{"title":"Caroline Walker Bynum","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCaroline Walker Bynum\u003c\/strong\u003e explores the profound intersections of \u003cem\u003ereligion, material culture,\u003c\/em\u003e and medieval history. Her works illuminate how devotional practices, sacred objects, and bodily experiences shaped spirituality in Late Medieval Europe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReaders can expect thoughtful studies that bridge \u003cem\u003ehistory and spirituality,\u003c\/em\u003e delving into themes of health, ritual fasting, and the physical expression of faith. Bynum’s scholarship invites a deeper understanding of the cultural and religious life of the past.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"dissimilar-similitudes-devotional-objects-in-late-medieval-europe-by-caroline-walker-bynum-9781942130710","title":"Dissimilar Similitudes – Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom an acclaimed historian, a mesmerising account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBetween 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 dolls representing Jesus and Mary, and even bits of consecrated bread and wine thought to be miraculously preserved flesh and blood. Theologians and ordinary worshippers alike explained, utilised, justified, and warned against some of these objects, which could carry with them both anti-Semitic charges and the glorious promise of heaven. Their proliferation and the reaction against them form a crucial background to the European-wide movements we know today as \"reformations\" (both Protestant and Catholic).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn a set of independent but inter-related essays, Caroline Bynum considers some examples of such holy things, among them beds for the baby Jesus, the headdresses of medieval nuns, and the footprints of Christ carried home from the Holy Land by pilgrims in patterns cut to their shape or their measurement in lengths of string. Building on and going beyond her well-received work on the history of materiality, Bynum makes two arguments, one substantive, the other methodological.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, she demonstrates that the objects themselves communicate a paradox of dissimilar similitude—that is, that in their very details they both image the glory of heaven and make clear that that heaven is beyond any representation in earthly things.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSecond, she uses the theme of likeness and unlikeness to interrogate current practices of comparative history. Suggesting that contemporary students of religion, art, and culture should avoid comparing things that merely \"look alike,\" she proposes that humanists turn instead to comparing across cultures the disparate and perhaps visually dissimilar objects in which worshippers as well as theorists locate the \"other\" that gives their religion enduring power.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46849018659052,"sku":"9781942130710","price":54.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/13117693482879.jpg?v=1759008857"},{"product_id":"holy-feast-and-holy-fast-by-caroline-walker-bynum-9780520063297","title":"Holy Feast and Holy Fast","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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 of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePrevious scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eProviding both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47430854869228,"sku":"9780520063297","price":64.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780520063297.jpg?v=1774558295"},{"product_id":"christian-materiality-by-caroline-walker-bynum-9781935408116","title":"Christian Materiality","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLate 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, weeping, and walking about.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChallenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounters with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In \u003cem\u003eChristian Materiality\u003c\/em\u003e, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eShe also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMoving beyond the cultural study of \"the body\"—a field she helped to establish—Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47470272741612,"sku":"9781935408116","price":84.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781935408116-christian-materiality.jpg?v=1775215116"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/collections\/caroline-walker-bynum.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}