Performing birth, enacting death: unstable bodies in late medieval devotion 1

The Body Inside‐Out: Anatomical Memory at Maubuisson Abbey

“…28 Some commentators have gone even further to present the sculptures as artefacts of a more internalized and voyeuristic streak in medieval culture, convincingly drawing links with the distinctly anatomical concerns of many Christian ritual bodies from contemporary abstractions of the Virgin's holy uterus to the divided figures of the saints. 29 So clear were these bodily evocations to the objects' original audiences that their commissioning was on occasion aggressively preached against by contemporary theologians. Jean Gerson, for instance, disliked the sculptural implication that Mary gave birth not just to Christ but to the full godhead and panoply of saints revealed inside her wooden stomach; he attempted to enforce a ban on Shrine Madonnas, although their restriction seems to have fallen on deaf ears for a faithful populous clearly captivated by the beguiling unfolding of their Matryoshka-like forms.…”