Sculpting Wanton Vessels: Physiognomy, Medical Theory and the Construction of the Evil Feminine in the Later Middle Ages
In: Illuminating the Dark Side: Evil, Women and the FeminineSearch for other papers by Brenda S. Gardenour in
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The character of the evil woman who makes her appearance in the fifteenthcentury inquisitorial handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum, written by the Dominicans Henry Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, as well as in the Formicarius of their predecessor, Johannes Nider, is born of the interaction of theology, Aristotelian natural philosophy and a concoction of late-medieval medical conceptions about the anatomy and physiology of the female body. The Dominican Thomas Cantimpré, for example, used the language of learned medicine taken from treatises such as the Viaticum of Ibn-Jazzar, the Qanun of Avicenna, and the De Secretis Mulierum of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus in conjunction with Aristotelian conceptions of the corrupt feminine and theological constructions of the holy virgin to write the lives of Lutgard of Aywières, Christina Mirabilis, Margaret of Ypres and Marie d’Oignies. In constructing the category of the miraculous and sexless virgin, whose body transcended both natural law and female biology, scholars such as Cantimpré also created the inverted category of the evil woman, whose very flesh not only embodied anatomical and physiological defects perceived as uniquely female but, like a dark mirror, intensified them.