A FAITH based on God’s choosing to take on human flesh should make us aware of bodies and should encourage us to value them — in other people and for ourselves. Too often, however, we pay little attention to them, regarding our souls as what really matter, and our bodies as something to be “mortified” rather than celebrated.
Even today, we may find bodies hard to talk about, covering up our unease with humour or criticising those who are more willing to discuss our shared embodiment. Such reactions seem to me to devalue incarnation. But, if we step back from a Christian world-view, there is also something about bodies which makes it difficult to accept that they have any “history” at all. Surely, bodies have always been with us, maybe more or less healthy, but with experiences of birth and death, breathing and laughing, feeling joy and pain, common to all of time?
Yes and no. Our bodies exist only in history. When we live, where we live, who we are — all of those affect how we think about our bodies and influence what we do with them. For many centuries, women’s bodies have been understood primarily in terms of their difference from those of men. In the stories of both Eve and the ancient Greek “first woman”, Pandora, woman is presented as a late creation in a male world. That difference has often been focused on four body parts. Taking those from the most visible to the least visible, from the outside to the inside, they are: breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb.
Medical writers have sometimes tried think in terms of shared humanity rather than difference, and have looked for male analogues of these four parts of the female body.
Breasts, although complicated by their combination of erotic and maternal qualities, are relatively straightforward here: those assigned male at birth have breast tissue, and so can suffer from breast cancer. Their breasts can also produce milk, under hormonal stimulation. As for the clitoris, historically it has been seen as a small penis, a “lady-penis”, although some current medical experts have suggested turning the image around to make a penis “a large clitoris”.
Our reactions to that suggestion can reveal our assumptions about male and female. Hymens, though, have no male equivalent, and nor do wombs, although historically they have been seen as inversions of the scrotum. Wombs, across history, have been acknowledged as miraculous body parts, but not everyone assigned female at birth, or who appears to be a woman, has a womb.
HISTORICALLY, difference has been the main approach to sexed bodies. In the classical model of the body, dominant from the “Hippocratic” writers in the fourth century BC to the early modern era, this difference was believed to extend well beyond the reproductive parts. It still is, but in different ways. Now, we take into account factors such as a higher body-fat percentage and slower kidney filtering in women, which can affect reactions to drugs. When I was recently put on to some medication, I was pleased to see that the long list of potential side effects specified those that are more common in women. That is a relatively new approach: women were usually left out of drug trials.
In the past, difference was centred on the belief that women had a different texture to all their flesh — their bodies were seen as spongier — making them “wetter” than men, absorbing more fluid from their diet and with fewer opportunities to use that up in physical activity.
Before the discovery of ovulation, and of the process by which the lining of the womb builds up and is regularly shed, the key part played by menstruation was thought to lie in protecting women from a potentially fatal accumulation of fluid in their spongier flesh. This made regular bleeding essential — it was not thought possible to miss a period — and it went beyond menstrual loss, with nosebleeds, ear bleeding, and even vomiting blood considered potentially useful if the normal route out was not taken.
Across the history of Western Europe, beliefs about menstruation have seriously affected women’s lives, and not just in terms of whether symptoms were regarded as dangerous or not. The nature of menstrual blood itself was debated: was it a waste product, passed out through the womb and the vagina, conveniently situated between the two other exit routes for waste? Or was it just like other blood, in which case, how could women regularly lose what in other contexts was essential to life?
Menstrual blood could not be seen as entirely bad, because, in the understandings of the body which dominated until the 18th century, it was also thought to be the material from which babies were made, besides being capable of transformation into milk, with channels thought to exist to carry it straight from the womb to the breasts.
AlamyA Middle English medical manuscript dealing with “The Sekenesse of Wymmen” (the sickness of women), written in the 15th century, and held by the British Library
Claims of imaginary parts such as these channels are a feature of the medical history of Western Europe, another example being holes thought to exist in the normal septum, which allowed blood to pass directly from one side of the heart to the other. The circulation of the blood and its passage to the lungs and back again was discovered only in the early 17th century.
These utterly imaginary parts were balanced by the refusal to believe in parts that we now know are real; for some 16th-century writers, such as the great anatomist Andreas Vesalius, the clitoris was an occasional freak occurrence — “a new and useless part” — not a standard feature of women’s bodies. Medical writers disagreed about its presence, its full extent — recognised in the 19th century, ignored, and restored only in the 1990s — and the possible part that it played in conception, and its capacity for pleasure.
Once again, our experience of our bodies is always situated in historical contexts. These contexts are not only medical — changing beliefs about how the body works — but also religious. Medicine and religion have always worked closely together, whether that is about consulting medical authorities to support the view that a potential saint really has performed a miracle, or a 16th-century anatomist’s regarding human dissection as primarily a way of showing the glory of humankind, the peak of God’s creation.
