FLUID BODIES AND Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe: Bodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art is an interdisciplinary collection, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, and literature, dealing with material from the early Middle Ages to the early modern period. The essays focus on discussions regarding the body and how its fluids both signify and explain change. For medieval and early modern thinkers, the apparent solidity of the body only came about through the dynamic interplay of a host of fluidities in constant flux. The intimately familiar language of the body served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Rethinking the human body was one way to approach redefining the social, political, and religious realities of the world.

Fluid Bodies situates itself in the context of a rich and ongoing conversation regarding conceptions of the human body and its significations in the medieval and early modern Western world. There is no shortage of scholarship on the subject of corporeality in these periods. Past work has interrogated the range of meanings assigned to the category of body. This work has stressed the multiplicity of these meanings, destabilizing monolithic categories of universal personhood or universal body by approaching their subjects through the lenses of gender, teleology, narrative, sexuality, and developing notions of the role played by bodily fluids in human physiology, particularly the humoral body and its reciprocal relations with its environment.

Materiality itself has also served as a frequent focus for recent research, particularly into the way the sacred and the material can interact and sometimes cohere. This work, especially as it has been developed by scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum, has stressed the recurrent anxieties that result from the investment of the divine in the material. Most pertinently for this volume, it also explores the ultimate fruitfulness of these anxieties as drives for cultural expression and creative thought, particularly in the signifying power of blood. Bynum's work has illustrated that speculation regarding bodily change often prompts focused reflections on personal identity