{"title":"Caroline Walker Bynum","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"metamorphosis-and-identity-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9781890951238","title":"Metamorphosis and Identity","description":"An exploration of the roles of metamorphosis and hybridity in the establishment of personal identity, with particular emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.The four studies in this book center on the Western obsession with the nature of personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with an eye toward antiquity and the present, Caroline Walker Bynum explores the themes of metamorphosis and hybridity in genres ranging from poetry, folktales, and miracle collections to scholastic theology, devotional treatises, and works of natural philosophy. She argues that the obsession with boundary-crossing and otherness was an effort to delineate nature's regularities and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, extending even beyond the grave. She examines historical figures such as Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, Bernard Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante, as well as modern fabulists such as Angela Carter, as examples of solutions to the perennial question of how the individual can both change and remain constant. Addressing the fundamental question for historians--that of change--Bynum also explores the nature of history writing itself.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49581694419217,"sku":"GOR008165629","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50329062342929,"sku":"CIN1890951234VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51056155754769,"sku":"NIN9781890951238","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51695378628881,"sku":"CIN1890951234G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1890951234.jpg?v=1750996171"},{"product_id":"resurrection-of-the-body-in-western-christianity-200-1336-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780231081276","title":"The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336","description":"In The Resurrection of the Body Caroline Bynum forges a new path of historical inquiry by studying the notion of bodily resurrection in the ancient and medieval West against the background of persecution and conversion, social hierarchy, burial practices, and the cult of saints. Examining those periods between the late second and fourteenth centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western conceptions of death and resurrection, she suggests that the attitudes toward the body emerging from these discussions still undergird our modern conceptions of personal identity and the individual. Bynum describes how Christian thinkers clung to a very literal notion of resurrection, despite repeated attempts by some theologians and philosophers to spiritualize the idea. Focusing on the metaphors and examples used in theological and philosophical discourse and on artistic depictions of saints, death, and resurrection, Bynum connects the Western obsession with bodily return to a deep-seated fear of biological process and a tendency to locate identity and individuality in body. Of particular interest is the imaginative religious imagery, often bizarre to modern eyes, which emerged during medieval times. Bynum has collected here thirty-five examples of such imagery, which illuminate her discussion of bodily resurrection. With this detailed study of theology, piety, and social history, Bynum writes a new chapter in the history of the body and challenges our views on gender, social hierarchy, and difference.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49588591493393,"sku":"GOR002120225","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49769266184465,"sku":"CIN0231081278G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51781669519633,"sku":"CIN0231081278VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53229432373521,"sku":"CIN0231081278A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231081278.jpg?v=1750738591"},{"product_id":"holy-feast-and-holy-fast-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780520063297","title":"Holy Feast and Holy Fast","description":"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 of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous 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. Providing 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49667766190353,"sku":"GOR005860403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50875291566353,"sku":"CIN0520063295VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51533685588241,"sku":"CIN0520063295G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51533685981457,"sku":"NGR9780520063297","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51533686210833,"sku":"GOR006874917","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53271565926673,"sku":"CIN0520063295A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521389879569,"sku":"NLS9780520063297","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0520063295.jpg?v=1751008175"},{"product_id":"christian-materiality-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9781935408109","title":"Christian Materiality","description":"Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials 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. Challenging 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 Christian Materiality, 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. She 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. Moving 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. 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Theologians and ordinary worshippers alike explained, utilized, 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). \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn a set of independent but interrelated 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. First, 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. Second, 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 religion enduring power.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49741388513553,"sku":"NGR9781942130710","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054414168337,"sku":"NIN9781942130710","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1942130716.jpg?v=1751251656"},{"product_id":"fragmentation-and-redemption-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780942299625","title":"Fragmentation and Redemption","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eFragmentation and Redemption\u003c\/i\u003e is first of all about bodies and the relationship of part to whole in the high Middle Ages, a period in which the overcoming of partition and putrefaction was the very image of paradise. It is also a study of gender, that is, a study of how sex roles and possibilities are conceptualized by both men and women, even though asymmetric power relationships and men's greater access to knowledge have informed the cultural construction of categories such as \"male\" and \"female,\" \"heretic\" and \"saint.\" Finally, these essays are about the creativity of women's voices and women's bodies.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Bynum discusses how some women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burden of fertility, yet made female fertility a powerful symbol; how some used Christian dichotomies of male \/ female and powerful \/ weak to facilitate their own \u003ci\u003eimitatio Christi\u003c\/i\u003e, yet undercut these dichotomies by subsuming them into \u003ci\u003ehumanitas\u003c\/i\u003e. 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Yet in the fifteenth century it was a European pilgrimage site surpassed in importance only by Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The goal of pilgrimage was three miraculous hosts, supposedly discovered in the charred remains of the village church several days after it had been torched by a marauding knight in August 1383. Although the church had been burned and the spot soaked with rain, the hosts were found intact and dry, with a drop of Christ's blood at the center of each.   In Wonderful Blood, Caroline Walker Bynum studies the saving power attributed to Christ's blood at north German cult sites such as Wilsnack, the theological controversy such sites generated, and the hundreds of devotional paintings, poems, and prayers dedicated to Christ's wounds, scourging, and bloody crucifixion. She argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, pious practice, and theology. As object of veneration, blood provided a focus of intense debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a prominent subject of northern art and a central symbol in the visions of mystics and the prayers of ordinary people.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50187110809873,"sku":"CIN0812220196G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008026149137,"sku":"NIN9780812220193","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53371717091601,"sku":"CIN0812220196VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53609041363217,"sku":"GOR008128167","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812220196.jpg?v=1752315136"},{"product_id":"resurrection-of-the-body-in-western-christianity-200-1336-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780231185295","title":"The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336","description":"Bynum examines several periods between the 3rd and 14th centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western eschatology, and suggests that Western attitudes toward the body that arose from these discussions still undergird our modern notions of the individual. He explores the plethora of ideas about resurrection in patristic and medieval literature--the metaphors, tropes, and arguments in which the ideas were garbed, their context and their consequences, in order to understand human life after death.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50194246172945,"sku":"NGR9780231185295","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231195966.jpg?v=1750813151"},{"product_id":"resurrection-of-the-body-in-western-christianity-200-1336-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780231081269","title":"The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336","description":"Bynum examines several periods between the 3rd and 14th centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western eschatology, and suggests that Western attitudes toward the body that arose from these discussions still undergird our modern notions of the individual. 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Medieval women spoke little of inequality and little of gender, yet there is a profound connection between their symbols and communities and the twentieth-century determination to speak of gender and study women.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50419455688977,"sku":"CIN0942299639G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51888627122449,"sku":"GOR004415136","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0942299639.jpg?v=1766142357"},{"product_id":"last-things-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780812217025","title":"Last Things","description":"Eleven essays that focus on the competing eschatologies of the Middle Ages.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50469951406353,"sku":"GOR013792881","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008070582545,"sku":"NIN9780812217025","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51479382130961,"sku":"GOR010018910","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51887932768529,"sku":"GOR014446929","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812217020.jpg?v=1752315266"},{"product_id":"jesus-as-mother-book-caroline-walker-bynum-9780520041943","title":"Jesus as Mother","description":"From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of lay spirituality. I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51769861538065,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51769861734673,"sku":"CIN0520041941G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780520041943.jpg?v=1751494523"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-caroline-walker-bynum.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}