Bringing these two contexts together, the first human dissections in Christian Europe were carried not in search of medical knowledge, but on potentially saintly individuals, with the purpose of finding something out of the ordinary — three bumps representing the Trinity, a cross-shaped structure in the heart — which could be taken as definitive evidence.
In ancient Greek mythology, disease was the result of Pandora’s opening her jar, against instructions. For Christians, disease and death existed only because of the Fall. In some early-modern anatomy theatres, where doctors and interested members of the public watched dissections, figures of Adam and Eve stood watching them.
MEDICINE and Christianity came together in decisions that affected living women, too. God’s announcement that Eve would give birth in pain was taken entirely seriously in 19th-century discussions of whether anaesthesia should be used in labour. The severity of labour pain was recognised — in 1847, William Tyler Smith noted that “No human suffering, perhaps, exceeds in intensity the piercing agonies of childbearing” — but some obstetricians saw it as having benefits, pressure on the womb being relieved by the woman’s cries.
The words of Jesus in John 16.21 were quoted as evidence for the normality of labour pain, but, on the other side of the debate, medical men argued that the gall and bitter herbs given to him on the cross supported the use of pain relief. Sir James Young Simpson, advocating painless labour, referred to 1 Timothy 4.4, “For every creature of God is good”, and claimed that this included chloroform. If we were to reject pain relief in labour, then “we ought to go naked, ought not to cook, not to wear hats, etc.”
The Bible has a long history of being used as a key to women’s health. One of the most chilling examples of this comes from the work of Isaac Baker Brown, who, in 1860s London, carried out clitoridectomy on women, to address conditions ranging from “distaste for marital intercourse” to religious mania, and with the support of the Church of England.
One of his supporters, Dr Routh, referred to a success story of a young woman who seems to have had learning difficulties; after the surgery, she “gradually improved so as to be able to read the Bible and converse, and . . . he understood, was now in service”. Bible-reading, along with useful employment, defined success.
In the 19th-century struggle for women’s higher education, a key argument revolved around whether a woman’s body had enough blood to supply both the womb and the brain. That was, at least, logical, in the context of the medical beliefs of the time, but it existed alongside folk traditions that regarded women’s blood as somehow toxic. Menstruation was thought to prevent bread from rising and jam from setting.
I remember early discussions of the ordination of women, in which it was claimed that menstruating women could never preside over communion because they were “impure”; and there are women priests still who remember men asking them in the vestry whether they were menstruating.
OVER the centuries, these unhelpful views of women’s insides have existed alongside beliefs about the birth and childhood of Jesus. The body and blood of Jesus, whether Jesus the man or Jesus in the eucharist, came from the body — the blood, and then the milk — of Mary.
An unease that God could have become flesh from the blood of a woman led to a range of workarounds: conception that somehow bypassed the vagina — through the ear, or the mouth, of Mary; and a womb that acted just as a container for a pre-formed Jesus with no contribution to his body coming from Mary’s blood. Debate about the part played by Mary’s womb, blood, and milk existed in dialogue with different theological views of the relative divinity and humanity of Jesus. Mary was shown feeding Jesus as a way to emphasise his humanity.
It was not just Jesus. There is a long history of Christian men who had visions of themselves taking milk from Mary’s breasts, besides drinking blood from Jesus’s wounds. In the medical assumptions that were in play here, these fluids were transformations of each other. Mary’s blood became her milk, drunk by Jesus, and then made into his own blood, shed for us all. Her feeding of Jesus was part of her position as role-model for other women, and huge pressure was put on them to use their bodies in this way as their “duty”.
The breastfeeding imagery could go even further. For example, in her book Jesus as Mother (1992), Caroline Walker Bynum drew attention to the 12th-century Cistercian abbot Guerric, who wrote that “The Bridegroom . . . has breasts” and that “the Holy Spirit was sent from heaven like milk poured out from Christ’s own breasts.”
Jesus, while taking his mortal flesh from his mother’s blood, appropriates even the parts and the functions of the female body.
Mary’s milk was one bodily product around which medicine and religion could come into conflict. Many medical writers in the classical tradition were quite clear that virgins could not make milk: what did this mean for Mary? Was feeding Jesus simply further evidence of her being “alone of all her sex”?
AlamyA pregnant woman uses a hoop to support her burgeoning womb, in an illustration from a medical text by the 16th-century French barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré
Some medical writers, such as the 13th-century Michael Scotus, believed that pious women produced more milk than others; was this how she could do it? But the 17th-century Dutch physician Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck argued that milk production by a virgin was possible only she was prey to “libidinous thoughts” and caressed her own breasts. Where women’s bodies are concerned, such sexual behaviour was, of course, incompatible with Mary.
