Celestial or Human Childbirth?: Medical and Scientific Terminology in Anglo-Saxon Marian Texts (original) (raw)

2014, 26th Annual Indiana University Medieval Studies Symposium

Abstract

The Virgin Mary was the subject of significant Anglo-Saxon Christian devotion, particularly for her role as the mother of Christ and the channel through which he took on humanity. As a woman performing such an extraordinary role, Mary also had an extraordinary nature: virginal and pure, but fertile and completely human. The paradox evident in Mary’s nature reflects the conflict faced by Anglo-Saxon religious writers, who wished to stress Mary’s human nature and the human physicality of Christ’s birth in order to establish Christ as both human and divine, but also wished to make clear Mary’s purity, for instance, through her exemption from traditional Jewish ritual purity requirements after childbirth. This challenge was complicated by many Anglo-Saxon religious writers’ unwillingness to discuss Mary’s pregnant body and her childbirth—which, being completely human, would include blood, physical labor, and the impurity associated with such from which Mary was exempt—in a graphic, visceral manner. This paper discusses that conflict, and argues that the result is a “sanitized” language, which hovers between literal and figurative, used in Marian texts to discuss Mary’s body and Christ’s birth. By using scientific or medical terms for the womb, pregnancy, and labor which are also used in medical texts such as the Old English Herbarium, Bald’s Leechbook, and the Lacnunga, the authors of Anglo-Saxon religious texts can confirm Mary’s human pregnancy and labor without explicitly discussing the flesh and blood of childbirth. By using medical and scientific terms in religious texts, the writers of Anglo-Saxon Marian texts clearly ground Mary’s pregnancy and labor in the human world and establish that Christ’s birth was not, indeed, a “celestial childbirth” accomplished “beyond the human way,” but one which was accomplished very much in the human way.

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References (86)

  1. Virgin!" 8 Another link to Old English medical literature, this focus on Christ's humanity inherited from Mary reflects both classical and medieval medical ideas about conception. We know that much Greek medicine and scientific teaching came down to the Anglo-Saxons second-hand.
  2. 9 Galen had a particularly heavy influence on Anglo-Saxon medicine, and he discusses Aristotle's claims in "On Seed," where he agrees with many of Aristotle's claims and challenges others. Both Aristotle and Galen agreed that, as Caroline Walker Bynum explains, "the mother is the oven or vessel in which the fetus cooks, and her body feeds the growing child, providing its stuff as it matures." 10 This medieval association of matter with mother is exactly what is described in Old English texts concerning the conception of Christ, emphasizing Mary's role as fertile mother and producer of the physical body for Christ. Anglo-Saxon poets and authors faced a conundrum when dealing with this subject. Discussion of Mary as the physical Mother of God and belief in Christ as both human and divine necessarily place Mary's female body and reproductive processes front and center. Talking about Christ's birth as a sort of "celestial childbirth," accomplished without physical labor or with Christ appearing in a ray of light, as some other medieval depictions would have it, was not enough. By and large, Anglo-Saxon sources seem to want to depict Christ's birth as fully human, normal in all ways except for the fact that it was, of course, painless for Mary, unlike all other human women after Eve. Anglo-Saxon sources, however, convey a distinct squeamishness about addressing the physical process and description of the birth directly. In order to avoid such explicit descriptions, then, Anglo- Saxon authors and poets used figurative language to a large extent to speak about Mary's pregnancy and labor-but they also included medical terms and language in an innovative way to accomplish this. By drawing on earlier Marian language and introducing their own, including medical terminology, these authors produced a sanitized, yet evocative, discourse of Mary as a reproductive, maternal figure.
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