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Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond
"Received the 2007 Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion Winner of the 2009 Otto Gruendler Prize from the Medieval Institute Awarded the 2011 Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America" The quiet market town of Wilsnack in northeastern Germany is unfamiliar to most English-speakers and even to many modern Germans. Yet in the fifteenth century it was a European pilgrimage site surpassed in importance only by Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The goal of pilgrimage was three miraculous hosts, supposedly discovered in the charred remains of the village church several days after it had been torched by a marauding knight in August 1383. Although the church had been burned and the spot soaked with rain, the hosts were found intact and dry, with a drop of Christ's blood at the center of each.
In Wonderful Blood , Caroline Walker Bynum studies the saving power attributed to Christ's blood at north German cult sites such as Wilsnack, the theological controversy such sites generated, and the hundreds of devotional paintings, poems, and prayers dedicated to Christ's wounds, scourging, and bloody crucifixion. She argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, pious practice, and theology. As object of veneration, blood provided a focus of intense debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a prominent subject of northern art and a central symbol in the visions of mystics and the prayers of ordinary people.
In Wonderful Blood , Caroline Walker Bynum studies the saving power attributed to Christ's blood at north German cult sites such as Wilsnack, the theological controversy such sites generated, and the hundreds of devotional paintings, poems, and prayers dedicated to Christ's wounds, scourging, and bloody crucifixion. She argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, pious practice, and theology. As object of veneration, blood provided a focus of intense debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a prominent subject of northern art and a central symbol in the visions of mystics and the prayers of ordinary people.
456 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
11 people are currently reading
218 people want to read
About the author
Caroline Walker Bynum
20 books81 followersCaroline Walker Bynum is an American medieval scholar and University Professor emerita at Columbia University, as well as Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study. She was the first woman appointed University Professor at Columbia, served as Dean of the School of General Studies, and led both the American Historical Association and the Medieval Academy of America. Her research focuses on how medieval people, particularly women, understood the human body and physicality within spiritual and theological contexts, highlighting female piety and the role of women in late-medieval Europe. She has received numerous honors and taught at Harvard, Washington, Columbia, and Princeton.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 15, 2007
[This review is soon to appear in the journal Historische Anthropologie]
Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood. Theology and Practice in late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. 402 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ISBN 0 8122 3985 7.
C. K. Woodworth, Ph.D., Research Affiliate, Center for Comparative Research, Medieval Studies Program, and Yale University Divinity School.
As Caroline Bynum notes as the starting point of her most recent book, “Crucifixion is not a bloody death,” and the believing faithful knew this very well.
Yet fourteenth and fifteenth century Christians depicted the crucified Christ, in paintings and sculptures, dripping with blood on every surface of his body, pouring blood from a hole in his side that looked not like a simple spear wound but an explosion of gore, spurting blood from his dying body like a crimson fountain into the waiting chalice or directly into the mouths of the waiting faithful.
At the same time, stories of Jews desecrating the host – stabbing it to reenact the murder of Christ, thus drawing forth living blood from the wafer miraculously transformed into the body of Jesus –– blossomed, as did anti-Semitism and pogroms.
Caroline Bynum, past recipient of America’s celebrated (and lucrative) “genius” grant and now a senor research scholar at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, turns her attention to the shockingly explicit and unashamedly exuberant blood thirst of the refined Christian culture of northern Germany.
As in her earlier books, Jesus as Mother (1982), Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987), The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (1995), and Metamorphosis and Identity (2001), she successfully turns her eye on that which is both foreign and familiar – stories and religious images that scholars and non-scholars have long known about but which defied rational (or comfortable) explanation.
Blood may be a natural symbol but there is no natural abhorrence of shed blood, even within the Western cultural tradition. It is not so difficult to understand, in the modern era of sensitivity to blood-borne infections, that the Middle Ages understood two kinds of blood: healthy, sweet, inside blood and polluting gore: in Latin, sanguis and cruor.
It is more difficult to understand how shed blood could be experienced as transcendent, although it certainly was. Even in the golden light of soon-to-be Renaissance Italy, blood held a lovingly physical, even erotic, fascination perverse to modern minds.
In a passage Bynum cites from the writings of St. Catherine of Siena, the joyous revel in blood sounds more sociopathic (viz Hannibal Lector) than saintly. Catherine was requested by a condemned criminal to accompany him to his execution: “His head was resting on my breast. I sensed an intense joy, a fragrance of his blood. … I said: ‘Down for the wedding, my dear brother…” He knelt down very meekly; I placed his neck [on the block] and … received his head into my hands” (p. 164). Bynum’s sensitive explication of both popular and erudite religious texts reveals the sense and meaning of Catherine joyfully receiving the severed head in a gush of fresh blood.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood. Theology and Practice in late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. 402 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ISBN 0 8122 3985 7.
C. K. Woodworth, Ph.D., Research Affiliate, Center for Comparative Research, Medieval Studies Program, and Yale University Divinity School.
As Caroline Bynum notes as the starting point of her most recent book, “Crucifixion is not a bloody death,” and the believing faithful knew this very well.
