Gabriel Josipovici
TLS Jan 13 2012
....Caroline Walker Bynum has made her name as the pre-eminent historian of the body in the late Middle Ages. The titles of her many books testify to her range and interests: Wonderful Blood, Metamorphosis and Identity, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. She is happy to see herself as both anthropologist and sociologist, and makes no bones about her indebtedness to researchers in those fields, especially Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour...
Her aim is to explore the paradoxes of an incarnational faith, in which the body is seen to be at once immortal and corruptible, whole but also fragmented...:
"Reliquaries - especially those of the later Middle Ages - explore and expose materiality in complicated ways. Denying the corruption of the flesh by displaying the body as hard, apparently dead bone, they simultaneously sublimate partition and deadness by sheathing such stuff in the gold and gems explicitly associated in Scripture and sermon with the life of the heavenly Jerusalem. For example, in the reliquary of Thomas Becket's blood, the blood itself (which is presumably a few rusty, dried flakes) is hidden in a casket, not displayed, but a large jewel has been constructed on the top by backing rock crystal with red foil to evoke the redness of blood. The stuff of the jewel is palpabel and shouts out living redness, but it plays visually with its own physicality; it is neither the blood in the container nor the ruby it appears to be..."
-in Literature RPL
Christian Materiality: an essay on religion in Late Medieval Europe
Caroline Walker Bynum
Zone Books, 2011
231.7309 B994c
Gabriel Josipovici in the catalog