Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body

Sarah Alison Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136923500
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

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

Part I
Ovidian Poetry

1
Virgins, Mothers, and Monsters

Ovidian and Pseudo-Ovidian Bodies

An aging Ovid, having failed to persuade Augustus to allow him to return to Rome, sought comfort in the composition of one final poem. He arranged for this poem to be buried with his bones in Tomis with the hope that his physical remains and this final addition to his literary corpus might eventually make their way back to his motherland. We are told as much in the prose accessus of this Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman), which was preserved in an ivory capsule, “consumed by no rot,” and discovered over a thousand years after Ovid’s death.¹ The poem was sent to Constantinople where it was translated and recognized as the last work of the great poet whose bones, by that time, had long since dissolved into dust.² Ovid had foretold as much in the closing lines of his Metamorphoses—that his poetry would long outlast his body.³ Indeed, the final word of the poem, vivam (“I will live”), demonstrates Ovid’s faith in the words he gives to Pythagoras, his philosopher of change: omnia mutantur, nihil interit (“all things change, nothing dies”).⁴ That Ovid’s fleshy corpus would become his textual corpus is the last transformation promised in the Metamorphoses.⁵ The accessus of De vetula thus announces two provenances; the story of this “final text” of the Ovidian corpus is inextricable from the story of Ovid’s body. It is fitting, then, that this final literary incarnation, which is everywhere about the vicissitudes of corporeal boundaries, survives intact while Ovid’s absent body serves as a testament to the exigencies of old age, death, and decay. These are exigencies to which the eponymous vetula and the author himself are vulnerable.

Ralph Hexter has characterized the pseudo-Ovidiana of the high Middle Ages as supplements or grafts onto Ovid’s corpus, understood both as his literary body of work and the body of the poet himself, especially in those instances where Ovid himself appears as an embodied subject in these texts (as in De vetula and Ovid’s medieval biographies).⁶ Read as an appendage to the medieval Ovid’s body, De vetula is not, as the accessus announces, the final, definitively bounded incarnation of the poet, for it is a testament— together with other pseudo-Ovidiana—to the permeability of that body.⁷ Ovid’s corpus, both body and text (De vetula does not allow the two to be put asunder) tends to spill from its proper boundaries.⁸ In this regard, Ovid’s body is not so different from the monstrous bodies that populate De vetula itself: it functions as a semantic system and a corporeal system, occupying an unsteady position where the two overlap. The “Ovid” who appears in De vetula—the poetic corpus within the autobiographical text— exemplifies this instability as he himself is a reader of unstable bodies, and by way of that reading, undergoes his own series of transformations.⁹

As the synopsis of this thirteenth-century Pseudo-Ovidian poem given in the accessus makes clear, De vetula is about change, and specifically about how changing bodies change categories of knowledge: the first book tells of “Ovid’s” way of life while he was giving himself over to love (dum vacaret amori); the second book reveals why he changed (mutavit) that way of life; and the third describes to what sort of life he changed (mutavit).¹⁰ The poem is entitled De vetula, we are told, “because an old woman [vetula] was the cause by which he changed [mutaverit] his way of living.”¹¹ The accessus is reticent, however, about the nature of the event that effected this change, namely “Ovid’s” experience of the horrific transformation of a female body. He is led into a darkened room where he believed a beautiful virgin awaited him, her body a study in order and containment. He embraces the figure reclining on the couch and discovers in his arms a revolting old woman, her body a monstrously ill-proportioned, overflowing jumble of parts. Like Metamorphoses, De vetula is about changing bodies, but here one of those bodies belongs to “Ovid” himself, who emerges from this encounter with corporeal flux a reshaped embodied subject.¹²

As a narrator well versed in the language of metamorphosis, “Ovid” experiences as transformation what was, properly speaking, a case of mistaken identity: “I have sung of forms changed into new bodies,” he cries, “and no change more amazing than that one is to be found there [i.e. in Metamorphoses].”¹³ Thus, De vetula is also about reading and misreading the vicissitudes of body boundaries. The misreading of a changed body changes the semiotic valences of bodies: after the traumatic transformation of the vetula, “Ovid” the poet-lover becomes “Ovid” the continent philosopher, a change that reshapes the epistemological and ontological boundaries that structure his world. The sub-title that appears in some manuscripts, De mutatione vitae, signals this close relationship between the puella’s transformation into an old woman and the narrator’s own metamorphosis.¹⁴

As the accessus reminds its readers, the body does not endure. But De vetula also bears witness to the intransigence of body boundaries, not so much as containers of flesh and blood, but as discursive entities, objects of discursive inscription that in turn shape discursive systems. When “Ovid” abandons his amorous pursuits and dedicates himself to philosophy, science, and religion, he cannot cast these new interests as abstract refuges from the body. Rather, he expands the significance of corporeal boundaries beyond the economies of individual bodies, a move that serves to highlight the discursivity of bodies characterized as conglomerations of erotic or repulsive flesh. The body’s physical features, organ systems, and humors become to the poet, now immersed in natural philosophy, readable blueprints that represent the order of the universe. This semiotic value of the body, however, exists in an uneasy relationship with the poet’s awareness that some bodies, because they fall short of, exceed, or confuse their proper boundaries, trouble this semiotics. They are instances of disorder in the very universe whose order is reflected by the microcosm of the human body, and thereby destabilize the very categories of knowledge that designate the body as a sign system. The newly Christian “Ovid,” having fled the troublesome instability of flesh, finds this instability extended beyond the economies of individual bodies into the Christian doctrines of the trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection of the flesh. Monstrous bodies manage to haunt those individuals and institutions that mark them as such. This poem, then, illustrates the discursive plasticity of the body, the way it makes meaning in different discourses: scholastic exposition, autobiography, courtship narrative, natural philosophy, and Christian prayer—all of these invest “Ovid” with a semiotics of corporeality. This poem also illustrates the body’s resistance to discursive systems that would locate corporeal slipperiness in old, female flesh in order to stabilize those boundaries that delineate the erotic from the repulsive, the virgin from the vetula, the natural and ordered from the monstrous.

