Christian materiality: an essay on religion in late medieval Europe

TLDR

Late Medieval Christianity (1150–1550) was marked by pilgrimages to sites where material objects—paintings, statues, relics, and even earth and stones—were believed to animate, provoking both increased devotion and a shift toward inward piety that made such miracles central to religious practice and polemic. Bynum seeks to examine how miracles challenged church authority and ordinary faith, and to situate Western attitudes toward the body and matter within evolving conceptions of material reality. She analyzes the proliferation of religious art and its sophisticated portrayal of materiality, arguing that this focus explains both the perceived animation of images and iconoclast hostility, while also contextualizing body attitudes within changing views of matter. Her work reframes the backdrop of sixteenth‑century reformations and offers a new theoretical lens for studying material culture and religious practice.

Abstract

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in context of changing conceptions of matter itself. In 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 fifteenth century at heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes miracles themselves, discusses problems they presented for both church authorities and ordinary faithful, and probes basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes proliferation of religious art in later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both animation of images and hostility to them on part of iconoclasts. Seeing Christian culture of fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of glory and threat of natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of background to 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 context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to study of material culture and religious practice.