A CULTURAL HISTORY

OF THE HUMAN BODY

IN THE
MIDDLE AGES

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Oxford New York __E
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 CHAPTER SEVEN

Bodily Essences
Bodies as Categories of Difference

monica h. green

Each of us experiences our body from the inside: its aches and pains, its warmth
or chill, its euphoric highs and depressing lows. But we also experience our bod-
ies in the ways others perceive us and treat us: whether they ignore us because
were short, snub us because we look aged or infirm, or attempt to subdue or
even persecute us because we belong (or seem to belong) to a group deemed
inferior. The creation of these categories of distinction is grounded in time and
space. It may well be that the distinction between internal body concepts
and external ones has been irrevocably blurred in the modern world, with
its ever-present mirrors and cameras that incessantly reflect back at us the ex-
ternal views that others have. But the physical image is itself largely neutral:
The cultural weight that is put on certain features is what determines whether
specific kinds of bodies are to be embraced or shunned, beaten or revered.
Here we examine the marked bodies of the Middle Ages. The notion of
marking comes from grammar. Words are neutralthey just arewhen
they have no delimiting marker that signals their plurality, tense, or subordina-
tion to another object or action. Words do not function, of coursethey dont
convey meaningunless they are put in relation to other words. Even an un-
marked word, therefore, is marked by absence. Yet functionally, in systems of __S
hierarchy, the unmarked seems the norm, unlimited in its potentiality. __E
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The notion of marking is fruitful, therefore, for it shows the ways in which
certain bodily characteristics were looked for and isolated to signal social status,
legal rights, and moral worth: Was this particular body to be granted limitless
freedoms or not? In looking for categories of bodily distinctions, of course, we
must keep in mind that populations in medieval Europe were far smaller than
we are accustomed to today. A moderately sized town might have only 5,000
to 10,000 people, meaning that residents were likely to know one another by
face. The generic categories of gender, race, class, age, and disease or disability
may have been less functional than those of family and social position, which
were well known in a face-to-face society. Nevertheless, it is clear that medi-
eval society did use certain physical characteristics to mark individuals and
treat them differently. In some cases (as in medicine), such categorization was
assumed to have its benefits because it allowed individualized treatment. In
others, marking was a way to segregate, stigmatize, and shun.
The bodily difference most important to medieval societies was sex, and
the bulk of this chapter is devoted to that topic. I also explore, however, the
categories of disease and disability to tease out a sense of how much those
notions of difference functioned. I defer to the following chapter discussion
of medieval notions of race, both because they have important connections
with notions of geographic diversity and because race was in fact a less potent
category for social division than ethnicity. Ethnicity could also be embodied,
of coursemost obviously in the practice of male circumcision by Jews and
Muslimsbut it often worked at the level of language, clothing, or behavior
and so was less grounded in the physical body itself. Marking extended to the
covering of the body, of course, to allow differentiation by class or profession:
Laws regulating dress were intended to ensure the social classes remained dis-
tinct, while the enforced marking within Christian society of Jews, Muslims,
and prostitutes by yellow stars or striped sleeves was intended to remove any
doubt among Christians as to how they should interact with these individuals
socially, legally, and sexually.
For reasons of both law and morality, age mattered, too, but it was not a
category with ambiguous boundaries. Yes, there were certainly legal cases in
which an individuals age was in doubt (almost always because of a question
of majority and inheritance). And age was a crucial issue when determining
eligibility to be betrothed or married (in Christian society, girls could marry
at twelve, boys at fourteen). Otherwise, however, age and its manifestations in
the body seem to have exercised neither the learned classes nor other elements
S__ of medieval society other than as passing medical interest in the diseases of
E__ children or the process of aging.1
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There was one final way in which the body served as a social cipher. The
ancient science of physiognomy, that aid in assessing character, had its own
distinctly medieval efflorescence, and it served to inform the astute observer of
traits at the core of others souls.

THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE: SEX

When discussing resurrection in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas
(12251274) returned to a question that had engaged Augustine of Hippo
(354430) several centuries earlier: whether the bodies of women will retain
their sex after resurrection. Aquinas had already concluded (as had Augustine)
that everyone will return in the vigor of adulthood, not in the incompleteness
of childhood or the decrepitude of old age. Resurrection for Aquinas even im-
proves on ones actual physical state in life: In terms of stature, all will not rise
again of the same quantity [they had in adult life], but each one will rise again
of that quantity which would have been his at the end of his growth if nature
had not erred or failed. This idea of resurrection improving on actual life (we
might call it reaching ones genotypic perfection rather than the phenotypic
imperfection of a life compromised by malnutrition or illness) raised a problem
in the case of women. Augustine, who concluded that women will remain as
they are, interprets the issue entirely as a question of whether womens bodies
will infect the afterlife with the sin of lust. (They will not, he concludes, since
all lust will have vanished.) Aquinas, in contrast, takes a different tack. He
had already admitted, following Aristotle, that females are by nature misbe-
gotten males, even if, in their souls, they are equal in the eyes of God.2 If all
error will be removed at the resurrection, the objection goes, then the female
sex [which] is produced beside the intention of nature, through a fault in the
formative power of the seed, would not rise again. Aquinas ends up agree-
ing with Augustine in the end, though only after some logical sleight of hand:
Diversity is becoming to the perfection of the species, he claims, and so
women will remain women to show the perfection of Gods creation. AuQ1
Although the Aristotelian language of women as misbegotten males was
not used universally in the Middle Ages, sex difference as the essence of social
identity was fundamentally embedded in all three medieval religious communi-
ties and their societies. Moreover, medical and scientific explanations of these
differences were remarkably uniform across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
thought; despite a wide variety of opinions, all three traditions drew their un-
derstandings of physical sex difference from an ancient core of Hippocratic, __S
Aristotelian, or Galenic views. __E
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For example, most educated persons in the medieval world would have agreed
with these basic views on female physiology found in a series of Latin question-
and-answer texts composed around the beginning of the thirteenth century:

Question: What is menstruation?

