‘Your body is full of wounds’: references, social contexts and uses of the wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Europe

Abstract

In this collaborative essay, the authors investigate the different ways in which representations of the wounds of Christ functioned in devotional practices as well as within a wider European context. The first section considers the wounds of Christ rendered as life-giving wells in Princeton MS Taylor 17, a fifteenth-century Middle English prayer book, focusing on their relationship to contemporary secular imagery as well as devotional literature about the heart. The second section focuses on the illustration on a Syphilisblätter, Dürer’s ‘Syphilitic Man’ (1496), and considers the visual referents relied on by the artist to communicate complex devotional ideas. This section also considers Dürer’s own relationship to philopassianism and positions this image within the artist’s oeuvre. The third section focuses on the Loftie Hours and the Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, both produced for female patrons in the Later Medieval period. Through consideration of the patterns of wear and intervisual relationships with contemporary illustrations of vulvas, the potential of these manuscripts to express different gendered positions alongside pious and devotional practices is examined.