While the title and subtitle of this work might initially seem to be at odds, Minji Lee’s slim volume provides not only an engaging close reading of Hildegard’s idea of the reproductive body, but also a thoughtful contextualization of the medieval German polymath’s vision. Lee argues persuasively that, in cultural as well as medical terms, Hildegard’s conceptualization of the female reproductive body was distinctive.
Both the length and the focus of the volume are themselves somewhat unusual. The Medieval Womb is published as part of the Borderlines series, which aims to bring both interdisciplinarity and theoretical innovation to the study of the premodern world. In keeping with these aims, Lee reads Hildegard of Bingen in conversation with Korean folk medicine past and present. These comparisons are found in the introduction and conclusion, which both frame the volume and invite reflection on the ways in which women’s knowledge circulates, and the ways in which reproductive bodies are often marginalized across patriarchal cultures.
Lee argues that, for Hildegard, porosity was both a physical reality and an important theological concept; her central argument is that Hildegard theorized the female reproductive body as made uniquely capable, rather than uniquely fallible, by permeability. The book’s organization is symmetrical rather than sequential, with chapters discussing how Hildegard’s ideas of porosity and flow were applied to the universe and the church bookending an extended discussion of how Hildegard saw these ideas as relevant to gendered bodies. These central chapters examine the role and representations of women’s bodies in discourses of theology (chapter 2), medicine (chapter 3), and reproductive sex (chapter 4.) While the internal organization of each chapter can be somewhat choppy, Lee’s reading of Hildegard’s ideas is elegant. The density of these ideas is illustrated by the fact that, for instance, the roles of Eve and Adam in Eden and after their expulsion from it are examined in each of these three chapters, in relation to Hildegard’s thought on sin and redemption, embodiment and menstruation, and reproduction. Lee reads Hildegard as revalorizing women’s bodies in each of these contexts. (Note: I follow Lee in not significantly problematizing Hildegard’s cisnormativity. The tension between a fairly strong binary idea of gender, and Hildegard’s reading of humoral qualities as individualized rather than linked to “womanly” or “manly” natures, is never fully resolved in chapter 4.)
To my mind, for all the merits of this close reading of Hildegard, the most interesting chapters are the most ambitious, in which Lee analyzes Hildegard’s visions of the universe (chapter 1) and the church (chapter 5.) For Hildegard, the permeability of the universe enabled it to be—like the reproductive body—self-cleansing. Porosity, in this reading, is necessary to the redemption of humankind; if humanity were entirely obdurate, how could it receive the necessary flow of divine grace? Both “cosmological and salvational [processes,]” (92), for Hildegard, were characterized by the same kind of flow as the reproductive body. As Lee notes in chapter 5, Hildegard’s framing of the church as mother of the faithful is unusual in its gynecological specificity. The act of labor itself, in Hildegard’s vision of Ecclesia, is redemptive rather than punitive. Lee’s work here opens a path for further investigation of the question about the extent to which Hildegard’s views on the reproductive body constituted an intervention. As Lee demonstrates, Hildegard was participating in active debates among canonists and theologians. While recent work by Michael Embach and others has examined the reception of Hildegard’s ideas, the question of how these were and were not taken up in theological and medical discourses would reward further study.
The bibliography, which could have overbalanced a volume of this size, is impressively curated. One omission that struck me was Laura Kalas’s Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course. While Kalas’s work on Hildegard is cited, I thought that it could have been generative to engage with her reading of Margery Kempe’s Book. I see meaningful and provocative parallels between Lee’s reading of Hildegard and Kalas’s reading of Margery as women who crafted powerful narratives about women’s embodied spiritual power, narratives that ran against much theological and medical consensus. Leah DeVun’s The Shape of Sex—relevant to the complexities of Hildegard’s reading of gender—is not present, though some of DeVun’s earlier work is.
The fact that the Latin is included in extenso—rather than assuming that interested readers will have knowledge of and access to editions of Hildegard’s works—makes The Medieval Womb particularly accessible to graduate seminars. Its length also means that it could be productively and feasibly assigned in advanced undergraduate courses, presuming classroom environments where most students would have strong reading skills and some background in medieval and/or women’s history.
Shortly after I received a copy of this book for review, I found myself in conversation with a student doing an undergraduate thesis on Hildegard of Bingen. His starting point for research was reflection on how Hildegard’s embodied experiences were similar to his own; but he observed dispiritedly to me that he felt he could not write about his physical and emotional experiences in an academic context. Rather than attempt an abstract rebuttal, I reached for this book, and told him to read its preface. In it, Lee discusses both her personal experiences of menstruation and her scholarly encounters with it. I myself had been struck by the vulnerability and boldness of this, and anticipate that this will be rewarded in the ways it stimulates and facilitates conversations like the one I had with my student.