Answer: Superfluity is contained in the body of the woman: thus the
menses are so called because of the superfluities of every part of the
body. The menses are certain superfluities from different parts of
the body attracted to the womb by the force of nature, and through
heat and spirit they are expelled for the sake of maintaining the
womans health. And just as in trees the flowers precede the fruit,
so the menses the fetus; it is because of this similarity that they are
called by the appropriate term flowers.3
Question: Why are they called menses?
Answer: Because this purgation ought to occur in the new moon from
month to month. The menses thus derive their name from month
[mensis] because they come every month.
Question: How are the menses created?
Answer: Every woman is of a cold complexion by nature; with her fri-
gidity counteracting the heat, the food in her stomach is not able to
be perfectly concocted and there remain certain superfluities which
nature expels each month, whence they are named menses. But
when conception has occurred, the heat from the fetus increases,
and so the food is digested better and so fewer superfluities result;
from those which remain the infant is nourished in the uterus, for it
grows out of the menstrual blood. Therefore the blood which ought
to be emitted to the outside is retained within as food for the fetus.
It is for this reason that pregnant women do not menstruate.4

As can be seen, menstruation is not simply a physiological process con-

fined to the uterus but a mechanism of purgation that has systemic relevance
to the whole body of the woman. Except during pregnancy or lactation (in
which case the normal excesses are channeled to new purposes), if a woman
was not menstruating, then she was on an inevitable course toward severe ill
health. Failure to menstruate was the root cause of uterine suffocation (a kind
of epileptic fit), heart problems, and breast abscesses and cancer. (In this last
S__ case, the unexpelled menstrual blood was diverted up to the breasts through
E__ special veins that connected them to the uterus, thus causing lesions and mor-
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 CHAPTER SEVEN 153

bid growths.) The drying up of the menses at the time of menopause was also
the cause of the evil eye in women; although the idea of the evil eye was not
universally accepted, there was little countervailing medical argument that
menopause brought any benefit to women.5 In texts on womens medicine
whether in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, or the European vernacularsthere was
virtual unanimity on the centrality of menstruation to womens health. Indeed,
when we find random collections of gynecological recipes, they will almost
always contain, first and foremost, mechanisms to bring on the menses. One
could, in fact, say that physiology was more important to the medieval defini-
tion of woman than anatomy.
Anatomical views of the female body were not dissimilar, grosso modo,
from those we have today. A late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century English
writer succinctly laid out an understanding of female anatomy by comparison
with the male:

There are five differences between man and woman. The first difference
is above their forehead, for there are some men who are bald, but women
are not. The second difference is that some men are thick-haired on their
beards [i.e., their chins], but women are smooth. The third difference
is on the breasts, for men have only little warts but women have long
paps. The fourth difference is between their legs, for men have a penis
with other appendages, but women have an opening which is called a
bel chos [pretty thing] or else a weket [gate] of the womb. The fifth
difference is inside the body of the woman between her navel and her
vagina, for there she has a vessel that no man has, which is called the
merres [matrix] and because it is inside the woman where no man may
see it, reason demands that I should tell you about it.6

The author then goes on to explain how the uterus is made up of sinews, how
it is shaped, and how it is divided into seven cells that account for the pro-
duction of males, females, and hermaphrodites (a topic we return to in due
course). It is particularly interesting that this text was addressed to a female
audience: This is what the author wished women themselves to know about
their bodies.
In formal anatomical texts, probably read primarily, if not exclusively, by
learned males, the uterus is generally considered to have two cellsan idea
based on ancient dissections of ungulates. Such learned texts also refer to the
female testicles. First described by the ancient Alexandrian anatomists, these __S
seed-generating organs were assumed to be analogous to the male testicles, __E
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only smaller and softer. As such, it was assumed that they functioned iden-
tically, releasing seed upon orgasm. (This understanding contributed to the
idea that a woman could not get pregnant from forced intercourse unless she
experienced climax, and therefore enjoyment. See chapter 3.) Beyond recogniz-
ing the uterus, vagina, and testicles, medieval anatomists said little further
about the anatomy of the female sexual organs. The hymen, for example, was
not assigned a distinct name in anatomical or gynecological texts in the central
Middle Ages, even though recipes found in the Trotula texts and elsewhere
for restoring virginity (in addition to the common notion of deflowering
a woman upon first intercourse) show recognition that some structure that
we would call the hymen existed. It was generally recognized that the vagina
could be closed by excessive tissue formation. If this growth was so thick as to
prevent sexual intercourse (or, in extreme cases, even block menstruation), sur-
gical intervention was recommended. Although the labia were recognized as
anatomical structures outside of the vagina, no mention of the clitoris appears
in medical writings until surgical writers in the late thirteenth century (drawing
AuQ2 on their Arabic sources) mentioned excessive size of the tentigo as a situa-
tion demanding surgical intervention. While the normal-sized clitoris remained
invisible to the medical gaze, popular understandings of sexual anatomy and
sexual functioning may have been more articulate than formal medical writing.
A French editor from the fifteenth century suggests that the male practitioner
use euphemisms so that female patients will name their anatomical parts more
readily without being ashamed. He proffers the term pignon (pine nut) for
what he says is regularly called the tongue (la langue).7
If, as I have argued, there seems to be ample evidence that medieval people
perceived anatomical and physiological differences between the sexes, how do
we explain an idea floated in 1990 by the historian Thomas Laqueur that in
the premodern world only one sexual type was recognized, what he calls
the one-sex body?8 According to Laqueur, when subject to environmental
influences (what he identifies broadly as gender), this sexually neutral body
would develop into either a masculine or a feminine body. This process primar-
ily happened in the womb: When there was the proper amount of heat, the
genitals would be pushed to the outside to form a man; if the individual was
too cold, the genitals would remain inside, and she would be a woman. But
relapse was constantly possible, leaving even adult bodies open to change.
Katharine Park has challenged Laqueurs views on a variety of grounds,
not least because statements that would support belief in the one-sex body are
S__ rarely found, and then often only in passing, in writings from antiquity to the
E__ later Middle Ages.9 Park shows that the Greek anatomist Galen of Pergamon
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 CHAPTER SEVEN 155

(ca. 129ca. 217 c.e.) had mused on the notion of complete homology be-
tween the male and female as an idea to think with, not a theory that drove
his medical views more generally. Park also shows that this section of Galens
work had a very spotty transmission history; although alluded to by the Persian
writer Avicenna (Ibn Sina, d. 1037 c.e.) in his great encyclopedia, the Canon of
Medicine, the work was not translated into Latin until 1317 and then had only
a limited circulation through the early sixteenth century.
One European writer who had access to this rare translation (in his case,
probably a copy in the papal library, which was then housed in Avignon) was
the fourteenth-century French surgeon (and physician to several popes) Guy
de Chauliac (d. 1368). Guy picks up on the Galenic homology and compares
all parts of the female genitalia to the male body: The uterus is like a penis
reversed and placed inside; it has two upper cellulated branches with testicles
like the sack of the [male] testicles; it has a hollow neck like a penis; the
clitoris (tentigo) is like the male prepuce; and so on.10 Guys adoption of the
Galenic homology in fact seems to have therapeutic implications. On several
occasions, he mentions in one breath conditions (like lesions or ulcers) that af-
flict both the male genitalia and the vagina or uterus; since he offers no distinct
treatment for the female, one is to assume that women are to be treated no dif-
ferently.11 In fact, the only other medical writers who, prior to Guy, adopt the
vaguer homological comparisons from Avicenna are likewise surgeons.12 This
is probably no coincidence. Already around 1300, physicians in northern Italy
and southern France were claiming new expertise in treating infertility, while
surgeons were expanding their claims to be able to intervene in conditions of
the female genitalia and obstetrical emergencies.13 For physicians, diagnosing
and treating infertility required use of the logical analytical skills that they
were already honing in their theoretical training into the hidden causes of
disease. For surgeons, however, while they, too, relied on increasing analysis
of their Arabic textual sources, a lot of their new knowledge came from clini-
cal empiricism. For the male genitalia, such new knowledge arose from surgi-
cal interventions, especially the increasingly elaborate treatments for inguinal
hernia.14 I suspect that their adoption of the Galenic homological discourse
was a way to make up for their relative lack of information on female pelvic
anatomy. Guy himself claims that the diseases of the parts of the pelvic re-
gion which properly pertain to surgeons include diseases of the uterus, such
as obstruction of the vagina and its enlargement, enlarged clitoris [tentigo],
extraction of the foetus and the afterbirth and the [uterine] mole; . . . and pro-
lapse of the uterus.15 To deliver on such claims, however, they had to act as if __S
they knew what they were doing. The bluff (if such it was) worked, and male __E
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involvement in womens medicine continued on an upward trajectory for the

