'O wie gar wundirbar ist dis wibes sterke!': Discourses of Sex, Gender, and Desire in Johannes Marienwerder's Life of Dorothea von Montau

Abstract

This article examines how the Latin and vernacular accounts of Dorothea's life articulate religious experience in its relation to the body. It argues that Johannes Marienwerder employs an ideal of sanctity that allows him to undercut the binary oppositions (male/female, body/spirit) which both medieval theology and contemporary theory often prefer. Instead, Dorothea's life is used to invoke a model of spirituality in which ascetic practices and rejection of the world are recontextualized within a physical encounter with God: the body is no longer a prison to be escaped, or a passive matrix, but rather bears the signs of an encounter with God; identity is defined through a transposition of human social roles, and the eucharist takes a central place in a strategy of incorporation of the divine, most strikingly in the images of spiritual pregnancy.