Doesn’t this coquettish figure just tempt you all over the place? The beauty of the noblewoman’s features here contrasts with the beast she is riding — as well it should, because this a 15th-century rendition of the Whore of Babylon from Christian mythology, as featured in _The Book of Revelations_. The sad thing about this character? The Whore of Babylon was really an extreme version of the views many people in the Middle Ages had about women generally — as temptresses whose sexuality was inherently problematic.
Many Christian theologians in the Medieval period bought into ideas put forth by the Ancient Greek Aristotle, who thought of women as “defective men.” In popular culture, it was common to think that women had “a hidden power to harm and association with filth.” This included a belief that menstruating women could emit poison. Unsurprisingly, more vulnerable women were considered even more dangerous, so that older women and poor women (because of their bad diet? — none of this makes actual *sense*) had an especially toxic power that could result in the death of children by their mere glance.
Source(s): P. 308, Elspeth Whitney, “Witches, Saints, and Other ‘Others’: Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture,” in _Women in Medieval Western European Culture_ ed. Linda E. Mitchell (Routledge, 1999). Image by Loyset Liedet and his workshop, ca. 1470, from Pierpont Morgan Library, in public domain. As cited in _National Endowment for the Humanities Blog_ “Dressing up (and down) in the Middle Ages (June 22, 2011), by Russell Wyland.
