This book provides a welcome addition to a sustained interest in medieval monstrosities that burgeoned within academia some years ago, building on work by scholars such as Karma Lochrie, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, David Williams, Bettina Bildhauer, Robert Mills, and others. It is also a book particularly welcome for its work in challenging persistent paradigms that still offer the male body as central to the construction of medieval monstrosity. In Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body, therefore, Sarah Alison Miller’s gendered treatment resonates most clearly with work recently undertaken that promotes the female body as a primary source of culturally approved monstrous discourse. In this capacity, Miller argues for the female body as a source of the monstrous, not because of its divergence from paradigmatic maleness but because of its own materiality as alluring object of desire and its role as reproductive agent. In her development of a compelling line of inquiry, Miller selects three generically diverse texts for her scrutiny, arguing that in each case discourses regarding an ontologically monstrous female body become the primary and driving hermeneutic, one which is ripe for acceptance or exploitation—or even, as in the case of Julian of Norwich, rejection.

The book is divided into three sections—“Ovidian Poetry,” “Gynecology,” and “Mystical Theology,” categories that clearly herald the book’s intended scope. Each section, however, also constitutes a single chapter, something which subjects the content to a somewhat unnecessary double division that ends up being a little tautological and, perhaps, compromises its deconstructive work.

Nevertheless, chapter 1 (“Virgins, Mothers and Monsters”) offers a fascinating and detailed analysis of a much underexamined text, the pseudo-Ovidian de Vetula (The old woman), which lays claim to being a final literary incarnation of Ovid himself but which, in fact, is a medieval graft onto Ovid’s original corpus (11). Here Miller presents this text’s author, “Ovid,” as a deliberate misreader of the concept of sameness-within-change lying at the heart of metamorphosis, a misreading that allows him to justify a depiction of the aging female body as a repellently monstrous phenomenon. In this way, “Ovid” is able to set the body of the old woman against that of the young virgin in a traditionally hierarchical and binary way, rendering the old woman monstrous compared to the young woman’s perfection. Chapter 2 (“Gynecological Secrets”) examines the gynecological De Secretis Mulierum (The secrets of women) as a deeply misogynistic text rather than a “scientific” exposition of the workings of a woman’s body for an ignorant male audience. As Miller argues, rather than revealing the signs (monstra) of a female ontological monstrosity, this text actually lays bare the male fear of a female (re)productivity that simultaneously generates repugnance and desire, which, as we are reminded, is “the secret enticement of the monster” (89). The final chapter (“Monstrous Love”) considers the writing of Julian of Norwich and the “feminine” ontology that Miller inscribes upon the suffering Christ as God-our-Mother. Here, while the reading is close and the analysis astute, Miller does tend to lose sight of issues of monstrosity for large parts of her discussion. Nevertheless, she returns to the topic at the end of the chapter in a compelling way, arguing that the discourses regarding monstrous female bodies, as examined earlier in the book (and discourses “to which Julian of Norwich surely had recourse” [135]), were consciously discarded by her in her attempts to elevate the feminine—and the female—to the level of the divine.

The exciting potential for an articulate dialogue between these three texts has clearly been recognized by Miller. All have been carefully selected for their coherence within an apparent generic diversity—and she is clearly aiming to deconstruct artificial generic boundaries as much as she is those of gender and monstrosity in her work. These aims are much to be praised, although Miller is not always entirely successful in their execution. For example, the book’s overemphatic division, as mentioned above, on occasion impacts negatively upon the drawing of links, connections, and comparisons between the texts, something that is particularly true of chapter 2, which fails to mention the argument constructed in chapter 1 until the final paragraph (89). Thus, what is ultimately at stake, both here and elsewhere, is not always clearly delineated for the reader, who is sometimes left with a sense of dislocation. Other problems include the lack of a consistent theoretical scaffolding when articulating the body and its relations, despite a periodic drawing upon Judith Butler (although Irigaray, Kristeva, and Freud do not appear until the conclusion); there are some notable bibliographic omissions during pertinent points in the discussion (e.g., Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity [Cambridge, 2002], in all three chapters; Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards, eds., Anchorites Wombs and Tombs [Cardiff, 2005], especially in chap. 3 and the conclusion, where these correlations are overtly flagged); and, more pedantically, perhaps, there is a significant number of small typological errors. Having made these points, however, this book nevertheless reveals an author whose scholarship is sophisticated and informative and whose analyses are consistently perceptive and astute. Thus, despite a few minor shortcomings, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body certainly makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex workings of medieval teratological discourse, its constructive and deconstructive capacities, and its role within the formation of medieval socioreligious material and textual identities.