Christian Materiality

by Bynum, Caroline Walker

• ISBN13: 9781935408109
• ISBN10: 1935408100
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-04
• Publisher: Zone Books

Summary

In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects-among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers-allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounter with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond cultural study of "the body"-a field she helped to establish-Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 13
Introduction	p. 15
Nicholas of Cusa and the Hosts of Andechs	p. 15
The Periodization of Holy Matter	p. 19
Materiality	p. 25
Beyond ôthe Bodyö	p. 31
Matter as Paradox	p. 34
Visual Matter	p. 37
Image Theory	p. 44
The Materiality of Images: Two Theoretical Considerations	p. 53
The Materiality of Images: Examples	p. 61
Viewer Response	p. 65
Materiality as Self-Referential	p. 66
Material Iconography	p. 82
The Material in the Visionary	p. 101
Living Images	p. 105
The Cross	p. 112
Conclusion	p. 121
The Power of Objects	p. 125
Two Caveats	p. 127
Definitions and Examples: Bodily Relics and Contact Relics	p. 131
Definitions and Examples: Dauerwunder	p. 139
Definitions and Examples: Sacramentals and Prodigies	p. 145
The Theology of Holy Matter: Relics, Sacramentals, and Dauerwunder	p. 154
Dissident and Heretical Critiques	p. 163
The Example of Johannes Bremer	p. 165
Holy Matter in Social Context	p. 167
The Case of Wilsnack	p. 171
Conclusion	p. 175
Holy Pieces	p. 177
Parts, Wholes, and Triumph over Decay	p. 178
Theologians and the Problem of Putrefaction	p. 187
The Contradiction: Fragmentation as Opportunity	p. 192
A Comparison with Jewish Practice	p. 194
The Iconography of Parts and Wholes: The Example of the Side Wound	p. 195
Concomitance as Theory and Habit of Mind	p. 208
Conclusion	p. 215
Matter and Miracles	p. 217
Three Examples	p. 220
Elite and Popular: Again a Caveat	p. 224
Theories of Miracle as a Way of Accessing Assumptions about Matter	p. 227
The Historiography of Matter	p. 230
Conceptions of Matter and Change	p. 231
Change as Threat and Opportunity: A Reprise	p. 239
Reducing Change to Appearance	p. 241
Explaining Miracles by Limiting Change	p. 243
Using Physiological Theories to Contain Miracles	p. 247
Matter as Dynamic Substratum	p. 250
Holy Matter as Triumph over Matter	p. 256
Tht Materiality of Creation	p. 259
Conclusion	p. 267
Reinterpreting the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries	p. 269
Jews, Muslims, and Christians	p. 273
Theories, Medieval and Modern	p. 280
Again the Paradox	p. 284
Notes	p. 287
Index	p. 399
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