Abstract
As a good amount of academic scholarship in the field of medieval studies has shown, the Middle Ages was a time in which the body was an important site of spiritual, scientific, philosophical, and epistemological questioning. Scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have documented the increased emphasis on the intersection of the spiritual and the bodily in the later medieval periods, an emphasis Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury term “an incarnational aesthetic.”1 This incarnational aesthetic, which informed the spiritual and secular lives of medieval people, has also governed the last decade of medieval scholarship, especially with contemporary theories of identity formation, including feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, gaining widespread use. More recently, medieval scholars have considered disability theory in their analyses of the connections between bodily difference and the formation of cultural, ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities.2 However, no one study succeeds in both combining disability studies with post-structuralist interrogations of the relationship between the body and culture and directly considering how discourses on the female body intersect with those on impairment.
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Notes
Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, eds. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), viii. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Stephen F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-c.1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Edna Edith Sayers (formerly Lois Bragg), Oedipus borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2004); and Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002): 351–82 and Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
Stephen F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-c.1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Edna Edith Sayers (formerly Lois Bragg), Oedipus borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2004)
Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002): 351–82 and Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
See Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
For more on disability studies, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and “What Is Disability Studies?” PMLA 120:2 (2005): 518–22
Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002)
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder discuss disability in a specifically literary sense in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
Erving Goffman Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; reprint London: Ark, 1984).
Susan Wendall, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 66.
“Since bodily infirmity is sometimes caused by sin, the Lord saying to the sick man whom he had healed: ‘Go and sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee’ (John 5:14), we declare in the present decree and strictly command that when physicians of the body are called to the bedside of the sick, before all else they admonish them to call for the physician of souls, so that after spiritual health has been restored to them, the application of bodily medicine may be of greater benefit, for the cause being removed, the effect will pass away.” Quoted in “The Medieval Catholic Tradition,” Darrel W. Amundsen, in Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, eds. Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 88–9.
I borrow this phrase from Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32.
Earlier works that emphasize sinfulness and bodily difference in the medieval period include Saul Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974)
Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1987).
Nancy Siraisi notes that “by the middle years of the twelfth century, the process that provided western European medicine with a rich, specialized literature, renowned centers of learning, and flourishing tradition of practice […] was already well advanced. The essential groundwork for late medieval and Renaissance medical culture had already been laid.” Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 16.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 136.
Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 25
Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, “Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women With Disabilities: The Example of Women and Literature,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 249.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 16.
These views do not suggest a single tradition but a constellation of notions regarding the female body. See Hippocrates, On Intercourse and Pregnancy: An English Translation of On Semen and the Development of the Child, trans. Tage U.H. Ellinger (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952); Soranus, Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956); and Claudius Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. Arthur John Block (London: Heinemann, 1963). See also Monica Green’s introduction in The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. by Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–62; and Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Soranus, Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956)
Claudius Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. Arthur John Block (London: Heinemann, 1963)
See also Monica Green’s introduction in The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. by Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–62
Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
See, for example, Galen, “On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body,” in Woman Defamed, Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 41[41–2].
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), p. 186.
Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 2.
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 9. See also Cadden’s later essay, “Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, eds. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 51–80.
See also Cadden’s later essay, “Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, eds. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 51–80.
Monica Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History: Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Philip M. Soergel, (AMS Press, 2005), pp. 1–46; and Helen King, “The Mathematics of Sex: One to Two, or Two to One?,” ed. Philip M. Soergel, pp. 47–58.
For centuries, readers attributed the Trotula to an eleventh-century woman named Trotula from Salerno Italy. The text, which has circulated in many forms, took the woman’s name as its title. Some scholars doubt it is female-authored; see especially John F. Benton’s “Trotula, Women’s Problems, and the Professionalization of Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 30–53. Benton argues a group of men authored the text. Beryl Rowland translated one manuscript, MS Sloane 2463, arguing that it represents the Latin Trotula that would have been read by a medieval audience, but Rowland does not reference other versions of the text. Monica Green classifies Rowland’s source as another gynecological text, not the source of the Trotula. In all, Green finds five versions of the Latin Trotula. The Trotula itself is divided into three books: “Book on the Conditions of Women,” “On Treatments for Women,” and “On Women’s Cosmetics,” each of which has roots in classical medical theories, but to differing degrees. See Beryl Rowland, Medieval Women’s Guide to Health (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981)
Monica Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West (Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: St. Edmundsbury, 2000).
Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 47.
Monica Green, “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Physiology and Disease through the Early Middle Ages,” doctoral disseration, Princeton University, 1985.
St. Jerome, “Adversus Jovinianum,” in The Principal Works of St. Jerome: Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Oxford: James Parker, 1893); and St. Augustine, De Bono Conjugali, De Sancta Virginitate, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Augustine, De Bono Conjugali, De Sancta Virginitate, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Monica Green finds references to a woman’s “flowers” in several trans-lations of the Trotula, indicating that “flowers” was most likely a vernacular term for menstruation. She writes, “[T]he term ‘flower’ (flos) had been used systematically throughout the Treatise on the Diseases of Women (the ‘rough draft’ of Conditions of Women, which had employed frequent colloquialisms), and at least fourteen of the twenty-two different vernacular translations of the Trotula (including Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, and Italian) employ the equivalent of ‘flowers’ when translating the Latin menses“ (p. 21). Hildegard of Bingen also makes reference to a woman’s flowers in Causae et Curae, ed. Paul Kaiser (Basel: Baler Hildegard-Geselleschaft, 1980), p. 105.
Garland Thomson, “Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure,” in Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 281 [279–91].
It should be noted that Butler’s Bodies That Matter explores the compulsory production of the body’s materiality, an insight I embrace throughout this project. Despite the work scholarship like Butler’s does to rehabilitate notions of bodily difference, I must acknowledge, along with Wendell and Garland Thomson, that such an approach often obscures or ignores the physical suffering of a bodily difference like disability. I hope to expose not only the cultural fictions that produce “the body” as a construct, but also highlight the very material experiences of one whose Otherness is embodied. In other words, I seek to bring the weightiness of the body back to “the body.” See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Garland Thomson, “Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: Feminist Disability Studies,” in Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers for Women and Girls With Disabilities (Washington, DC: Center for Women Policy Studies, 2001), pp. 1–24.
Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).
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© 2010 Tory Vandeventer Pearman
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Pearman, T.V. (2010). Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and the Disabled Female Body. In: Women and Disability in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117563_1
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