Jennifer Jasmin Konrad

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

The World as Vulva: Genital Metaphors in the Writing and Images of Female Mystics

Medieval mysticism is known for its insights into the dynamics between the earthly body and ecstasy as a religious experience. These intuitions are recorded in egodocumentary visions and autobiographical descriptions in richly illuminated manuscripts. In her work Liber Scivias (1151/1152), the best-known female mystic Hildegard von Bingen was the first to develop a genuinely female interpretation of the cosmos, describing it in genital terms. The accompanying illustration of the cosmos clearly has the shape of a vulva. It is designed in rings and a central yellow-red crescent, which resemble the outer and inner labia and the clitoris. It was the female mystics of the 14th century who took up von Bingen’s approach in their Books of Hours and adopted the vulval form for an isolated, full-page depiction of the wound of Jesus Christ. With regard to the progressive discovery of intimacy in the High Middle Ages, the article examines the use of sexually connoted and erotic imagery in the mystical context and its seemingly contradictory function. The erotic descriptions and images serve as triggers of somatic arousal in order to achieve an ecstatic, cosmic transgression. Sexuality, originally stigmatised as a sin, thus becomes a means of religious practice, while at the same time providing an insight into the thinking of female scholars.