next 200 years. As Park has shown, intense curiosity about female anatomy
would be a driving force behind the development of anatomical investigation
at the end of the Middle Ages.16
If there is any sense in which we can talk about a one-sex body in the Mid-
dle Ages, it is in terms of visual representation. Even here, though, the evidence
is mixed. There is only one medieval iconographic tradition focusing on genital
anatomy. As we see in the abstract images of the genitalia in the Wellcome
Apocalypse manuscript (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2), there is nothing homological
about the male versus female organs. Aside from the testicles (whose parallel-
isms were widely noted) and the teardrop-shaped cross-sections of the support-
ing muscles (lacerti), neither in structural form nor in terminology do these two
images set up a one-to-one equivalence between the male and female organs.
Turning to other medical illustrations, we find two types of images, in
both of which the male predominates. First, we have the male body serving
as the generic human in such images as the phlebotomy man, the wound
man, and the zodiac man (see Figures 0.20.4). But as I have argued in the
Introduction to this volume, these figures were themselves diagrammatic, not
strictly representational. The fact that the figure is malethat is, endowed
with a penis and testiclesis incidental and irrelevant. It is unmarked. All
other medical depictions of the genitalia show therapeutic interventions. Here
again, the male representations vastly outnumber the female. Since the male
is again the unmarked category, females would presumably be depicted only
when the condition itself was marked, that is, specific to the female body.
As we have already seen in the Introduction, there was no regular tradition of
depicting visceral organs. Since the main reproductive organ of women was the
uterusnever seen in living patients by any practitioner, male or female, unless
it prolapsedit is not surprising that it should receive no more visual treat-
ment than other viscera. The often-reproduced fetus-in-utero images (found
in the Wellcome Apocalypse manuscript as well; see Figure 7.3) are not meant
to show the uterus; they are meant to show the different ways the fetus might
malpresent at birth. Hence the uterus here really is nothing but a container.
Again, these images are diagrammatic, not representational. Male physicians,
whose involvement with womens gynecological conditions focused on assess-
ing fertility and menstrual problems, needed to infer the body (see chapter 4)
when dealing with gynecological conditions in the same way they did for all
internal conditions.
S__ The second reason we find so few images of the female genitalia hinges on
E__ the differences between physicians and surgeons practice. The latter took as
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FIGURE 7.1: Male genitalia from Wellcome MS 49 (Wellcome Apocalypse), fol. 37v (detail).

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FIGURE 7.2: Female genitalia from Wellcome MS 49 (Wellcome Apocalypse), fol. 37v
(detail).

S__
E__
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 CHAPTER SEVEN 159

FIGURE 7.3: Fetus-in-utero figures from Wellcome MS 49 (Wellcome Apocalypse),

fol. 37v (detail).

their purview treatment of the bodys surface. Conditions of the male genitalia
were always part of the surgeons practice. And when we do find illustrated
surgical texts, interventions on the male genitalia (hernias, pustules, etc.) are
liberally illustrated, with no apparent embarrassment or coyness.17 The situ-
ation with women was different. The female breasts were treated regularly
by male surgeons and were unproblematically depicted in surgical texts. Yet
even when the female genitalia began to elicit male surgeons attention in the
late thirteenth century, no visual tradition of depicting such interventions de-
veloped. Here, it may well be social notions of sexual propriety as well as
surgeons hesitant knowledge of female pelvic anatomy that prohibited such __S
images from being developed. In fact, I know of only two surgical manuscripts __E
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 160 BODILY ESSENCES

that show the naked female genitalia, and both of these are rather late and
show no detail of anatomical structure.18 It is not until the sixteenth century
that we get detailed (sometimes pornographically so) depictions of the internal
and external female genital organs, ones that show both the anatomy of the
organs and, in the case of one German surgeons manuscript of surgical proce-
dures, methods to intervene in their diseased conditions.19
In sum, there are plausible explanations for the paucity of visual repre-
sentations of the female body in medieval medicine that in no way demand
recourse to a one-sex body theory and an assumption that female difference
was so insignificant that it need not, or even could not, precipitate its own
representational traditions. In fact, what proved to be the only really popular
medical image of the female bodythe so-called disease womanseems to use
the female body as the generic human. The first known disease woman is really
just a standard image of the muscle system with breasts drawn on her chest
and a uterus with a fetus inside. The image matured, however, into a veritable
synopsis of nosology in the fifteenth century, where it is extant in twelve dif-
ferent copies, including the English copy shown in Figure 7.4. It does have spe-
cifically gynecological disease labels attached, but it also itemizes such generic
diseases as gout and arthritis in the joints, and mania and frenzy in the head.
The disease woman served a rather mundane pedagogical purpose of teaching
clerics (like the one for whom the Wellcome Apocalypse manuscript was made)
and marginally learned practitioners some medical basics. The disease woman
was not, in other words, a sophisticated summation of learned anatomy even
in its heyday but was rather a crib sheet of information on basic pathology
for the medical nonspecialist and lay practitioner. With the advent of print, it
was immediately incorporated into a handbook for surgical practitioners and
barbers, the popular Fasciculus medicinae (Handbook of medicine), published
repeatedly from 1491 on.
As a field primarily concerned with the dysfunction of an organ that was
never seen except when it prolapsed or was dissected at death, gynecology re-
mained a field where the mental imagination of disordered processes was more
important to diagnosis and treatment than was detailed visual representation.
As our fifteenth-century English writer said about the uterus, because it is
inside the woman where no man may see it, reason demands that I should tell
AuQ3 you about it. Gynecological texts were concerned with the physiological dif-
ferences that made the female body unique: disorders of menstruation, uterine
growths or fluxes, infertility, and difficulties of birth. Many did not even bother
S__ to include sections on anatomy, since the anatomical differences between the
E__ sexes were largely taken for granted. The existence of the uterus was a given;
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FIGURE 7.4: Disease woman from Wellcome MS 290, ca. 14701480 (probably Lon-
don), fol. 52v. Wellcome L0045159. Wellcome Library, London.

the female testicles, even if acknowledged to exist, were irrelevant diag-

nostically and therapeutically and therefore almost never mentioned outside
of anatomical texts. And while surgeons developed a more precise sense of
the structure of the vagina, the hymen, the labia, or the clitoris in the later
medieval centuriesby the fifteenth century, the vaginal speculum had come
into fairly regular usethey did not capture that knowledge in images. But
all medieval medical practitioners, I believe, understood sexual difference to
be real. Physicians and anatomists of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries
did not discover female difference but rather increased their visual scrutiny
of those differences as traditions of anatomical practice, visual representation,
and therapeutic responsibilities changed over the course of the postmedieval
centuries.