As for Mary’s hymen, that has been one of the most contested body parts in the Christian imagination. If the hymen is supposed to be the material evidence of virginity, then how could she remain ever-virgin, when she had given birth? In the late 13th century, the Italian Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi wrote of Christ’s birth, “The beautiful son is born without breaking the seal, leaving his castle with the gate locked.”
Even in the early modern world, medical writers were aware that not all women have a hymen, and that, while just a few are imperforate “seals” requiring medical intervention, most of these membranes disappear. Yet this body part has been fetishised above all others, and not only in Mary. Women have been warned against activities including horse-riding (other than side-saddle) and using a bicycle, in case these “broke” it, and they have been expected to bleed on their wedding nights. Even today, there is a market in hymen “restoration”, from workarounds inserted in the vagina, to claims from some bastions of “purity culture” that prayer can make a hymen return.
WHY does this any of matter? Because, I believe, we are still far too coy about bodies, particularly those of women. It is clear from debates in the General Synod that even saying the currently correct anatomical terms for body parts makes people uncomfortable. But what message are we giving to people when we squirm like this?
The Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, as Bishop of Gloucester, has campaigned since 2016 to highlight body shaming: one third of all girls express negative feelings about their bodies. If we can recognise and discuss the wide range of body images that have been considered the goal across history, perhaps we can take that important step back and help young people to challenge the impossible ideals held up to them today.
Surveys still show that people confuse the words “vulva” and “vagina”; how does this level of ignorance help women to talk to their doctors about their bodies? Secular projects such as the photographer Laura Dodsworth’s 100 Vaginas, or Philip Werner’s book 101 Vagina (2013), seek to share the range of what is “normal” and to reduce the incidence of the promotion by retail medicine of procedures such as surgical labiaplasty.
Knowing where our vocabulary comes from is also helpful. “Vagina” may sound reassuringly medical, even if it is difficult to say the word in a Synod meeting, but the Latin original means “sheath” or “scabbard”: the place where one keeps one’s sword. There is an undercurrent of violence here. Much historical language of the female body has drawn on rich metaphors focused on protection, enclosure, and flowers; is this more helpful, in showing that the body is beautiful? Seventeenth-century images of the hymen liken it to “the bud of a rose half blown”.
But there may also be a subtext here of danger, of fragility: 19th-century advice texts to young women warned them not to damage their “flower”, which was usually shorthand for avoiding what Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy, a campaigner for women’s education and suffrage and an author of an advice book, referred to as “tampering or dalliance”. Yet, the long history of seeing menstruation, too, as “the flowers” certainly feels more acceptable than the term “the fiend” used in the early 20th century; and then, of course, there is the link to Eve in “the curse”.
Finally, the history of the body speaks to current discussions of sex and gender identity. Identity is something that we feel, but also something that we perform — and it has always been so.
The history of the body shows that the male/female binary is nowhere near as neat as some would like to think. People are born with insides and outsides that simply do not match, something that has been clear at least since the 19th century. Whether we focus on difference or on similarity, we still have no certain way of allocating everyone to one of two sexes. Although we may try by using external sex organs, gonads, chromosomes, or hormones, we easily fall back into saying “it’s obvious,” based on our gendered and historically specific assumptions about appearance, including hairstyles, or the use of cosmetics.
Stories of those who spontaneously changed sex have been told since the ancient world, although it was long believed that you could change only towards the male form, the “perfect” version of humanity. But bodies have always been open to modification, whether that means how we manage our hair, how we dress, or something surgical.
Placing great theological significance on differences between the sexes makes gender transition today a challenge to many religious groups. In 2003, the House of Bishops stated that both affirming and negative views on transition may be validly held, although, since 2018, trans people have also been “unconditionally affirmed”. This is a similar position to that of women priests and bishops under the Five Guiding Principles, or to allowing priests to refuse to marry a person who has previously been divorced. Bishops can decline to ordain a trans candidate; some, of course, have transitioned after ordination and remain priests.
God took flesh in Jesus, and our bodies exist in history as well as in the light cast by this central event. Western medicine has not hesitated to use the Bible to decide on medical interventions in women’s bodies, while women have been told to look towards Eve and Mary, as the bookends of history, to learn what they should not be, and what they should be. None of this makes Christianity a healthy place in which to be a woman.
Dr Helen King is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University, an authorised lay preacher, a member of the General Synod’s House of Laity, a trustee of WATCH, and the author of Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the history of women’s bodies (Books, 20 September). She will be speaking at the 2025 Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature.