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Feminine Images of Jesus: Later Medieval Christology and the Devaluation of the Feminine

Feminine Images of Jesus: Later Medieval Christology and the Devaluation of the Feminine

By Jenny Bledsoe (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 3 no. 1 (2011)

Introduction: During the later medieval period in Western Europe, feminine representations of Jesus abounded. Medieval Christians had begun to emphasize the humanity of Jesus in reaction to the religious foci of the era before their own (early medieval focus on the spirit and Jesus’ resurrection), and seemed to find that “feminine” characteristics were most expressive of the human nature of Jesus. During the later medieval period (1000–1500 CE, encompassing both the “high” and “late” medieval periods), motherhood was valued. Medieval motherhood was cast in a positive light through the recent trend toward veneration of the humanity and suffering of the Virgin Mary. This standard of motherhood was based on self-sacrifice. While families were central and the cultivation of “feminine” virtues was valued, this does not mean that women themselves were.

As a result of economic changes, the later medieval period refashioned Christology, as well as conceptions of self. Feminine images of Jesus express changing ideals of femininity and also the socially accepted roles of women in the Church and the public. This study explores later medieval representations —both textual and visual—of Jesus as mother in order to determine the implications of such representations for actual women. We will sample three medieval writers who wrote about feminine Jesuses, two writing in the heyday of incarnation theology and feminized Jesus imagery—the twelfth century monastics Bernard of Clairvaux and Hildegard of Bingen—and later, one fourteenthcentury theologian who inherited the legacy of her predecessors, Julian of Norwich. In her book on Hildegard’s theology of the feminine, Barbara Newman describes the shared focus and understanding of all medieval representations of a feminine Jesus: “The common denominator is a sense that the feminine is somehow problematic; being neglected, undervalued, or wrongly understood within a patriarchal culture, it needs to be perpetually redefined, revalued, and relocated in the general worldview.” Although all of the medieval writers subscribed to essentialist understandings of gender based in a patriarchal society, it is true that they all seemed to think that it was necessary to explore and define the feminine more fully and consider how the feminine fits within human understandings of God.

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