That virgin into vetula is the climactic body change that turns “Ovid” away from erotics suggests that the old woman’s monstrosity issues from an association between the reproductive life cycle—embodied in the instability of female corporeality—and mortality. This is among the hypotheses I argue in this chapter by examining the representation of several bodies in De vetula (among them, a semivir [half-man], a puella [girl], a vetula [old woman], the body microcosm, and the Virgin Mary), the affective and epistemological valences that the author locates in the boundaries of those bodies, and the specific function of female corporeality in shaping the discursive boundaries trespassed by the monstrous. The analysis of the function of body boundaries in the poem is crucial for appreciating it as a cohesive text, and for understanding how it draws from the Ovidian corpus which also demonstrates a keen interest in bodies, their beauty and repulsiveness, their transformations, and the questions about identity and the nature of the universe that arise when the contours of the body change. Ovid and “Ovid” both convey the affective response that body contours elicit, particularly when they prove to be erotically, wondrously, or horrifically unstable. Both authors also explore how the body, volatile as it may prove to be, produces, substantiates, and makes intelligible the perceptible and imperceptible world. These thematic convergences, together with several specific references to Ovid’s works throughout De vetula, indicate that “Ovid” was a keen reader of his namesake, and this chapter also analyzes how “Ovid” reads (and mis-reads) bodies, what these readings suggest about Ovid’s medieval corpus (in Ralph Hexter’s ambivalent sense). It also explores how this medieval Ovid—an assemblage of classical and medieval models of corporeal semiotics—may himself be the monstrous creature who haunts the hexameters of De vetula. It should be stressed, however, that the many backward glances to the literary corpus of the Augustan poet in this chapter are not meant to detract from “Ovid’s” own poetic voice, which merits examination not simply for its ventriloquism, but for its own contribution to the literary history of the body.¹⁵

PART 1 THE MONSTROUS HALF-MAN

Before narrating the specifics circumstances under which he changed, Ovid confesses that a strong desire for the female sex (femineus sexus) had always gripped him, and, moreover, that, “without it [the female sex], I used to think that no man could live.”¹⁶ In order to illustrate just how changed a man he has become, he analyzes his valuation of a certain monstrous creature prior to and after his change, namely, the half-man (semivir): “I used to praise only the man to whom nature had given power [vis], so that as many times as he could wish, he would be able to know a girlfriend [cognoscere amicam]. But now, I praise half-men.”¹⁷ He is fairly explicit about whom he means to indicate with the term semivir. He is a man whom “nature has denied” the power (vires) to have intercourse, and, at least initially, his examples of half-men are exclusively mechanical: men who have been castrated by jealous husbands, or men for whom some physical abnormality has made intercourse impossible or prohibitively painful, those, for example, who have suffered hernias.¹⁸ Their bodies prevent them from doing the deed.¹⁹

This identification of the semivir in terms of his physical status begins to falter as “Ovid” becomes increasingly less sure of precisely what the semivir is, and concordantly, less sure of his praiseworthiness. He first begins to wonder whether or not it is proper to say that he praises istos semiviros, “for there is doubt whether the semivir is a he [iste] or a she [ista].”²⁰ The semivir, he reasons, cannot be a “she” because there is no vagina (vulva). Yet the semivir cannot be a “he” because of the “grave defect” (talis defectus) that “unmans” (devirat) him.²¹ “Ovid” then proceeds to rule out further possibilities through the sort of academic, deductive reasoning that he will later employ at length in the philosophical ruminations of Book three. The semivir cannot be “neuter” (neutrum) because every animal (which, of course, is neuter in the Latin, animal) must be either a “he” or “she;” yet there is doubt whether or not the semivir can be considered an animal at all because all animals, the poet is sure, have a sex. After a lengthy passage on why the semivir cannot be a plant, “Ovid” summarizes all that he has thus far deduced about this troubling creature whom he claims to praise so highly:

What, then, is the eunuch [eunuchus], since it is not a woman, nor a man, nor an animal, nor a plant? It is not without life. Therefore, what can it be? It can be nothing but a monster [monstrum].²²

As “a boundary or category violation,” the eunuch epitomizes the monster as it was characterized by twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers, academic and literary.²³ This period witnessed an increasing fascination (both positive and negative) with the monstrous, those “mixed things with no names.”²⁴ “Ovid” cannot categorize the semivir, and therefore defines him as a monstrum, but, in an exercise characteristic of medieval scholasticism, he proceeds to describe at great length the many categories of knowledge which the semivir’s monstrosity violates. He is a grammatical monster (monstrum grammatice), a taxonomical monster (quod non cadit in genus et quod / Non cadit in speciem), a rhetorical monster (monstrum rhetorice), a mathematical monster (apud matheses indemonstrabilie monstrum), a monster of nature (monstrum nature), a moral monster (monstrum mor...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Ovidian Poetry
• Part II Gynecology
• Part III Mystical Theology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index