Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe

In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christiansin western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects--amongthem paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharisticwafers--allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequentencounter with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejectedmaterial objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at theheart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline WalkerBynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented forboth church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientificand religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes theproliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it calledattention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animationof images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christianculture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation ofthe glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a newunderstanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, bothProtestant and Catholic. Moving beyond cultural study of "thebody"--a field she helped to establish--Bynum argues thatWestern attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changingconceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.