Medieval Belief that Jesus was a Mother

Readers of this post might remember a recent article illustrating the way menstrual blood and images of vaginas paralleled the wound in Christ’s side in Medieval culture. (I promise I am not making this up.) A few posts later, I showed that before Europe’s scientific revolution, anatomists thought that breast milk was menstrual blood that had been transformed and carried through a mythical “female vein,” which they invented. Well, today’s post brings it all together, because now I want to tell you about how Jesus came to be thought of as a mother, nourishing His children spiritually. Blood and breasts are both involved.

In an absolutely famous Medieval history book — if that’s what you’re into — called _Jesus as Mother_, Carolyn Walker Bynum definitively and with examples replete related the ways that Christ was described in very maternal terms in the Middle Ages. Mothers were nourishing, nurturing, and mild, and gave of themselves to their children. And so did Jesus. In art, Christ’s wound frequently spurts out blood from his breast, and it looks like lactation, and this is not an accident. The painting here is from 1510, and is only one of many examples of the blood of Jesus becoming nourishing liquid.

Medieval writers could be blunt in their comparisons of the blood and breast milk. The English monk Aelred of Rievaulx wrote that “His outspread arms will invite you to embrace him, his naked breasts will feed you with the milk of sweetness to console you.” The 12th-century Bernard of Clairvaux advised people who might feel temptation to sin to “suck not so much the wounds as the breasts of the Crucified [ . . . ] He will be your mother, and you will be his son.”