In Christian Materiality (2011), the medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum redefined her groundbreaking work on gender and sexuality studies as a sub-category of materiality. Rooting her argument in medieval definitions of “matter” and “bodies” (materia, corpora), Bynum reconceptualized medieval studies of the body as one aspect of the study of “Christian materiality” in which matter is defined as living. “[They] understood “body” to mean “changeable thing:” gem, tree, log, or cadaver, as well as living human being...[To] explore “the body” was to explore stars and statues, blood and resin, as well as pain, perception, and survival.”[i] In other words, premodern devotees rejected the contemporary assumption that there is a profound distinction between living and non-living, body and object, animate and non-animate. While work by Arjun Appadurai on the “social life of things” and by Lorraine Daston on “things that talk” emphasized the agency of objects in circulation,[ii] Bynum argues that medieval thinkers considered matter itself to be changeable, sometimes deteriorating, sometimes transformative, thus moving it beyond mere “thing-ness.”[iii]
In this talk, I argue that this repositioning of body as part of the study of living matter has important implications for the study of late medieval Passion devotion.[iv] The bodiliness of Jesus’ suffering was rendered excruciatingly palpable through lengthy consideration of other living materia, such as his blood, which while flowing was animate, complicating distinctions between interior and exterior, bounded and unbounded.[v] My case study focuses on the new emphasis post-1492 in Spanish Catholicism on Jesus’ bloodied embodiment, an emphasis which began in a climate marked by a newly-homogenous Christianity, the Inquisition, and the beginning of empire.
My talk features the role of blood and physiology in the first extensive Castilian meditation on Jesus’ suffering and death, found in the Life of Christ narrative that forms the majority of Pedro Jímenez de Prejano’s Bright Star of the Christian Life (1493), published just after the reconquest of Granada and the Expulsion of the Jews.[vi] Prejano began his Vita Christi with a discussion of Jesus’ unique embryology and fetal development, emphasizing the purity of blood necessary for a fully human, fully divine person and connecting this purity to Jesus’ heightened capacity for pain. His focus on Jesus’ blood intervened directly in debates over purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) unique to the peninsula, where forced conversions had led to general Christian suspicion of the sincerity and even genealogical capacity for Jewish conversion.[vii] Yet Prejano also rendered Jesus’ blood and pain in highly material ways, comparing the arma Christi (weapons used to torture Jesus) with elite adornment: “Look at the gloves and rings of the hands, which are large and sharp nails that rip apart the nerves, the flesh, and the bones…. He is resting on a rich bed covered with hangings, which is the cross on which he is nailed, stretched, and hung.”[viii]
Exploring this topic in relation to contemporary theoretical approaches to embodiment, I propose that the term “hyperbody” best expresses the devotional depiction of Jesus’ body as fully yet inordinately human in its suffering. Pierre Lévy, who examines the virtual/actual divide in modern society in a Deleuzian vein,[ix] proposed the term “hyperbody” to mark the biotechnological transformation of bodies in the twentieth century, for all bodies are now interconnected through transfusions, transplants, prostheses, and other medical procedures.[x] In his analyses, mechanical body parts and metal frames are intrinsic to the contemporary experience of body, while transfused blood circulates far beyond any one person to provide life to many. I suggest this is a description of embodiment that can help us consider how Jesus’s body was displayed for devotional viewing in medieval Passion spirituality: his hyperbody is marked by its massive bloodletting that circulates in a system of salvation, a bloodletting induced by various weapons of wood and metal that opened the fully human, fully divine body up to view.
[i] Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, 32, see also corpora as materia on 261, 264-5. Another crucial work is Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter.
[ii] Arjun Appadurai, Social Life of Things; Lorraine Daston, Things That Talk. For Bynum’s critique of these modern theorists, see Bynum, Christian Materiality, 281-4. For a contemporary theory of art and “things” that also develops the idea of living matter, citing Marcel Mauss, see Tim Ingold, "Materials Against Materiality," 11.
[iii] Bynum, Christian Materiality, 30.
[iv] “[I]n the later Middle Ages, the expression or reaction to Christ’s humanity, even his bodiliness, were part of a larger religious discourses about the material itself and how it might manifest or embody God.” Bynum, Christian Materiality, 33.
[v] For the medieval fascination with blood as boundary-crossing, see also Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, passim; Bynum, Christian Materiality, 257.
[vi] Citing from the earliest surviving edition, Pedro Jiménez de Prejano, Lucero.
[vii] The bibliography is vast. For a starting point, see David Nirenberg, "Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities," 3-41.
[viii]Prejano, Lucero, ch. 61, 62r-v
[ix] He cites both medieval scholastic discussions of virtualis, derived from virtus, and Deleuze’s Différence et Répétition. Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual, 23-24. My thanks to Vasudha Narayanan for directing my attention to this work.
[x] Lévy, Becoming Virtual, 40-2.
Bildhauer, Bettina. Medieval Blood. Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2006.
Ingold, Tim. "Materials Against Materiality." Archaelogical Dialogues 14, no. 1 (2007): 1-16.
Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum Trade, 1998.
Prejano, Pedro Jiménez de. Lucero de la vida cristiana. Burgos: Fadrique de Basilea, 1495.
As Bynum shows in Christian Materiality (2011), premodern Christian devotees rejected the contemporary assumption that there is a profound distinction between living and non-living, body and object, animate and non-animate. This has significant implications for the study of late medieval Passion devotion. My case study focuses on the new emphasis post-1492 in Spanish Catholicism on Jesus’ bloodied embodiment, an emphasis which began in a climate marked by a newly-homogenous Christianity, the Inquisition, and the beginning of empire. Proposing that Pierre Levy’s term “hyperbody” best expresses the devotional depiction of Jesus’ body as fully yet inordinately human in its suffering, I take the first Vita Christi written after 1492 as a case study, showing how the Castilian archbishop Prejano drew on physiological and material discussions of blood to render Jesus’ embryology, fetal development, and torture in light of the Spanish debates over purity of blood and forced conversion.