Ide and Silence are also visible signs of both individual and paternal transgression. And, like Melusine, Bisclavret’s mutating body expresses the weakness of the flesh, its capacity for irrational resistance. In a sense, these metamorphic and hybrid bodies are disturbing because of their paradoxical honesty, their quality of being at once incomprehensible and yet all too meaningful. Wolves that are also knights, knights that are really ladies, ladies that turn into flying serpents—or into actual, male knights—do not, it might be argued, exist in “real life.” The social disruption that occurs in stories where people are confronted with beings like this, as well as the frisson experienced by the reader, might simply be attributed to the shock of the alien, the supernatural. Yet to stop at this would be to misinterpret the powerful impact of such tales. These exotic and scandalous bodies reveal the inner conflicts of the self. Resistance to socially defined norms of class or gender, crises of identity, secret guilt, the stress of leading a double life outside the public eye: What modern society might define as psychological trauma is coded in these tales as a trauma of bodily instability. Moral and theological writings portray the soul as trapped in a weak and corrupted body during its life on earth. This confluence of mortal body and immortal soul defines humanity in its fallen state. Angels, too, are immortal spirits, while the mortality of the body is common to all animals; humans alone have both. The span of bodily life is understood as a testing period that determines the fate of the soul—the true identity of the self, one might say—in the eternity of spiritual life after death. The texts we have looked at here,

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though operating from a secular and social perspective, are informed by this overarching moral framework. The masculine training to which Silence’s body is subjected, for example, produces a corruption of its feminine nature that, in turn, impinges on the persona inhabiting that body, causing an anguished crisis of identity. The unspecified process of “refeminization” to which Silence is subjected at the end of the romance—the eradication from her body of all that is masculine—might be seen as analogous to the acts of penance whereby the soul is cleansed through the mortification of the flesh. Bisclavret is also at the mercy of his body, and after his wife’s betrayal, he lives at court as a human persona literally trapped in the body of a wolf. Melusine is trapped in an immortal serpentine body from which she longs to escape in order to gain entrance to a spiritual afterlife. In both cases the only hope for escape from the bestial body lies in a perfect conformance to behavioral norms expected of courtiers and ladies respectively—a period of trial that is explicitly identified as penitential in Melusine. Through these processes of trial, penance, and social conditioning, the body is shaped and constrained: from without, by the social forces that act on it and the costumes and disguises it is forced to assume, but also from within, by the persona that animates it. Different texts may imagine different outcomes to this process: The magical or bestial signs of transgression may or may not be successfully expunged; the adoption of a masculine persona may or may not be sufficient to re-form a female or animal body into a biologically male, and human, entity. The production of a human body, like the formation of a human self, entails a rigorous process of conformance to a wide range of socially determined norms of class, gender, and morality. And the human being that results, a composite of body and soul or persona, will be characterized by a process of give and take between these two aspects of the self, each one acting upon the other in an ongoing process of formation and re-formation.

notes

Introduction 1. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn 1995): 1–33; reprinted in After the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 2. Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence on the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past and Present 149 (November 1995): 3–32. 3. Michael R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus’ Library 15 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006). 4. Fernando Salmón, “Pain and Medieval Medicine,” Pain: Science, Medicine, History, Culture, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/pain/microsite/history2.html (accessed April 3, 2009). 5. Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Robert P. Hudson, “ ‘A drynke þat men callen dwale to make a man to slepe whyle men kerven hem’: A Surgical Anesthetic from Late Medieval England,” in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 34–56. 6. See, for example, A. L. Grauer, “Where Were the Women?” in Human Biologists in the Archives, ed. A. Herring and A. Swedlund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 266–87. 7. The best studies of these wide-ranging processes of medicalization in high medieval society are Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Joseph Ziegler, “Practitioners and Saints: Medical Men in Canonization Processes in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries,” Social History of Medicine 12 (1999): 191–225. 8. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). 9. Charles Singer, “The Figures of the Bristol Guy de Chauliac MS (circa 1430),” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Sect Hist Med) 10 (1917): 71–90; and Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 6 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996).

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10. On the “deluxe” qualities of many of these illustrated books, see the essays by Cathleen Hoeniger and Jean Givens in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). Peter Murray Jones, Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts, rev. ed. (London: British Library by arrangement with Centro Tibaldi, 1998), is the best general survey of medieval medical illustration, though it gives no indication how many thousands of medieval medical manuscripts had no illustrations at all. Of nearly 200 copies of the Trotula texts (a compendium on women’s medicine), for example, only three have any illustrations beyond a simple “portrait” of the alleged authoress. 11. Likewise, none of the many copies of various anatomies of the pig—which was studied because of its alleged similarity to human visceral anatomy—had any illustrations. 12. Quoted in Loren C. Mackinney, “The Beginnings of Western Scientific Anatomy: New Evidence and a Revision in Interpretation of Mondeville’s Role,” Medical History 6, no. 3 (July 1962): 233–39. 13. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Anatomical Illustration in Arabic Manuscripts,” in Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, ed. Anna Contadini (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 147–59 and figs. 1–6. 14. Catherine Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society; Essays in Honour of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 172–88. 15. Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Baraz, “Violence or Cruelty? An Intercultural Perspective,” in A Great Effusion of Blood? Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark Meyerson, Oren Falk, and Daniel Thierry (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2004), 164–89. 16. Edmond Albe and Jean Rocacher, eds., Les Miracles de Notre Dame de Rocamadour au XIIe siècle (Toulouse, France: Le Peregrinateur, 1996), 220–23, quoted in Carole Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth and Religion in Later Medieval England,” in Women and Religion in Medieval England, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Oxbow, 2003), 91–117. 17. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (1972; Penguin Books, 1984, 2003), bk. 8, chap. 16, p. 322. 18. “St. Michael the Archangel,” in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (1941; repr., New York: Arno, 1969), 585. 19. On “the body politic” as a potent political metaphor, see Takashi Shogimen, “ ‘Head or Heart?’ Revisited: Physiology and Political Thought in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 2 (2007): 208–29. On Avignon, see Joëlle Rollo-Koster, “The Politics of Body Parts: Contested Topographies in Late Medieval Avignon,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 78, no. 1 (January 2003): 66–98.

Chapter 1 1. Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, ed. H. Boese (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 1.78–84. See Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Inter-

NOTES

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

221

pretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. chap. 6. In Sears’s figure 1, which represents a slightly different schema, the seven ages are represented by seven male figures arranged across the top of the woodcut, while death is portrayed as a supplementary, “eighth” stage. Patrick Geary, “The Uses of Archaeological Sources for Religious and Cultural History,” in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 36. See, in general, Marianne Elsakkers, “The Early Medieval Latin and Vernacular Vocabulary of Abortion and Embryology,” in Science Translated: Proceedings of the Leuven Congress 2004, ed. Michele Goyens, Pieter De Leemans, and An Smets (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008), 377–413, and the literature cited therein, including John Thomas Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists, enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 9–139. L. E. Goodman, “The Foetus as Natural Miracle: The Maimonidean View,” in The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. G. R. Dunstan (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 79–94; cf. Noonan, Contraception, 143–287. Despite this difference regarding legal personhood, medieval Jewish thought concerning fetal development shared many ideas with its Christian counterpart; see Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 41. Constantinus Africanus, De humana natura, ed. and trans. C.S.F. Burnett, in Burnett, “The Planets and the Development of the Embryo,” in Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. G. R. Dunstan (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 95–96 and 101 (translation slightly revised). For early Christian views, see Elsakkers, “Vocabulary.” See Claude Thomasset, “Quelques principes de l’embryologie médiévale de Salerne à la fin du XIIIe siècle,” in L’Enfant au Moyen Age (Littérature et Civilisation), ed. CUERMA, Sénéfiance 9 (Aix-en-Provence, France: Publications du CUERMA, 1980), 107–21. Marianne Elsakkers, “Inflicting Serious Bodily Harm: The Visigothic Antiquae on Violence and Abortion,” Legal History Review 71 (2003): 55–63; and Sara M. Butler, “Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England,” Journal of Women’s History 17 (2005): 9–31. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 122. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Braziller, 1978), 173. A more extensive discussion of Béatrice’s testimony appears in Ruth Mazo Karras and Jacqueline Murray, “The Sexual Body,” chapter 3 in this volume. Quoted in Sylvie Laurent, Naître au Moyen Age: De la conception à la naissance: la grossesse et l’accouchement, XIIe–XVe siècle (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1989), 156. Quoted in Roger Vaultier, Le folklore pendant la guerre de Cent Ans d’après les lettres de rémissions du Trésor des Chartes (Paris: Librairie Guénégaud, 1965), 227. Antoine Bernard, La sépulture en droit canonique du décret de Gratien au Concile de Trente (Paris: Editions Domat-Montchrestien/F. Loviton, 1933), 116–17 and 134–35.

222

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13. Alexandrine Garnotel and Véronique Fabre, “La place de l’enfant médiéval dans l’espace des morts: apport des fouilles du Lunellois,” in L’enfant, son corps, son histoire: Actes des Septièmes Journées Anthropologiques de Valbonne, 1–3 juin 1994, ed. Luc Buchet (Sophia Antipolis, France: Actes du XVe Colloque international d’archéologie et d’histoire d’Antibes, 1997), 9–24. See also the essays by Cécile Niel, Arnelle Alduc-Le Bagousse, and Isabelle Séguy in the same volume. 14. See Donald Mowbray, “A Community of Sufferers and the Authority of Masters: The Development of the Idea of Limbo by Masters of Theology at the University of Paris (c. 1230–1300),” in Authority and Community in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian P. Wei, Donald Mowbray, and Rhiannon Purdie (Sutton, UK: Stroud, 1999), 43–68. 15. Pierre André Sigal, “La grossesse, l’accouchement et l’attitude envers l’enfant mort-né à la fin du moyen age d’après les récits de miracles,” in Santé, médecine et assistance au moyen age, ed. Le Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1987), 23–41; and Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), chap. 2. 16. On the practice of Cesarean section, see below. 17. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 126. 18. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 501 (this passage does not appear in the translation cited in note 9). 19. Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 57–61. 20. See ibid., chap. 1, esp. pp. 48–49; Laurent, Naître au Moyen Age, 186–90; Carole Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion in Later Medieval England,” in Women and Religion in Medieval England, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Oxbow, 2003), 91–117; Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 1, 2, and 5; and Gabriela Signori, “Defensivgemeinschaften: Kreißende, Hebammen und ‘Mitweiber’ im Spiegel spätmittelalterlicher Geburtswunder,” Das Mittelalter 1 (1996): 113–34. 21. Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 49. 22. On the polluting nature of sex in medieval Christian culture, see Karras and Murray, “The Sexual Body,” in this volume. 23. Theodore Kwasman, “Die mittelalterlichen jüdischen Grabsteine in Rothenburg o. d. T.,” in Zur Geschichte der mittelalterlichen jüdischen Gemeinde in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, ed. Hilde Merz (Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany: Verein Alt-Rothenburg, 1993), 154. For a revisionist approach to medieval midwifery, which stresses the absence of evidence for midwives as an occupational group before the later Middle Ages, see Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 134–38, and the literature cited therein. 24. Kathryn Taglia, “Delivering a Christian Identity: Midwives in Northern French Synodal Legislation, c. 1200–1500,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York, UK: York Medieval Press; Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2001), 83–84 (quotation on p. 84). 25. Musacchio, Art and Ritual of Childbirth, esp. the introduction and chap. 2. 26. See Daniel Schäfer, Geburt aus dem Tod: Der Kaiserschnitt an Verstorbenen in der abendländischen Kultur (Hürtgenwald, Germany: Guido Pressler, 1999), chap. 3,

NOTES

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

223

which relies mostly on prescriptive literature; and (for several late-medieval Italian cases) Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 64–65 and 134–35. For a more extensive analysis of this image, see chapter 9 of this volume. Quoted in Laurent, Naître au Moyen Age, 160, 162. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, 135n49; Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion,” 96; and Ernest Coyecque, L’Hotel-Dieu de Paris au moyen âge: Histoire et documents, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1889–1891), 1:64–73. Purification rituals seem to have been confined largely to northern Europe—a reminder of the geographic variability of childbirth practices. See Paula M. Rieder, On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Becky R. Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth,” Gender and History 14 (2002): 224–41. Paula M. Rieder, “The Implications of Exclusion: The Regulation of Churching in Medieval Northern France,” Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1998): 78. Geary, Living with the Dead, 2–3. On good and bad deaths, see Philippe Ariès’s classic study, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), pt. 1; and Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum Press, 1966), 33–50. On the elaboration of deathbed ritual in the early Middle Ages, see Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Genesis of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe, 500–900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). For an excellent overview of funerary practices, see Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997). For the cult of relics in this formative period, see Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), esp. chap. 1. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum . . . , ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne, Bonn, and Brussels: J. M. Heberle/H. Lempertz, 1851), 11.1, vol. 2, pp. 266–67. Ibid., 11.22, vol. 2, p. 290. Ibid., 11.23, vol. 2, p. 290. Ibid., 11.65, vol. 2, p. 314. Ibid., 11.35, vol. 2, p. 297. Ibid., 11.39, vol. 2, p. 301. See, for instance, Vaultier, Folklore, 43–44; and Sharon Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Regino of Prüm, Reginonis abbatis Prumiensis libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis, ed. F.G.A. Wasserschleben (Leipzig: G. Engelmann, 1840), 1.363, p. 180. See, in general, Nikolaus Kyll, Tod, Grab, Begräbnisplatz, Totenfeier: Zur Geschichte ihres Brauchtums im Trierer Lande und in Luxemburg unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Visitationshandbuches des Regino von Prüm (d. 915) (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1972), esp. 30–43. Not all churches had associated cemeteries; see Julia Barrow, “Urban Cemetery Location in the High Middle Ages,” and Vanessa Harding, “Burial Choice and Burial Location in Late Medieval London,” both in Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992), 78–100 and 119–35.

