Feminine and Jewish Discrimination "Bleeding" into the Medieval Era

Feminine and Jewish Discrimination "Bleeding" into the Medieval Era

During the Middle Ages, differences between men and women were established through physiological capabilities, such as men producing sperm and women producing menstrual blood. According to Galen, a man who claimed to be an authority on the female body, women were incomplete and deformed versions of men. Women’s ovaries and menstrual blood were thought to be crude mimics of a man’s testicles and sperm. This idea was based on the thought that women did not receive enough heat in the womb, preventing them from fully developing into men who received plenty of heat and were the perfect form of humanity. The notion of woman being a lesser man was integrated into many tales written in the Medieval era, one such tale being Beroul’s Tristan. In this story, Beroul utilizes female menstruation as a form of othering, degrading the leper Ivan as simultaneously feminine and Jewish.

Under Galen’s belief that women were deformed versions of men, a parallel can be drawn between Ivan the Leper and women. Leprosy is a disease that causes deformation of the body through loss of body parts, such as an arm or leg. This disease can be connected to women because of their incomplete bodily construction, i.e. their inability to have testicles and sperm. These missing body parts portrayed women as deformed as well, and since both leprosy and being a woman were seen as deformities, there is a connection between Ivan and the female body. Such a connection allows for the ridicule of Ivan, especially in the manner of how he is killed.

Ivan, the leper to whom Queen Isolde is given as a form of punishment for sleeping with another man, is abruptly put in his place by Tristan and Gorvenal who end up saving the Queen. As recited in the story, “Gorvenal indeed, snatching up an oak sapling, crashed it on Ivan’s head till his blood ran down to his misshapen feet” (Beroul). Notice here that blood ran from Ivan’s head down to his feet. This occurrence could invoke imagery of menstruation because the blood is running down Ivan’s body and presumably down his thighs and lower legs. Ivan’s bleeding mixed with his deformities mirrors the biological and conceptual ideas thought about women in the Medieval era since women bled between their legs and were “deformed” men.

Perhaps if we examined this a little more, we might notice how Ivan’s bleeding is reminiscent of the notion that Jewish men menstruate. It was believed that Jewish men were not fully formed either, and because of this they would menstruate from their anus or even their penis. Such a thought lumps Jews right in there with the grossness of women and demonstrates a form of othering that Christian males would often use back in the Middle Ages. This othering could certainly have been utilized when depicting Ivan because he noticeably bleeds from his head. In this case the word head may be representing the head of a penis instead of the cranium, meaning that Ivan would not only be deformed like a woman, but also bleeding from his male genitalia like a Jewish man.

Whether Beroul was actually attempting to other Ivan as female and Jewish can be debated, but textual evidence along with the prevalent theories about women during the Medieval era seem to point to the conclusion that he was.

Personhood and the Mechanics of Masculine Menstruation

    In its application as a symbol, blood is one of the most varied of all icons. Some associate the flow of blood with death, others with signs of life while even others associate blood with resurrection implications or healing properties. In some readings, it's seen as pure, while in others blood is a putrefying substance. Blood is completely universal in its appearance in both literature and mythic traditions, but its meaning is interpreted on a spectrum which touches all ranges of societal implications from class, gender, race, religiosity, and humanity. With all of this taken into consideration, it is fascinating to note that societal implications as to how one bleeds factors with equal importance to the nature of the blood itself. In fact, assertions have been made throughout history concerning the nature of bleeding, both conscious and otherwise, especially in distinguishing a kind of otherness in a group of people. For example, numerous early to late Medieval tracts declare that Jews possess an otherness of blood, going so far as to say that Jews require blood for ritualistic practices and that Jewish men have a similar flow of blood to that of women, hexed eternally with "cursu menstruo sanguinis" (Katz 441). However, in total there were numerous instances of overlapping bodily mechanics which blurred the lines between the masculine and feminine body and the demonstrable traits they possessed.

     The understanding of what menstruation was helped shape the conceptions of male menstruation in medieval literature. The thought behind menstruation in the first place according to Galen was that women used their monthly cycle as a kind of run off for excess blood building up in the body and thereby disrupting the humors (Kats 442). Pubescent boys were also noted to have a similar release valve reminiscent of their female counterparts, noted by Seperto. He is quoted as stating that the seemingly notable increase in nosebleeds in pubescent boys was a mechanical synonym for girls of the same age who first achieved menses (Katz 446). In all of these respects, however, the feminizing of monthly bleeding still dominates ideas surrounding the mechanics, and in this Jewish men found themselves as targets for effeminate as well as unclean suppositions. There are other recorded instances of masculine lactation, or stand-ins for menstruation present in males such as hemorrhoids or bloodletting through various orifices. 

     All told, medieval medicine tried in many ways to note the corresponding aspects of both the feminine and masculine bodies and demonstrate similarities between gendered bodily mechanics. This overlap continues to demonstrate the medieval ideas of gender and defining characteristics by means of the observable. As medical understanding grew, the corresponding attributes waned, but the assertions and assumptions surrounding these mechanics stayed present in both culture and literature.


