At Once Limit and Threshold: How the Early Christian Touch of a Hem (Luke 8.44; Matthew 9.20) Constituted the Medieval Veronica

Abstract

From the early fourth century onwards Christian legends and apocrypha elaborate on the biblical miracle story of the Woman with the Flow of Blood or the “Haemorrhoissa” (Mark 5.24b-34) and connect it to an image of Christ, initially rendered in a sculpture group. This article contends that the notion of the “hem” of Christ’s sculptural garment in those legends and apocrypha - mimicking the hem in the original biblical miracle story as described in Luke and Matthew - already contained the quintessential image-paradigmatic content that eventually constituted the medieval “Veronica.” It contends that this notion of the “hem” hence served as an early Christian conceptual “portal” to the Christian holy icon and to Christian visual culture at large, and therefore excavates the complex cultural matrix that underlay this early Christian notion of the “hem” (of Christ’s garment) and reveals its continuing resonance into this medieval image paradigm.