Male Menstruation

If, as I have suggested, sex difference was not questioned, how do we explain
two ideas in medieval thought that blur the line between the sexes: the notion
of male menstruation and the explanations of hermaphroditism? The full nar-
rative of the surprising view that some men menstruated has yet to be worked __S
out, but it is clear that the concept collapses several different ideas. One, __E
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already formulated by the late twelfth century, is the notion that regular hemor-
rhoidal bleeding in some men is salubrious and should not be corrected by
therapeutic intervention.20 The male body as well as the female body needed to
keep a proper balance of humors flowing in the body; if there was an excess,
then it should be eliminated. This was the basic rationale for periodic blood-
letting of both men and women. If the body itself perceived the problem
and automatically initiated a purgative process (in this case, bleeding hemor-
rhoids), it was not to be interfered with. (Similarly, nosebleeds in a woman
who was not menstruating were seen as salubrious.) Thus, bleeding hemor-
rhoids in men could be seen as analogous to menstruation in women, but the
term was not used.
Surprisingly, this notion evolved later into the idea that Jewish men, be-
cause of their particularly melancholic (cold) disposition and the strange foods
that they ate, produced a chronic excess of humors that resulted in regular
menstruation. In an intriguing thesis of Peter Biller, this new direction of
speculation occurred because of the circumstantial intersection of several dif-
ferent lines of thought at precisely the time that the Jewish question became
of urgent political concern with the expulsions of Jews from Gascony, England,
and France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century.21 But what did it
mean, after this anti-Semitic twist developed, when a Christian man menstru-
ated? Gianna Pomata traces the idea into the early modern period, where she
finds that positive views toward male menstruation continued, thereby mollify-
ing, to some extent, anti-Semitic assertions that this process was unique to a
certain group of already-stigmatized men.22
Whatever its genesis, this idea of the menstruating man only nominally
supports Laqueurs thesis that mens and womens bodies were on a single mor-
phological continuum. Indeed, even hermaphroditism did not trouble this fun-
damental sense that the distinctions between male and female were absolute.

Hermaphrodite

The phenomenon of hermaphroditism is currently understood to involve several

possible levels of genetic, hormonal, anatomical, and physiological development.
It is estimated from modern data that some sort of hermaphroditism occurs in
about 1.7 of every 100 live births.23 If the same level of incidence obtained in
the Middle Ages, then it would not have been an uncommon occurrence. How
hermaphroditism was handled as a social phenomenon differed quite radically
S__ between the Muslim and Christian worlds. Because ones identity as a male or
E__ female was crucial to Islamic practices of prayer, care for the dead body, and so
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forth, it was of great concern to Muslim jurists to be able to determine whether

or not an apparent hermaphrodite was truly male or female. Prior to adoles-
cence, such determination was not critical; the simplest determination was made
by how the individual urinated. Upon adolescence, such signs as growth of fa-
cial hair or ability to have penetrative sex with the penis proved the individual
to be male; for a woman, growth of breasts, onset of menstruation, or ability
to have vaginal sex were decisive. (It is interesting in this regard that Arabic
surgical writers included fatty male breasts, which nature abhors, as a con-
dition demanding surgical intervention.)24 If no determination had been made
by adolescence, however, the individual was deemed a khuntha mushkilan
ambiguous hermaphroditeand jurists expended considerable effort working
out the legal ramifications about where this individual should pray, whether
s/he could marry or inherit property, and how s/he was to be prepared for burial.
As Paula Sanders has noted, a person with ambiguous genitalia or with no ap-
parent sex may have been a biological reality, but it had no gender.25 That is,
the hermaphrodite had to be assimilated into either the category of male or that
of female. In Islamic society it could not be both.
In the Western Christian world, hermaphroditism was acknowledged le-
gally only by the terse statement in Roman and canon law: Hermaphrodi-
tus an ad testimonium adhiberi possit, qualitas incalescentis sexus ostendit
(Whether the hermaphrodite is able to give [legal] testimony is determined by
the quality of its incalescent sex).26 This legal dictum became, in a subsequent
codification of English law, Hermaphroditus comparatur masculo tantum vel
feminae tantum secundum praevalescentiam sexus incalescentis, which has
been translated as a hermaphrodite is classed with male or female accord-
ing to the predominance of the sexual organs.27 Yet the unusual Latin word
incalescens in fact means warming up or, here, arousable; thus, sex is
determined by ability to perform the male (penetrative) or female (receptive)
role and not by any other anatomical or behavioral sign.
Ability to perform sexually as a male or female likewise informs two of the
handful of cases in which hermaphroditism has been historically documented.
An early fourteenth-century account tells that

in a town near Bern . . . a woman lived for ten years with a man. Since
she could not have sex with a man, she was separated [from her partner]
by the spiritual court. In Bologna (on her way to Rome), her vagina was
cut open by a surgeon, and a penis and testicles came out. She returned
home, married a wife, did hard [physical labor], and had proper and __S
adequate sexual congress with her wife.28 __E
__L

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 164 BODILY ESSENCES

A similar case from Catalonia in 1331 tells of a woman who could not fulfill
her conjugal debt nor conceive nor bear a child; she was examined, in the
presence of a lady of the town, by a male surgeon. She was found to have a
male penis and testicles, as well as other abnormalities of her genitalia, though
in her case we do not learn whether she was rehabilitated into a male life.
This comparison between Muslim and Christian attitudes toward hermaph-
roditism is instructive. Once sex was assigned under Islamic law, it was per-
manent, whether or not new signs (such as the growth of breasts) seemed to
contradict the original assessment. Under Christian law, sex could be changed
provided that the necessary adjustments were made in marital arrangements
so that the marriage debt could be paid naturally (see chapter 3). Did
the hermaphrodite in Christian Europe constitute, then, a third sex, a being
that is at once a mixture of male and female and yet neither?29 Answering this
brings us back to the question of what constitutes male and female. Is it the
nature of the seed itself that confers sex or some other factor? The answer is
that, in most views of generation, it is some kind of combination of factors. Al-
ready in Greco-Roman antiquity, the idea was widely accepted that males are
associated with the right side of the body and females with the left. The Alex-
andrian anatomists saw that the sheep and other animals they were dissecting
had bisected, two-celled uteruses and assumed the human uterus was similar.
Several centuries later, the Greek physician Galen expanded this anatomical
understanding into a full-fledged physiology of reproduction: The right side of
the uterus was indeed nourished by warmer, more purified blood than the left,
hence producing (warm) males on the right and (cold) females on the left. As
we have seen, this highly intricate explanation did not circulate widely in Latin
Europe. Rather, a more simplified view held. Again, our Salernitan questions:

