Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body by Sarah Alison Miller (review)

Sarah Alison Miller's study of medieval women and monsters—those violators of natural and societal boundaries—dissolves some boundaries of its own, deftly interweaving literature, medicine, and religion to create a work of interdisciplinary scholarship well suited to its multilayered topic. Miller argues that the female body was by its very nature monstrous, even if its familiarity and ubiquity distinguished it from the more recognizable monsters populating the dark corners of the earth and the medieval imagination. Drawing together the figures of the virgin, the mother, the crone, and the corpse, Miller explores how thinkers in the Middle Ages envisioned the female body as a putrid, contaminating "sewer" (as one medieval author vividly put it), as well as the generative site of human birth and salvation.

Miller's first chapter focuses on the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Ovidian poem "De vetula" (The old woman), in which an ill-fated tryst inspires the author's transformation from a shallow womanizer into a serious-minded philosopher. In the poem, "Ovid" is lured into a dark room for a sexual encounter with what he imagines to be a young and beautiful virgin, only to find himself duped into the embrace of a repulsive old woman. The perfect body of the virgin, whose head-to-toe description merits a remarkable hundred lines of verse, stands in stark contrast to the crone, whose sagging flesh, leaky orifices, and foul odor epitomize physical disorder and decay. The poem is full of contrasts between bodily integrity and decomposition: it even compares the survival of Ovid's "body" of work—that is, his poetry—to the breakdown of the author's physical body, dissolved and scattered to the elements. Miller wisely suggests that the poem holds up the virgin and crone as opposites not so much to document the distressing change of the one into the other but to indicate the potential for decay contained within all female bodies. This perception of a woman's body as one that inevitably deteriorates also troubles the poet's understanding of the Virgin Mary—forever pure and immutable even after childbirth—who cannot be contained by his vision of the feminine as monstrously unstable.

Next, Miller considers the endlessly fascinating but understudied On the Secrets of Women, attributed to the thirteenth-century scholastic Albert the Great but more likely written by one of his students. Designed to titillate as much as to inform, On the Secrets of Women revealed supposedly hidden (and generally misogynistic) truths about the female body to its male monastic readers. In the text, women were not active purveyors of their own secrets; instead, their body parts and effluvia were the secret, scrutinized and displayed by men to further male claims to power. Miller focuses on a description of "virginity tests," genital examinations that evaluated the chastity of maidens. One apparently trustworthy sign of virginity was a vaginal enclosure so tight that it caused abrasions to the first penis that entered it. This sexual act punctured the male body, reversing the roles of penetrator and penetrated. Men could also succumb to the contaminating effects of a woman's menstrual blood, a venomous substance thought to cause cancer, leprosy, and fetal deformities. While earlier texts expressed concerns about unreleased menstrual blood that might build up and harm a woman's own body, On the Secrets of Women is among the first sources to cite the threat of released menstrual blood to the bodies of others. Miller interprets the unbounded and uncontrollable nature of woman's reproductive organs and fluids as another example of female monstrosity. Yet it is worth noting that in this text men's bodies too are unstable, the flesh of their most intimate parts torn, leaking fluid, and subject to congress between interior and exterior. Transgression, instability, and porosity—that is, the monstrous as Miller defines it—plagued not just women but also men, particularly in the dangerous context of sexuality.

Miller finally turns to the visionary Julian of...