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

Caroline Bynum's latest book is a welcome addition to the study of late-medieval piety, since it takes up a subject of great importance that has long been overlooked by English-speaking scholars:the many permutations in devotion to the blood of Christ that flourished in northern Germany in the later Middle Ages. As Bynum admits, her monograph is not the first study of these themes, since the subject was masterfully treated in a number of articles and books by the German historians, Peter Browe and Romuald Bauerreiß, in the interwar years. Despite the high quality of insight in those works, they have been read by only a small circle of Anglophone specialists. Bynum's new book consequently picks up where both these earlier historians left off, and through a careful attention to the surviving sources, she answers many of the questions that have long swirled around the "Holy Blood" cults.

A short review cannot summarize the many important insights this book has to offer. From a purely empirical perspective, for instance, Bynum's combing through previous studies, medieval manuscripts, and some archival sources now provides us with a detailed picture of just when and where certain permutations in devotion to Christ's blood first appeared; how these cults changed over time in response to competition from newer forms of devotion; and which types of devotions were most popular and controversial at certain times and places. A major focus of the work is Wilsnack, perhaps Germany's most notorious late-medieval pilgrimage. Bynum's detailed discussion of that shrine, the site of an enduring "miracle of the host" or Dauerwunder, sets its history within the continuum of early-medieval devotions to blood relics as well as the later medieval fascination with the tortured Host and images of the Bleeding Savior (Schmerzenmannsbilder). Here she also provides an invaluable aid to future researchers by charting the precise mechanisms through which the newer, anti-Jewish devotions of the fifteenth century appeared. All this is, as anyone who has ever examined the landscape of Central European pilgrimage knows, an important achievement in and of itself, since the documentary traces of Germany's shrines are scattered in scores of small libraries and archives lying hundreds of kilometers apart. And a precise mapping of these shrines has often been obscured by the polemic and counterpolemic of early-modern Protestant and Catholic propagandists and historians as well.

An important advantage of this book is that Bynum scrupulously avoids any teleological treatment of her subject, refusing to peer forward into the sixteenth century, that is, to the point when Holy Blood cults became for Protestants symptoms of the corruption, abuse, and "false" teaching of the traditional Church. Until all but the work's final pages, Bynum sidesteps any consideration of just how the many diverse devotions to Christ's blood may have been implicated in the subsequent Reformation.

Instead she takes us into the luxuriant thickets of late-medieval piety, shining light on its dark recesses and complexities as only a scholar of her breadth of learning can. In a series of thought-provoking chapters she argues that the Eucharist was far more than a tool of clerical domination in late-medieval Germany and that the various devotions that flourished to it and to the Blood of Christ were fueled by impulses more varied than just the rise of a visual and affective subjectivity. Here her conclusions do not discount the insights of earlier scholars like Charles Zika, Pierre-André Sigal, André Vauchez, and Lionel Rothkrug, who have argued along these lines, but instead suggest other deeper avenues for interpretation. As Bynum reveals the contours of the many varied kinds of devotion that flourished to Christ's blood, she delineates the appeal of each through a careful attention to theological debates and actual lived religious experience. Above all, she argues that a desire...