Caroline Walker Bynum's ‘essay on religion’ is in fact an essay on matter, which she places centre-stage in the theatre of devotion. The intensification of the immanence of numinous matter in the period 1100–1500 was one of two opposite and contradictory developments, the second being the rise of spiritual interiority. Exploring the former, Bynum delineates not a dialectic as much as an irresoluble paradox, which afforded a true encounter with the ineffable by its very unresolvedness while also precipitating a crisis of sacredness in the simultaneous assertion of opposing responses to the divine. God was in every particle of creation, revealing his creative agency via the mutation not only of devotional objects with numinous pretensions such as effigies or icons of saints, which wept or came alive, but also in the mundane metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs, or rotting logs (p. 251). Where did the sacred cease, when the divine seeds of change lay already fertile in the earth of all matter, waiting for the spring, to heave forth fruit, or the winter, to inculcate decay? However it was viewed, whether in light of the Ovidian perception of matter as divinely impregnated chaos, or the Aristotelian quasi-naturalistic perspective of matter as a substrate, or, through a Neo-Platonic lens, wherein the soul of the universe engendered inter-species transmutation, matter could never be inert in the late Middle Ages. ‘As a religion at whose heart lay the doctrines of incarnation, creation, and the re-creation of resurrection’ as well as the doctrine of the real presence (later, ‘transubstantiation’), Christianity was bound to invest it with numinous power as those doctrines maturated (p. 285), a process Bynum dates to the centuries 1100–1500, the period covered by her book.
Chapter i, on art objects, challenges the traditional theological interpretation – that holy objects serve to point to (immaterial) spiritual realities – by contending that they served more practically to make the divine immanent and potent in the world, drawn down to earth in sculpted metal, carved wood and significant iconography. It might seem that matter and iconography were two separate things, but Bynum shows how, in the minds of the faithful, they enmeshed, reinforcing the materiality of each other. Whereas post-Renaissance representational artists separated sculptures and pictures, medieval devotional objects were symbolic: their likeness obtained in signifiers that were associated with the exemplar, such as Christ's wounds or a martyr's palm. The signifiers combined with the potent associations of sculpted materials to evoke more fully than any representational attempt at depiction the immanence of the exemplar.
Chapter ii, on relics, observes that relics and objects elided when the former were incorporated into icons, monstrances or shrines. Whereas theologians might contend that relics, which literally were what they presented, were more potent than icons or objects, people nevertheless behaved as though all these holy things were numinous (p. 125). Theological responses to this paradox are explored in this chapter, without the assumption – which is carefully eschewed – that an elite perspective is visible to offset a popular one. Thinkers struggled with it, as best they could. There is a useful discussion of the eucharist and sacramentals, and Bynum clarifies what, if anything, was new after 1100, pointing to miracles that involved the transformation of matter. Bleeding or shining relics, moving statues and weeping Maries fall in this category.
Chapter iii, on ‘holy pieces’ (i.e. the partition of holy bodies) adumbrates themes developed in chapter ii. Paradox is piled upon paradox, as Bynum reveals that the theological notion of concomitance, which revered fragmentation as a manifestation of wholeness, paralleled the tendency of late medieval piety to regard part as whole. Mystical arguments appealed to paradox, to explain how Christ could be indivisible even when his body and blood were divided among the faithful, or how saints could be cut up into relics yet remain incorruptible. Bynum attributes attacks on relics and satires against devotional materiality to the unease that arose from those unresolved tensions, anticipating a point argued in her conclusion: that Reformation iconoclasm is the surest evidence of the threatening potency of matter in later medieval religion.
Chapter iv, on matter and miracles, unravels the different strands of thinking that wove into the evolving discussion of matter qua the divine. In the thirteenth century ‘the transformation of matter’ came to be regarded as the method by which miracles were worked. To Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, miracle demanded metamorphosis. Theologians were enticed into the debate about matter as much because it promised some means of approach to the sacred as because of the threatening way in which it blurred the boundaries of the profane. Their responses only underlined the paradox.
Throughout her career Caroline Walker Bynum has been opening new windows on medieval spirituality. The paradox of her work is that they opened onto materiality. Many of the ideas in her book have been mooted in earlier works, but nowhere have they unfolded with the arrangement of subtle hues that, here, adumbrates the whole. Her achievement lies in analysis that is phenomenological as well as historical; that spans responses to the numinous ranging from the tactile to the intellectual, and that moves with equal ease through several allied disciplines, as though Bynum, herself, has united them into her own, while resisting any impulse to theorise and obfuscate.
Nothing gives rise to objection, but there are two questions that arise from her book. Bynum contends that her argument ‘is not about periodisation’ (p. 273), yet the book is periodised at least in its argument for unity over the period 1100–1500 (pp. 19–25). Here we have the horns of a dilemma: for the origins of her intense materiality either lie in developments peculiar to the eleventh century (which need to be identified), or fade back into earlier centuries (undermining the assertion of unity of the later ones). The second question is how to quantify the importance of materiality within the sum of late medieval religious experience. To place it centre stage as a subject of study is one thing; to use it as a central explanatory factor in the history of religion is another.