Question: In which part of the womb ought the man to be created, in

which the woman?
Answer: When the seed has been deposited in the womb and its mouth
shut tight, if it settles in the right part near the liver, the fetus be-
comes hot; because it is nourished by better and hotter blood, the
fetus is made male. If it settles in the left, it is colder [and becomes]
a female. On the other hand, if it settles in the right but is turned a
little bit to the left, it becomes an effeminate man; if in the left but
a little toward the right, a masculine woman.30

S__ In the twelfth century, a new theory began to circulate that there were seven
E__ cells within the womb. Early in the century, a text on the anatomy of pigs
L__

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 CHAPTER SEVEN 165

(whose dissection served to teach physicians-in-training) posited that the pig

had a seven-celled uterus. In the middle of the century, another anatomical
writer, positing four cells in the womb, also added that if the seed falls into
neither the two right cells nor the two left ones but rather settles into the
middle of the uterus, it will generate a hermaphrodite. This may have been no
afterthought, for the author goes on: Although [the hermaphrodite] has both
sexes, according to the decrees of the princes it has the privilege of whichever
sex it uses more and in which it takes [sexual] delight.31 This echoing of the
language of Roman (and now canon) law suggests that it may have been the
legal revival of this period that induced natural philosophers and physicians to
ponder more concretely than they had done before how hermaphrodites were
generated. The theory of seven cells was thus even more useful, since it could
explain the maximum number of fetuses that could be generated at one time,
and it could explain where and how fetuses were sexed. This view remained
popular through the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in works by clerics
and in vernacular literature. Nevertheless, more complex views could also be
found in such theorists as Albert the Great (d. 1280), who believed that the
hermaphrodites body simply reflected a monstrous excess of flesh or some
other material defect at the time of conception. He, too, tells the story of a
girl with retained testicles and penis who was found to really be a male when
the closed lips of her vulva were cut open to prepare her for marriage.32
The involvement of surgeons in the three cases of hermaphroditism is part
of a general medicalization of society and law in the later Middle Ages. Surgical
statements about hermaphroditism, taken over directly from Arabic medical
texts, were nonchalant, approaching hermaphroditism simply as a matter of re-
moving what was excess on the body. In the early modern period, in contrast,
as with other notions of anatomy, we find a marked shift in attitudes toward the
hermaphrodite. Those attitudes had their own culturally specific genesisas
much to do with Ovids poetry as the new culture of anatomical empiricism
and we ought not assume they had any direct medieval corollaries.33 The lack
of anxiety over hermaphrodites in western Europe reinforces what we have
already learned about the sexual body: It was what one did with ones body that
mattered and not so much how one perceived that that body was structured or
even how one perceived ones own identity.

Disease and Disability

Disease and disability also marked medieval bodies, though we should not __S
assume that they did so with the same effects that we observe today. A study __E
__L

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 166 BODILY ESSENCES

of notarial records in fourteenth-century Marseille, for example, showed that

individuals were far more likely to identify themselves, and be identified, by
where they lived than by any physical characteristics.34 But as noted by Ann
Carmichael in chapter 2, medieval Europe and the Mediterranean basin shared
a group of infectious diseases that would most decidedly leave their marks on
the human body. Just how prevalent smallpox was in this period is not yet
clear.35 Probably the two diseases that most regularly left their visible marks on
medieval bodies were tuberculosis and leprosy.
Tuberculosis (TB), the microbial disease we now ascribe to the pathogen
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, had no single name or disease concept in the
Middle Ages. Nevertheless, we know from paleopathological studies that it
was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin and Europe.36 The symp-
toms of pulmonary TB (the most common manifestation) included low-grade
fever, chills, coughing, weight loss, and general fatigueall of them too un-
specific to distinguish TB from all the other diseases that would have gener-
ally been classed as fevers by physicians. Tuberculosis no doubt contributed
generally to debilities that diminished individuals potential to engage actively
with their societies. Most of its damage to the body is internal, but tuber-
culosis could also have visually disabling effects. When TB infects the spine,
it can cause a characteristic condition called kyphosis (now also known as
Potts disease), which, because some of the spinal vertebrae collapse, produces
a crooked back, difficulty in walking or standing, and impaired breathing.
For leprosy, the paleopathological evidence is especially important since
leprosy did not killit only disabled. Distinctive features are loss of sensation
in patches of skin; resorption of the bones of the feet and hands, leading to the
characteristic clawed hands; and resorption of the nasal cartilage and reces-
sion of the bone between the nose and upper lip, leading to loss of the central
incisors, all producing the characteristic facial changes of leprosy: the facies
leprosa. These deformities are then compounded by various lesions caused
by injury or other infections due to loss of sensation. Because leprosy leaves
distinctive marks on the skeleton, it is possible for modern bioarchaeologists
to detect its presence quite accurately. Although not every individual afflicted
with Mycobacterium leprosae (the pathogen that causes clinically defined Han-
sens disease) will display such bone lesions, when they are found they are
diagnostic. A recent study of a cemetery from southern Germany in the early
Middle Ages found that as many as 16 percent of individuals buried there had
some kind of leprous involvement on their bones; in Scandinavia in the High
S__ Middle Ages, it has been estimated that as much as a quarter of the population
E__ was afflicted. Some studies show it to have been more prevalent among men
L__ than women.37

