Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages

In Fallen Bodies, Dyan Elliott looks at issues of ritual purity, demonic presence, sexuality and gender in light of the Gregorian reform movement and thirteenth-century scholasticism. She argues that clerical fears about ritual purity/pollution were at the heart of many of their misogynist views, and that ultimately those fears gave rise to the witch crazes of the late medieval/early modern period. Elliot sifts through a wealth of information to produce a synthesis impressive in its breadth, and scholars will find the lengthy endnotes well worth mining. As a whole, the book interesting, and mostly well-written, but Mr Bingley would tell Elliott she has at times a tendency to study too much for words of four syllables, and the reliance show more on Freud as a framework for psychoanalysing medieval people just struck me as weird. Elliott writes, in defense of her methodology, that an attempt by historians to avoid all anachronisms of concepts/terminology when writing about medieval people is misguided as "it ultimately leads to flattening out the medieval psychic landscape by confining its description to the vocabulary in which medieval thinkers were accustomed to describe themselves" (7), but while that may arguably be true, that still doesn't explain to me why she thought Freud's theories were the best lens to use. show less