Medieval Menstruation and Jesus’s Wounds

Sometimes, history is so weird I don’t even know where to begin. Strap in, people, because today’s post is about ideas Medieval people had about menstruation.

The two illuminated manuscript illustrations both show graphic depictions of the wounds of Christ. And if you’re thinking that those pictures don’t immediately conjure up the side of Jesus, lanced by a Roman soldier during the crucifixion, you are not alone. As the character Inigo Montoya from _The Princess Bride_ articulates: “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” Years ago, historian Caroline Walker Bynum detailed the ways that people from the Middle Ages could become mesmerized with thoughts of Jesus and — as they saw it — his selfless decision to die out of mercy for his children on the cross. His body was punctured, and the blood he shed from his wounds became life-giving . . . And if we substitute some of these adjectives, we might as well be talking about women’s bodies, menstruation, and ideas about the role mothers played. You know what they say, once you see it, you can’t unsee . . .
Paralleling these ideas of Jesus as mother was an idea that women’s bodies were inherently defective. This line of thinking goes way back in time, but certainly the Christianty that developed in the Middle Ages exacerbated it. One of the most prominent Medieval women, the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, herself bought into this. In _Causae et Curae_, she argues that the reason women menstruate is because of Original Sin. Thus, the very first woman, Eve, brought about the creation of periods — in the text, Eve began to menstruate because she had erotic thoughts: “When an influx of desire entered Eve,” writes Hildegard, “all of her veins were opened with a flow of blood.” Tough load of guilt for half the population to take . . . . But did the view of Jesus as mother at least make some important space in the Medieval imagination for the female body to be considered divine?