Bleeding Pages, Bleeding Bodies: A Gendered Reading of British Library MS Egerton 1821

Abstract

odily fluids were central to late medieval piety and artistic practice in fifteenth-century Northern Europe. Blood devotion, in particular, was reified during this period. The obsessive and anxiety-ridden interest in Christ’s wounds, bleeding, and suffering marked a deep desire to understand the physicality of Christ’s death as well as to achieve a new, body-centered form of piety. Blood frenzy widely manifested itself in images, texts, and alleged visions; one of the most extreme manifestations of late medieval blood piety and interest in physical modes of devotion is found within British Library manuscript Egerton 1821. Made in England circa 1480-90, Egerton 1821 is comprised of a Psalter, Rosary of the Virgin, and litany, among other smaller devotional texts. It was likely crafted by Carthusian monks at the priory of Sheen and possibly intended for the use of a laywoman in Kent.1 What is most visually striking about this pocket-sized codex are its prefatory pages— they have been seemingly spattered with the blood of Christ: the first three pages are painted entirely black and filled with numerous bloodred drops (Fig. 1). The following eight pages are covered with hundreds of tiny crimson wounds superimposed on red vellum back-drops (Fig. 2). Beginning on the verso of folio 8, this same design continues but is mostly covered by three pasted-in woodcuts depicting Christ and the Arma Christi, the Five Wounds of Christ, and Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Figs. 3, 4, & 5). The main purpose of this paper is to consider the gendering of Christ’s blood and how Egerton 1821 articulates this in both text and image. I will first consider the manuscript in the context of this fanatical period of blood devotion in order to answer the question that first comes