Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe

by Caroline Walker Bynum

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 through such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounters 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 the 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.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Medieval History, Medieval, Theology

416 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 2011

About the author

Caroline Walker Bynum is Professor emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and University Professor emerita at Columbia University in the City of New York. She studies the religious ideas and practices of the European Middle Ages from late antiquity to the sixteenth century.

Reviews

[Darrick Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walker's book is an interesting interrogation of Christian beliefs concerning matter, roughly from the period between 1300-1500. Walker notes how ambivalent were the attitudes of late medieval Christians in Northern Europe, who saw matter as something capable of conveying the divine, but also as something threatening, in the sense that it was characterized by decay and corruption. Even those who attacked images and statues, such as the Lollards, talked about those statues as if they were animated, not as if they were merely empty husks of matter. that is, effectively, Walker's point in her book: that the late medieval world, both in its popular and more intellectual expressions, saw matter as something that was active, animate. Walker's method is one which tries to cull from the assorted types of evidence she presents, what might be called the "tacit" beliefs of people in late medieval Europe. She insists on the integrity of the late medieval period, and insists it was not merely a prelude to the iconoclasm and Reform (both Catholic and Protestant) of the 16th century. She reminds us that ecclesiastical authorities often frowned upon the unpredictable nature of matter, and the miraculous events associated with relics and other "matter," precisely because it was so difficult to control. In doing so, Walker shines a light on how the doctrines of the Incarnation and Creation played themselves out in Western medieval culture, and how attitudes shifted over time. She also takes time at the end of the book to compare Christian attitudes to matter with those in Judaism and Islam. A very well written, and intriguing scholarly history. Highly recommended.

[C. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some thought-provoking ideas in this book, and it certainly leads one to consider our own relationship to objects. The first chapter is the highlight for me, because it explores a wide range of Christian objects and imagery from western mediaeval Europe in ways which made me see them differently. I also treasure an overarching point that Bynum makes: mediaeval Christianity was not uniform. Every person who wrote about relics and miracles under examination here contradict each other, and sometimes themselves. Bynum shows clearly that there was no one mediaeval conception of matter, portraying the period in its full complexity. Having said all this, I did feel quite out of my depth when knowledge of Aristotelian physics became more important... I think I'll have to return to this when I've caught up a bit!

[Jing Rainbole · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is no doubt that Bynum has some great ideas with evidence to back up. However, this book lacked a general message, by which I mean it had wonderful anecdotes and examples but no bigger message. I found myself reading it with great interest but whenever I closed the book I had no idea what I took out of it other than "oh there was one cool woodcut". The images were helpful as it provided a visual reference to the text, but overall it was a forgettable book.

[Individualfrog · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading a ton lately about the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the 'disenchantment of the world' lately, and getting very enthusiastic about the state of pre-Reformation Christianity, which (I agree with the reformers) very nearly approaches the beautiful pagan religions (I disagree with the reformers that that is bad) specifically in terms of its ritualistic, magical, idolatrous, animistic (I think all of these things are good) material orientation, so when I heard about this book I immediately requested it on interlibrary loan as precisely up my alley.

But having read merely the introduction and looked at the illustrations referenced in it, I found it so viscerally disgusting -- I don't mean like ideologically or whatever, I mean I literally had to stop eating my pizza because I thought I was going to throw up -- that I don't think I can actually read it. This is ruining my day both because I am disappointed I don't get to read the book I wanted to read, but also because I feel like it's some kind of moral failure, like I have failed Flaubertian strictures on experiencing everything with disinterested equanimity. Also I have no idea what it is about, for example, a painting with relics embedded in the picture or the frame that makes me feel so incredibly grossed out. It is a real puzzle. Maybe I will force myself through this queasiness and continue this review later, we'll see.

A week or so later: Talking about this experience here and with some friends, who each grilled me about what exactly was disgusting me, somehow desensitized me enough to go back to it. My friend Tim thought I should stick with it because "if you had that powerful a reaction, you must be on to something," which is actually the sort of modern superstition that I am very dubious about, in the same way that most people are skeptical of older superstitions like some described here, e.g. bending a penny 'in honor of' a saint and then rubbing it on diseased livestock to cure them -- but anyway, I did stick with it. And it was interesting, but not to the degree I was hoping.

