Pleasures of the flesh
For many medieval mystics, the key to spiritual ecstasy lay in degrading acts such as drinking the pus from wounds
In the 1360s, a young woman called Catherine of Siena experienced a vision from God during which – according to her biographer, Raymond of Capua – she drank the water from the wound in Christ’s side.
Catherine’s vision proved a life-changing experience. From that day, she was in an almost constant state of contemplation. She no longer menstruated, or defecated. She refused food and drink, and began substituting it with other, more revolting liquids. Raymond tells us that Catherine drank the pus from the cancerous wound of a nun in her care – imagining that she was ingesting the fluids of Christ.
To the 21st-century eye, this was a bizarre – and repulsive – way of displaying your devotion to God. But it was far from unique. Catherine was one of a new breed of medieval women who rejected the everyday temptations of the material world and gave themselves over to the life of the mystic. They were determined to communicate with God more directly, and fervently believed that degrading themselves before him, and propelling themselves into a state of ecstasy, was the best way to do it.
Catherine of Siena – who died in 1380, aged 33 – certainly found fulfilment in establishing this new hotline to the divine. She told Raymond that she had never tasted any food and drink sweeter or more exquisite than the leaking emissions of this wound.
Men, too, could choose the life of the mystic. But the vast majority were women, and this emphasis on fluids – the water and blood from Christ’s side, the pus from the nun’s wound – goes some way to explaining why. While medieval Europeans thought men to be hot and dry, women were considered cold and wet. While men’s bodies were regarded as strong and intact, women’s were, it was believed, more susceptible to external influence, more likely to leak and more prone to excess.
But by ingesting liquid from wounds, women could recast this negative view of their bodies in a new light. They could use their fluidity to help them connect more closely with the divine.