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 CHAPTER SEVEN 167

Obviously, people in the Middle Ages did not have our modern bacterio-
logical understanding of the disease. Given that we find leprous individuals
buried outside of leprosaria cemeteries and nonleprous people buried within, it
is obvious that no strict segregation of the leprous was achieved. The religious
brothers and sisters who ministered to lepers, for example, would also have
been buried in the leprosariums cemetery. And it may well be that those who
had skin diseases and other afflictions that would not now be classified as Han-
sens disease might have been erroneously diagnosed. But recent studies suggest
that, especially toward the later Middle Ages, methods of diagnosis may have
been more accurateor at least more cautiousthan we might initially sup-
pose. One intriguing finding from later-medieval Denmark is that those show-
ing signs of leprosy who were buried outside leprosaria cemeteries tended not
to have the facial lesions associated with the disease. In other words, if leprosy
did not manifest on the facewhere it was most visible to othersthen one
was less likely to be deemed leprous and so be sequestered.38
In the Muslim world, leprosy was considered both contagious and heredi-
tary. Sometimes those deemed leprous were confined to hospitals or leprosaria.
But, more often, they had freedom of movement. One surviving medical cer-
tificate, apparently signed by two Muslim doctors, declared that a Jewish male
living near Cairo has been affected by such black bile as has caused him to
develop leprosy, and that fact is such that it debars him from mixing freely with
the Muslims and from earning his living. It may be that the Jew had himself
requested this document, perhaps in order to receive charitable support. Other
evidence shows that leprous Jews had freedom to travel through Muslim ter-
ritories to bathe in the waters of Tiberias in Palestine.39
Attitudes toward leprosy in the Christian world seem to have been quite
harsh in the early Middle Ages, though once documentary evidence becomes
more readily available in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we see a modula-
tion of opinion.40 The Salernitan questions, for example, repeated the common
notion that leprosy could be caused congenitally by corrupt seed. Other theorists
(as we saw in chapter 3) put a more moralistic overtone on its causation, seeing
leprosy as the result of unnatural sex by the childs parents. Yet recent work
suggests that medieval European attitudes toward leprosy were perhaps not as
heartless as we have supposed. The clapper so distinctive of images of lepers
was, we used to think, used to warn approaching healthy individuals to keep
their distance. Newer interpretations see clappers and bells instead as a means
to attract people to lepers trying to beg: One of the cruel symptoms of Hansens
disease is that it causes loss of the voice, making some alternate method of __S
speaking necessary.41 The famous attacks on leprosaria in France in 1321 and __E
the practice of segregating lepers are well documented. But most leprosaria were __L

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 168 BODILY ESSENCES

right on the edge of town and earned the attentions of religious brothers and sis-
ters who dedicated their lives to attending to the inmates because in giving such
care they themselves earned salvation. Medical practitioners tended to be cau-
tious in their pronouncements, sometimes deferring judgment when the signs
seemed ambiguous. As the famous Montpellier physician Bernard of Gordon
stated, no one should be judged leprous unless disfigurement is manifest.42
Visibly disabling conditions could be due to congenital problems and to
accidents suffered during life as well as to infectious disease. How were such
people treated by society? It has been argued recently that while there was
clearly a great deal of impairment in the Middle Ages (the physical condi-
tion of not having full use of a bodily part or function), there was very little
disability in the sense of being limited socially by that impairment.43 As with
leprosy, associations of disabling conditions with sin, although common in the
Bible, became less frequent as the Middle Ages progressed, largely being lim-
ited by the twelfth century to blaming some congenital defects on the parents
sexual misconduct. And, as we have already seen, according to Aquinas physi-
cal impairment was not assumed to constitute ones identity: Whereas ones sex
would be maintained after the resurrection, all impairments would disappear.
Yet the one most important source used by historians of disabilitymedieval
saints lives and canonization proceedingstestifies that neither impair-
ments nor disabilities were inconsequential: the fact that healing miracles
often make up the bulk of a potential saints claim to sanctity is itself witness
to widespread suffering. Yes, medical practitioners were certainly sought after,
and their social prominence increased enormously in the later Middle Ages.
But part of what patients wanted from their healers was an honest assessment
of their prognosis: Everyone knew the limits of medicine, and (as we saw in
chapter 1) a good death was one that had been prepared for in advance.

Character: The Use of Physiognomy

In medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, social class was indicated by all
the markers examined in the preceding, on top of which there was the even
more immediate and prominent marker of clothing. But ones status in society
could also trump other considerations: A leper could be king, a womaneven
a menstruating onecould be queen and overlord. Class, then, is perhaps too
broad a category to localize exclusively in the body. Nevertheless, individual
character could be marked on medieval bodies and therefore mapped. There
S__ was a whole subdiscipline of knowledge, called physiognomy, that helped one
E__ judge an individuals character and fate by his or her hair color, the shape of
L__ the chin, or even the appearance of the genitalia. This area of natural knowl-

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 CHAPTER SEVEN 169

edge had its origins in ancient Greece, where one of the most popular medieval
textsin Byzantium and the Islamic world and (in a redacted form) in Latin
Europewas composed. As noted by Joseph Ziegler, physiognomy was a rhe-
torical tool devised by men, for men, and against men, who were praising or
defaming each other in the political arena.44 A late-antique Latin text offered
a distillation of this ancient Greek science:

It needs to be established what physiognomy promises: it promises that it

examines and perceives the quality of the mind from the quality of the body.
Loxus [a physician from whom our Latin author is allegedly drawing], for
example, established that the blood is the dwelling-place of the soul, and
moreover that the whole body and the parts of it which give signs give dif-
ferent signs according to the liveliness or inertia of the blood and whether it
is thinner or thicker . . . But others think that just as the soul is the shaper
of the body, so the soul derives its appearance from the quality of the body,
just like liquid in a small vessel which derives its appearance from the vessel
and just like air breathed into a pipe, aulos, or trumpet: for although the
breath is uniform, a trumpet, pipe, and aulos make different sounds.45

In Latin Europe, physiognomy took on a new life in the later Middle Ages,
in part because it became even more ambitious in its coverage of the body.
Whereas the ancient texts and the works that circulated up through the thir-
teenth century generally confined themselves to the face, head, hair, and skin
of the limbs, in the later Middle Ages writers began to explore the significance
of the appearance of the genitalia, too. Medieval physiognomic writers also
turned their attention to the female body in ways ancient physiognomy never
had. Close physiognomic analysis could offer useful information about the
potential fertility of an individuala critical skill when making marriage ne-
gotiations, for example. One need not even examine the genitalia directly to
make these inferences: The size of a mans nose and his penis were directly cor-
related, hence obviating any need to undress. For a woman, one had to exam-
ine her foot. Physiognomy could also readily provide information on virginity
in either sex or effeminate sexual inclinations in men. While it is clear that in
later-medieval physiognomy, authors actually envisioned learning much of a
mans character from direct examination of his genitalia, for a woman all that
was learned was her openness to sex.
How much such disquisitions resonated beyond the learned classes is unclear,
though we can certainly find echoes of such opinions in popular literature and __S
sermons. And again, just as there was not a particularly pronounced tradition of __E
visually portraying anatomy, so physiognomy was, in the Middle Ages, a textual __L

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 170 BODILY ESSENCES

S__
FIGURE 7.5: Hand diagram. Wellcome L0015603 Credit: Wellcome Library.
E__
L__

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 CHAPTER SEVEN 171

genre almost entirely devoid of images. The words of physiognomy texts them-
selves were meant to be sufficiently evocative of character.46 Only chiromantic
textstreatises explaining how to discern character from lines on the hand
were regularly accompanied by images, and these were really diagrams high-
lighting the different lines and what they signified (see Figure 7.5). Interestingly,
here too we find gendered differences in analysis: The right hand of a male was
to be read preferentially, the left hand of a female. Whereas physiognomy seems
to have stayed largely the province of learned males, in late-medieval England, at
least, two texts on chiromancy were written specifically for female recipients.47