224

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45. David Lepine and Nicholas Orme, eds., Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter (Exeter, UK: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 2003), 21–22. 46. Ibid., 37–38; Binski, Medieval Death, 72–114. 47. The literature on late-medieval tombs and tomb sculpture is enormous; one classic study is Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1964), chap. 3. 48. See Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 49. See note 18. 50. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronica fiorentina, ed. Niccolò Rodolico (Città di Castello, Italy: S. Lapi, 1903), 230–31. 51. On Jewish cemeteries, see Barrow, “Urban Cemetery Location,” 94 (with useful references). On suicides, who were often treated with leniency, see Daniell, Death and Burial, 104–5. 52. Caesarius, Dialogus, 11.43 and 11.50, vol. 2, pp. 302 and 306. 53. See, in general, Binski, Medieval Death, 30–46. The classic study is Mary Catharine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). 54. Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 198–99. For similar developments in Italy, see Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), chap. 4. 55. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, chap. 5; and Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacles of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 145–55. 56. Thomas of Cantimpré, De natura rerum, 1.84, p. 82. See Peter H. Niebyl, “Old Age, Fever, and the Lamp Metaphor,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26 (1971): 351–68. 57. See Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 354–61; and Caroline Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), esp. 265–67. 58. Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” Past and Present 152 (1996): 3–45; and Caciola, “Spirits Seeking Bodies: Death, Possession, and Communal Memory in the Middle Ages,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66–86. Although Jean-Claude Schmitt’s Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), does not distinguish clearly between wandering spirits and wandering corpses, it contains much relevant material. 59. William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; repr., Wiesbaden, Germany: Kraus, 1964), bk. 5, chap. 24, vol. 2, pp. 479–82 (quotations on pp. 480, 481, and 482). 60. Ibid., 480. See also Anke Bernau, “Bodies and the Supernatural: Humans, Demons, and Angels,” in this volume.

NOTES

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61. Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual,” 33–34. On contrasting Italian and Iberian beliefs and practices, see Katharine Park, “The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 111–32; and Laura Vivanco, Death in Fifteenth Century Castile: Ideologies of the Elites (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2004), 74. 62. Quoted in Kyll, Tod, Grab, Begräbnisplatz, Totenfeier, 121nn594–95. These beliefs may also have contributed to popular doubts as to whether women who died with their unbaptized fetuses still inside their wombs could be buried in consecrated soil; see Ludwig Schmugge, “Im Kindbett gestorben: Ein kanonistisches Problem im Alltag des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Grundlagen des Rechts: Festschrift für Peter Landau zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Richard H. Helmholz, Paul Mikat, Jörg Müller, and Michael Stolleis (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000), 467–76. 63. See Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual,” 27–32. 64. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), chap. 1; Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 29–30; and Paxton, Christianizing Death, 25–27. 65. Bynum, “Material Continuity”; and Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), esp. chaps. 5 and 8 (quotation on p. 327). On the representation of fragmented bodies and body fragments in medieval visual culture, see Samantha Riches and Bettina Bildhauer, “Cultural Representations of the Body,” in this volume, chap. 9. 66. Daniell, Death and Burial, 124. 67. See Chiara Frugoni, “The Cities and the ‘New’ Saints,” in City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 71–91; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chap. 5; and Patrice Georges, “Mourir c’est pourrir un peu . . . : Techniques contre la corruption des cadavres à la fin du Moyen Age,” Micrologus 7 (1999): 372–79. 68. See Park, Secrets of Women, 52–54. 69. On the early history of dissection in Italy, see ibid., chaps. 1–2; and Michael R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus’ Library 15 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006), 71–72 and 238–40. 70. Park, “Life of the Corpse.” 71. 1 Corinthians 15:50 (King James Version). 72. See Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, which contains many additional images of this scene.

Chapter 2 1. Robert Ian Moore, The First European Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 39–44; and Rodolfus Glaber, Rodolfi Glabri Historiarum Libri Quinque, ed. and trans. John France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 21. 2. Kirk Ambrose, “A Medieval Food List from the Monastery of Cluny,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 6, no. 1 (2006): 14–20; and Antoni Riera-Melis, “Society, Food and Feudalism,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Massimo Montanari, Jean-Louis Flandrin, and Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 251–67.

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3. Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10–15 and 35–58; and Stephen Mendell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 56–57. 4. D. Serjeantsen and C. M. Woolgar, “Fish Consumption,” in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantsen, and T. Waldron (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 102–4. 5. Anton Ervynck, “Following the Rule? Fish and Meat Consumption in Monastic Communities in Flanders (Belgium),” in Environment and Subsistence in Medieval Europe: Papers of the “Medieval Europe Brugge 1997” Conference, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe (Zellik, Belgium: Doornveld, 1997), 67–81. 6. James H. Barrett, Alison M. Locker, and Callum M. Roberts, “Dark Age Economics Revisited: The English Fish Bone Evidence AD 600–1600,” Antiquity 78 (2004): 618–36; and David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, eds., England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham, 2000), 10–11. 7. Richard Hoffmann, “Medieval Fishing,” in Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-Use, ed. Paolo Squatriti (Boston: Brill, 2000), 331–93; and Hoffmann, “Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 646–48. 8. Hoffmann, “Medieval Fishing,” 334–36, esp. 373–76; and Paul Benoit and Joséphine Rouillard, “Medieval Hydraulics in France,” in Squatriti, Working with Water, 161–215. 9. James A. Galloway, Derek Keene, and Margaret Murphy, “Fuelling the City: Production and Distribution of Firewood and Fuel in London’s Region, 1290–1400,” Economic History Review 49, no. 3 (1996): 448–49. And see John Hatcher, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1, Before 1700: Towards the Age of Coal (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 16–30. 10. Ronald Findlay and Mats Lundahl, “Demographic Shocks and the Factor Proportions Model: From the Plague of Justinian to the Black Death,” in Eli Heckscher, International Trade, and Economic History, ed. Ronald Findlay, Rolf G.H. Henriksson, Hakan Lindgren, and Mats Lundahl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 185–91. 11. P. R. Schofield, “Medieval Diet and Demography,” in Woolgar, Serjeantsen, and Waldron, Food in Medieval England, 239–53. On economic change see John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12. Kathy Pearson, “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet,” Speculum 72, no. 1 (1997): 1–32. See also Ann Hagen, Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink: Production, Processing, Distribution and Consumption (Norfolk, UK: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2006), 442–43, which also supplements impressive historical research with archaeological evidence gleaned before 1985. But even for the early centuries English and Scandinavian populations grew briskly. Anglo-Saxon England alone, for example, trebled in numbers between the seventh century and the Norman invasion. 13. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 30–41. 14. Massimo Montanari, “Production Structures and Food Systems in the Early Middle Ages,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Massimo

NOTES

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

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Montanari, Jean-Louis Flandrin, and Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 168–77. See also Montanari, The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 38–67. On the forest products that were regularly part of early-medieval diets, see Roland Bechmann, Trees and Man, trans. Katharyn Dunham (New York: Paragon, 1990), 15–44, with a nice discussion of both remedies and poisons known to forest users in the Middle Ages. Richard H. Steckel, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era,” Social Science History 28, no. 2 (2004): 211–29. Tony Waldron, “The Effects of Nutrition on the Skeleton,” in Woolgar, Serjeantsen, and Waldron, Food in Medieval England, 254–66, disagrees with Steckel’s claim; he sees no significant fluctuation in aggregate adult heights of English skeletal populations, 950–1700 c.e. Here see Jesper L. Boldsen, “Body Proportions in a Medieval Village Population: Effects of Early Childhood Episodes of Ill Health,” Annals of Human Biology 25, no. 4 (1998): 309–17, who ridicules such myths. Boldsen focuses on nutritional evidence from skeletons, correlating adult skeletal heights with episodes of dental hypoplasia in childhood. The advantage of his study of a medieval Danish village is this correlation of 619 skeletons over a 200-year period but only beginning in the twelfth century. Steckel’s studies, in contrast, aggregate massive numbers of observations and compare medieval European evidence to same-era North American skeletal assemblages. Both approaches have value, though alas not great harmony. See the classical study here: Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Robert Fossier, “Rural Economy and Country Life,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3:53–63; and Henri Dubois, “L’Essor médiévale: premier monde plein,” in Histoire de la population française, vol. 1, Des origines à la Renaissance, by Jacques Dupâquier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 207–66. On the general trend see Stephan R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1705 (London: Routledge, 2000). Mendell, All Manners of Food, 40–61, who emphasizes that social class was more important within European diets than regional differences throughout the period from 1000 to 1500; and Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). McCormick, Origins, 708–16; Bruno Laurioux, Une Histoire culinaire du Moyen Âge (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 157–96; and Paul Freedman, “Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1209–27. Mendell, All Manners of Food, 53–58, argues that a more subtle use of spices to vary the taste of different dishes distinguished later medieval cuisine, reinventing status distinctions connected to culinary spices. Glaber, Historiarum, 191. Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 153 and 318. And see Pearson, “Early-Medieval Diet,” 25, for the description of the 860s famines in Saxon annals. Montanari, Culture of Food, 2–3 and 48–49. By the eleventh century, privileged observers did not consider eating grasses, “like beasts,” rational behavior. See also Hagen, Anglo-Saxon Food, 441–42, for English famine foods of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

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23. Montanari, Culture of Food, 40. Hagen, Anglo-Saxon Food, 438–41, identifies forty significant famine years in Anglo-Saxon England over the same interval, half of which occurred in the eleventh century. 24. See Hans-Werner Goetz, “Protection of the Church, Defense of the Law and Reform: On the Purposes and Character of the Peace of God, 989–1038,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. 264–70. 25. H.E.J. Cowdrey, “The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century,” Past and Present 46 (1970): 42–67, who discusses the epidemic at Limoges (pp. 49–52), linking Saint Martial to the cult healing this disease. Landes, Relics, 29–30, links the outbreak of an epidemic of “holy fire” to panic and terror that was readily contained by raising the body of Saint Martial from his tomb and tends to see the entire event as part of a “chiliastic scenario,” thus ignis sacer, or an apocalyptic plague of fire. But the Limoges epidemic of 994 was indisputably linked to the novel peace conferences. See also Goetz, “Protection of the Church,” 268. 26. Dante Colella, “Le epidemie di ergotismo nell’XI secolo,” Pagine di Storia della Medicina 13, no. 1 (1969): 68–77; and C. N. Nemes, “The Medical and Surgical Treatment of the Pilgrims of the Jacobean Roads in Medieval Times. Part 1. The Caminos and the Role of St. Anthony’s Order in Curing Ergotism,” International Congress Series 1242 (2002): 31–42. 27. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, retrospective diagnoses centered instead on leprosy and syphilis. See Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 20–22. 28. The fungus is globally distributed and will grow on many kinds of grains and grasses; cleaning the grain helps to remove the visible “sclerotia” or ergot bodies, which contain many pharmacologically active alkaloids. Frank James Bové, The Story of Ergot (Basel: Karger, 1970). 29. See here Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece; Laurinda S. Dixon, “Bosch’s St. Anthony Triptych—An Apothecary’s Apotheosis,” Art Journal 44, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 119–31; and C. N. Nemes and M. Goerig, “The Medical and Surgical Management of the Pilgrims of the Jacobean Roads in Medieval Times. Part 2: Traces of Ergotism and Pictures of Human Suffering in the Medieval Fine Arts,” International Congress Series 1242 (2002): 487–97. 30. Cowdrey, “Peace and Truce of God,” 54. Relics of Saint Anthony were translated from Byzantium to the Dauphiné in the 1070s, and he quickly became associated with ignis sacer. 31. M. L. Cameron, “The Visions of Saints Anthony and Guthlac,” in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 152–58. Saint Guthlac, an eighth-century English ascetic, supposedly experienced visions after subsistence on ergotized barley bread. 32. Hagen, Anglo-Saxon Food, 435–36. 33. Michael McCormick, “Bateaux de vie, bateaux de mort: maladie, commerce, transports annonaires et le passage économique du bas-Empire au Moyen Âge,” in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo, 2 vols., Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medoevo 45

NOTES

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

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(1998): 1:35–122; and Mirko Grmek, Diseases in the Ancient Greek World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 2–4. Frank Barlow, “The King’s Evil,” English Historical Review 95 (1980): 3–27. Amy G. Remensnyder, “Pollution, Purity and Power: An Aspect of Social Reform between the Late Tenth Century and 1076,” in Head and Landes, Peace of God, 297–98. Jesper L. Boldsen, “Epidemiological Approach to the Paleopathological Diagnosis of Leprosy,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 115 (2001): 380–87. Robert Ian Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987). Carole Rawcliffe, “Learning to Love the Leper: Aspects of Institutional Charity in Anglo-Norman England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 23 (2000): 231–50. See also the lucid discussion of shifts in medieval Christian thinking about disease from the early to the High Middle Ages in Mark Jordan, “The Very Idea of Disease,” in Death, Sickness and Health in Medieval Society and Culture, ed. Susan Ridyard (Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 2000), 55–75. On the importance of medical knowledge and interventions to the prevalence of leprosy among the medieval elite, see Luke E. DeMaitre, “The Relevance of Futility: Jordanus de Turre (fl. 1313–1335) on the Treatment of Leprosy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 25–61. From the life of Francis by Benvenuto of Gubbio (d. 1232), as quoted in Angela Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 5. See Lisa J. Kiser, “The Garden of St. Francis: Plants, Landscape, and Economy in Thirteenth-Century Italy,” Environmental History 8, no. 2 (2003): 229–45. David Nicholas, Urban Europe, 1100–1700 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 4–5 and 11–13. McCormick, “Bateaux,” 37–39 and 52–68; and Michael McCormick, “Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ecological History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, no. 1 (2003): 1–23. John Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19–24. Constraints on urban growth were not, however, the ones determining medieval population stagnation and decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At most, medieval towns and cities held 15 percent of the overall population. We must look to the rural world for explanation of the larger economic and demographic patterns; see Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages. Margaret Murphy, “Feeding Medieval Cities: Some Historical Approaches,” in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London: Hambledon, 1998), 119–22. Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, “Fuelling the City,” 447–72; and Karl Appuhn, “Inventing Nature: Forests, Forestry and State Power in Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 861–89. P. W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Stroud, UK: Alan Sutton, 1993), 40–49. A large literature even for England, recently summarized in James Davis, “Baking for the Common Good: A Reassessment of the Assize of Bread in Medieval England,” Economic History Review 57, no. 3 (2004): 465–502, esp. 467–68.

