Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond Dominic Holtz OP (bio) Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. By Caroline Walker Bynum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 402 pp. $49.95. Caroline Walker Bynum is perhaps one of the most influential historians of the European Middle Ages writing today. Her numerous works, including Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (University of California Press, 1982), Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1987), Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, 1992), The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (Columbia University Press, 1995), and Metamorphosis and Identity (Zone Books, 2001), have received accolades from across the disciplinary divides of the academy, earning awards from the American Society of Church History, the American Academy of Religion, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. One of the more compelling features of Bynum’s work has been the strength of her analytical skill in interpreting a broad array of source material, from the subtle nuances of scholastic disputations through the wordplay in devotional poetry and vernacular literature to the iconographic programs of altarpieces and early Modern woodcuts. Moreover, she has coupled this analysis both with the classic rigors of intellectual history and with the concerns of more recent modes of analysis, notably the issues raised by gender theorists and the wider questions of the interplay between the body and society. In this regard, Bynum’s recent work, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (2007), is no exception. Indeed, Wonderful Blood is in many ways, and explicitly so, an historiographical experiment in détente. She is “not able,” Bynum writes, “to jettison either a 1990s sense that there are only particular stories and voices nor [her] 1960s conviction that somehow, behind it all, lie common assumptions” (xvi). It is through her study of blood cult in the later Middle Ages, grounded in a study of the devotion, influence, and controversy surrounding the holy Blood of Wilsnack during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that Bynum attempts to resolve her own internal, historiographical tension. Nonetheless, her study ranges through material from the Patristic and early Medieval period to the sixteenth century, and geographically to material from across northern Europe and throughout Latin Christendom. Said differently, Wonderful Blood endeavors to explore the common assumptions about blood, and more significantly about Christ’s blood, in late Medieval Europe through a study that remains grounded in the radical particularity of the texts, images, and praxis in and out of which those assumptions were experienced and transformed. The work itself is divided into four parts: “Cults in Northern Germany,” “Blood Disputes in Fifteenth-Century Europe and their Background,” “The Assumptions of Blood Piety,” and “Sacrifice and Soteriology.” In the first part, “Cults in Northern Germany,” recognizing its unfamiliarity to most English-speaking scholars outside of the pilgrimage made there by Margery Kempe, Bynum introduces the reader to the cult of the blood at Wilsnack. During the fifteenth century, Wilsnack became one of the most important sites of pilgrimage in Latin Christendom, only Rome and Santiago de Compostela exceeding it in popularity. Yet, despite the local approval and promotion of Wilsnack and its hosts, significantly [End Page 230] promoted as sanguis (blood) and not corpus (body), the cult at Wilsnack from its inception also inspired controversy, in the form of learned treatises disputing the possibility of any of Christ’s blood being present on the earth and whether or in what sense such blood was worshipful, as well as in the form of rival cults in other northern German towns. Having grounded the reader in the details of the cult at Wilsnack, its relic, and the controversy which surrounded it in the fifteenth century, Bynum tackles some significant historiographical obstacles to understanding “why an obscure village in the Prignitz would—or could—emerge as the center of late Medieval blood cult, both for Germany and beyond.” (50) Bynum discusses the difficulty of evidence for these cults, textual attestation for...