The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 by Caroline Walker Bynum (review)

BOOK REVIEWS521 hers. Instructors using her book should simply expect to use a secondary text or lectures to furnish data not well-represented here. They will find their job in the classroom made easier by the excellent questionsJolly encourages students to ponder at the end of each selection and the equally fine introductions she has before each. Putting together an anthology like this—which requires one to select,locate, collect, photocopy, translate, organize, and introduce scores of historical sources, as well as to master at least the fundamental research for a millennium and a half of ecclesiastical history—is, as Jolly accurately describes it,"a monumental task" (p. 1 1). She has done the job about as well as it can be done. May her efforts earn her this reward at least: that her collection stay in print a long time. Kevin Madigan Catholic Theological Union, Chicago The Resurrection ofthe Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. By Caroline Walker Bynum. [Lectures on the History of Religions Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, New Series, Number 15.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 1995. Pp. xxii, 368. $29.95 clothbound; $17.50 paperback.) This volume presents, in printed form and with careful scholarly elaboration, the ACLS Lectures on the History of Religions delivered by Caroline Walker Bynum, who is Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor at Columbia University and the author of several books that have decisively shaped the recent study of the Western Middle Ages, includingJesus as Mother and Holy Feast and Holy Fast. As those books and her other writings have documented, Professor Bynum has become a leading figure in "the new history of the body that is being written by historians such as Peter Brown, Danielle Jacquart, Lynn Hunt,Thomas Laquer , Roy Porter, Marie-Christine Pouchelle, and Claude Thomasset" (p. xviii). In choosing as her topic specifically the resurrection of the body, she emphasizes that "this book is not about eschatology or about soul but about body" (p. xvii). But it is "about body" in the sense that the resurrection of the body means "the continuity of the self" (p. 309); for"what was at stake was not finally fingernails. It was self" (p. 225). And though it is "not about soul" as such, it is obliged to pay much attention to soul, especially when the soul is "physicalized" (p. 158) or, conversely,when the dominant tendency ofthe time is"packing body into soul" (p. 270), the "subsuming of [body] into soul" (p. 283)· In Christian theology, the understanding of the term "body" is fundamental to the doctrine of the Incarnation , to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, to the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and "bodily" Assumption of the Virgin Mary, to the cult of relics, and to a host of moral issues including sexuality. In Christian art, the iconography of any age inevitably expresses its guiding presuppositions 522BOOK REVIEWS about "body," whether it be the body of Christ or of the Virgin or of the other saints; and in the monuments of Christian literature, such as the Divine Comedy , to which "any study of eschatology must come" (p. 291), the portrayal of bodies is the key to the poem's meaning. Despite its title, this is not a continuous history of the development of the idea of the resurrection of the body from "200 to 1336." Its terminus a quo is indeed 200, especially "the daring inconsistency of genius" (p. 38) in Tertullian and Irenaeus; and its terminus ad quern is the controversy over the beatific vision involving the hapless Pope John XXII, which was "really about body and resurrection" (p. 279), together with what Jacques Le Goff has called "the birth ofpurgatory" and other fourteenth-century phenomena. But between its terminus a quo and its terminus ad quern, the late patristic and the early-to-middle medieval periods receive far less than their share ofattention; as the author herself acknowledges,"no one can be more keenly aware than I how much it loses by omitting the early Middle Ages" (p. xvii). She is also aware how much it loses by concentrating, almost but not quite exclusively, on what the title calls...