230

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50. Martha Carlin, “Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England,” in Carlin and Rosenthal, Food and Eating, 27–51. 51. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 155–78 and 187–93; and Dolly Jørgensen, “Cooperative Sanitation: Managing Streets and Gutters in Late Medieval England and Scandinavia,” Technology and Culture 49, no. 3 (2008): 547–67. 52. Ernest L. Sabine, “City Cleaning in Mediaeval London,” Speculum 12, no. 1 (1937): 19–43. 53. See, for example, Derek Keene, “Issues of Water in Medieval London to c. 1300,” Urban History 28, no. 2 (2001): 161–79; and Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54–57. 54. Nicholas, Urban Europe, 155–58; Jørgensen, “Cooperative Sanitation,” 562–65; and Ronald Edward Zupko and Robert Anthony Laures, Straws in the Wind: Medieval Urban Environmental Law; the Case of Northern Italy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 33–40 and 73–86. 55. Jean Pierre Leguay, Le Rue au Moyen Age (Rennes: Ouest France, 1984), 56; Nicholas, Urban Europe, 157; and Norman Pounds, The Medieval City (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 55–83. 56. Sabine, “City Cleaning,” 22. 57. For a recent study of such comprehensive city governance, see Michael Kucher, “The Use of Water and Its Regulation in Medieval Siena,” Journal of Urban History 31, no. 4 (2005): 504–36. Siena was the driest city in Tuscany; London at this same time (late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries) had plenty of water but sought to manage choking sulfurous smoke resulting from the introduction of sea coal into city industries; see William H. TeBracke, “Air Pollution and Fuel Crises in Preindustrial London, 1250–1650,” Technology and Culture 16, no. 3 (1975): 337–59. 58. Julia Barrow, “Urban Cemetery Location in the High Middle Ages,” in Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992), 78–100. 59. TeBracke, “Air Pollution and Fuel Crises”; and Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, “Fuelling the City.” 60. Georges Jehel and Philippe Racinet, La ville médiévale: de l’Occident Chrétien à l’Orient musulman, Ve–XVe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1996), 164–65. 61. A. L. Grauer and C. A. Roberts, “Paleoepidemiology, Healing and Possible Treatment of Trauma in the Medieval Cemetery Population of St. Helen-on-the-Walls, York, England,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 100 (1996): 531–44; and Grauer, “Patterns of Anemia and Infection from Medieval York, England,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 91 (1993): 203–13. 62. Nicholas, Urban Europe, 13–15, 19. 63. Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov, Secular Cycles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 35–80. 64. Thomas J. Crowley and Thomas S. Lowery, “How Warm Was the Medieval Warm Period?” Ambio 29, no. 1 (February 2000): 51–54. And, in general, see Raymond S. Bradley, K. R. Briffa, J. E. Cole, M. K. Hughes, and T. J. Osborn, “The Climate of the Last Millennium,” in Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future, ed. K. D. Alverson, R. S. Bradley, and T. F. Pedersen (Berlin and New York: Springer,

NOTES

65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

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2003), 105–41; R. S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, and Henry F. Diaz, “Climate in Medieval Time,” Science 302, no. 5644 (October 17, 2003): 404–5; and Michael Mann, C. M. Ammann, R. S. Bradley, K. R. Briffa, T. J. Crowley, M. K. Hughes, P. D. Jones, et al., “On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late 20th-Century Warmth,” Eos 84, no. 27 (July 8, 2003): 256–58. Medievalists should be wary: Popular accounts related to medieval climate are often highly politicized. J. M. Grove, “The Initiation of the Little Ice Age in Regions round the North Atlantic,” Climatic Change 48 (2001): 58–82. In general, see Rudolf Brázdil, Christian Pfister, Heinz Wanner, Hans von Storch, and Juerg Luterbacher, “Historical Climatology in Europe, the State of the Art,” Climatic Change 70 (2005): 363–430. William C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). André Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988). Daniel Lord Smail, “Accommodating Plague in Medieval Marseille,” Continuity and Change 11 (1996): 11–41. Beverley J. Margerison and Christopher J. Knüsel, “Paleodemographic Comparison of a Catastrophic and an Attritional Death Assemblage,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 119 (2002): 134–43; and R. L. Gowland and A. T. Chamberlain, “Detecting Plague: Paleodemographic Characterisation of a Catastrophic Death Assemblage,” Antiquity 79 (2005): 146–57. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Plague and Family Life,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 6, c. 1300–c. 1415, ed. Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 124–54. Ann G. Carmichael, “The Language of Plague: Universal and Particular, 1348– 1500,” in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, Medical History Suppl. no. 27 (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, 2008), 34–39 and 42–51. Gabriele Zanella, “La peste del 1348: Italia, Francia e Germania: una storiografia a confronto,” in La Pesta Nera: dati di una realtà ed elementi di una interpretazione; Atti del Convegno storico internazionale, 1993 (Spoleto, Italy: Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994), 349–81. See also, in general, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Arnold, 2002); and, on England specifically, Koenraad Bleukx, “Was the Black Death (1348–1349) a Real Plague Epidemic? England as a Case Study,” in Serta Devota: In Memoriam Guillelmi Lourdaux, Part 2, Cultura Mediaevalis, ed. W. Verbeke, M. Haverals, R. De Keyser, and J. Goossens (Louvain, Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 1995), 65–114. Ann G. Carmichael, “Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice in Renaissance Milan,” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991): 17–60; and Carmichael, “Epidemics and State Medicine in Fifteenth-Century Milan,” in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Luis Garcia Ballester (London: Ashgate, 1998), 221–47. Malcolm K. Hughes and Henry F. Diaz, “Was There a ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ and If So, Where and When?” Climatic Change 26, no. 2 (1994): 109–42. C. M. Woolgar, “Take This Penance Now, and Afterwards the Fare Will Improve: Seafood and Late Medieval Diet,” in Starkey, Reid, and Ashcroft, England’s Sea Fisheries, 36–44.

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76. John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, 21–65. 77. Schofield, “Medieval Diet and Demography,” 239–53. 78. Landers, Field and Forge, 31–34.

Chapter 3 1. Ruth Mazo Karras and David L. Boyd, “Ut Cum Muliere: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (Routledge, 1996), 101–16. 2. Alain de Lille, Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 67; and Nikolaus M. Häring, ed., De Planctu Naturae, Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., 19 (1978): 806. 3. Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 4. See, for example, Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), bk. 3, chap. 49, p. 609, and bk. 3, chap. 33, p. 544. 5. James Brundage has argued that the whole apparatus of confession and instance cases, originally thought to be aimed at controlling heresy, in fact was a mechanism to enforce conformity to sexual regulations onto the laity. See James A. Brundage, “Playing by the Rules: Sexual Behavior and Legal Norms in Medieval Europe,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 23–41. 6. Robert Ian Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987). 7. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Sodom and Gomorrah: On the Everyday Reality and Persecution of Homosexuals in the Middle Ages, trans. John Phillips (London: Free Association Books, 2001); Mark Boone, “State Power and Illicit Sexuality: The Persecution of Sodomy in Late Medieval Bruges,” Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996): 135–53; Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 8. James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. 313–14, 398–400; and Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 9. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 218–27. 10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Ottawa: Commissio Piana, 1953), 2.2.151.2, vol. 3, pp. 2156b–57b. 11. Jacqueline Murray, “ ‘The law of sin that is in my members’: The Problem of Male Embodiment,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), 9–22.

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12. See Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and James A. Brundage, “Obscene and Lascivious: Behavioral Obscenity in Canon Law,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 246–59. 13. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 96. 14. Peter Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26–40; and John Thomas Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists (New York: Mentor-Omega Books, 1965), 238–43. Peter Lombard, for example, cited Gregory the Great to the effect that intercourse was not possible without sin. Although he himself said that pleasure is sinful only when people come together for a reason other than procreation, he also noted that most couples do have a reason besides procreation, and therefore venial sin is involved. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, ed. Ignatius Brady, 2 vols., Spicilegium Bonaventurianum 4–5 (Grottaferrata, Italy: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1981), 4.31.8.2–3, vol. 2, pp. 450–51. 15. Gulielmus Peraldus, Summa de Vitiis, 3.2.2. We are grateful to Siegfried Wenzel for the use of his draft of a normalized edition of this text. 16. David M. Feldman, Birth Control in Jewish Law (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 298. See also Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 147. On infertility as grounds for divorce in Judaism, see Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 32–38. 17. Basim Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15. 18. Peraldus, Summa de Vitiis, 3.2.3. See Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 179–205. 19. Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxii–xxiii. 20. Biller, 45–50; Albertus Magnus, Scripta in IV Libros Sententiarum, dist. 33, art. 1, in Opera Omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet (Paris: Vives, 1890–99), vol. 30, 289–90. 21. Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 71–73; and Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 96, 103. 22. Patrick J. Geary, ed., trans., “Le registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier,” in Readings in Medieval History (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1992), 2:200. 23. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Society in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 133–34. 24. John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1:134. 25. Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 25.

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26. William of Conches, Dragmaticon Philosophiae (Strasbourg, 1567), 241. 27. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 95–96; and Jacqueline Murray, “Sexuality and Spirituality: The Intersection of Medieval Theology and Medicine,” Fides et historia 23, no. 1 (1991): 20–36. 28. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 153. 29. Ibid., 64; Paul Delany, “Constantinus Africanus’ De Coitu: A Translation,” Chaucer Review 4 (1970): 56. 30. See Dyan Elliott, “Bernardino of Siena versus the Marriage Debt,” in Murray and Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline, 168–200. 31. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 60. 32. Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), passim. 33. John of Freiburg, Summa confessorum (Venice, 1568), bk. 4, tit. 2, q. 40, fol. 439. 34. Augustine, De bono conjugali, 11–12, ed. Joseph Zycha, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1900; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1979), 41:203; translated in St. Augustine on Marriage, ed. Elizabeth A. Clark (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 54. 35. Jacqueline Murray, “On the Origin and Role of ‘Wise Women’ in Causes for Annulment on the Grounds of Male Impotence,” Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990): 235–49; and P.J.P. Goldberg, “Women in Fifteenth-Century Town Life,” in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. John A.F. Thompson (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1988), 119. 36. Jean Duvernoy, ed., Le registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1965), 3:41. 37. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 1987), 123; see also Elizabeth B. Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 38. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 29. 39. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2.2.154.11, vol. 3, pp. 2184a–85a. 40. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 400–401. 41. Robert of Flamborough, Liber Poenitentialis, ed. J. J. Francis Firth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971), chap. 224, pp. 196–97. 42. Maud Burnett McInerney, “Rhetoric, Power, and Integrity in the Passion of the Virgin Martyr,” in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Marina Leslie and Kathleen Coyne Kelly (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 50–70; see also Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 20–21; and Clarissa Atkinson, “ ‘Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass’: The Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 137, although she argues that other understandings were more important. 43. Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church, trans. John J. Hagen (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 177–78. 44. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, 86. 45. R. N. Swanson, “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (Harlow,

NOTES

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

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UK: Longman, 1999), 160–77; Jo Ann McNamara, “Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours,” in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 199–209; and Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 34–51. Ruth Mazo Karras, “Chastity and Clerical Masculinity,” in Bitel and Lifshitz, Gender and Christianity, 52–67. C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-Century Recluse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), chap. 43, pp. 114–19. Jerome, Commentaria in Epistolam ad Ephesios, ed. J. P. Migne, in Patrologia Latina (Paris: Garnier, 1865), 3:26, cols. 532C–34C. Kathryn Kelsey Staples and Ruth Mazo Karras, “Christina’s Tempting: The Presentation of Sanctity and Sexual Temptation in the Twelfth Century,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (New York: Routledge, 2004), 184–96. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000). See the discussion in Robert Mills, “Can the Virgin Martyr Speak,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 187–213; and Salih, Versions of Virginity, 74–98. Nancy F. Partner, “Did Mystics Have Sex?” in Murray and Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline, 305. Venantius Fortunatus, The Life of the Holy Radegund, in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, ed. Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halborg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 81, and the discussion in John Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117–22. See also the useful discussion in Vern L. Bullough, Dwight Dixon, and Joan Dixon, “Sadism, Masochism and History, or When is Behaviour Sado-Masochistic?” in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 52–58. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), which includes a reply to a critique of his first edition by Caroline Bynum: “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 399– 439. The classic work here is Caroline Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 271.

Chapter 4 I would like to thank Monica Green and Montserrat Cabré for their stimulating comments. Andrew Cunningham has generously and patiently revised the English. The research on which this chapter is based has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (HAR2008-02867-HIST).

