Sacred space and disruptive bodies in the high and late Middle Ages

This article examines how women disrupted sacred space and attempts to maintain gendered divisions in areas dedicated to religious use in the high and late Middle Ages. Drawing on examples mainly from England and France from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, it shows that women consciously transgressed sacred space in acts of both protest and piety. The reform movements of the eleventh century had consolidated and given new importance to existing norms, which an increasingly centralised episcopacy sought to push through more systematically. From the point of view of reformists and bishops, sacred space was an expression of divine order, but one under threat from forces of disorder and pollution, epitomised in the female body - transgressive, marginal and unbound. Whether dancing in monastic precincts or merely seeking proximity to the holiest of spaces, medieval women posed a challenge to the gendered order of sacred space. This potential for disruption was at times harnessed by secular men using the bodies of marginalised women such as prostitutes in symbolically charged attacks on clerical masculinity. Women would, however, often find allies and champions among clerics who supported the breaking of gendered boundaries and ignored the demands of custom and ecclesiastical authority.