Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (The Middle Ages Series) - Softcover

Bynum, Caroline Walker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812220196 ISBN 13: 9780812220193

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

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Críticas

"For three decades now, Bynum has been pivotal in drawing the attention even of nonspecialists 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. . . . 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 piety once more."-Times Literary Supplement "A work of deep scholarship. . . Bynum's erudite book poses the question, why blood? . . . There is no other scholar who is better prepared to answer that question."-Speculum "Bynum's latest masterpiece."-Renaissance Quarterly "A wide-ranging exploration of the meaning of the macabre but ubiquitous 'blood piety' that loomed large in Western Christianity in the later Middle Ages."-New York Review of Books

Reseña del editor

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0812220196
• ISBN 13: 9780812220193
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 456