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1. Nancy Siraisi, “The Faculty of Medicine,” in A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. H. Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 360–87. 2. I discorsi dei corpi [Discourses of the body], Micrologus’ Library 1 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1993). 3. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Luís García Ballester, “The Construction of a New Form of Learning and Practicing in Medieval Latin Europe,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 75–102. 4. Margaret Lock, Allan Young, and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Mark Berg and Annemarie Mol, eds., Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques and Bodies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998). 5. Roger French, “Berengario da Carpi and the Use of Commentary in Anatomical Teaching,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear, Roger French and Iain Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 42–74. 6. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). 7. Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 8. Vivian Nutton, “Humoralism,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 1:281–91. 9. Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 8–72. 10. Peter M. Jones, “Image, Word, and Medicine in the Middle Ages,” in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 1–24. 11. Danielle Jacquart and Françoise Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’occident médiéval (Paris: Maissonneuve-Larose, 1990); Luís García Ballester, “Introduction,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luís García Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–29; and Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, eds., La scuola medica salernitana: Gli autori e i testi (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007). 12. John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 13. Byron Good, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14. La visione e lo sguardo nel Medio Evo [View and vision in the Middle Ages], Micrologus’ Library 5 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1997), chaps. 1 and 2. 15. Roger Bacon, The “Opus majus” of Roger Bacon, ed. J. H. Bridges (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), 2:12–13. 16. Paul O. Kristeller, “Bartholomaeus, Musandinus and Maurus of Salerno and Other Early Commentators on the Articella, with a Tentative List of Texts and Manuscripts,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 19 (1976): 57–87; Tiziani Pesenti, “Le

NOTES

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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Articelle di Daniele di Marsilio Santasofia (†1410), professore di medicina,” Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1990): 50–92; and Cornelius O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Gregor Maurach, “Johannicius Isagoge ad Techne Galieni,” Sudhoffs Archiv 62 (1978): 154–56. Galen, Cl. Galieni Opera Omnia, ed. C. G. Kühn (Leipzig: K. Knobloch, 1821– 1833; repr., Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1965), 3:759–99. Roger French, “De juvamentis membrorum and the Reception of Galenic Physiological Anatomy,” Isis 70 (1979): 96–109. Max Meyerhof, The Book of the Ten Treatises on the Eye Ascribed to Hunain ibn Is-haq (809–877 A.D.) (Cairo: Government Press, 1928). David C. Lindberg, A Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Optical Manuscripts (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), 98–100. Haly Abbas, Pantegni, in Omnia opera Ysaac . . . Galieni a Constantino compositum, by Isaac Israeli (Lyon, 1515), fols. 17r and 27v; and Gül Russell, “The Anatomy of the Eye in ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Magusi: A Textbook Case,” in Constantine the African and ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Magusi, ed. Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 247–65. Avicenna, Liber Canonis tocius medicinae (Venice, 1527; repr., Brussels: Medicinae Historia, 1971), fol. 162r. Fernando Salmón, “The Many Galens of the Medieval Commentators on Vision,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 50 (1997): 397–419. Galen, De iuvamentis membrorum, in Opera Omnia (Venice, 1490), fol. 29r. Laurence M. Eldredge, “The Textual Tradition of Benvenutus Grassus’ De arte probatissima oculorum,” Studi Medievali 34 (1993): 132–37. Arnau de Vilanova, Commentum supra tractatum Galieni de morbo et accidenti, Krakow, Bib. Jagiellowska 781, fol. 143ra; Antonio da Parma, Questiones supra tractatum Galieni de morbo et accidenti, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 4450, fol. 83rb; Alberto da Bolonia, Commentum supra tractatum Galieni de morbo et accidenti, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. Lat. 2000, fol. 49va; and Gentile da Foligno, Notata super libro de accidenti et morbo, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CLM 62, fol. 80va. Jean de Saint-Amand, Die Concordanciae, ed. J. L. Pagel (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1894), 222; and Bernard de Gordon, Lilium medicinae (Paris, 1542), fol. 132v. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976); and Bruce S. Eastwood, The Elements of Vision: The Micro-Cosmology of Galenic Visual Theory According to Hunayn ibn Ishaq (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982). Laurence M. Eldredge, “The Anatomy of the Eye in the Thirteenth Century: The Transmission of Theory and the Extent of Practical Knowledge,” Micrologus 5 (1999): 145–60. Taddeo Alderotti, Expositiones in Hipp. Aphorismi, lib. Pronosticorum, Regiminis acutorum et in Ioannitii Isagogarum lib. (Venice, 1527), fol. 370v. Ibid., fols. 370v–371r. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 78–114. Roger French, Canonical Medicine: Gentile da Foligno and Scholasticism (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 89–141. Galen, Liber Tegni Galieni, in Articella (Venice, 1483), fol. 163v. Avicenna, Liber Canonis, fol. 162r/v.

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NOTES

37. Galen, Liber Tegni, fols. 163v–164v; Avicenna, Liber Canonis, fols. 162r–173r. 38. Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1973); and Vivian Nutton, “God, Galen and the Depaganization of Ancient Medicine,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 17–32. 39. Avicenna, Liber Canonis, fol. 131r. 40. Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 1–22; and Elisabeth Sears, “Sensory Perception and Its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17–39. 41. Fernando Salmón, “A Medieval Territory for Touch,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005): 64–65. 42. Eastwood, Elements of Vision, 18; Plato, Timaeus, ed. J. H. Waszink (London and Leiden: Brill, 1975), 41; Galen, De iuvamentis, fol. 29r; Galen, De interioribus, in Opera Omnia, fol. 127r; Meyerhof, Ten Treatises, 16; Aristotle, “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” in On the Soul; Parva naturalia; On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, 5th ed., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press/Heinemann, 1986), 438b, p. 227; Albert the Great, Secunda pars summae de creaturis, in Opera Omnia, ed. A. Borgnet (Paris: Vives, 1890–1898), 35:168; and Albert the Great, Parva naturalia (De sensu et sensato), in Opera Omnia, 9:33. 43. Alderotti, Expositiones, fol. 370v; Taddeo Alderotti, Expositio in Galieni microtegni (Naples, 1522), fol. 65r–v. 44. Galen, De interioribus, fol. 126v. 45. Fernando Salmón and E. Sánchez Salor, “Sobre el uso de la autoridad en la medicina medieval: Aristóteles, Galeno y las moscas volantes,” Dynamis 13 (1993): 347–71. 46. Meyerhof, Ten Treatises, 50; and Galen, De morbo et accidenti, in Opera Omnia, fol. 150r. 47. Bernard de Gordon, Lilium, fol. 144r. 48. Petrus Hispanus, Commentum super libro Prognosticorum (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 1877), fols. 127v–128r; Alderotti, Expositiones, fols. 204v–205r; Arnau de Vilanova, Commentum, fols. 143v–144r; Mondino de Liuzzi, Commentum supra Hippocratis librum Prognosticorum, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 4466, fol. 6r/v; Antonio da Parma, Questiones, fol. 84r; Alberto de Bolonia, Commentum, fols. 50v–51r; and Gentile da Foligno, Notata, fol. 81v. 49. Galen, Liber pronosticorum, in Articella, fol. 53r/v; and Galen, Opera Omnia, fols. 126v–127r and fol. 150r. 50. Meyerhof, Ten Treatises, 50. 51. Aristotle On the Soul 419a, p. 107. 52. Salmón, “Many Galens,” 397–401. 53. Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Edocere medicos: Medicina scolastica nei secoli XIII–XV (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici, 1988). 54. Bernardo C. Bazàn, John Wippel, Gérard Fransen, and Danielle Jacquart, eds., Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit et de médecine (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1985). 55. Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friar’s Natural Philosophy (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1996).

NOTES

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56. Salmón and Sánchez Salor, “Sobre el uso de la autoridad,” 362–71. 57. Avicenna, Liber Canonis, fol. 3r. 58. García-Ballester, “Construction of a New Form,” 75–102; Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Danielle Jacquart, La médecine médiéval dans le cadre parisien (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 59. Michael R. McVaugh, “Cataracts and Hernias: Aspects of Surgical Practice in the Fourteenth Century,” Medical History 45 (2001): 319–40. 60. Pearl Kibre, “The Faculty of Medicine at Paris, Charlatanism and Unlicensed Medical Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27 (1953): 1–20; and Montserrat Cabré i Pairet and Fernando Salmón, “Poder académico versus autoridad femenina: la Facultad de Medicina de París contra Jacoba Félicié (1322),” Dynamis 19 (1999): 55–78.

Chapter 5 I would like to thank Monica Green and Steve Rigby for their helpful comments on drafts. All translations from Middle English, unless otherwise indicated in the bibliographical information, are mine. 1. Michael Camille, “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 67. He adds that this view, of a mutual exchange of influence between the human body and the cosmos, shifted in the later Middle Ages, to one that privileged the influence of the cosmos on the human body. 2. Sidrak and Bokkus, ed. T. L. Burton, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, o.s., 311 and 312 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), vol. 1, pp. 553, 555, ll. 9473–9522. 3. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 553, 555, ll. 9523–28. 4. Camille, “Image and Self,” 62. 5. Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1929), vol. 1, bk. 5, “Of Demons,” chap. 1, p. 313. 6. John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader, Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures 2 (1997; repr., Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), introduction by Shinners to Section 35, “German Encounters with Demons (1280s),” 216. 7. In the exemplum, which Joan Young Gregg defines as an “instructive sermon stor[y],” the mundane is often used to highlight a particular didactic point in terms that can be widely understood, often drawing on contemporary and familiar locations, settings, and situations. Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories, SUNY Series in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 3. 8. Bernadette Filotas, writing in relation to an early-medieval context, suggests, for instance, that there was a “cross-fertilization between learned and folklore sources.” She concludes that “many of the practices and beliefs condemned as superstitious and pagan, then, were parts of the common heritage which bound all classes together, as much as did the oral traditions of secular culture and the forms of popular piety encouraged by the Church.” Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals,

240

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

NOTES

Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature, Studies and Texts 151 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 26n56 and 27. David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger, trans., The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (1941; repr., New York: Arno, 1969), 585. Keck, Angels, 170, 169. Ibid., 168. The Fall of Lucifer (Chester 1), in English Mystery Plays: A Selection, ed. Peter Happé (1975; repr., London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 56–57, ll. 163–64, 169–70, and p. 59, ll. 221–24. Keck notes that the angels who joined in the rebellion in heaven “fell into the middle air between heaven and earth, and from there, they descended to Hell to torture the souls of the damned” (Angels, 24). Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews, 25. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 1, p. 320. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (1972; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2003), bk. 11, chap. 15, p. 447 and bk. 11, chap. 17, p. 449. My emphasis. As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains, “The precise distinction between the two terms [daemonium and devil] in ecclesiastical usage may be seen in the phrase used in the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council: ‘Diabolus enim et alii daemones’ (The devil and the other demons), i.e., all are demons, and the chief of the demons is called the devil” (see under “Demons” at http://www. newadvent.org/cathen/04710a.htm). However, as with many of these issues, there was also some divergence of opinion regarding this. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 8, p. 328. MS. Linc. Cath. Libr. A.6.2, fol. 133, cited in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1933), 112. Saint Bonaventure; cited in Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 216. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 42, p. 376. Ryan and Ripperger, Golden Legend, 583. Cited in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, “Introduction,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages, ed. Karen Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe 3 (London: Athlone Press, 2002), xi. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 112. Keck, Angels, 24. “Saint Michael the Archangel,” in Ryan and Ripperger, Golden Legend, 583. See Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 128. She adds that this was “a distinction that was frequently lost on later generations of scholars.” Ibid., 128. Ibid., 131, summarizing the view held by the twelfth-century Honorious Augustodunensis. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, bk. 8, chap. 16, p. 322. Ibid., bk. 9, chap. 9, p. 354.

NOTES

241

32. Sidrak and Bokkus, vol. 1, pp. 155–57, ll. 2637–40, 2658. It goes on to compare body and soul to two young men, the one a coward who relies on his companion to protect him, the other brave and distrustful of his friend’s reliability should danger approach. The former is like the body, which thinks only of its pleasure in the here and now; the latter is like the soul, who knows that when adversity comes, it cannot rely on the other. 33. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, bk. 9, chap. 9, p. 354. 34. “As it is, not only does the wretchedness of their soul prevent them from being happier than men; they are even more miserable than men because they are chained to the body for all eternity.” Augustine, Concerning the City of God, bk. 9, chap. 10, p. 355. 35. Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews, 35. 36. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, bk. 8, chap. 15, p. 320. 37. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, bk. 5, chap. 10, p. 330; my emphasis. 38. Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 146. 39. Ibid., 129. For a range of different and opposing views on the corporeality of angels and demons, see ibid., esp. 130–33. 40. Ibid., 134. Elliott argues that this move ultimately cemented the notion that demons could never change their fate. Concomitant with this was a de-emphasizing of the pleasure demons could experience in leading humans astray (see pp. 134–35). 41. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 172–73. 42. Keck, Angels, 93, 94. 43. This view is the one that informed the condemnation of Joan of Arc for heresy. Joan had claimed that she not only regularly spoke to but had also embraced the apparitions of the saints that came to her; it was this assertion that led to her death sentence. In the view of those questioning her, “neither saints nor angels . . . could have had bodies to be embraced.” Therefore, “the entities Joan had communicated with must . . . have been demons.” Maud Burnett McInerney, Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 200. 44. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 28, p. 356. Nevertheless, the Monk adds that humans have an inborn antipathy to the devil because the “Lord has placed enmity between them”; this means that “though the outer man may not see him, yet the inner man, i.e. the spirit perceives plainly enough the presence of that evil spirit” (vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 54, p. 387). 45. Ibid., vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 29, p. 360. 46. St. Margaret, in Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 294. 47. Ibid., 300; my emphasis. In the Chester play The Fall of Lucifer, this is reiterated when the demons respond to their predicament by focusing their anger on humanity: “And therefore I shall for [God’s] sake / Show mankind great envy; / As soon as [God] can make [man] / I shall set out to destroy him” (p. 59, ll. 233–36). 48. Ancrene Wisse, in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 130. 49. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 47, pp. 381–82. 50. As the Monk explains the Novice: “In those, who in heaven cherished the most intense pride and envy against the Creator, there flourishes even now the bitterest eagerness to do harm. It is said that some simply consented to join the others who with Lucifer rebelled against God, and while these fell with the rest, yet they are

242

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

NOTES

less evil, and do men less harm.” Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 35, p. 366. Ibid., vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 36, p. 367. From H. T. Riley, The Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, Rolls Series 28, pt. 3 (London: Longmans, 1866), pp. 196–9, trans. by Shinners in Medieval Popular Religion, Item 36.1, pp. 220–21 (pp. 220, 221). Etienne de Besançon, An Alphabet of Tales: An English Fifteenth Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon, from Additional MS. Add. 25719 of the British Museum, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, Early English Text Society, o.s., 127 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1904), chap. 247, p. 173. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 2, bk. 12, chap. 4, p. 292. While demonic sex with women is a more common trope, there are some stories in which it is men who are deceived. In An Alphabet of Tales, the two stories related above are followed by a third in which a “lusty young man” arranges to meet a woman at night; what he doesn’t realize is that the woman he spends the night with is really “a fiend” who has taken on her likeness (chap. 258, p. 180). Besançon, Alphabet of Tales, chap. 256, pp. 179–80. Rudolf von Schlettstadt, Historia Memorabiles: Zur Dominikanerliteratur and Kulturgeschichte des 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt (Cologne: Böhlau, 1972), 96–98; trans. by Shinners in Medieval Popular Religion, Item 35.2, p. 217. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (1966; repr., Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 167–68. An astonished Vortigern then calls “a certain Maugantius” to him, who explains this phenomenon to him: “Between the moon and the earth live spirits which we call incubus demons. These have partly the nature of men and partly that of angels, and when they wish they assume mortal shapes and have intercourse with women” (p. 168). The chapter finishes with Merlin demonstrating his magical, prophetic powers, to the king’s and the court’s awe: “All those present were equally amazed at his knowledge, and they realized that there was something supernatural about him” (p. 169). Caroline D. Eckhardt, ed., Castleford’s Chronicle or The Boke of Brut, 2 vols., Early English Text Society (Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. 1, ll. 207–14. Ancrene Wisse, 79. In the words of Gregg, “popular homiletic narrative reveals a devil ubiquitous in the everyday life of layman and cleric alike, a shapeshifter who pandered to the human appetites for food, drink, sex, gain, and status by presenting himself under a multiplicity of forms” (Devils, Women, and Jews, 36). Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 15, p. 335. Siegfried Wenzel, ed. and trans., Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), V. xxxv, p. 605. Sawles Warde, in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 212. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 15, p. 335. Wenzel, Fasciculus morum, V. xxx, pp. 579, 581. See also Owst, Literature and Pulpit, who says that demons can transform “themselves into a dozen shapes in as many different situations, now a swine, now a dog, now an ape, now a black horse, now a spider, now a fair damsel, now some innocent-looking parish clerk, manorial servant, or even well-known neighbour” (p. 112). Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 6, p. 325.

NOTES

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

243

Wenzel, Fasciculus morum, V. xxxv, p. 603. Ibid., p. 605. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 51, p. 385. Ancrene Wisse, 114, 115. Ibid., 115. Savage and Watson note that this tripartite organization of sins “among the devil, the world and the flesh” is “a commonplace by the thirteenth century” (Anchoritic Spirituality, 372n20). Ancrene Wisse, 370n7. Ibid., 119. Judgement Day (York), in Happé, English Mystery Plays, p. 638, ll. 161–64. St. Juliana, in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 314. Wenzel, Fasciculus morum, V. xxxv, pp. 609, 611. Holy Maidenhood, in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 240. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 51, p. 386. Charles Swan (with corrections by Wynnard Cooper), from The Gesta Romanorum, or Entertaining Moral Stories (London: George Bell & Sons, 1877), 308–10; translated in Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 215. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 11, p. 332. Wenzel, Fasciculus morum, V. xxx, p. 577. The author adds, however, citing another authority, that “if a man or woman gathers medicinal herbs or something of this kind and does so reciting the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or writes these on a piece of paper which he places on the sick person, so that by doing this he only honors God, the Creator of all things, there is no reproach in this as long as nothing else of a superstitious character gets mixed in with it” (p. 577). Elves and such creatures are dismissed by this writer as superstition; they are seen as illusions conjured up by a powerful devil, a shape-shifter whose “mischievous spirit[s] help to delude humanity” (p. 579). It is not suggested that spirits cannot be summoned— the work clearly suggests that they can (see p. 585), but it emphasizes that it is wrong to do so. Sawles Warde, 212. St. Margaret, 294. Sidrak and Bokkus, vol. 1, p. 126, ll. 1108–20. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 7, p. 327. Ibid., bk. 5, chap. 11, p. 332. The Fasciculus morum paints the following picture: “Morally interpreted, [the] strong and swift animal [tiger] and her cubs stand for man and his virtuous deeds. The hunter is the devil, who constantly ‘goes about seeking whom he may devour,’ for he is always trying to carry off the cubs of good deeds” (V. xxxv, p. 609). Sawles Warde, 213. Sidrak and Bokkus, vol. 2, pp. 582, 584, ll. 8803–12. Besançon, Alphabet of Tales, chap. 30, pp. 21–22. Ibid., chap. 108, p. 78. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 12, p. 332. Ibid., vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 14, p. 334. See The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. B.A. Windeatt (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 54. Riley, Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, trans. by Shinners in Medieval Popular Religion, Item 36.2, pp. 221–22 (p. 222).

244

NOTES

96. Ancrene Wisse, 174. 97. As the demon says to Saint Margaret, “That’s the thing I hate most under the sun, people running often to confession of their sins.” St. Margaret, p. 298. 98. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, vol. 1, bk. 5, chap. 47, p. 382. There are many examples of stories in which the sign of the cross protects the one who makes it from evil; one of the most dramatic is in the life of Saint Margaret, in which the sign of the cross that she makes as the demon-dragon tries to swallow her causes him to burst asunder. 99. St. Juliana, 314. 100. A Song of Praise to Our Lord, in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 326. 101. Keck, Angels, 168. 102. “Saint Michael the Archangel,” 585–86. 103. St. Margaret, 298. 104. Ancrene Wisse, 156.

Chapter 6 It is a pleasure to thank Monica Green and Fernando Salmón for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Research leading to this article has been generously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, project HAR2008–02867/ HIST. For general introductions, Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and Umberto Eco, History of Beauty, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2004). 1. Pierre Monteil, Beau et laid: Contribution à une étude historique du vocabulaire esthétique en latin (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1964). 2. Pierre Ruelle, L’ornement des dames (Ornatus mulierum): Texte anglo-normand du XIIIème siècle (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1967), 32. 3. Katherine Allen Smith, “Bodies of Unsurpassed Beauty: ‘Living’ Images of the Virgin in the High Middle Ages,” Viator 37 (2006): 167–87. 4. Caroline W. Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 231–34. 5. Claudio da Soller, “The Beautiful Woman in Medieval Iberia: Rhetoric, Cosmetics and Evolution” (PhD diss., University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005), 41. Available online at http://edt.missouri.edu/Summer2005/Dissertation/DaSollerC072205-D2926/research.pdf (accessed September 8, 2008). 6. Jan Ziolkowski, “Avatars of Ugliness in Medieval Literature,” Modern Language Review 79, no. 1 (1984): 9. 7. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. A. C. Cawley (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 180–91. My thanks to Sylvia Huot for bringing this tale to my attention in relation to the moral values of beauty and ugliness. 8. On the important relationship between cleanliness and beauty, Anne-Laure Lallouette, “Bains et soins du corps dans les textes médicaux (XIIe–XIVe siècles),” in Laver, monder, blanchir: Discours et usages de la toilette dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Sophie Albert (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), 33–49. 9. Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, “Rides et cheveux gris dans les ouvrages de Roger Bacon,” in Les soins de beauté: Moyen àge, début des temps modernes; Actes du

NOTES

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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IIIe Colloque International Grasse (26–28 avril 1985), ed. Denis Menjot (Nice, France: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Nice, 1987), 253–59. On this phenomenon see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 4. Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Savoir médical et anthropologie religieuse: Les représentations et les fonctions de la voetula (XIIIe–XVe siècle),” Annales 48 (1993): 1281–1308. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. and intro. Frances Hogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vv. 985–1016, pp. 16–17. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 28. See Mary Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 188–89. Alcuin Blamires and C. W. Marx, “Woman Not to Preach: A Disputation in British Library MS Harley 31,” Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (1993): 58; and Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx, eds., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 252. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999), 65. M. Bennett, “Military Masculinity in England and Northern France c. 1050–c. 1225,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999), 79. Jenny Jochens, “Before the Male Gaze: The Absence of the Female Body in Old Norse,” in Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York and London: Garland, 1991), 3–29. da Soller, “Beautiful Woman,” 57–58. D. S. Brewer, “The Ideal of Feminine Beauty in Medieval Literature, Especially ‘Harley Lyrics,’ Chaucer, and Some Elizabethans,” Modern Language Review 50, no. 3 (July 1955): 257–69; Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, vv. 532–72, p. 10; and Francisco A. Marcos-Marín, “Masculine Beauty vs. Feminine Beauty in Medieval Iberia,” in Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature and Music, ed. Dru Dougherty and Milton M. Azevedo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 22–39. Michael R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus’ Library 15 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006), 216–18. Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, vv. 2153–63, p. 33. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 181–83. Katharine Park, “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 50–73; Joan Cadden, “Trouble in the Earthly Paradise: The Regime of Nature in Late Medieval Christian Culture,” in Daston and Vidal, Moral Authority of Nature, 207–31; and Valentin Groebner, “Complexio/Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250–1600,” in Daston and Vidal, Moral Authority of Nature, 357–83.

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26. Frédérique Lachaud, “La critique du vêtement et du soin des apparences dans quelques oeuvres religieuses, morales et politiques, XIIe–XIVe siècles,” Micrologus 15 (2007): 61–86. For medical and surgical discussions, Walton O. Schalick, “The Face behind the Mask: 13th- and 14th-Century European Medical Cosmetology and Physiognomy,” in Medicine and the History of the Body, ed. Yasuo Otsuka, Shizu Sakai, and Shigehisa Kuriyama (Tokyo: Ishiyaku EuroAmerica, 1999), 295–311; Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, “Esthétique et soins du corps dans les traités médicaux latins à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Médiévales 46 (2004): 55–72; Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, Medizinische Ästhetik: Kosmetik und plastische Chirurgie zwischen Antike und früher Neuzeit (Munich: Wilhem Fink, 2005), 31–69; and McVaugh, Rational Surgery, 215–29. 27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province, 2nd rev ed. (1920), 2.2.169.2, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3169. htm#article2 (accessed September 8, 2008). 28. Marirì Martinengo, “L’armonia di Ildegarda,” in Libere di esistere: Costruzione femminile di civiltà nel Medioevo europeo, by Marirì Martinengo, Claudia Poggi, Marina Santini, Luciana Tavernini, and Laura Minguzzi (Turin, Italy: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1996), 9–23. 29. Susan Udry, “Robert de Blois and Geoffroy de la Tour Landry on Feminine Beauty: Two Late Medieval French Conduct Books for Women,” Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002): 90–102. 30. The quote is from a Summa on the Corpus juris civilis by Bolognese jurist Azo, written between 1208 and 1210 and later incorporated into the ordinary commentaries of this legal code. Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 66–69. 31. Marcia L. Colish, “Cosmetic Theology: The Transformation of a Stoic Theme,” Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 1 (1981): 3–14; and Claire M. Waters, “Dangerous Beauty, Beautiful Speech: Gendered Eloquence in Medieval Preaching,” Essays in Medieval Studies 14 (1997), http:// www.illinoismedieval.org/ems/emsv14.html (accessed September 8, 2008). 32. “Bene Socrates, cum decorum adolescentem tacitum vidisset, ‘Loquere’ inquit ‘ut te videam’: non tam in vultu putabat videri hominem, quam in verbis.” Francesco Petrarca, “Invective contra medicum,” in Opere Latine II, ed. Antonieta Bufano, Basile Anacri, and Clara Kraus Reggiani (Turin, Italy: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975), 848. Cf. Fernando Salmón, “ ‘Quis enim possit investigare rationes, imaginationes et memorias anime’: Las funciones del cerebro y sus alteraciones en la medicina escolástica,” Quaderns d’Italià 11 (2006): 12. 33. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), pt. 2, chap. 62, 188. 34. Ibid., 188. 35. Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 62, 188–189. 36. Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 63, 189. 37. Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 64, 190; the French quotation is from Maureen Cheney Curnow, “The ‘Livre de la cité des dames’ of Christine de Pizan: A Critical Edition” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1975), 958. 38. Christine de Pizan discusses rape in a previous chapter. City of Ladies, pt. 2, chap. 44, 147–48. 39. Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 64, 190.

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40. Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Cité des dames” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 246–83. 41. Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies or the Book of the Three Virtues, trans. Sarah Lawson (London: Penguin, 1985), pt. 1, chap. 3, p. 40. 42. Ibid., pt. 2, chap. 11, pp. 133–35. 43. Ibid., chap. 12, p. 136. 44. Ibid., pt. 3, chap. 2, p. 149. 45. Monica H. Green, “The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading: Women and the Gendering of Medical Literacy,” in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 32–37, 49–76. 46. For a learned overview of ancient women’s medical writings, Rebecca Flemming, “Women, Writing and Medicine in the Classical World,” Classical Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2007): 257–79. 47. Holt N. Parker, “Women Doctors in Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire,” in Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, ed. Lilian R. Furst (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 149; and Green, Trotula, 213. A list of extant manuscripts can be found in Monica H. Green, “Medieval Gynecological Texts: A Handlist,” in Women’s Healthcare, appendix, pp. 8–10; Flemming, “Women, Writing and Medicine.” 48. Rosa Kuhne, “La medicina estética, una hermana menor de la medicina científica,” in La medicina en al-Andalus, ed. Camilo Álvarez de Morales y Ruiz-Matas and Luisa Fernanda Aguirre de Cárcer (Granada, Spain: Junta de Andalucía, 1999), 202. 49. Judith Wilcox and John M. Riddle, “Qust¸a¯ ibn Lu¯qa¯’s Physical Ligatures and the Recognition of the Placebo Effect: With an Edition and Translation,” Medieval Encounters 1, no. 1 (1995): 8, 42. 50. Enrique de Villena (1384–1434) refers to her as an authority on perfumed oils and waters and as the author of a “book of her cosmetics”; he was familiar with De physicis ligaturis. Villena, Tratado de aojamiento, ed. Anna Maria Gallina (Bari, Italy: Adriatica editrice, 1978), 115–16. 51. Giovanni Marinello, Gli ornamenti delle donne tratti dalle scritture d’una reina greca per M. Giovanni Marinello (Venice: Francesco de Franceschi, 1562), fol. Vv–VIr. 52. Hélène Congourdeau, “ ‘Métrodôra’ et son œuvre,” in Maladie et société à Byzance, ed. Evelyne Patlagean (Spoleto, Italy: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1993), 57–96; Parker, “Women Doctors,” 138–40, 150; and Flemming, “Women, Writing and Medicine.” 53. The identification and correspondence between Metrodora’s gynecological section and the two versions of the late-antique or early-medieval text De passionibus mulierum is discussed in Green, “Medieval Gynecological Texts,” 24–25. 54. For the history of the authorship ascription, see Monica H. Green, “In Search of an ‘Authentic’ Women’s Medicine: The Strange Fates of Hildegard of Bingen and Trota of Salerno,” Dynamis 19 (1999): 25–54. The compendium was edited and translated into English by Green, Trotula. 55. On health practitioners’ involvement with cosmetics, see Schalick, “The Face Behind the Mask”; Moulinier-Brogi, “Esthétique et soins du corps”; and McVaugh, Rational Surgery, 181–229. For the textual entanglement of cosmetics with other aspects of women’s health in medical literature, see Monica H. Green, Making

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56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

NOTES

Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Montserrat Cabré, “From a Master to a Laywoman: A Feminine Manual of SelfHelp,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 371–93. Green, Trotula, 45–46 and 226n186, for a later transformation of Muslim noblewomen into Salernitan noblewomen. Monica H. Green, “Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno,” in La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: SISMEL, 2007), 183–233. For the anonymous women experts, see Montserrat Cabré, “Autoras sin nombre, autoridad femeninan (siglo XIII),” in Las sabias mujeres, II (siglos III–XVI): Homenaje a Lola Luna, ed. María del Mar Graña Cid (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1995), 59–73. Monica H. Green, “Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (2008): 106–7; and Carmen Caballero-Navas, “The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 146–63. Montserrat Cabré, “Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories of Health Care in Late Medieval Iberia,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (2008): 18–51.

Chapter 7 1. For medieval developments of the ancient notion of the “ages of man,” see the literature cited in chapter 1. All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province, 2nd rev. ed. (1920), http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3169.htm#article2 (accessed September 8, 2008), esp. I, Q 92, art. 1; Second Part of the Second Part, question 169, art. 2. 3. The euphemism of calling the menses “flowers” is discussed at length in Monica H. Green, “Flowers, Poisons, and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe,” in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 51–64. 4. Brian Lawn, ed., The Prose Salernitan Questions Edited from a Bodleian Manuscript (Auct. F.3.10) (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 12–13. 5. On the physiology of menstruation, see Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 19–22. On the evil eye, see Fernando Salmón and Montserrat Cabré, “Fascinating Women: The Evil Eye in Medical Scholasticism,” in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Luis García-Ballester, (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 53–84. 6. Alexandra Barratt, ed., The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing: A Middle English Version of Material Derived from the “Trotula” and Other Sources, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 4 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), ll. 40–51.

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7. Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 199–200. 8. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 9. Katharine Park, “Itineraries of the ‘One-Sex Body’: A History of an Idea,” unpublished essay. My thanks to Dr. Park for permission to consult this. 10. Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia magna, ed. Michael R. McVaugh, with Margaret S. Ogden, Studies in Ancient Medicine, no. 14, vols. 1 and 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 1:52. 11. Ibid., 1:130, 204–5, and 239–41. 12. A fact noted by Park, “Itineraries.” 13. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine; and Monica H. Green, “Moving from Philology to Social History: The Circulation and Uses of Albucasis’s Latin Surgery in the Middle Ages,” in Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Florence Eliza Glaze and Brian Nance, Micrologus’ Library 30 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, forthcoming). 14. Michael R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus’ Library 15 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006). 15. Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium, Volume 1, 368. 16. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). 17. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, 92. 18. Ibid., 159. 19. Park, Secrets of Women, chronicles the increasing explicitness of anatomical depictions of women in the period immediately succeeding the Middle Ages. See also Walter von Brunn, ed., Die Handschrift des Schnitt- und Augenarztes Caspar Stromayr in Lindau im Bodensee: In der Lindauer Handschrift (P.1.46) vom 4. Juli 1559 (Berlin: Idra-Verlagsanstalt, [1925]). 20. Green, Trotula, 215. 21. Peter Biller, “A ‘Scientific’ View of Jews from Paris around 1300,” Micrologus 9 (2001): 137–68. Biller’s essay usefully includes complete transcriptions of the pertinent texts. 22. Gianna Pomata, “Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine,” in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 109–52. 23. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 53. 24. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, 93. 25. Paula Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” in Shifting Boundaries: Women and Gender in Middle Eastern History, ed. Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 88. 26. Corpus iuris civilis, Digest, bk. 22, sect. 5, par. 15. In his modern English translation, Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian, rev. ed., 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Univer-

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27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

NOTES

sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 2:194, renders this as “Whether a hermaphrodite can witness a will depends on his sexual development.” Cf. Gratian, Decretum Gratiani, pt. 2, cause 4, questions 2 and 3, canon 3, sect. 22, which repeats the exact phrasing, http://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen.de/decretum-gratiani/online/ angebot (accessed April 12, 2009). Harvard Law School Library, Bracton Online, http://hlsl5.law.harvard.edu/brac ton/ (accessed December 21, 2006), 2:31. Annals of the Friars Minor of Colmar (1308–1314), as cited in Miri Rubin, “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’ ” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 100–122. Cary J. Nederman and Jacqui True, “The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 4 (April 1996): 497–517. Lawn, Prose Salernitan Questions, 14. A translation of the Anatomy of the Pig can be found in George Washington Corner, Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1927). The second text, not yet published, appears uniquely in Monte Cassino Ms. 167; my thanks to Florence Eliza Glaze for bringing it to my attention. Albert the Great, On Animals: A Medieval “Summa Zoologica,” trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., and Irven Michael Resnick, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 2:1312–14. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France,” in “Premodern Sexualities in Europe,” ed. Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 4 (1995): 419–38. Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 199. Ann G. Carmichael and A. M. Silverstein, “Smallpox in Europe before the Seventeenth Century: Virulent Killer or Benign Disease?” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 42, no. 2 (1987): 147–68. Charlotte A. Roberts and Jane E. Buikstra, The Bioarchaeology of Tuberculosis: A Global View of a Reemerging Disease (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). Jesper L. Boldsen, “Leprosy in the Early Medieval Lauchheim Community,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135, no. 3 (March 2008): 301–10. Jesper L. Boldsen and Lene Mollerup, “Outside St. Jørgen: Leprosy in the Medieval Danish City of Odense,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 130, no. 3 (2006): 344–51. H. D. Isaacs, “A Medieval Arab Medical Certificate,” Medical History 35 (1991): 250–57; and Sara Scalenghe, “Disability,” in Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1:208–9. Luke E. DeMaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). François-Olivier Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies,” in Contagion: Perspectives from Premodern Societies, ed. L. Conrad and D. Wujastyk (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 161–83. Quoted in DeMaitre, Leprosy, 22.

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43. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–c. 1400, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture (London: Routledge, 2006). 44. Joseph Ziegler, “Sexuality and the Sexual Organs in Latin Physiognomy 1200– 1500,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005): 84. 45. Ian Repath, “Anonymous Latinus, Book of Physiognomy,” in Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s “Physiognomy” from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, ed. Simon Swain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 557. 46. My thanks to Joseph Ziegler for this information. 47. Derek J. Price, ed., An Old Palmistry: Being the Earliest Known Book of Palmistry in English; Edited from the Bodleian MS Digby Roll IV (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer & Sons, 1953); and Paul Acker and Eriko Amino, “The Book of Palmistry,” in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. L. M. Matheson (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1994), 141–83. 48. Diane Owen Hughes, “Earrings for Circumcision: Distinction and Purification in the Italian Renaissance City,” in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton, UK: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1985), 155–82. 49. David Nirenberg, “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 1065–93. 50. Ruth Mazo Karras and David L. Boyd, “Ut cum muliere: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London,” in Fradenburg and Freccero, “Premodern Sexualities,” 101–16; and Helmut Puff, “Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477),” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 41–62. 51. Michael H. Shank, “A Female University Student in Late Medieval Kraków,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 373–80.

Chapter 8 1. The classic debunking of this myth is Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1997). 2. Leonid S. Chekin, Northern Eurasia in Medieval Cartography: Inventory, Texts, Translation, and Commentary (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006). 3. Peter Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 219. 4. Ibid., 232–38. 5. Ibid., 248–49. 6. Ibid., 280–83. 7. Maaike van der Lugt, “La peau noire dans la science médiévale,” and Jean Wirth, “La représentation de la peau dans l’art médiéval,” both in “La pelle umana/ The Human Skin,” special issue, Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali/ Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 13 (2005): 439–76 and 131–53. 8. Peter Biller, “Black Women in Medieval Scientific Thought,” Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali/Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 13 (2005): 477–92. 9. The French Rabbinic scholar Rashi (d. 1105) had incorporated maps into his widely copied Hebrew biblical commentaries, while cartographers in the Muslim world

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10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

NOTES

imagined worlds of incomparable beauty in both their terrestrial and celestial maps. But their maps bore little resemblance to Christian ones. On cartographic traditions in Hebrew, see Rehav Rubin, “Hug ha-‘ares by Rabbi Solomon of Chelm: An Early Geographical Treatise and Its Sources,” Aleph 8 (2008): 131–47, and the literature cited therein. (My thanks to Gad Freudenthal for this reference.) On Muslim cartography, see J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987–). Pliny, Natural History, bk. 7. The classic study for the medieval fate of these views is John B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Edited and translated in Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 254–317. Asa Simon Mittman, Monsters and Maps in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2006). Ingrid Baumgärter, “Biblical, Mythical, and Foreign Women in the Texts and Pictures on Medieval World Maps,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: The British Library, 2006), 320. Ratramnus of Corbie Epistola 12, as cited in Robert Bartlett, The Natural and Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 97–98. As cited in Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 102–3 and 104. John de Marignollis, Chronicon Bohemorum, as cited in Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 105 (my translation). As claimed by Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural, 106. Maaike van der Lugt, “L’humanité des monstres et leur accès aux sacrements dans la pensée médiévales,” in Monstre et imaginaire social: Approches historiques, ed. A. Caiazzo and A.-E. Demartini (Paris: Créaphis, 2008), 135–61; I cite the version available online at http://halsha.archives-ouvertes.fr/, where the essay is paginated 1–23. William Shakespeare, Othello, act I, scene iii. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 20. Robert Bartlett, “Illustrating Ethnicity in the Middle Ages,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 132–56. On female use of earrings, see chapter 7. See also Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 2, From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery,” in two parts (Cambridge, MA: Menil Foundation, 1979); Henry Abramson, “A Ready Hatred: Depictions of the Jewish Woman in Medieval Antisemitic Art and Caricature,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 62 (1996): 1–18; Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the “Bible moralisée” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Eva Frojmovic, ed., Imaging the Self, Imaging the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2002); and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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22. See the essays in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, Origins of Racism. For the origins of the term race in French concepts of nobility (of hunting animals as well as humans), see Charles de Miramon, “Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of Race in the Late Middle Ages,” in ibid., 200–216; on Iberian uses of the cognate raza, see David Nirenberg, “Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish Blood’ in Late Medieval Spain,” in ibid., 232–64, esp. 247–52. 23. David Abulafia, “Sugar in Spain,” European Review 16, no. 2 (May 2008): 191– 210. 24. Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in FifteenthCentury Valencia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 4n9 and 10. 25. Thomas Capuano, ed., Textos y Concordancies del Libro de medecina llamado macer Granada: Andrés de Burgos, 1518 y 1519 (Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), fol. 24v: “la leches delas animalias negras es muy major que la delas animalias blancas & es mas cumplidamente cozida enlas tetas. E porende es mas ligera de digerir enlos estomagos de los hombres.” My thanks to Debra Blumenthal for bringing this source to my attention. 26. Rebecca Lynn Winer, “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (June 2008): 164–84. 27. See chapter 3 regarding this obligation to provide sex to one’s spouse. 28. Winer, “Conscripting the Breast.” 29. Debra Blumenthal, “Implements of Labor, Instruments of Honor: Muslim, Eastern and Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Valencia” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2000), 265–71. In her 2009 book, the only wet nurse whose color is mentioned is white; see Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 188. 30. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 56; the percentage calculations are my own. Blumenthal demurs reading any “racist” connotations into these figures, given how many other differentials went into assessing sale price (e.g., age, skills), yet it is striking that differentials in price persist across the five decades of her data for female slaves and that the gap is significantly larger for women than it is for men. 31. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars. 32. Ibid., 42–45, 250–51, 264, 269–77. 33. Núria Silleras-Fernández, “Nigra sum sed formosa: Black Slaves and Exotica in the Court of a Fourteenth-Century Aragonese Queen,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 546–65. 34. As cited in Valentin Groebner, “The Carnal Knowing of a Coloured Body: Sleeping with Arabs and Blacks in the European Imagination, 1300–1500,” in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, Origins of Racism, 223. 35. John Hunwick, “Arab Views of Black Africans and Slavery,” paper presented at The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, November 7–8, 2003, available online at http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/ Hunwick.pdf (accessed October 3, 2009). 36. Debra Blumenthal, “ ‘La Casa dels Negres’: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 225–46. 37. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 119. 38. Blumenthal, “ ‘La Casa dels Negres.’ ”

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39. Nirenberg, “Was There Race,” 257. 40. Ibid., 252. 41. On interfaith sexual congress, see Mark Meyerson, “Prostitution of Muslim Women in the Kingdom of Valencia: Religious and Sexual Discrimination in a Medieval Plural Society,” in The Medieval Mediterranean: Cross-Cultural Contact, ed. Marilyn J. Chiat and Kathryn L. Reyerson (St. Cloud, MN: North Star, 1988), 87–95; David Nirenberg, “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 1065–93; and Nirenberg, “Love between Muslim and Jew in Medieval Spain: A Triangular Affair,” in Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 127–55. On concerns about wet nursing, see Monica H. Green, “Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (2008): 105–18.

Chapter 9 1. Similarly, in a secular context, the inside and outside of a person, inner and outer beauty, were believed to coincide. In courtly fiction, for example, a noble countenance—light skin, red lips, shiny hair—is indicative of a person’s noble birth to such an extent that a lost prince is often recognized by his beauty even underneath ragged clothes, dirt, or uncouth demeanor, for example, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s romance Parzival (ca. 1200–1210). 2. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 3. The seven spiritual works of mercy—which are not directly based on biblical sources—are usually defined as converting the sinner, instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting the sorrowful, bearing wrongs patiently, forgiving injuries, and praying for the living and the dead. 4. David Lepine and Nicholas Orme, eds., Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter (Exeter, UK: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 2003), 186. 5. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, ed. Eberhard Nellmann, 2 vols., Bibliothek des Mittelalters 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). 6. Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, ed. and trans. Rüdiger Krohn, 3 vols. (1980; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996). 7. Hartmann von Aue, Erec: Mittelhochdeutscher Text und Übertragung, ed. Thomas Cramer (1972; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998). 8. Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, ed. Georg Friedrich Benecke and Karl Lachmann, trans. Thomas Cramer (1966; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981). 9. “Das Nonnenturnier,” in Novellistik des Mittelalters: Märendichtung, ed. and trans. Klaus Grubmüller, Bibliothek des Mittelalters 23 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996), 944–77. 10. On this topic see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 239–97; and also her fuller study The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

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11. George Ferzoco, Il murale di Massa Marittima/ The Massa Marittima Mural (Florence and Leicester, UK: Consiglio Regionale della Toscana and University of Leicester Centre for Tuscan Studies, 2004; 2nd ed., 2005). Pressure of space demands that only one aspect of Ferzoco’s analysis can be summarized here; other aspects include the identification of symbolism of witchcraft within the image, which again has overtones of unnaturalness. 12. The etymological roots of the term vulva are obscure, with suggestions including valva (“folding door”)—given by Pseudo-Albertus Magnus in the influential medieval work De Secretis Mulierum (Women’s Secrets), first published in 1501, which probably derived from the usage valvae (“doors”) given by Isidore of Seville (d. 636)—and velle (“want”), linked to the claim in Proverbs 30:16: “There are three things that cannot be sated. . . . Hell, the mouth of the vulva, and the earth.” However, the link to the Latin term vulnus (“wound”) seems to be equally strong in the medieval mind, especially in discussion of the wound in Christ’s side as a homology of the vulva. See Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 70. 13. John 19:34; Augustine of Hippo, ‘In Joannis Evangelium’, in Augustine of Hippo, Opera Omnia, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 11 vols, vol. 3: 2 Post Lovaniensium Theologorum Recensionem etc., Patrologia Latina, xxxv (1841), cols 1579–1976 and Norman P. Tanner, ed. and trans., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:360 (Canon 1). 14. Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 248–49. 15. This folklore seems to tie in with the established convention that medieval people did not generally feel the need for underwear. This is supported by reference to images such as the Limbourg Brothers’ calendar image of February in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413–1416), where peasants are shown warming themselves by a fire. On beliefs about female genital exposure, see Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V (London, UK: Phoenix, 2004), 9–64. 16. On representations of the vulva, see Blackledge, Story of V, 42–46, 53–56. 17. See Samantha Riches, “ ‘Hyr wombe insaciate’: The Iconography of the Feminised Monster,” in Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women: Pawns or Players? ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 177–96. 18. Figure 1.2 (see chapter 1) is derived from the Wellcome Apocalypse (Western MS 49), a work that includes material on physical health as well as the spiritual health that is the more common focus of the medieval apocalypse (as the name implies, the principal topic of these works is always a narrative of the last days, as set out in the book of Revelation, or Apocalypse). Most medieval versions are English and date from the period 1250–1400; this rather late version was probably produced in a monastic workshop in Thuringia in east-central Germany, with some parts of the text given in a Thuringian dialect of German. On this work see Almuth Seebohm, Apokalypse, Ars moriendi, medizinische Traktate, Tugend- und Lasterlehren: Die erbaulich-didaktische Sammelhandschrift, London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Ms. 49 (Munich: Lengenfelder, 1995). 19. On the birth of the Antichrist, see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), though readers should note that the author’s methodology for understandings of Cesarean birth more generally in the medieval period has been called into question. For a more reliable account of

256

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

NOTES

Cesarean section in the Middle Ages, see Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), esp. 64–65, 134–35, 241; and also Daniel Schäfer, Geburt aus dem Tod: Der Kaiserschnitt an Verstorbenen in der abendländischen Kultur (Hürtgenwald, Germany: Pressler, 1999). On Saint George and gendered dragons, see Samantha Riches, St. George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Sutton, UK: Stroud, 2000), 156–78. The doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary was proposed by a number of the church fathers, including Origen (185–ca. 253) and Saint Jerome (340/342–420). It was officially defined in the third canon of the Lateran Council held under Pope Martin I in 649 and hence formed a well-established facet of medieval Christian belief. The issue at stake is the soul of the infant, which is weighed down with original sin until the moment of baptism. In late-medieval Christian understanding (and, indeed, in Roman Catholic belief even into the late twentieth century) if a baby died unbaptized, the soul was destined for limbo (limbus infantium), the abode of souls that are excluded from the presence of God but are not condemned to other punishment. It thus appears that a deeply Christianized act is invoked in the iconography of the coming of the Antichrist. The concept of the “wandering womb” did not attract universal credence in the medieval period, and indeed it may have acted primarily as a metaphor, perhaps for women’s inherent “instability.” However, it is discussed in a number of medieval medical treatises as well as by classical authorities such as Hippocrates. For full discussion see Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty (New York: Routledge, 2003); and, for the medieval period, Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 22–30. Robert Mills has critiqued the view that the assignment of a passive, penetrated role to a martyr is necessarily to be equated with a heterosexual paradigm; see Robert Mills, “Ecce Homo,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002). Samantha Riches’s current work on the cult of Saint Ursula also indicates that the attacks on this martyr’s body gender the assailant as much as the victim and form just one element in the construction of the complex gender role of this saint. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Clement Charles Julian Webb, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), bk. 5, chap. 2. Friedrich Ebel, ed., Sachsenspiegel: Landrecht und Lehnrecht, (1953; 3rd rev. ed., Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), bk. 1, chap. 3, par. 3, p. 31. Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild: Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1992), 344–46. Mary Caroline Spalding, The Middle English Charters of Christ, Bryn Mawr College Monograph series 15 (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1914). Robert Priebsch, ed., “Die heilige Regel für ein vollkommenes Leben”: Eine Cisterzienserarbeit des XIII. Jahrhunderts aus der Handschrift Additional 9048 des British Museum, Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 16 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1909). Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, 348–50.

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31. Etienne de Besançon, An Alphabet of Tales: An English Fifteenth Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon, from Additional MS. Add. 25719 of the British Museum, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, Early English Text Society, o.s., 127 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1904), 378.

Chapter 10 1. Alain de Lille, “Memorare nouissima tua,” in Textes inédits, ed. Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, Etudes de Philosophie Médiévale 52 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965), 268. Here and elsewhere, translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Ibid., 268. 3. Ibid., 273. 4. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques francais du moyen age, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1973–75), 3682–85, hereafter cited in text. 5. Heldris de Cornualle, Le Roman de Silence, ed. and trans. by Sarah Roche-Mahdi, Medieval Texts and Studies 10 (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), hereafter cited in the text. 6. The importance of the body as a site of gendered identity in Silence has been much debated. Simon Gaunt concludes that in this text, “the patriarchal aphorism that ‘sex is destiny’ is ultimately endorsed,” in “The Significance of Silence,” Paragraph 13 (1990): 203. Roberta Krueger, surveying the range of critical perspectives, concludes that the text serves to affirm the status quo, in Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101–27. Peggy McCracken similarly acknowledges that in this text “even the mutable body retains the authority to determine gender,” in “The Boy Who Was a Girl: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence,” Romanic Review 85 (1994): 521. McCracken, however, also argues for an element of ambivalence in the text, noting that “Silence’s story suggests that the body’s ‘nature’ may be determined by its ‘nurture’ ” (534). Erika Hess argues for a reading of Silence as more subversive of cultural gender norms in Literary Hybrids: Cross-Dressing, Shapeshifting, and Indeterminacy in Medieval and Modern French Narrative (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 7. “La Chanson d’Yde et Olive,” in Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive, ed. Max Schweigel (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1889); and De la fille d’un roy, in Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, ed. Gaston Paris and Ulysse Robert, (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1893), 7:2–117. These are cited in the text hereafter. For discussion of these texts, see Robert L.A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 319–44. 8. On literal and allegorical bodies in the Rose, see my “Bodily Peril: Sexuality and the Subversion of Order in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose,” Modern Language Review 95 (2000): 41–61. 9. Marie de France, Les Lais, ed. Jean Rychner, Classiques francais du moyen age (Paris: Champion, 1973). Text references are to line numbers. On lycanthropy and human identity in this text, see Leslie Dunton-Downer, “Wolf Man,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, The New Middle Ages 4 (New York and London: Garland, 1997), 203–18; and Sylvia

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Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 188–99. 10. My discussion concerns the tale by Jean d’Arras, Melusine, ed. Louis Stouff (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974). The text also exists in other versions in Middle French, as well as other European languages. On this text see Sylvia Huot, “Dangerous Embodiments: Jean Froissart’s Harton and Jean d’Arras’s Melusine,” Speculum 78 (2003): 400–420; Ana Pairet, “Mélusine’s Double Binds: Foundation, Transgression, and the Genealogical Romance,” in Reassessing the Heroine in Medieval French Literature, ed. Kathy M. Krause (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); and the essays in Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds., Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). On the “Melusine” legend more generally, see Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au moyen âge: Morgane et Mélusine; La Naissance des fées, Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Age 8 (Paris: Champion, 1984), 78–178. 11. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1972), bk. 14, chap. 17, pp. 578 and 579.

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contributors

Anke Bernau is lecturer in medieval literature and culture at the University of Manchester. Her research includes a range of topics, with particular focus on medieval and postmedieval virginities, medieval and early-modern foundation myths and historiographies, and cinematic engagements with the Middle Ages and medievalism. She has published a study on female virginity in Western culture, Virgins: A Cultural History (Granta, 2007), and, most recently, a coedited collection on medievalism and film, Medieval Film (Manchester University Press, 2009). Bettina Bildhauer is a lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. She became interested in the complexities of medieval bodies and minds when she studied English, German, and art history at the University of Cologne. She did her doctorate and postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge. Her monograph on Medieval Blood (2006, paperback 2009) is concerned with medical, religious, legal, and literary representations of blood and bodies, especially the outer limits of the body and their importance for medieval people’s sense of self. She also edited The Monstrous Middle Ages (2003, with Robert Mills), which deals with medieval ideas about monsters and their bodies, and Medieval Film (2009, with Anke Bernau). Bildhauer is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow in Berlin completing a monograph on medieval film, A Medieval History of Film. She has won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding scholarship for her work to date. Montserrat Cabré is associate professor of the history of science at the Universidad de Cantabria, where she is also the director of the Women’s Studies Program. Her research interests include the history of medieval and early-modern medicine, particularly women’s health care, as well as medical conceptions of

288

CONTRIBUTORS

the female body and cultural representations of sexual difference. Her work has focused on late-medieval and Renaissance constructions of the gendered body through medical discourse and practical experience; as a related issue, she has worked on the significance and types of bodywork provided by women in the household setting. She is currently completing a book on women’s selfcare in late-medieval Iberia. Ann G. Carmichael is associate professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington. Originally trained in medicine, she publishes generally on the history of infectious diseases and specifically on late-medieval and Renaissance epidemics in Italy. Monica H. Green is professor of history at Arizona State University where she holds affiliate appointments in Women’s and Gender Studies and the Program in Social Science and Health in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. She has published extensively on various aspects of the history of women’s medicine in premodern Europe, including Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (2000), which was cowinner of the 2004 John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book in medieval studies; The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (2001); and Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford, 2008), winner of the 2009 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize. Sylvia Huot is professor of medieval French literature and a fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (1987), The “Romance of the Rose” and Its Medieval Readers (1993), Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet (1997), Madness in Medieval French Literature (2003), Postcolonial Fictions in the “Roman de Perceforest” (2007), and Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the “Roman de la Rose” (2010). She is the editor, with Kevin Brownlee, of Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception (1992). She is a member of the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the Roman de la Rose Digital Library (http://romandelarose.org); a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America; and an honorary member of the Center for Research on Language and Culture at Senshu University, Tokyo. Ruth Mazo Karras is professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of four books: Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (2005), From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (2003), Common

CONTRIBUTORS

289

Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (1996), and Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (1988). She is coeditor of the volume Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe (2008) and of the journal Gender and History. Her current research concerns quasimarital unions. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Jacqueline Murray is professor of history at the University of Guelph and a member of the graduate faculty at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on ideas about gender, sexuality, and the body in medieval society. Katharine Park is Samuel Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. She teaches and writes on the history of medieval and early-modern science and medicine, as well as of gender, sexuality, and the body. Her most recent book, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2006), won the 2007 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize of the History of Science Society, as well as the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association of the History of Medicine. Samantha Riches is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the expression of concepts of gender and monstrosity in the medieval cults of pseudohistorical saints. She has published extensively on understandings of Saint George in late-medieval England, including her book St. George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (2000 and 2005), and is currently researching a monograph on the panoply of meanings associated with the encounter between saints and monsters. She is based at Lancaster University, where she holds the position of Coordinator of the Centre for North-West Regional Studies. She has previously lectured in both history and art history at the Universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, St Andrews, and Huddersfield. Fernando Salmón is professor of the history of science in the medical school at the University of Cantabria, Santander. His research interests include the history of the modern hospital, the patient/physician relationship, and university medicine in the Middle Ages. On this last area he has published on sense perception, madness, and the teaching of medicine in medical scholasticism. He is currently working with Michael R. McVaugh in the historical analysis and critical edition of Arnau de Vilanova’s Repetitio super canonem Vita Brevis (Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia, vol. 14, forthcoming 2010).

index

Abelard, Peter, 62 abortion, 18 – 19, 20 Ademar of Chabannes, 45 adultery, 65 – 6, 67 Agatha, St, 187 age, 142 agriculture, 49 Alan of Lille, 61, 203 – 4 Albert the Great, 166, 169, 172, 174 Alderotti, Taddeo, 88 Ambrose of Milan, 18 anatomical knowledge, 5 – 10, 77 – 82 textbooks, 7 – 10, 82 – 97 women’s anatomy, 145 – 6, 149 – 52 angels, 100, 101, 102, 103 Antichrist, 195 Aquinas, Thomas, 62, 72, 103, 122, 128, 143, 159 Aristotle, 68, 92, 167, 175 Arnold of Verniolles, 71 art see cultural representations of the body astrology, 9, 99 – 100 gestation and, 19 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 11, 18, 63, 67, 70, 102, 104, 106, 143, 169, 171, 190 autopsies (dissection), 6, 36, 83 Avenzoar (Abu Marwan b. Zuhr), 134 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 6, 91, 95, 146 Bacon, Roger, 82 baptism, 21 – 2, 23, 25, 26 Bartholomew, St., 131

