Jesus’ Bloody Hyperbody: Materiality and Physiology in Late Medieval Spanish Passion Devotion

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.