Yet fourteenth and fifteenth century Christians depicted the crucified Christ, in paintings and sculptures, dripping with blood on every surface of his body, pouring blood from a hole in his side that looked not like a simple spear wound but an explosion of gore, spurting blood from his dying body like a crimson fountain into the waiting chalice or directly into the mouths of the waiting faithful.
At the same time, stories of Jews desecrating the host – stabbing it to reenact the murder of Christ, thus drawing forth living blood from the wafer miraculously transformed into the body of Jesus –– blossomed, as did anti-Semitism and pogroms.
Caroline Bynum, past recipient of America’s celebrated (and lucrative) “genius” grant and now a senor research scholar at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, turns her attention to the shockingly explicit and unashamedly exuberant blood thirst of the refined Christian culture of northern Germany.
As in her earlier books, Jesus as Mother (1982), Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987), The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (1995), and Metamorphosis and Identity (2001), she successfully turns her eye on that which is both foreign and familiar – stories and religious images that scholars and non-scholars have long known about but which defied rational (or comfortable) explanation.
Blood may be a natural symbol but there is no natural abhorrence of shed blood, even within the Western cultural tradition. It is not so difficult to understand, in the modern era of sensitivity to blood-borne infections, that the Middle Ages understood two kinds of blood: healthy, sweet, inside blood and polluting gore: in Latin, sanguis and cruor.
It is more difficult to understand how shed blood could be experienced as transcendent, although it certainly was. Even in the golden light of soon-to-be Renaissance Italy, blood held a lovingly physical, even erotic, fascination perverse to modern minds.
In a passage Bynum cites from the writings of St. Catherine of Siena, the joyous revel in blood sounds more sociopathic (viz Hannibal Lector) than saintly. Catherine was requested by a condemned criminal to accompany him to his execution: “His head was resting on my breast. I sensed an intense joy, a fragrance of his blood. … I said: ‘Down for the wedding, my dear brother…” He knelt down very meekly; I placed his neck [on the block] and … received his head into my hands” (p. 164). Bynum’s sensitive explication of both popular and erudite religious texts reveals the sense and meaning of Catherine joyfully receiving the severed head in a gush of fresh blood.
May 10, 2018
A work that bids the reader to want to investigate its themes in more detail. This is a rich intellectually challenging (to me) that shows how complex late Medieval soteriology was. It made sense to me of some themes my father stressed in his apperception of Christian experience. We see how materiality was important to Medieval thinkers and how Christ was both beyond yet inherently part of contemporary experience. We grasp why Christ's blood was shed not spilled. We grasp how Christ' blood was (is) pouted out for us. And we grasp how Christ's materiality is immutable.
March 19, 2024
Pretty wild stuff, but it could have been a bit shorter. Bynum has the tendency to repeat herself.
July 3, 2008
A very good and very interesting book that challenges number of commonplaces about Medieval theology and attempts to bring a wide array of scholarship into dialogue. She explores the often-oversimplified range of meaning of blood in its various forms, using the Wilsnack pilgrimage site as the anchor of the study. Bynum also does a good job highlighting the ambivalences and paradoxes of late medieval blood piety: appearance of blood as blessing and as reproach, or as a marker of both presence and absence. Her section dismantling the common dichotomy between Anselm and Abelard is also particularly valuable both from a historical and a systematic theology perspective.
I only withhold the fifth star because of a slight tendency to re-hash the same debates multiple times. While this allows her to bring out several angles in each event and dispute, it almost feels repetitive at times. Also, there are one or two times when she uses vague and unscholarly terms such as "guilt-tripping" in the midst of an argument.
All in all, an important and valuable book for the student of medieval theology, piety, and culture. Bynum does not disappoint.
I only withhold the fifth star because of a slight tendency to re-hash the same debates multiple times. While this allows her to bring out several angles in each event and dispute, it almost feels repetitive at times. Also, there are one or two times when she uses vague and unscholarly terms such as "guilt-tripping" in the midst of an argument.
All in all, an important and valuable book for the student of medieval theology, piety, and culture. Bynum does not disappoint.
July 29, 2025
Any book where I get to read the words "blood cults" and "crypto-flagellants" over and over again is a five star rating from me.
But on a more serious side, Bynum is becoming one of my favorite historians as she takes seriously the many different questions surrounding much of the wild religious devotion of Medieval Europe. Combing both popular and theological sources, she opens the window into world where religion feels alive and visceral in both its negative and positive outcomes. I look forward to tackling her other books soon.
But on a more serious side, Bynum is becoming one of my favorite historians as she takes seriously the many different questions surrounding much of the wild religious devotion of Medieval Europe. Combing both popular and theological sources, she opens the window into world where religion feels alive and visceral in both its negative and positive outcomes. I look forward to tackling her other books soon.
Want to read
April 19, 2016I had the oppertunity to hear Dr. Bynum speak this last semester on Medieval Christ Cradels. Dr. Frankfurter said that every book he has read by her has changed his perspective on the topic at hand. Her books are strange; yet she believes that as a historian one of her jobs is to present the past in all its monstrous glory in order to evoke wonder. Her books are essential reading for American Protestant Christians who tend to have no understanding of the importance of materiality in relegion.
February 25, 2008
Could be secondarily titled: "All You Ever Wanted to Know About Eucharistic Miracles, But Were Too Smart to Ask."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews