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

The subject of Caroline Walker Bynum's book is "blood obsession" in late medieval Christian religion, the creation of a northern European devotional art and piety which seemed "awash with blood." Its manifestations—blood wonders, host miracles, blood pilgrimages, host-desecration libels, and anti-Jewish violence—clustered in, but were not exclusive to, the German lands and the Low Countries, and the devotion they sparked and the opposition they aroused radiated into universities and episcopal courts and all the way to Rome.

Bynum's goal is "to look at the whole of religion … for the basic, often implicit, human concerns that lie behind it," even though "such concerns, exactly because basic and implicit, will appear different from every particular vantage point."[xvi] She builds outward and upward from a cluster of such points in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, of which the most famous is the site of the miracle known as the "Wilsnack Blood." At this small place in the Brandenburg province of Prignitz, a priest was said to have discovered three bleeding hosts in the charred remains of an altar several days after the village was torched by a marauding knight. From then until the midsixteenth century, Wilsnack was one of the most famous and most visited cult sites in Europe, surpassed only by Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostella. Bynum next widens the inquiry to other North German blood cults, to the theological debates—Nicholas of Cusa took part in them—over the presence of blood, and finally to the broad themes of northern European devotion in the late medieval era.

In a work which aims to unite deed and word, devotion and theology, and the local and the universal, Bynum is bound to frame a very broad thesis about the meaning of her subject. "Blood and blood piety," she writes, "summed up peculiarly fifteenth-century anxieties" which reflected two closely related issues: holy matter and access to God.[7] The question that arises was vital to Protestant attacks on Wilsnack and related sites. If Christ has departed in resurrection and ascension, how can Christians find Him present here on this earth? The discussion turned on the respective values of access through eating (sacramental communion) and access through seeing (ocular or spiritual communion). No access, no reason for devotion.

Why did this issue arise at all? Bynum point outs firmly, though in a generous voice, the deficits of accepted interpretations of these topics, especially those of literary and art historians, who tend to reduce them to matters of signification and essential dichotomies, and to make the Eucharist "the semiotics of the Middle Ages."[13] She sweeps these approaches aside as inadequate and argues that "there is something about blood as physical and psychological stuff—and hence as bodily symbol—that made it particularly appropriate to express the dilemmas and desires of fifteenth-century Christians."[21] She thus attempts the classic historian's gambit of interpreting the particular without obliterating it, and in the attempt she creates a picture of late medieval religion which fits its own temporal and spatial contexts, free from servitude to either what came before or what came after. But chiefly what came after, for, as Bynum argues about the existing literature, "scholarship on Wilsnack mirrors the course of early Reformation studies" with its confessional interpretations and its concentration on issues of clerical control and power. Without the leitmotiv of blood, she argues, such lines of argument are unable to connect recondite theological arguments with the allegedly disorderly religiosity the theologians attacked. Here Bynum serves the historians of religion as she earlier treated the historians of art and literature. Separated from the "blood obsession," the historical record makes little or no sense.

Through the following chapters Bynum marches, just as she planned, from Wilsnack all the way into scholars' studies and the universities' halls. She tracks the growth of pilgrimages, the spreading culture of blood wonders, and...