Caroline Walker Bynum. Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe.

Abstract

In her newest book, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe, Caroline Walker Bynum continues with some of the ideas she penned in her 2011 book, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. The two volumes form a compendium. Whereas the earlier volume takes up questions of miracles and the body, this one addresses religious, holy, charged, vibrant, and ordinary things. Constructing masterful arguments, she reveals that much of the repeated wisdom about ornate cradles, dolls, reliquaries, crowns, footprints, holy beds, and Eucharist wafers has been wrong. Chapters 1 and 2 form a diptych, each addressing a category of objects particularly found in female monasteries. The first analyses intricately sculpted miniature cradles, including the captivating example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Although she asks a linguistic question about whether these objects should be considered cribs or cradles or both, what’s especially interesting is her close looking at the example at the Met, and her larger question, which motivates many of the studies in the book: To what degree did medieval people take metaphors such as “rocking the baby Jesus in the cradle of one’s heart” literally rather than metaphorically? As Bynum shows, when believers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries embraced meanings literally, their doing so was often related to the objects’ intense tactility, which insists on the user’s handling and performance. Encouraging this kind of reception, the Met cradle playfully engages with the senses, including the touchable velvet bedding and the bells affixed to the canopy. Moreover, the intricately carved woodwork depicts a shepherd cupping his ear and the ox licking the Christ Child’s feet. As Bynum astutely observes, the carved wood rises into microarchitectural Gothic towers, suggesting that the object is both a bed and a cradle. It presents a charged contradiction: in its empty state, the bed suggests waiting for the incarnation, and when the Christ Child doll is dressed and laid onto the velvet cushion, the intricate parts structure a sensuous encounter. Such an object toggles between inviting spiritual and literal meanings.