Caroline Walker Bynum

In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature...

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials is viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. 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 through such activities as bleeding,...

From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerising account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects. Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used in worship a plethora of objects, not only prayer books, statues, and paintings but also pieces of natural materials, such as stones and earth, considered to carry holiness. They also used...