Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity by Sara Ritchey (review)

Based on detailed readings of a small number of mostly well-known texts, Ritchey’s Holy Matter argues that the re-creation of the world in Christ’s incarnation was a significant theme in piety from the twelfth to the later fourteenth century. Since the two most important forms of holy matter in the Christianity of the high Middle Ages were relics and the Eucharist—each scarcely mentioned here—the title is misleading. One wonders if it was a publisher’s imposition. Ritchey’s book clearly began as a study of tree imagery in spirituality, and that theme is what ties its chapters together and accounts for its most perceptive parts. Those sections are thoughtfully done, focusing on passages scholars have overlooked, and they make an impressive contribution to the study of the literature of devotion. Elsewhere the book tends to veer into discussions about gender and about the physical context of meditational practice that are relevant subjects but not treated with enough evidence to be sufficiently convincing. Among the important issues broached is the question—alive since Huizinga and tellingly explored recently by Thomas Lentes—of how literally medieval devotees took images (physical, textual, and mental). Ritchey’s attention to the spiritual theme of God’s infusion into, and hence redemption of, creation will be an important counter both to those who see the period as characterized by concentration on suffering and sacrifice and to those who emphasize discipline, even abuse, of the physical human body in its ascetic practice.