The Consequences of Marking

Marking the body could be both voluntary (as in the Muslim and Jewish prac-
tice of male circumcision) or enforced (as in strictures that Jewish women in
Italian towns pierce their ears).48 But all markings, whether one was born with
them, acquired them accidentally, or was forced to take them on, were cultur-
ally loaded. Indeed, that was their purpose. That women, Jews, Muslims, slaves,
or even the leprous or impaired at times challenged and contested their social
categorization is not in doubt. Several decades of scholarship have shown myriad
ways that individuals falling into all these embodied categories acted to assert
themselves. Still, we are left to wonder if, given the opportunity, they might not
choose to cast off their markedness. Medieval instances of cross-dressingin
any directionare illustrative of how, on occasion, individuals attempted to
use the readily adoptable markings of clothes to further their ambitions. Many
court cases about illicit sex across religious boundaries in Spain have come
to us because Jewish and Muslim males were allegedly not wearing the gar-
ments prescribed for their station and took advantage of this anonymity
to engage in sexual relations with Christian women.49 There is no doubt that a
male prostitute in London and the female sodomite in Nuremberg both used
cross-dressing to further sexual aims.50 But, importantly, that male prostitute
also lived as a woman: He engaged in needlework as one of several methods of
earning money. Cross-dressing was probably most potent in its possibilities (and
dangers) for women. Joan of Arc is certainly the most famous medieval cross-
dresser, but one wonders how many other women there might have been like a
female university student in Krakw, who (so a unique story tells us) passed
as an adolescent scholar for two years before being discovered by a soldier
traveling through town.51 Marking had consequences that were as real as life
itself. Like trumpets or pipes making different sounds from the same air, bodies __S
shaped the expression of ambitions and the fates of souls, even if all three medi- __E
eval religious traditions recognized those souls as equal in the eyes of God. __L

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 264 NOTES

52. Giovanni Marinello, Gli ornamenti delle donne tratti dalle scritture duna reina
greca per M. Giovanni Marinello (Venice: Francesco de Franceschi, 1562),
fol. VvVIr.
53. Hlne Congourdeau, Mtrodra et son uvre, in Maladie et socit Byz-
ance, ed. Evelyne Patlagean (Spoleto, Italy: Centro Italiano di Studi sullAlto Me-
dioevo, 1993), 5796; Parker, Women Doctors, 13840, 150; and Flemming,
Women, Writing and Medicine.
54. The identification and correspondence between Metrodoras gynecological section
and the two versions of the late-antique or early-medieval text De passionibus
AuQ27 mulierum is discussed in Green, Medieval Gynecological Texts, 2425.
55. For the history of the authorship ascription, see Monica H. Green, In Search of
an Authentic Womens Medicine: The Strange Fates of Hildegard of Bingen and
Trota of Salerno, Dynamis 19 (1999): 2554. The compendium was edited and
translated into English by Green, Trotula.
56. On health practitioners involvement with cosmetics, see Schalick, The Face Be-
hind the Mask; Moulinier-Brogi, Esthtique et soins du corps; and McVaugh,
Rational Surgery, 181229. For the textual entanglement of cosmetics with other
aspects of womens health in medical literature, see Monica H. Green, Making
Womens Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gy-
naecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
57. Montserrat Cabr, From a Master to a Laywoman: A Feminine Manual of Self-
Help, Dynamis 20 (2000): 37193.
58. Green, Trotula, 4546 and 226n186, for a later transformation of Muslim noble-
women into Salernitan noblewomen.
59. Monica H. Green, Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno, in La Scuola
Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Para-
vicini Bagliani (Florence: SISMEL, 2007), 183233. For the anonymous women
experts, see Montserrat Cabr, Autoras sin nombre, autoridad femeninan (siglo
XIII), in Las sabias mujeres, II (siglos IIIXVI): Homenaje a Lola Luna, ed. Mara
del Mar Graa Cid (Madrid: Asociacin Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1995), 5973.
60. Monica H. Green, Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages, Journal of Medieval His-
tory 34, no. 2 (2008): 1067; and Carmen Caballero-Navas, The Care of Wom-
ens Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian
Women, Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 14663.
61. Montserrat Cabr, Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories
of Health Care in Late Medieval Iberia, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82,
no. 1 (2008): 1851.

Chapter 7
1. For medieval developments of the ancient notion of the ages of man, see the lit-
erature cited in chapter 1. All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise
S__ indicated.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province,
E__
2nd rev. ed. (1920), http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3169.htm#article2 (ac-
L__

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 NOTES 265

cessed September 8, 2008), esp. I, Q 92, art. 1; Second Part of the Second Part,
question 169, art. 2. AuQ28
3. The euphemism of calling the menses flowers is discussed at length in Monica H.
Green, Flowers, Poisons, and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe,
in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (New
York: Palgrave, 2005), 5164.
4. Brian Lawn, ed., The Prose Salernitan Questions Edited from a Bodleian Manu-
script (Auct. F.3.10) (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1213.
5. On the physiology of menstruation, see Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The
Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Womens Medicine (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1922. On the evil eye, see Fernando Salmn and
Montserrat Cabr, Fascinating Women: The Evil Eye in Medical Scholasticism,
in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. Roger French, Jon
Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Luis Garca-Ballester, (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 1998), 5384.
6. Alexandra Barratt, ed., The Knowing of Womans Kind in Childing: A Middle En-
glish Version of Material Derived from the Trotula and Other Sources, Medieval
Women: Texts and Contexts 4 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), ll. 4051.
7. Monica H. Green, Making Womens Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Au-
thority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
199200.
8. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
9. Katharine Park, Itineraries of the One-Sex Body: A History of an Idea, unpub-
lished essay. My thanks to Dr. Park for permission to consult this.
10. Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia magna, ed. Michael R. McVaugh,
with Margaret S. Ogden, Studies in Ancient Medicine, no. 14, vols. 1 and 2 (Lei-
den: E. J. Brill, 1997), 1:52.
11. Ibid., 1:130, 2045, and 23941.
12. A fact noted by Park, Itineraries.
13. Green, Making Womens Medicine Masculine; and Monica H. Green, Moving
from Philology to Social History: The Circulation and Uses of Albucasiss Latin
Surgery in the Middle Ages, in Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enter-
prise in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Florence Eliza Glaze and Brian
Nance, Micrologus Library 30 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, forth-
coming).
14. Michael R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus Li-
brary 15 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006).
15. Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium, 368. AuQ29
16. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human
Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006).
17. Green, Making Womens Medicine Masculine, 92.
18. Ibid., 159.
19. Park, Secrets of Women, chronicles the increasing explicitness of anatomical de- __S
pictions of women in the period immediately succeeding the Middle Ages. See __E
also Walter von Brunn, ed., Die Handschrift des Schnitt- und Augenarztes Caspar
__L

