Gender and Holiness

Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe

Sam Riches, Sarah Salih

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134514885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This collection brings together two flourishing areas of medieval scholarship: gender and religion. It examines gender-specific religious practices and contends that the pursuit of holiness can destabilise binary gender itself. Though saints may be classified as masculine or feminine, holiness may also cut across gender divisions and demand a break from normally gendered behaviour. This work of interdisciplinary cultural history includes contributions from historians, art historians and literary critics and will be of interest not only to medievalists, but also to students of religion and gender in any period.

1 ‘The law of sin that is in my members’

The problem of male embodiment

Jacqueline Murray

But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members.

(Romans 7:23)

The study of the human body in the Middle Ages has received increased attention in recent years. This is not surprising in light of contemporary society’s preoccupation with sexuality and identity and the challenges that have been posed to traditional sexual mores. In the contemporary world, moreover, there are shifts and fissures in our understanding of phenomena previously understood to be essential and immutable, so that even something popularly thought to be stable, such as the sexed body, has come under new scrutiny in light of the experiences of transsexual and transgendered persons. Certainly, the notion of the instability of the body meshes nicely with the theory of social construction, even as it troubles those with faith-based concerns about the complex relationship between embodiment, morality and holiness.

For medieval people, too, the relationship between the body and holiness was tense, indeed, fraught, as they sought to reconcile the inherent goodness of the body, as exemplified in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the Body, with the antimaterialist critique proffered by dualism.¹ For the average member of the laity, the secular sexual practices of daily life, focused around love, sexual passion and the generation of children, would have seemed far removed, indeed, from the religious discourses of bodily control.² Moreover, theological discussions of embodiment tended to focus on ‘the flesh’, an approach to human embodiment that somehow appears to be gender-neutral. This medieval tendency to discuss the body as if it were human and unsexed, or to assume the male body as the universal norm, has served ironically to obscure male as much as female embodiment. Furthermore, this perspective is still found in modern discussions of the body and it continues to obfuscate the importance of sex difference in embodiment.³

In recent years, the study of the body has received a great deal of attention from scholars, in particular from medievalists.⁴ The dramatic, indeed revolutionary, influence of feminist scholarship underlies most of these studies, although the influence of postmodern theory is equally as evident in many approaches to the study of the body. This is particularly true for literary studies, which have tended to distance us from real human bodies by focusing on bodies as texts and texts as bodies.⁵ Furthermore, our contemporary feminist perspective, while highlighting how medieval thought constructed women as Other, is nevertheless complicit in scholarship’s perpetuation of women as the marked category. A cursory glance at research into medieval gender and sexuality would, until very recently, have left the overwhelming impression that only women had gender and only women had bodies. This is the case not only for avowedly feminist studies but also underlies the work of scholars who try to approach questions of embodiment from a gender-neutral perspective.⁶

Indeed, recent studies of the body have tended to reinforce the medieval notion that women had specific, sexed, marked bodies whereas men had human bodies. For example, even the brilliant insights of Caroline Walker Bynum, in her reply to Leo Steinberg’s study of The Sexuality of Christ, tend to obscure men’s bodies by stressing the humanness of Christ’s embodiment and minimising the significance of the sexed nature of that body.⁷ At least, by focusing on the genitals, Steinberg tried to direct our attention to the maleness of Christ’s body.⁸

Thus, many scholars’ well-intentioned and necessary desire to integrate women into the category of humanity has served to perpetuate the medieval tendency to naturalise and universalise bodies as ‘flesh’, ‘the body’ or ‘the human body’ and consequently to obscure the sexual specificity of embodiment.⁹ It is necessary, then, to interrogate the body from a more critical and gendered perspective. Indeed, an examination of some of the questions surrounding the male body in the Middle Ages highlights the necessity of re-evaluating our understanding of male embodiment and exposes the dissonance between theoretical discussions and men’s lived experience. It is this ‘lived experience’ which has eluded both medieval commentators and modern observers of masculine embodiment. For both the medieval and the modern observer, text separates experience from perception of experience. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways to approach problems and texts about bodies. One is the literary and metaphorical ‘reading of the body’, the other is a more historical analysis that consciously keeps in the forefront the people behind the text: the real people who experienced real bodies. Two examples can serve to illustrate the differences between these two equally useful approaches.

With the recent interest in the study of men and masculinity, medievalists have once again focused on the remarkable life of Abelard. He is an ideal subject for an examination of the meaning of masculinity, given his public and dramatic emasculation and his penchant for writing about it. For a number of scholars, Abelard’s castration is a metaphor for his intellectual prowess. His reassertion of his intellectual superiority subsequent to his castration is read as a successful ‘remasculinization’,¹⁰ just as his celebration of his sexual adventures with Heloise reinforced his masculine virility despite his physical emasculation.¹¹ Other scholars have re-examined Abelard from a more historical perspective, for example, by seeking to understand the physical consequences and social liabilities which confronted Abelard as a result of his castration.¹² My own research asks how Abelard, as a man, made sense of his experience.¹³ All these interpretations take the same texts as their starting point. What varies widely is the perspective, methodology and intention. Some authors are more concerned with the text, others with attempting to reconstruct the experience behind the text.

A similar bifurcation is apparent in a number of recent studies on the medieval understanding of nocturnal emissions. This was an area of male experience that received attention from medieval monastic and ascetic writers, along with theologians and moralists. Some research has focused on how the discourse surrounding nocturnal emissions and its moral evaluation can be understood to symbolise or mirror changing social values. For example, the differing interpretations of the polluting effect of emissions have been interpreted as reflecting the Church’s changing circumstances, from persecuted community to official religion,¹⁴ or to indicate the evolving understanding of power and who could be trusted to rule.¹⁵ A psychological approach to nocturnal emissions has examined how the moral responsibility for emissions shifted gradually from men and their sexual fantasies to demons who tricked them. In the process, clerical sexual anxiety is revealed.¹⁶ My own historical approach to the problem examines how the concern about bodily emissions was projected by the clergy onto laymen, and even women and young boys, reflecting an increasing concern about the sexuality of the laity.¹⁷

The examples of Abelard’s castration and of nocturnal emissions indicate how there are various approaches to the study of embodiment. Some, more abstract and metaphorical, focus on the internal dynamics of the text and its meaning. The other, historical, approach seeks to place texts in their social context and not to lose sight of the real people and real bodies behind the texts. It is understanding these historical circumstances and people, however imperfectly reflected in the texts interposed between then and now, that is the intent of this exploration of the interplay between male embodiment and the pursuit of sanctity. Even though medieval writers did not often articulate this interplay explicitly, it nevertheless informs obliquely much that men wrote about themselves and others.

Medieval theological writers were, for the most part, concerned about women’s bodies. This was due to many of the attitudes and values that were incorporated into Christian teaching from secular Roman society and Jewish law. Thus, writers were preoccupied with issues pertaining to women’s reproductive capacity, with menstruation, lactation and childbirth, with questions of blood taboos and ritual purity, and with the appropriate regulations and prohibitions that should be placed on women in order that their bodies neither harm men nor pollute sacred space.

Formally, at least, men’s sexed bodies did not receive equivalent attention.¹⁸ For the Middle Ages, this should not surprise us given some modern scholars’ conclusions that masculinity is an essentially negative identity, in part ‘because it is grounded in male body alienation’.¹⁹ Among the platitudes and conventional affirmations about the body as the temple of the lord,²⁰ that believers are the body of Christ,²¹ and the admonitions to keep the body chaste, there is minimal discussion about a body that is specifically sexed male and explicitly differentiated from either human or female bodies. Yet there were many problematic aspects of the male body that should have received closer examination. Just as women’s bodies threatened notions of purity and sanctity, so, too, men’s bodies challenged notions such as the primacy of reason, control of the flesh, and masculine superiority in creation. The consequence was that, cushioned among the many assertions of masculine superiority, especially with regard to the control of the flesh, there are also faint echoes of men’s dis-ease with their own bodies and the chasm that separated their own lived experience of a male body from the ideal of chastity and bodily control that was established as an essential aspect for salvation.

This dis-ease can be identified as early as Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which the apostle laments: ‘But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members.’²² This tension, expressed so early on in Christian history, endured through the medieval discussions of the body and sexuality. While, again formally, Church Fathers and theologians from Jerome and Augustine through to Aquinas all affirmed the inherent dignity and goodness of the body, as exemplified in the doctrines of the Incarnation and Resurrection, nevertheless, they had difficulty giving the body more than a nod of approval. Dualism, both neoplatonic and gnostic, exercised great influence on a religion that maintained the inextricable integration of body and soul, while still denigrating the body and the mortal dangers inherent in embodiment.

The focus of medieval men’s dis-ease with their bodies is apparent in discussions of gluttony and drunkenness, condemnations of the pleasures of all five senses, but most of all in discussions of sexuality and the sin of lust. There were a number of tensions inherent in the Church’s insistence on chastity and its decided preference for virginity. But beyond this, and even more difficult, were the constant admonitions that the control of the flesh, an essential characteristic of holiness, meant the eradication of desire and the ‘movements of the flesh’. This requirement put an almost insurmountable weight on the shoulders of men, especially those who sought assiduously to put precepts into practice. It was they who were indeed ‘at war with their members’.

The anxiety occasioned by movements of the flesh is wonderfully illustrated by two early thirteenth-century writers, Jacques de Vitry and Caesarius of Heisterbach. Both men used exempla and retold popular stories to enliven their moral exhortations; in the process they have much to say about how men’s bodily movements and seminal emissions were perceived. In one of his sermons, Jacques de Vitry told the story of a priest who considered a nocturnal emission to be a worse sin than fornication. When one of his parishioners confessed that he had been polluted in his sleep, the priest asked why he had not purged himself of the wicked humours by going to a prostitute rather than incurring such a sin.²³On the surface, Jacques’s goal was to rectify what he viewed to be an erroneous imbalance in the evaluation of the relative seriousness of sins. Nevertheless, this little story shows that the belief that nocturnal emissions were more serious for a man than was fornication with a prostitute resonated sufficiently, whether among the clergy or the laity, for Jacques to believe that he could deploy the exemplum effectively in a sermon.²⁴

Caesarius of Heisterbach was not so lenient in his Dialogus miraculorum. Lest any man think that nocturnal emissions were a private matter and a secret sin, Caesarius recounts how men who experienced such emissions could be publicly exposed. A monk named Monoldus had the temerity to enter a church without having confessed and cleansed himself of his nocturnal pollution. A demon immediately recognised the monk’s impure state and denounced him.²⁵ Even worse, however, than the fear of the exposure of a secret sin, were the potential negative supernatural ramifications of ‘wasted seed’ from spontaneous or nocturnal emissions and from masturbation. Caesarius reports that: ‘demons collect all wasted seed, and from it fashion for themselves human bodies, both of men and women, in which they become tangible and visible to men’.²⁶ While the secretions of women’s bodies might pollute sacred space or even, according to some observe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Gender and holiness
• 1 ‘The law of sin that is in my members’
• 2 The role of patronage and audience in the cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch
• 3 Virginal effects
• 4 Pain, torture and death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea
• 5 St George as a male virgin martyr
• 6 Becoming a virgin king
• 7 Female piety and impiety
• 8 Staging conversion
• 9 Gendering charity in medieval hagiography
• 10 Ecce Homo
• Bibliography