Works Cited:

Katz, David S.. “Shylock's Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England”. The Review of English Studies 50.200 (1999): 440–462. JSTOR

"Men have scars, women mysteries": Blood magic in ASOIAF as a reproduction of Aristotle's blood hierarchy

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote about blood hierarchies. He believed that all bodily fluids were the same, just more or less purified versions of blood. He named semen as the top of this hierarchy, calling it "the final form of nourishment," the pinnacle of purification. Of course, he placed menstrual blood at the bottom of the hierarchy:

Now the weaker creature [woman] too must of necessity produce a residue greater in amount and less thoroughly concocted, and this, if such is its character, be of necessity a volume of bloodlike fluid... the secretion in females which answers to semen is the menstrual fluid.

This idea that men's bodily secretions were somehow cleaner and more refined than women's (shockingly) prevailed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This resulted in a lot of, let's just say, interesting tall tales—my personal favorite being the myth that women with irregular or no periods could shoot acidic menstrual blood out of their eyes like lasers.

I dunno, watching election news kinda makes me think that myth didn't go away.

Interestingly, in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, women's menstrual blood isn't construed as acidic or bile-like, or really even (all that) disgusting. It's another form of blood, and the only time men concern themselves with female blood at all seems to be when they're concerned with whether a girl is old enough to marry, and as proof of her virginity on her wedding night.

But George doesn't get off the hook that easily. See, in his world, women's blood may not create deep trenches in the earth or poison babies, but it is the only blood explicitly used in magic and prophecy. And, in a series comprised of 5 books and roughly 1,770,000 words (so far), that connection isn't to be ignored.

Blood magic starts off in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones, when the maegi Mirri Maaz Duur uses both horse's blood to force a miscarriage onto Daenerys—a bloody affair in and of itself—to keep Khal Drogo alive, in a vegetative state. The magic Dany had begged the witch to do involved her own blood and her child's to do, and it gave her only a husk of her husband. 

The next interaction with blood magic isn't much better: A Feast for Crows opens with a young Cersei going to Maggy the Frog (also a maegi—white people just can't pronounce foreign words) for her fortune. The witch requires Cersei's blood to tell her, and the future she reads is dark, haunting Cersei to the present day.

Even in sheer prophecy, not even blood magic, women's blood is key. In the third book, A Storm of Swords, Patchface (the court fool of Stannis Baratheon) sings a lunatic song that later turns out to prophesy the Red Wedding, one of the biggest turning points of the series' main military conflict, the War of the Five Kings. He sings:

Fool's blood
King's blood
Blood on the maiden's thigh
But chains for the guests
And chains for the bridegroom
Aye, aye, aye 

Thus, the Red Wedding, at which the war loses its best contender at his uncle's wedding, it is still of some fundamental importance to mention that a woman, and a maiden nonetheless, will bleed. Even in the magic of prophecy, far removed from blood magic, blood is vital, and the blood of women is essential.

So George doesn't write about women's blood being disgusting, or lesser, in any such terms, but he instead writes another iteration of the same perspective: women's blood is the only blood imbued with magic, and women's blood should be feared for it. There is as much a blood hierarchy in ASOIAF as there is in medieval literature and thought—when men are wounded in battle, it's honorable, but when women bleed, it's often sorcery.

In A Clash of Kings, Cersei Lannister tells Sansa Stark, "A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough... and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all." Little does Sansa—or most readers—know just how right she is.

Out for Blood: Reactions to Women Bleeding

In the show and books, Game of Thrones treats blood as a symbol of a women’s ability to have children, and therefore ability to be married. In the show, Sansa Stark is horrified to wake up to find that she has started her period. She wakes from a nightmare where she is being harassed to find blood all over her sheets. In this scene the focus is on her blood that has stained her sheets instead of the blood on her. She rushes to get a knife to cut out the stain and Shae walks in and immediately starts helping her hide the blood, which they are eventually unsuccessful in doing. Sansa’s blood was the focus of this scene. After, Sansa confesses to Cersei that she did not expect it so messy and Cersei tells her that childbirth is worse. The obsession with Sansa’s “flowering” is connected to her ability now to have children, specifically Joffery’s children, so they can now marry. In this example, a medieval woman bleeds to show her ability to have children. She is scared of her own blood while everyone else was anticipating it. As Sansa is now scared of the king, the thought of having his children is something is desperately avoiding. The same acceptance and usefulness of women’s blood is seen with Dany as she prepares to marry Khal Drogo. She is described as being ready for marriage because “she has had her blood” (34). Again women’s blood is connected to their ability to have children and therefore, in this scenario, their individual worth.

Another example of blood from the show is in the scene between Ygritte and Jon Snow in which Ygritte assures Jon that “girls see more blood than boys.” Here is another reverse to women’s menstruation and childbirth but this time it is in a superior tone. Ygritte portrays women’s almost indifference to blood as a strength they have over men.

From the book A Feast for Crows, Cersei does not talk of blood in menstruation; instead it is something that is showing her weakness. Curse has a dream that she is sitting on the Iron Throne but it is almost attacking her as the sharp edges cut into her skin. The description of the dream is vivid: “blood ran red down her legs, as still teeth gnawed at her buttocks…The more she struggled the more the throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of flesh from her breasts and belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red, glistening” (Martin 65-66). Here blood seems to be Cersei’s punishment for wanting to hold a man’s position and gain power. Cersei imitating a man has caused her to bleed and her blood is not praised for what it brings or a sign of strength but rather a sign of her weakness and shortcoming.

For these female characters, the presence of blood takes on several different meanings and can either be an unwelcome sentence or a symbol of their power.