Jesus’s Vagina: A Medieval Meditation
Earlier this fall my co-pastor Ken Wilson wrote an article called Gender Fluid Jesus is For Real, talking about the ways Jesus violated gender norms of his time and culture, and showing how Jesus identified with the feminine personified form of Wisdom, Sophia.
Reading it caused me to remember that many Medieval prayer books included images of Jesus’s side wound as a vagina. Those prayer books were collectively called The Book of Hours — though they often differed one from the other because they were specially commissioned by the wealthy and literate, and because many pre-dated the invention of the printing press. Tens of thousands of these books survive, most of which date from between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Book of Hours contained psalms and prayers to be prayed at different times of the day (the offices), as well as illumination and images on which the faithful could meditate.
Sometimes those images look … well, vaginal.
Medievalists speculate that the wound, pictured as a slit in Jesus’s side emitting blood and clear liquid, led some mystics to imagine other bodily slits that emanate blood and clear fluids.
