Books by Caroline Walker Bynum

Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Zone Books)

by Caroline Walker Bynum

In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects ― among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers ― allegedly erupted into life. These objects appeared animated ― they wept, bled, and even walked. Such phenomena posed a challenge to Christians. On the one hand, they sought ever more frequent encounters with miraculous matter and, on the other hand, they turned toward an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion. By the fifteenth century, these aspirations, accompanied by new anxieties and concerns, were at the heart of religious practice and polemic.

In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they posed to both church authorities and to the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. Bynum also provides a deep analysis of the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages.

Her argument is without precedent: religious art, in this context and time period, called attention to its own materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility toward them on the part of iconoclasts. Understanding the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’ Christian culture as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum’s study suggests a new understanding of the background to sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond a cultural study of “the body” ― a field she was crucial in establishing ― Bynum exposes how Western attitudes toward the body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Christian Materiality is a major contribution to the study and theory of material culture and religious practice.

Wonderful Blood Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond

by Caroline Walker Bynum

The quiet market town of Wilsnack in northeastern Germany is unfamiliar to most English-speakers and even to many modern Germans. Yet in the fifteenth century it was a European pilgrimage site surpassed in importance only by Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The goal of pilgrimage was three miraculous hosts, supposedly discovered in the charred remains of the village church several days after it had been torched by a marauding knight in August 1383. Although the church had been burned and the spot soaked with rain, the hosts were found intact and dry, with a drop of Christ's blood at the center of each.

In Wonderful Blood, Caroline Walker Bynum studies the saving power attributed to Christ's blood at north German cult sites such as Wilsnack, the theological controversy such sites generated, and the hundreds of devotional paintings, poems, and prayers dedicated to Christ's wounds, scourging, and bloody crucifixion. She argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, pious practice, and theology. As object of veneration, blood provided a focus of intense debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a prominent subject of northern art and a central symbol in the visions of mystics and the prayers of ordinary people.

Last Things Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages

by Paul Freedman, Caroline Walker Bynum

When the medievals spoke of "last things" they were sometimes referring to events, such as the millennium or the appearance of the Antichrist, that would come to all of humanity or at the end of time. But they also meant the last things that would come to each individual separately—not just the place, Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, to which their souls would go but also the accounting, the calling to reckoning, that would come at the end of life. At different periods in the Middle Ages one or the other of these sorts of "last things" tended to be dominant, but both coexisted throughout.

In Last Things, Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman bring together eleven essays that focus on the competing eschatologies of the Middle Ages and on the ways in which they expose different sensibilities, different theories of the human person, and very different understandings of the body, of time, of the end. Exploring such themes as the significance of dying and the afterlife, apocalyptic time, and the eschatological imagination, each essay in the volume enriches our understanding of the eschatological awarenesses of the European Middle Ages.

Metamorphosis and Identity (Zone Books)

by Caroline Walker Bynum

In Metamorphosis and Identity, award-winning historian Caroline Walker Bynum explores the Western obsession with the nature of change and personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but concerned as well with Antiquity and the twentieth century, Bynum confronts the question of why intellectuals, religious leaders, and ordinary people alike exhibited a precise and persistent desire to understand how the individual both changes and remains the same.

Examining shifting conceptions of change itself in the years around 1200, Bynum situates the intense medieval curiosity about radical or substantial change in the context of specific cultural and social developments. Two images of change ― hybridity and metamorphosis ― were prominent in imaginative literature, theology, the visual arts, and natural philosophy; these sites of competing and shifting understandings each entailed different anthropological and psychological assumptions. As Bynum demonstrates in the four essays of Metamorphosis and Identity, the fascination with boundary crossing and alterity reveals an effort across different genres to delineate the regularity of nature and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, perduring even beyond the grave.

Included as the final chapter of Metamorphosis and Identity is Bynum’s 1999 NEH Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to a scholar in the humanities.