Review of Minji Lee, The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)

Kathleen Crowther

I teach a course called “Women and Medicine” that explores the history of women as medical practitioners, patients, and objects of medical knowledge from the ancient Greeks to the present. Early in the semester, I pose this question to students: When you think of menstruation, what are the first words that come to your mind? Nearly every list includes some variants of pain, inconvenience, messiness, and moodiness. Some positive terms emerge – relief (at not being pregnant), natural, and female bonding. But all my students are aware that negative views of menstruation and of the female body are widespread. They push back against these views, and they call out the underlying misogyny, but they do not have an alternative, fully positive vision of menstruation and of the female body.

Minji Lee offers such a vision in her new book, The Medieval Womb: Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Reproductive Body. Lee’s analysis of the medical and theological writings of the twelfth-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) brings fresh perspective to this extraordinary figure and recovers an important but hitherto neglected strand of proto-feminist thought on the female body. She demonstrates that Hildegard transformed the misogynistic language and imagery her contemporaries used to imagine menstruation and reproduction into a positive and empowering account of the female body.

Hildegard provided an important counterweight to the generally misogynistic view of women’s bodies and reproductive capacities in the Middle Ages. Rather than using the male body as the norm, and the female body as a deviation from that norm, Hildegard treated male and female bodies as complementary. In this, she stands apart not just from her medieval contemporaries but from a plethora of modern writers. As anthropologist Emily Martin has so eloquently described, modern scientific textbooks continue to take the male body as the standard, and to use negative language and imagery to describe female bodily functions.^[1] In many ways, Hildegard’s views of the female body are more positive and empowering than the views of my students in the twenty-first century, which makes Lee’s work even more urgent and necessary.

The idea of menstrual blood as impure and as a mark of female inferiority has a long history. Ancient Greek physicians and natural philosophers understood menstrual blood as a waste product, analogous to urine and feces. And they believed that women menstruated because female bodies were colder and wetter than male bodies. The heat of the male body consumed food more efficiently, leaving less waste for the body to purge. These ideas were picked up and developed in the European Middle Ages by Christian theologians, philosophers and physicians, many of whom saw menstruation, along with the pain and danger of childbirth, as part of God’s curse on Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. Texts like the thirteenth-century Secrets of Women, once attributed to Albertus Magnus, exemplify the extremes of medieval misogyny, describing menstrual blood as a poison capable of harming men and killing children. One commentator on the Secrets of Women even compared women to “poisonous animals, such as spiders and snakes.”^[2] I suspect that the author of the Secrets and many of his medieval readers would be very comfortable on the blogs, podcasts, and Reddit forums that make up the manosphere. Their ideas about women and women’s bodies have had enormous staying power, as my students’ responses illustrate.

Hildegard did not reject the humoral medicine of the ancients or her contemporaries. Nor did she dispute that female bodies were colder and more porous than male bodies. But she transformed what men like the author of the Secrets of Women took as indications of female inferiority into “spiritual assets.” (18) Male authors, both ancient and medieval, described menstruation as polluting. Hildegard described it as healthy and natural, and compared menstrual flow to the life-giving rains that caused plants to flourish. Menstruation was often seen as God’s curse on Eve and her daughters. Hildegard agreed that Eve, in her original created state, did not menstruate, but she asserted that after the Fall Adam’s seed (semen) became poisonous. For Hildegard, all post-lapsarian bodies, male as well as female, were impure. Impurity was not a distinctive characteristic of the female body. In her theological work, Hildegard described the spiritual process of being purged of sin as analogous to the purgation of the menstrual flow. In other words, she turned a female bodily experience into a metaphor for a process that all male and female Christians had to undergo.

Ancient and medieval male intellectuals reduced women’s role in reproduction to that of a passive vessel. The womb received seed and provided a warm, nourishing space for the fetus to develop. Hildegard rejected the notion that the womb was “a motionless, functionless, empty room.” (79) She insisted that the womb – and the pregnant woman’s body as a whole – played an active formative role in the production of offspring. As noted above, she believed that male seed was poisonous. For conception to occur, the womb had to first purify this seed, making it fit for generation. Hildegard’s positive view of the womb carried into her theological work. In her extended allegory of Ecclesia (the female personification of the Church), she describes sinners entering Ecclesia’s womb to be cleansed.

In the Afterword, Lee offers us a tantalizing glimpse of a future research project exploring transhistorical, transcultural understandings of women’s bodies. She points to the similarities between Hildegard’s discussions of heat and cold and of porosity and flow and the reproductive medicines employed by contemporary Korean women. “These parallel traditions,” she notes, “demonstrate both convergences and divergences that invite fresh analytical approaches.” (120)

The Medieval Womb could be incorporated into classes like mine on the history of medicine, as well as classes in the history of religion, women in the Middle Ages, and medieval history. But given the pervasiveness of the misogynistic ideas about the female body in contemporary culture, ideas that have their roots in ancient and medieval medicine and theology, this book deserves a broad readership both inside and outside of academia.

Featured image caption: Illumination from Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias (1151) showing her receiving a vision and dictating to teacher Volmar (Courtesy Wikimedia)

Kathleen Crowther

Kathleen Crowther is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include science, medicine, gender and religion in the early modern period. Her first book was Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2010). One of her current projects is an examination of anatomical studies of reproduction, including the anatomy of the male and female reproductive organs and of fetal development, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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