Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body out of Bounds Sarah Alison Miller a Dissertation Submitted

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Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body out of Bounds Sarah Alison Miller a Dissertation Submitted View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body Out of Bounds Sarah Alison Miller A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Eric S. Downing Maura K. Lafferty Sharon L. James Brooke Holmes Megan M. Matchinske © 2008 Sarah Alison Miller ii Abstract Sarah Alison Miller Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Late-Medieval Readings of the Female Body Out of Bounds (Under the Direction of Eric S. Downing and Maura K. Lafferty) This dissertation examines representations of female corporeality in three late-medieval texts: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman ); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albertus Magnus, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women ); and Julian of Norwich’s Showings , an autobiographical account of visions she experienced during an illness in 1373. These texts present female bodies whose anatomical structures and physiological processes mark them unstable, permeable, and overflowing – attributes associated with medieval monstrosity. These bodies not only exceed their own physical borders, but vex the ontological and epistemological boundaries that discursively structure the texts themselves. Chapter One considers how the transformation of a virgin into the eponymous old woman forces the poet of De vetula to confront the slipperiness between the erotized and repulsive female body. I also show how the poet’s conversion to philosophy and Christianity does not free him from the troubling significance of corporeal instability, now extended beyond the economies of individual bodies to the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation, and resurrection of the body. Chapter Two analyzes how the iii gynecology and natural philosophy of De secretis mulierum construct a leaky, contaminating female body whose superfluities threaten the integrity of proximate bodies with wounds, illness, and deformity. Although this text’s disclosure of women’s secrets depends on the legibility of the female body, I contend that the instability of female corporeality and the ambiguity of its signs trouble the text’s claim over this semantic field. Chapter Three demonstrates how Julian’s Showings recasts the unbounded female body by developing a theology of Christ’s maternity predicated on the permeability of his flesh. I show how the perforated surfaces, uncontrollable flows, and overlapping enclosures of Christ’s body are precisely what make possible communion between humanity and divinity. This dissertation measures how these texts negotiate classical and medieval representations of female corporeality germane to their particular discursive traditions – that is, of Ovidian bodies, medicalized bodies, and mystical bodies. I also explore how the female body elicits both desire and disgust, and posit that an association between the reproductive female body, the monster, and the corpse invites these responses. iv To Mom, Dad, Mary, Aaron, and Kamila v Table of Contents Introduction: Crossing Boundaries......................................................................................1 Chapter One: Stable and Unstable Body Boundaries in Pseudo-Ovid’s De Vetula ..........21 Part One: The Monstrous Semivir ..........................................................................27 Part Two: Virgin into Vetula ..................................................................................34 The virgin body: order and moderation...............................................34 The vetula ’s body: flux and filth..........................................................39 Part Three: Ovidian Bodies in De Vetula ..............................................................49 Monstrous metamorphosis: two maternal bodies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses ....................................................................49 Dipsas and her ilk.................................................................................55 Monstrous didacticism: the double Ovid and disordered female bodies in Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris ..........................59 Part Four: The Aged Puella and “Ovid’s” Mixed Thanks.....................................72 Part Five: Cosmic Body Boundaries......................................................................84 Part Six: Myrrha and Mary: Models of Maternal Metamorphosis........................94 Chapter Two: Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum : Decoding the Female Body.......................................................................101 Part One: Reading Secrets...................................................................................101 Part Two: The Semiotics of Virginity..................................................................114 Spiritual signs / corporeal signs.........................................................116 Virgin morphologies..........................................................................124 vi Part Three: Blood: Hymeneal, Seminal, Menstrual.............................................144 Menstrual fluid bound and unbound..................................................153 Part Four: The Embryology of Monsters.............................................................162 Chapter Three: Julian of Norwich’s Showings : The Permeable Body of Christ.............171 Part One: Textual Bodies / Compassionate Bodies.............................................179 Part Two: Compassionate Illness.........................................................................192 Part Three: Blood, Dryness, and Desire...............................................................207 Part Four: Christ’s Maternal Body: Wounds, Breasts, Womb.............................228 Part Five: A Theology of Breaches and Enclosures............................................240 Part Six: Boundaries of the Anchorhold..............................................................249 Bibliography....................................................................................................................261 vii Introduction: Crossing Boundaries Virgins, Mothers, Monsters is about bodies that exceed their proper physical boundaries and thereby trouble the conceptual boundaries according to which texts represent and find meaning in corporeality. Drawing from Aristotle’s Physics , the fourteenth-century treatise on human generation, De secretis mulierum , defines monsters as “those individuals of a certain species which in a certain part of their body are outside the bounds of the common course of the nature of the species [ cursum communem illius speciei excedunt ].” 1 This dissertation considers how the monster is “out of bounds” in a dual sense – because its corporeal excesses, deficiencies and deformities violate the boundaries of the proper human form and because these abnormalities violate the epistemological and ontological categories whose boundaries structure the very ideologies from which the monster is born. 2 But the monster’s predilection to exceed established categories of meaning far from renders it meaningless; indeed, the monster is a meaning-laden creature, this meaningfulness being rooted in its very name: the monster, monstrum , is etymologically the thing that signs, that shows, that reveals (from the Latin, 1 DSM 6; Lemay (1992), 112. Unde sciendum quod monstra sive peccata nature vocantur individua alicuius speciei quae in aliqua parte corporis cursum communem illius speciei excedunt . See Aristotle, Phys. II, 8; 199a 32. 2 Bynum (2001), 117. See also Cohen (1996): “This refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’ is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6). monstrare ).3 The monster therefore enmeshes body and text by corporealizing signs to become books of flesh, so to speak, whose meaning is not their own, but the one readers find there. Jeffrey Cohen has suggested that monsters invite a modus legendi , “a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender.” 4 Thus the medieval monster acts as text for medieval readers, but because it is a text whose meaning is constructed and ascertained by medieval ideological systems, it also becomes a text in which the processes of those very ideological systems can be read. Virgins, Mothers, Monsters aims to uncover in monstrous bodies the process whereby specific medieval ideologies designate and recuperate monstrous signs, thereby solidifying the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural while also betraying the contingency of these categories. In other words, this dissertation is about reading late-medieval literary representations of monstrous bodies, and it is about reading those representations of bodies as acts of reading performed by the representatives in each text invested with the power to decipher bodies “out of bounds.” The study of medieval monstrosity is now being recognized as a rich point of entry into matters of identity, corporeality, race, religion, and gender because the monster’s body is not simply peripheral, but “constitutive,” that is, “producing the 3 See Cohen
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