Book description
Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their
"fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting
impulses-particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their
corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on
penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls.
Drawing on a variety of canonical and other sources, Fallen
Bodies examines a wide-ranging set of issues generated by fears of
pollution, sexuality, and demonology. To maintain their purity,
celibate clerics combated the stain of nocturnal emissions; married
clerics expelled their wives onto the streets and out of the
historical record; an exemplum depicting a married couple having sex
in church was told and retold; and the specter of the demonic lover
further stigmatized women's sexuality. Over time, the clergy's
conceptions of womanhood became radically polarized: the Virgin Mary
was accorded ever greater honor, while real, corporeal women were
progressively denigrated. When church doctrine definitively denied the
physicality of demons, the female body remained as the prime material
presence of sin.
Dyan Elliott contends that the Western clergy's efforts to
contain sexual instincts-and often the very thought and image of
woman-precipitated uncanny returns of the repressed. She shows how
this dynamic ultimately resulted in the progressive conflation of the
female and the demonic, setting the stage for the future persecution
of witches.
"This elegantly written book reveals and explores a set of
profound if elusive connections that made the materialization of the
witch in the early modern period, in Dyan Elliott's closing words,
'virtually irresistable.'. . . A dazzling recreation of
pre-Enlightenment thinking about the overlapping configurations of
pollution, this important book will be essential reading for premodern
and early modern scholars of gender, sexuality, and the
body."-Medium Aevum
Dyan Elliott is Associate Professor of History and Adjunct of
Religious Studies and Women's Studies at Indiana University.
