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The Paradox of Holy Matter in the Later Middle Ages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2013
Extract
Via the focus on food that she had found to be the distinguishing preoccupation in the female piety of the Middle Ages and had addressed so probingly and with such independence of scholarly spirit in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Walker Bynum has moved on over the past two decades, and logically enough, to bring her formidable scholarly intelligence and drive to bear, first, on issues pertaining to the body and then, beyond that, to the intriguing cat's cradle of questions pertaining to late-medieval assumptions about matter and its nature in general. The first impulse came to fruition in her Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, a book in which celibacy, asceticism, fasting, and renunciation notwithstanding, she pushed back hard against the modern temptation to project onto medieval religiosity some sort of body-hating soul-body dualism. In this she was moved, as she herself has forthrightly acknowledged, by a “determination to let individual voices be individual and to let the past be different,” as well as by the adamant refusal, evinced also in the work under review, to simplify “the intricate and contradictory assumptions and practices” she was exploring. “Paradox remains paradox,” she has bluntly insisted, and “complexity remains complex” (13).
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- Review Essay*
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2013
Footnotes
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Caroline WalkerBynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 2011). Page references are given in parentheses in the main text.
References
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2 Bynum, Caroline Walker, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
3 Bynum, Caroline Walker, “Why Paradox? The Contradictions of My Life as a Scholar,” CHR 98 (2012) 433–55Google Scholar.
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7 Bynum, “Why Paradox?,” 451.
8 Thus William J. Courtenay, while putting the point in (admittedly problematic) temporal terms, also describes the potentia absoluta (absolute power) as referring to “the total possibilities initially open to God, some of which were realized by creating the established order” with “the unrealized possibilities now [therefore] only hypothetically possible” (“Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion [ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman; Leiden: Brill, 1974] 29–39 [italics in original]). See also his Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Quodlibet 8; Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990), where he lays great (albeit misleadingly exclusive) emphasis on this particular meaning. For a succinct and (more or less) up to date account of the rapidly shifting state of scholarly play on the topic, I venture to refer to Oakley, Francis, Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002)Google Scholar.
9 Printed in Gerson, Jean, Opera Omnia (ed. Du Pin, Louis Ellies; 5 vols.; Antwerp: Sumptibus Societatis, 1706) 2:903–16Google Scholar.
10 D'Ailly's official verdict in these cases may be found in Annales de la province et comté du Hainaut (ed. François Vinchant; 6 vols.; Brussels: Vandale, 1848–1853) 6:133.
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13 On which, and on the similar view of Bernard Sylvestri's, see Bynum, Caroline Walker, “Metamorphosis, or Geraldus the Werewolf,” Spec 73 (1998) 77–111Google Scholar.
14 In this connection, see the perceptive observation of Mircea Eliade to the effect that Plato “could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of ‘primitive mentality,’ that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity” (Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return [New York: Harper & Row, 1959] 34).
15 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (ed. Malcolm, Noel; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012) pt. 4, ch. 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.