For one thing, the bent-penny bit is exactly what I was looking for, and it's only really a very small part of the book (which is deceptively short, because at least a third of it is endnotes!) Understandably, Bynum spends a lot of time on the thoughts and attitudes of various writers of the period -- churchmen, theologians, philosophers, reformers -- in regard to material Creation and its relationship to the divine. As an academic, writing a book for a reason after all, she also spends a lot of time using this material in dialogue with other specialists in her field, arguing a position in opposition to some and in qualified agreement with others. In both cases, the intellectual, theoretical arguments are only sort of tangentially interesting to me -- very clearly, the reason that Bynum had for writing the book that I mentioned above is not the reason I had for getting it out at the library and reading it. Particularly the latter concern -- the discourse with fellow medieval historians -- is not really explained fully, just as if you were writing an op-ed to argue for or against Joe Biden's position on something, you probably wouldn't lay the groundwork with a detailed explanation of the American "liberal/conservative" divide, you'd just launch into it. She mentions, for example, that since the 1980s the idea of a split between "elite" and "folk" or "popular" religion has been rejected, and some explanation of why, but without having read any of the works cited I was left mostly in the dark. The fault here is mine, not hers, of course.

While not unreadable, the book does suffer from far too much accomodation for the "predatory reader" that I have complained about before, a lot of "in this chapter I will" and "in this chapter I have" stuff that just kills me. And I do think there is something very strange in a book which explains "the objects acted *per virtutes, per vim benedictionis*, and so forth" can on the same page as this untranslated Latin used to prove a point, also explain that radishes are "long roots from a plant of the mustard family, used as relish". But I have to admit that the main reason I was only kind of interested, instead of fascinated, by this book, is that the examples were just mostly not to my taste, for the reason I put it down at first. Bleeding eucharist wafers, icons that ooze oil, Christ figures with trypophobic wounds covering the entire body, paintings with relics embedded in them -- these are not compelling/powerful to me, they are just gross, and while I don't know how to explain that I also don't think it's an interesting mystery either. There's plenty of things I just don't like, and those are some of them, that's all.

[Gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What interests me particularly here is Henry[ of Ghent]'s fifth type [of adoration], "conaturality," for it is his answer to the problem of the worms who share matter with the saints. By it, Henry means that worms from the cadavers of saints will have material from the saints' bodies inside, and these worms can be adored per accidens with simple veneration, just as relics are. What is adored is not, however, the worms, but the matter of the saints they contain, which is conatural with the saints...Moreover, the veneration to which the worms are entitled should be purely "interior" or spiritual, not done with bodily gestures, such as genuflexions, for gestures might give the impression that the worms themselves were being venerated."

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and well researched book. Made me look at relics in a whole new way.

[Gibbous Waner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this a lot!! Gives very interesting insight into the medieval mindset on matter / spirituality which is so different from ours

[Monica Mitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this an insightful read, especially with my interests in animate sacred matter in medieval times. In this book, Caroline Walker Bynam breaks several dichotomies. She argues that:
• There was no great split between the early and late Middle Ages in term of approaches to materiality: the former was not less sophisticated and more materially oriented, nor was the latter more spiritually minded and hence more sophisticated. Rather, sacred objects proliferated in the late Middle Ages, and discussions on their efficacy & propriety of use, philosophically, theologically, and naturally, were rife.
• Christianity is unique in its approach to materiality: it explains materiality by materiality, which can be seen in its founding on the doctrines of incarnation, creation, and resurrection as recreation.
• This creates and complicates the paradox: that the material as temporal and changing was to manifest the changeless and eternal God. Not simply a symbolic pointing to, but a manifestation in materiality. Material was animate.
• Bynam disagrees with modern theories of material agency like Latour’s, where material agency is likened to that of humans, and hence things have more agency the more they are like humans. Rather, she argues that medieval Western Christians saw material as having agency in itself. Hosts, relics, images, statues, all these could manifest life and eternity and changelessness in their nature as material objects that can change. Their agency lies in their materiality.

[AskHistorians]

Tombs with statues of the deceased featuring bugs crawling out of their eyes and semi-exposed skeletons. Badges marking a successful pyramid shaped like genitalia. Women canonized as saints who saw visions of a dead baby being served on the altar at Mass. Yes, religion in the later Middle Ages got weird sometimes. At the top of her game and the apex of her career, a master of medieval religion explains why.

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written from an Art History perspective rather than a Religious Studies perspective, which makes it more accessible those who are interested in religious art of Western Europe but don't have a lot of theory background.