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

2014, 26th Annual Indiana University Medieval Studies Symposium

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.