HIST 332 Chapter Notes - Chapter reading: Good Sunday, Margery Kempe
Document Summary
Women and man are dependent on each other. Food practices and metaphors were crucial to women. It seems likely that women were drawn to identify with christ"s suffering and feeding flesh because both men and women saw the female body as food and the female nature as fleshly. Men and women described christ"s body in its suffering as a birthing and lactating mother and at some unconscious level felt that a woman"s suffering was fusing with christ. The notion that woman was "not in god"s image" was not absorbed by medieval woman, even married woman, as a prohibition of their approach to god. The writing of women mystics is full of references to being created in god"s image. Woman or the feminine symbolizes the physical, lustful, material, appetitive part of human nature whereas a man symbolizes the spiritual, or rational or mental.
