Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Abstract

This thesis examines responses to Christ’s gendered flesh that are located not in canonical literary texts or traditional saints’ lives, but in the sermons, visions and confessions of devout and orthodox men and women, whose orthodoxy, upon closer examination, is nevertheless decidedly unorthodox. In it, using a series of test cases, I argue that closer scrutiny of these non-canonical texts thus offers a more nuanced understanding of late-medieval notions of interplay between gender, sexuality and the divine than has been considered within previous scholarship. Beginning with the thirteenth-century Liber Specialis of Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), I demonstrate that, although remaining within the bounds of orthodox scripture and exegesis, the Saxon author nevertheless presents her readers with a Christ whose identity as saviour is predicated on his elevation of the female and the fleshly, and whose symbiotic, fluid relationship with Mechthild implicates her as co-redeemer through a divine, glorious, joyful, and uniquely feminine fecundity. I follow this with a detailed close analysis of the early fourteenth-century transcript of a young woman’s heresy trial in southern France, in which she confesses to equating Christ’s body with the ‘filth’ of the afterbirth, a concept so awful to her that she had been unable to believe in God or the transubstantiation. As I argue, however, Auda Fabri, experiences a species of revelation not unlike other orthodox female mystics, but, lacking their communities of discourse, must remain in a state of abjection from which capitulation to androcentric authority alone can save her. My third case-study is a sermon by the fourteenth-century English priest, John Mirk, in which Christ condemns an unconfessed merchant to Hell through the clotted blood from his feminised side-wound, which he casts at the dying man. I argue that, in attempting to uphold orthodox belief and practices, Mirk reveals a profound anxiety regarding late-medieval beliefs regarding the body and feminised flesh of Christ, whose appearance Mirk eventually demonises. Finally, to initiate my set of conclusions, I focus briefly on a largely unknown thirteenth-century Hebrew text, in which a Jewish woman in Sicily seems to give birth to a messianic figure from her body, which drips honey and oil. The woman’s ecstasy, resonant of the experiences of Christian women mystics like Mechthild, suggests some sort of commonality between the Sicilian Jewish and Christian female communities in pre-plague Europe. Ultimately, then, this thesis argues for – and contributes to – the need for far wider recognition of the importance of non-canonical and more generically varied source material and its closer scrutiny to gain better understanding of the deeply gendered complexities attached to the many labile beliefs concerning Christ’s flesh and blood during the Middle Ages.