The Womb in Labour: Representing the Woman’s Body as an Active Vessel in Hildegard of Bingen’s Cause et Cure

Abstract

Summary Hildegard of Bingen was a German nun who wrote medical treatises in the Middle Ages that interpreted the female body as a positive and purifying agent of God’s creation and salvation at a time when negative connotations of female physicality prevailed in medicine. In particular, she described the female body as an active vessel, in opposition to the predominant image of the female body as passive. Her explanations of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in her medical book Cause et Cure represent the female body as actively advancing, nourishing, purifying and caring for future generations in the form of the baby, creating an analogy between the woman’s power of reproduction and God’s power of creation. This article concludes that Hildegard’s vessel imagery is a result of her high regard for the female body and its capacity for reproduction. Hildegard’s novel interpretation of the vessel provides a uniquely woman-empowering image for discussing the broader complex of gender and body in medieval medicine.