From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders.These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual...
From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new ...
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other...
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for th...
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...
In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects -- among...
