Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

by Sarah Alison Miller

The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages―the female body―exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman) ; a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women) , and Julian of Norwich’s Showings . Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples with the monster’s semantic flexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to define. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form it is a body out of bounds.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

226 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 2010

Reviews

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miller offers a gender-sensitive reading to narratives of monsters from the medieval world. A scholarly study, this book will give the reader a view of several medieval documents that make clear the patriarchal bias against women's bodies that continue to exert an influence despite the elapsed centuries. More comments may be found at: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.