some questions/thots/qoutes about bynum's wonderful blood
a) even in the idea of the effluvium miracles that are about the lack of containment (radical material shifts, icons pouring blood, chalices over flowing, furniture bleeding et. al) there seems to be a continual effort to contain or staunch the flow--either thru devices (i.e monstrances, etc); language (the ritual words of the eucharist, the highly symbolic/poetic language of the mystic, or the governmental language of the papacy (Leo's enyclical against it)
b) also, the collapsing of categories b/w flesh, the host, the blood, the relic, and that which is used to contain them, b/w the open monstrance and hte closed tabernacle, or the like meets like of the sacred relcis in shapes of hands, etc
c) the fail to contain it perhaps is a metaphor of the failure to properly heirchalise the church (Wycliffe and Hus' documents on the blood of christ; the blood miracles that occur under the auspices of abbesses, etc)
d) some of this relates to the rise of what is called the ocular devotion found in the 14th century--where seeing the elevated host was considered a kind of taking the host, or sufficent to eating the host; there is discussion of female mystics who though only seeing the host, feel satiated and report that they have literally tasted what they have seen without touching it--(obv?) connected to the holy fasting of these mystics
e)back to leo and other church fathers documents, in attempts to declare some miracles legit and some not, and to foreground transubstantion instead of cocommittal is a way of tightening power in the church--and could this tightening be connected to the new rules of celibacy
f) are women's bleeding and the discourse of blood libel that surounds the jews--the idea that women's uncontained bleeding makes the contained bleeding of the eucharist unholy and the idea of jews absconding with the host, disorder that which is ordered--and so stories of rot setting in, or the host liquifiying hte wrong hands, attach themselves to that feat of instability.
qoutes:
With elaborate puns and coneits, devotional writers packed much biblical and theological learning in to meditaiton on blood. Playing wiht the opposites "soft" and "hard", "stinking" and "sweet", "staining" and "cleansing", Richard Rolled for example prayed to rest "among the dead that lie stinking foully" yet are "softened in that sweet bath" that washes even while it "makes bloody my soul" . A well-known nineteenth-century manula of Cartusian devotions by Dom Cypien-Marie Bourtrais, compiled from late medevial material and often reprinted, provides many examples of fourteenth and fifteenth meditaitons on blood, living and shed.. (2)
(the idea that this discussion of blood, coming from puns, metaphors, conciets--abstracted language away from the physical substance, while talking about the physical substance, furthers the irony of containment...)
Collette of Corbie (d 1447) to whom Christ appeared as chopped meat on a platter, was warned that "the offenses people do against him, tear him into smaller peices than the flesh cut up on this plate" John Mirk, in his Festial for preachers, reported that a sick man who refused to confess cried out "I am damned" when Christ appeared, his wounds all read and cast a great handful of blood from his side into the sinners face" (4)
The eucharist has been much emphasized in recent study of the rleigion of the later Middle Ages--the eucharist as corprate symbol, as instrument of clerical "management" as reflection of the much touted "visuality" of late medevial culture. And it is, of course true, that
Corpus Christi as feast and as holy object united and divided medeival society, expressed and constructed its corperate boundries, and defined Jews and heretics as outsiders...(10) (Talking about the Gregory Mass) In the 1473 version from ST Maria zur Weisen Soest, the Christ figure is less a painted panel than an animated gigure who has just alighted before the pope. The paten is empty; there is no host on the altar linen. Before an astonished Gregory, blood leaps from Christ's wounds into the chalice and thence not only from chalice to pope but also from chalice to graveyard, where the poor souls who recieve it appear to rise from the dead under its saving power. The checkered floor (delieverately executed in careful perspective) carries the viewer's eyes not to pope or chalice but to the side wound itself; yet the sharp lines of blood then pull away not from wound but even from chalice and toward the little angular figures in the churchyard. Our eyes move toward Chirst and then away, toward the osuls who need salvaiton. The movement is inwatd, then outward, the picture spinters to our right. Blood savbes, but it spills out in order to do so. Whereas host incorprates and binds within, blood has a more complec valence, tying souls to the body from which it exits in a gushing stream (11)
The wound or wounds of Christ are more frequently hymned as doorway or access, refuge and conslation, than as violation; to penetrate is to open the way. Depicitons of Christi's bleeding on the cross sometimes stress waves pouring forth but often focus visually on discrete red gobles or drops, the blood is always fresh in crucifxion scenes, but it is often bits dropping into chalices to feed and wash as it is torrents leaping onto the heads of sinners....the body parts of Christ and hte saints represented in devotional images and reliquaries are synechdoes for the whole person, indeed for the glorfied person. As Christ is present interger in ever particle of the eucharist and ever eucharistic celebraiton, so the saints are wholly present in every relic fragment.... (14)
sangus/curor
Hus--The Red Thing Does No Wonders.
Following Johnnes Von Dorsten, who wrote in the 1470s, Paltz argues that such miraces are useful to reporach the negligence of priests, to countrer infidelity, and ot excite recerence toward the Eucharist, which (says Paltz( is more doubted than other sacraments (41)
According to a 16th cenutry legend, a Jew who stole or acquired a host found his hands covered with blood and bured the holy object, ground into fragments, at a place of execution beneath a gallows. He later confessed and was himself broken on the wheel. Miracles and visions in whcih blood figured promiently induced the bishop of Havelberg, the margrave, the pastor at nearby PRitzwalk, and nuns from a neibrhoughing house...to establish a clositer on the wite where the miraculous host fragments had been found, bleeding and reassembled. (A very odd moment in the story is the invident of the peasent who supposedly tricked the Jew into confessing by dressing up as a priest)... ((59)
is this a way of narratizing men who do not have the orders, who work the eucharist regardless.
We do find indeed some hesitation before images and visions even among those visionaries, especially ubt not exclusively women, whose understanding of their own union with Christ was not only expressed in increasingly graphic and somatic langauge but also mannifested in bodily phenomena such as levitaiton, stigmata and mystical pregrancy (79)
Yet withdrawl o the cup only increased the people's sense of its power. Desire kept pace with--and circumvented--prhobition...some of the clositered, denied access to the cup at mass, recieved it in visiuon. Others (for example, Beatrice of Nazareth and Catherine of Seina) expereinced the proffered wafer as the withheld bood, gushing into their mouths or over their bodies. What the clergy deinded them, they simply obtained in another way. Miracles of blood erupting from wafers were thus not only illustrations of concomitance to teach those who mistakenly iissted on Christ's blood in the cup, they were also a means of immediate access to that blood. 95
questions
to look up
Hus Tract on Blood
Joahnnes Von Platz Supplementum Coelfodiae
mystical pregnancy
beatrice of nazareth
