Caroline Walker Bynum
WONDERFUL BLOOD
Theology and practice in late medieval Northern Germany and beyond
448pp. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. $49.95; distributed in the UK by NBN International. £32.50.
978 0 8122 3985 0
When Longinus, the blind soldier who pierced Christ’s side on the Cross, accidentally touched his eyes with Christ’s blood, he began to see (or so the medieval legend goes). Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood in turn makes us see Christ’s blood, and see it everywhere in late-medieval Christianity: it streams from his wound on the Cross; it gushes into the waiting mouth of believers meditating on the Eucharist; it cakes on his forehead in the Passion; it soaks the earth of Golgotha; it miraculously appears when Eucharistic hosts are stolen or abused; it imprints the heart of devoted Christians; it saves, washes and nourishes all; in short, it emerges as the central object of Northern European spirituality in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For three decades now, Bynum has been pivotal in drawing the attention even of non-specialists to some of the overlooked, sophisticated conceptions that late-medieval piety developed of personal identity, death, redemption, gender, asceticism and the body. She now zooms in on and brilliantly illuminates the equally complex and equally crucial issue of blood, which – as first noted by Kathleen Biddick – had been conspicuous in her medieval material and sources, but absent in her analyses.
At a leisurely pace and in her characteristically elegant style, Bynum begins by describing the debates and practices of the famous controversial pilgrimage to “the blood” at Wilsnack, Brandenburg, to three abused Eucharistic hosts on which drops of blood had allegedly appeared. Bynum then links the Wilsnack cult with several other Northern German pilgrimages to various kinds of Christ’s blood, and contextualizes these cults further in the surprisingly numerous, and partly forgotten, theological debates about it. Briefly sketching the discussions of Christ’s blood in the Eucharist (well explored since Bynum’s seminal Holy Feast and Holy Fast), she gives welcome accounts of the lesser-known controversies on whether the blood, as it appeared in host miracles or in relics of the Crucifixion, could indeed have been left behind on earth after the Resurrection; whether it decomposed or remained fresh after Jesus’s death; and what happened to it during the three days between his dying and rising. According to Bynum, these were important issues for theologians as well as for laypeople, who venerated Christ’s blood in the Passion, in relics and in the Eucharist, because they encapsulated their hopes for eternal life and access to the supernatural realm. The recurrent core of the theological and devotional beliefs about Christ’s blood, according to Bynum, was that it remained on earth, independently of his body, even beyond his death and Resurrection. This repeated not only the miracle of Resurrection pars pro toto, but also more generally demonstrated the unchanging nature of blood, despite superficial change. This was likened to the immutability of God the Son when he took flesh, and thus said as much about the Incarnation as about the Resurrection. Moreover, blood was the only part of Christ believed to be still alive on earth, and thus allowed medieval Christians some access to God’s unfathomable self-sacrifice. In their devotion to blood, Bynum says, late-medieval Christians emphasized the positive aspects of sacrifice – the bonds it created between Christ and Christendom – rather than the less acceptable cruelty and one-sidedness of this killing.
Bynum sees herself as trying to strike a balance between generalization and detail, and the outstanding contribution of this book happens in the middle range. Her accounts of so many different theological debates, pilgrimages and devotional texts convincingly demonstrate the centrality of blood to late-medieval spirituality; highlight the fact that blood was often depicted as living; connect this to the medieval concepts of matter, personal identity, change and sacrifice; and contextualize the importance of the Eucharist. Perhaps inevitably, Bynum’s focus in close-ups and overviews is less sharp. Her selection of medieval material, in particular of vernacular and visual sources, strangely relies on well-known secondary accounts and even translations, rather than on originals or their editions. Although she emphasizes the importance of close reading, of paying attention, as she puts it, “to the verbs and adjectives chosen”, her study of particular texts and pictures usually rests on summary.
Moreover, despite the fresh focus on blood, those familiar with Bynum’s work will not be surprised by her ultimate conclusion that Christ’s blood, to medieval Christians, meant overcoming change and safeguarding survival even beyond death. That the prime achievement of medieval Christianity was to guarantee personal identity in the afterlife had already been Bynum’s main argument in her excellent, relatively underrated 1995 book, The Resurrection of the Body, in Metamorphosis and Identity (2001) and in some of her previous articles on blood. While she has done plenty to revalue the much-maligned medieval theology and piety, she now perhaps paints too rosy a picture of the spiritual comfort it offers, only grudgingly acknowledging the horrendous anti-Semitism intermingled with much devotion to Christ’s blood even before the Reformation, and blending out all misogyny. Caroline Walker Bynum thus beautifully and compellingly traces the positive message about personal integrity that theologians and believers are trying to give, but pays less attention to its inconsistencies, or indeed to how unique Christ’s “wonderful blood” and the coherent identity secured by it was. As ever, though, her empathy with medieval Christians has allowed her to put her finger on one of their key concerns, and Wonderful Blood should refocus the study of late-medieval Christian piety once more.
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Bettina Bildhauer is a lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. Her book Medieval Blood was published last year.