Bartholomew the Englishman, 173, 174 beards, 127 beauty, 121 – 4 nature versus art or alliance of art with nature, 128 – 34 sexual difference and, 124 – 8 women’s knowledge of, 134 – 9 Bernard of Gordon, 3, 158 Bieart, Denisette, 25 – 6 Biller, Peter, 153, 167, 175 birth, 17 – 18, 22 – 7, 195 Black Death (plague), 30, 44, 51, 52, 54 – 7 black people, 167 – 9, 173 – 9 bloodletting, 3, 4, 8 Blumenthal, Debra, 176, 177 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 131 Bodel, Jean, 191 Bonaventure, St., 106 bread, 40, 41, 49 breasts, 127, 150 lactation, 74, 167, 169, 175 – 6 Burchard of Worms, 34 burial, 29 – 30, 35 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 35, 36, 182 Caciola, Nancy, 34 Caesarian section, 25, 26, 195 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 28, 29, 31, 34, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 116 Camille, Michael, 99 Canary Islands, 165 – 6, 177

292

Capellanus, Andreas, 125 celibacy, 63, 72 – 4 cemeteries, 21, 51 cereal production, 40, 41, 42 – 3, 46 character, physiognomy and, 142, 159 – 60 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 123 Chauliac, Guy de, 146 – 7 Chester cycle of plays, 102 Chiara of Montefalco, 6 children birth, 17 – 18, 22 – 7, 195 demon parentage, 109, 110 illegitimacy, 65 infant mortality, 57 infanticide, 18 – 19, 20 China, 166 Christianity, 2 – 3, 10 – 11 abortion/infanticide and, 18 – 19 baptism, 21 – 2, 23, 25, 26 beauty and, 125, 128, 129 birth rituals, 23, 27 death and, 27, 28, 29, 33 funerals, 29 – 30, 33 hermaphroditism and, 154 – 5 monastic diet, 40 representations of the body see cultural representations of the body saints martyrs, 3, 11, 182, 197 – 200, 201 – 2 relics, 35, 186 sexuality and, 61 – 75 supernatural and, 101 – 20 Christina of Markyate, 73 circumcision, 22, 142, 160 cities and urban areas, 48 diet in, 49 – 50 disease and, 48, 49, 50 – 1 health care, 51 – 2 plague in, 56 population collapse in 14th – 15th centuries, 52 cleanliness, 127 Cleopatra VII, Queen, 134, 135 Clergue, Pierre, 66 climate, 53, 166 – 9 clitoris, 146 clothing, 142 cross-dressing, 162, 206 – 18 coal, 51 conception, 67 – 8 conjoined twins, 172

INDEX

Constantine the African (Constantinus Africanus), 19, 69, 93 Constantine the Great, 18 contraception, 20, 63 – 4, 66 corpses see dead bodies cosmetics, 127, 129, 136 – 8 criminals, 30, 32, 33 cross-dressing, 162, 206 – 18 Crusades, 53 cultural representations of the body, 181 – 2 body as locus of salvation, 182 – 4 body as metaphor, 200 – 2 body parts and fragments, 186 – 9 limits of the body, 184 – 6 natural and unnatural female body, 189 – 97 penetrated bodies, martyrdom and gender, 197 – 200 Damian, Peter, 71 Daston, Lorraine, 173 dead bodies, 33 – 6 dissection, 6, 36, 83 resurrection, 36 – 7 death, 17 – 18, 27 – 33 miscarriage and stillbirth, 20 – 1, 25 demons, 34, 101 – 20 Denmark, 157 desire, sexuality and, 59 diet see food disability, 158 – 9 diseases, 44 – 8, 156 – 9 customary disease environments, 48 – 52 see also individual conditions dissection, 6, 36, 83 diversity of humankind, 163 – 4 climate and, 166 – 9 monsters (“Plinian races”), 169 – 73 racial differences, 167 – 9, 173 – 9 Edmund of Eynsham, 74 elite culture, 101 Elliott, Dylan, 104 embalming, 35, 36 empiricism, 6 ergotism, 46 erysipelas, 46 executions, 30, 32, 33 eyes, 82 – 3, 85 – 97 fairies, 214 – 18 famine, 42, 45 – 6, 52, 53, 54

INDEX

fetuses, 17, 18 – 22 fire, 49 – 50 fish, 41 food, 39 cities and urban areas, 49 – 50 famine, 42, 45 – 6, 52, 53, 54 increasing population and, 42 – 3 land use and, 40 – 1 monastic, 40 social class and, 43 – 4, 49, 56 fornication, 65 France, Marie de, 214 Francis of Assisi, St., 48 funerals, 29 – 30, 33, 35 Galen of Pergamon, 6, 68, 84, 85, 90 – 1, 93, 94, 134, 146, 155 Geary, Patrick, 17, 27 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 109 geographical knowledge, 164 – 6, 170 Gerald of Wales, 72 Germany, 157 Gerson, Jean, 32 – 3 Giovanni of Milan, 23 – 4 Glaber, Rudolfus, 40, 45 Gottfried of Straßburg, 185 Gowing, Laura, 20 Grassus, Benvenutus, 84 Green, Monica, 136 Gregory III, Pope, 40 Gregory of Tours, 45 Guillerme, André, 54 guns, 54 hair, 127 healing process, 185 – 6 health care see medicine Heldris of Cornwall, 206 Henry of Ghent, 125 hermaphroditism, 153 – 6, 201 Hildebert of Le Mans, 72 Hildegard of Bingen, 128 homosexuality, 60 – 1, 62, 71, 127, 162 human variation see diversity of humankind humours, 5, 93 Ibn al-Jazzar, 134 Ibn Hazm, 125 identity, 204 – 5 Ignatius, St., 201 illegitimacy, 65 illustrated books, 7 – 10, 82 – 97 impotence, 70 – 1

293

infant mortality, 57 infanticide, 18 – 19, 20 Ishaq, Hunain ibn, 82 Isidore of Seville, 169, 170 Islam, 9, 142 beauty and, 125, 137 – 8 contraception and, 64 hermaphroditism and, 153 – 5 sexuality and, 61 d’Arras, Jean, 214 Jerome, Saint, 11, 73 – 4 Jerusalem, 164 Jesus Christ, 10, 74, 190 Joan of Arc, 162 Johannitius, 82 John of Freiburg, 69 John of Salisbury, 200 Jordan, William, 54 Judaism, 142, 173, 174 abortion/infanticide and, 19 anti-Semitism, 178 – 9 birth rituals, 23 circumcision, 22 contraception and, 64 funerals, 30 ideals of beauty and, 125 sexuality and, 61, 70 Karakorum, 171 Keck, David, 101 Kempe, Margery, 69, 73, 117 Kilkenny, Andrew, 184 king’s evil, 47 Knights Templar, 71 lactation, 74, 167, 169, 175 – 6 land use, diet and, 40 – 1 Laqueur, Thomas, 146, 153 lawyers, 5 leprosy, 11, 44, 46 – 8, 157 – 8 limbo, 21 London, 49, 51, 55 Lorris, Guillaume de, 125, 205 Lucretia, 132 Lucy, St., 187 Luqa, Qusta ibn, 134 McCormack, Michael, 42, 47 macrocosm, 3, 99 Maimonides, 61 Maiolus, Saint, 40 maps, 164 – 6, 170 Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, 30

294

Margaret, St., 106 – 7, 114, 120 Marignollis, John de, 171 marking, 141 – 2, 160 – 2 marriage, 63, 212 adultery, 65 – 6, 67 “marriage debt,” 69 – 71, 73 sexual identity and, 206 – 18 Marseilles, 54 martyrs, 3, 11, 182, 197 – 200, 201 – 2 Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, 10, 74 masturbation, 71 – 2 Maurice, St., 167 meat eating, 40 medicine, 3, 5, 11 anatomical knowledge, 5 – 10, 77 – 82 textbooks, 7 – 10, 82 – 97 health care in cities, 51 – 2 Mediterranean Sea, 164 men beauty and, 124 – 8, 138 circumcision, 22, 142, 160 male menstruation, 152 – 3 penises, 186 – 9 see also sex differences between women and men menstruation, 143 – 4 male, 152 – 3 Metrodora, 135 Meun, Jean de, 205, 212 microcosm, 3, 99 midwifery, 23 miscarriage, 20 – 1, 25 monasteries land use, 40 – 1 monastic diet, 40 sexuality and, 73 Mondeville, Henri de, 7 money, 28 Mongol invasions, 11, 166 monsters, 169 – 73 Montanari, Massimo, 43 Moore, R. I., 40, 61 Münzer, Hieronymus, 177 mystics, 182 nature, beauty and, 128 – 34 Neoplatonism, 91 nerves, 83 – 4, 85 nuns, 73 Orthodox church, 61 pain, 3 – 4 self-inflicted, 74, 120 Paris, 50 – 1, 52

INDEX

Park, Katharine, 6, 146, 147, 173 parts of bodies, 186 – 9 relics, 35, 186 Paul of Tarsus, St., 63, 69 Pearson, Kathy, 42 penises, 186 – 9 Peraldus, William, 64 Peter the Chanter, 129 Petrarca, Francesco, 130 phlebotomy (bloodletting), 3, 4, 8 physiognomy, 142, 159 – 60 Pierre of Auvergne, 172 Pizan, Christine de, 130 – 4, 138 – 9 plague, 30, 44, 51, 52, 54 – 7 Planissoles, Béatrice de, 20, 66 Plato, 91 “Plinian races,” 169 – 73 Pliny the Elder, 170 Polo, Marco, 166, 173 Pomata, Gianna, 153 popular culture, 101 population collapse in 14th – 15th centuries, 52 – 7 growth, 42 – 3 priesthood, 61 prostitution, 67 – 8, 70, 129 Pseudo-Methodius, 195 Ptolemy, 164 pygmies, 172 “quickening,” 19 – 20 race, 167 – 9, 173 – 9 “Plinian races,” 169 – 73 Radegund, 74 rape, 63, 68, 73 Regino of Prüm, 29 relics, 35, 186 religion see Christianity; Islam; Judaism representations of the body see cultural representations of the body reproduction, sexuality and, 59, 63 – 4 resurrection, 36 – 7, 187 Rieder, Paula M., 27 Robert of Flamborough, 72 Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 106 St. Anthony’s fire, 44, 45, 46 saints martyrs, 3, 11, 182, 197 – 200, 201 – 2 relics, 35, 186 Salerno, 124, 135 salvation, body as locus of, 182 – 4 Sanders, Paula, 154 scarring, 3

INDEX

Schongauer, Martin, 192, 193 Sebastian, St., 197 – 200 self and society, 203 – 18 self-inflicted pain, 74, 120 Seuse, Heinrich, 201 sex differences between women and men, 59, 60, 142, 143 – 52 beauty and, 124 – 8 cross-dressing, 162, 206 – 18 hermaphroditism, 153 – 6, 201 sexuality, 59 – 75 celibacy, 63, 72 – 4 climate and, 169 demons and, 108 – 10 homosexuality, 60 – 1, 62, 71, 127, 162 martyrdom and, 199 – 200 sexual identity, 206 – 18 Sheela-na-Gig, 190 Siamese twins, 172 slavery, 2, 174 – 6 social class adultery and, 65 – 6 beauty and, 125 – 6 diet and, 43 – 4, 56 plague and, 56 society, self and, 203 – 18 sodomy, 71 Solinus, 170 Spain anti-Semitism in, 178 – 9 slavery in, 175, 177, 178 Steckel, Richard, 43 stillbirth, 20 – 1, 25 supernatural, 99 – 120, 214 – 18 surgery, 3 textbooks, 7 – 10, 82 – 97 Thomas of Cantimpré, 17, 27, 33, 36, 173, 174 Thomas of Chobham, 129 torture, 3 towns see cities and urban areas trade, 49 Trotula of Salerno, 136 Truce of God, 53 tuberculosis, 156 – 7 ugliness, badness and, 123, 124 – 5 unmarried mothers, 20, 25 – 6 urban areas see cities and urban areas uterus, 145, 146, 149, 152

295

vaginas, 145 – 6, 151, 189 – 97 Valencia, 175, 177, 178 Valerius Maximus, 131 Vigevano, Guido da, 7 Viking invasions, 11 Vincent of Beauvais, 173, 174 virginity, 63, 70, 72 – 3, 145 vision, 85 – 97 von Aue, Hartmann, 185 Voragine, Jacobus de, 101, 103 vulvas, 145 – 6, 151, 189 – 97 Wallace, William, 187 warfare, 53 – 4 waste disposal, 50 – 1 water resources, 50, 54 William of Apulia, 124 William of Newburgh, 34, 35 William of Rubruck, 171 wills, 28, 184 wine, 40 Wolfram of Eschenbach, 185 women, 74, 167 – 8 adultery and, 65 – 6, 67 anatomy, 145 – 6, 149 – 52 beauty and nature versus art or alliance of art with nature, 128 – 34 sex differences, 124 – 8 women’s knowledge of, 134 – 9 birth, 17 – 18, 22 – 7, 195 cross-dressing, 162, 206 – 18 female slavery, 2, 175 – 6 lactation, 74, 167, 169, 175 – 6 menstruation, 143 – 4 prostitution, 67 – 8, 70, 129 rape, 63, 68, 73 sexual demons and, 108 – 10 sexual identity, 206 – 18 sexual organs, 145 – 6, 151, 189 – 97 sexual pleasure and, 68 – 70 virginity, 63, 70, 72 – 3, 145 see also sex differences between women and men wounds, 185 – 6 female sex organs as, 190 – 7 York, 52 Ziegler, Joseph, 159 zodiac, 9, 10