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 266 NOTES

Stromayr in Lindau im Bodensee: In der Lindauer Handschrift (P.1.46) vom 4. Juli

1559 (Berlin: Idra-Verlagsanstalt, [1925]).
20. Green, Trotula, 215.
21. Peter Biller, A Scientific View of Jews from Paris around 1300, Micrologus 9
(2001): 13768. Billers essay usefully includes complete transcriptions of the per-
tinent texts.
22. Gianna Pomata, Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in
Early Modern Medicine, in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduc-
tion in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Valeria
Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press,
2001), 10952.
23. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of
Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 53.
24. Green, Making Womens Medicine Masculine, 93.
25. Paula Sanders, Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval
Islamic Law, in Shifting Boundaries: Women and Gender in Middle Eastern His-
tory, ed. Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991), 88.
26. Corpus iuris civilis, Digest, bk. 22, sect. 5, par. 15. In his modern English transla-
tion, Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian, rev. ed., 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 2:194, renders this as Whether a hermaphrodite
can witness a will depends on his sexual development. Cf. Gratian, Decretum
Gratiani, pt. 2, cause 4, questions 2 and 3, canon 3, sect. 22, which repeats the
exact phrasing, http://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen.de/decretum-gratiani/online/
angebot (accessed April 12, 2009).
27. Harvard Law School Library, Bracton Online, http://hlsl5.law.harvard.edu/brac
ton/ (accessed December 21, 2006), 2:31.
28. Annals of the Friars Minor of Colmar (13081314), as cited in Miri Rubin, The
Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order, in Framing Medieval
Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1994), 100122.
29. Cary J. Nederman and Jacqui True, The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphro-
dite in Twelfth-Century Europe, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 4 (April
1996): 497517.
30. Lawn, Prose Salernitan Questions, 14.
31. A translation of the Anatomy of the Pig can be found in George Washington Cor-
ner, Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Carnegie Insti-
tution of Washington, 1927). The second text, not yet published, appears uniquely
in Monte Cassino Ms. 167; my thanks to Florence Eliza Glaze for bringing it to my
attention.
32. Albert the Great, On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, trans. Kenneth F.
Kitchell, Jr., and Irven Michael Resnick, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 2:131214.
S__ 33. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of
Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France, in Premodern Sexualities
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in Europe, ed. Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, special issue, GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 4 (1995): 41938.
34. Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Me-
dieval Marseille (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 199.
35. Ann G. Carmichael and A. M. Silverstein, Smallpox in Europe before the Sev-
enteenth Century: Virulent Killer or Benign Disease? Journal of the History of
Medicine and Allied Sciences 42, no. 2 (1987): 14768.
36. Charlotte A. Roberts and Jane E. Buikstra, The Bioarchaeology of Tuberculosis:
A Global View of a Reemerging Disease (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2003).
37. Jesper L. Boldsen, Leprosy in the Early Medieval Lauchheim Community, Amer-
ican Journal of Physical Anthropology 135, no. 3 (March 2008): 30110.
38. Jesper L. Boldsen and Lene Mollerup, Outside St. Jrgen: Leprosy in the Medieval
Danish City of Odense, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 130, no. 3
(2006): 34451.
39. H. D. Isaacs, A Medieval Arab Medical Certificate, Medical History 35 (1991):
25057; and Sara Scalenghe, Disability, in Medieval Islamic Civilization: An
Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1:2089.
40. Luke E. DeMaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
41. Franois-Olivier Touati, Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in
Medieval Minds and Societies, in Contagion: Perspectives from Premodern Soci-
eties, ed. L. Conrad and D. Wujastyk (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 16183.
42. Quoted in DeMaitre, Leprosy, 22. AuQ30
43. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Physical Impairment in the High
Middle Ages, c. 1100c. 1400, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture
(London: Routledge, 2006).
44. Joseph Ziegler, Sexuality and the Sexual Organs in Latin Physiognomy 1200
1500, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005): 84.
45. Ian Repath, Anonymous Latinus, Book of Physiognomy, in Seeing the Face,
Seeing the Soul: Polemons Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval
Islam, ed. Simon Swain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 557.
46. My thanks to Joseph Ziegler for this information.
47. Derek J. Price, ed., An Old Palmistry: Being the Earliest Known Book of Palmistry
in English; Edited from the Bodleian MS Digby Roll IV (Cambridge, UK: W. Hef-
fer & Sons, 1953); and Paul Acker and Eriko Amino, The Book of Palmistry,
in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. L. M. Matheson (East
Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1994), 14183.
48. Diane Owen Hughes, Earrings for Circumcision: Distinction and Purification
in the Italian Renaissance City, in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Iden-
tity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard C. Trexler
(Binghamton, UK: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1985),
15582.
49. David Nirenberg, Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Me- __S
dieval Spain, American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 106593. __E
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50. Ruth Mazo Karras and David L. Boyd, Ut cum muliere: A Male Transvestite
Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London, in Fradenburg and Freccero, Premod-
ern Sexualities, 10116; and Helmut Puff, Female Sodomy: The Trial of Kath-
erina Hetzeldorfer (1477), Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30,
no. 1 (Winter 2000): 4162.
51. Michael H. Shank, A Female University Student in Late Medieval Krakw, Signs:
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Chapter 8
1. The classic debunking of this myth is Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat
Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1997).
2. Leonid S. Chekin, Northern Eurasia in Medieval Cartography: Inventory, Texts,
Translation, and Commentary (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006).
3. Peter Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford:
AuQ31 Oxford University Press, 2000), 219.
4. Ibid., 23238.
5. Ibid., 24849.
6. Ibid., 28083.
7. Maaike van der Lugt, La peau noire dans la science mdivale, and Jean Wirth,
La reprsentation de la peau dans lart mdival, both in La pelle umana/
The Human Skin, special issue, Micrologus: Natura, scienze e societ medievali/
Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 13 (2005): 43976 and 13153.
8. Peter Biller, Black Women in Medieval Scientific Thought, Micrologus: Natura,
scienze e societ medievali/Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 13 (2005):
AuQ32 47792.
9. The French Rabbinic scholar Rashi (d. 1105) had incorporated maps into his widely
copied Hebrew biblical commentaries, while cartographers in the Muslim world
imagined worlds of incomparable beauty in both their terrestrial and celestial maps.
But their maps bore little resemblance to Christian ones. On cartographic tradi-
tions in Hebrew, see Rehav Rubin, Hug ha-ares by Rabbi Solomon of Chelm:
An Early Geographical Treatise and Its Sources, Aleph 8 (2008): 13147, and
the literature cited therein. (My thanks to Gad Freudenthal for this reference.) On
Muslim cartography, see J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of
Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian
Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
AuQ33 10. Pliny, Natural History, bk. 7. The classic study for the medieval fate of these views
is John B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
11. Edited and translated in Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Mon-
sters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 254317.
12. Asa Simon Mittman, Monsters and Maps in Medieval England (New York: Rout-
S__ ledge, 2006).
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