medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Has anyone heard of anything remotely similar?
Indirectly, insofar as there is a clear connection between cheese and childbirth in later medieval thought because of Aristotle's use of the process of cheese-making as a metaphor for human conception. According to Aristotle, an embryo is conceived from male semen and female blood. The male semen provides the idea or form of a human being, while the female blood provides the physical matter from which it is created. The semen ‘fixes’ the blood causing it to coagulate and solidify into human matter. Aristotle notes that this process is similar to the way that milk curdles when a setting agent such as rennet is added during the manufacture of cheese. Thus he writes:'The male provides the form and the female provides the body. Compare the coagulation of milk. Here the milk is the body, and the rennet contains the principle which causes it to set. The semen of the male acts in the same way within the female. ('On the Generation of Animals' Bk 1).
Rennet is obtained from the fourth stomach of a cow or goat. In the middle ages, once a young goat had started to produce the enzyme renin in the fourth stomach, it was slaughtered and its stomach removed. The stomach was then “kept alive” as an ongoing source of rennet by hanging it from the neck and periodically topping it up with more milk. To make cheese, rennet was added to milk. Once it had solidified into a kind of gel, the liquid whey was strained off through a cheese cloth and the remaining coagulated curds were hung up to dry in a curd sack.
Many artists, especially Flemish ones, use Aristotle’s analogy of cheese-making to represent Christ’s own conception as a human embryo in their Annunciation scenes. In Rogier van der Weyden's St Columba Altarpiece, for example, there is a sack of curtain material hanging from the bed post. Not only does this sack reflect medieval ideas about the shape of a female uterus, but it also looks very similar both to a goat’s fourth stomach hanging by the neck, and also to a curd sack hanging up to dry.
See Susan Koslow, “The Curtain-Sack: A Newly Discovered Incarnation Motif in Rogier van der Weyden’s Columba Annunciation” Artibus et historiae 13 (1986), 9—34; also Shirley Neilsen Blum, 'Hans Memling's Annunciation with Angelic Attendants', Metropolitan Museum Journal Vol. 27, (1992), 43-58.
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