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That a child shares its mother’s blood is made vividly clear in birth: the umbilical cord oVers striking evidence that the maternal relationship is a blood relationship. The blood of parturition further demonstrates a child’s origins in its mother’s blood, though the evidence of birth is often unacknowledged in symbolic representations of blood relationships, as anthropologist Brigitta Hanser-Schäublin emphasizes: A Xow of blood accompanies the delivery of the baby which is covered with its mother’s Xuids. It is followed by the afterbirth which is lifeless. In [modern] Western culture blood group factors give the impression that a child inherits its blood from either its father or its mother. But these factors blur the fact that a baby’s blood as Xuid originates exclusively from its mother.1 Medieval texts do not describe heredity in terms of blood group factors, though they do of course represent paternal relationships in terms of blood, as I have discussed in previous chapters. The relationship between mother and child was also explained in terms of blood: according to Pseudo-Albertus, who wrote in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century , both father’s blood (in the form of semen) and mother’s blood (in the form of menses) are necessary for conception: When a woman is having sexual intercourse with a man she releases her menses at the same time that the man releases sperm, and both seeds enter the vulva (vagina) simultaneously and are mixed together, and then the woman conceives. Conception is said to take place, therefore, when the two seeds are received in the womb in a place that nature has chosen. And after these seeds are received, the womb closes up like a purse on every side, so that nothing can fall out of it. After this happens, the woman no longer menstruates.2 Albert the Great, the Pseudo-Albert’s teacher, oVered a more Aristotelian view of conception: when he deWned the generative properties of male 5 The Scene of Parturition and female seed, he described the active faculty of the male and the passive faculty of the female.3 The twelfth-century nun Hildegard of Bingen oVered a somewhat diVerent explanation of male and female roles in generation in her medical writings, and one that contradicted classical ideas about conception. Whereas Hildegard attributed seed only to the male, she claimed that the woman’s matter joined itself to the man’s seed, warming it and giving it form. However, like other medieval thinkers, Hildegard believed that the strength of the man’s semen determined the sex of the child.4 Medical or scientiWc models of conception are not necessarily invoked in the representations of heredity in stories like Le roman du comte d’Anjou or in The Man of Law’s Tale. But these texts do oVer a representation of a model of generation that valorizes the mother as a partner in generation: the English versions of the monstrous birth story that recount the son’s resemblance to his mother suggest that the mother oVers a signiWcant contribution to his conception. So while narratives about sacriWce valorize paternity in terms of the blood a child shares with its father, and while medical models of reproduction identify the mother’s blood as necessary for conception, but inferior to the father’s engendering seed, medieval Wctions about monstrous conceptions recognize a mother’s contribution to conception in their debates about the value of a mother’s blood in generation. The evil mother-in-law’s story of corrupt maternal lineage describes the mother’s legacy as a dangerous one, whereas the father’s recognition of his wife in her son reunites the family and secures lineage, status, and wealth. The fact that a child shares its mother’s blood would not seem to be disputed: the scene of birth—although not explicitly described in these stories—makes abundantly clear that the child literally shares its mother’s blood. But it is the value of the mother’s blood that is in question in these stories. If the mother’s menstruum oVers the material out of which the child is formed, what essential identity is passed through the mother’s blood? This question is raised by the false accusation of monstrous birth: the prostitute/demon/fairy mother is said to pass her monstrous nature to her son. The value of a mother’s contribution to conception is debated further in a story in which the description...

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