{"product_id":"christian-materiality-an-essay-on-religion-in-late-medieval-europe-9781935408109","title":"Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the period between 1150 and 1550  an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects  among them paintings  statues  relics  pieces of wood  earth  stones  and Eucharistic wafers  allegedly erupted into life. These objects appeared animated  they wept  bled  and even walked. Such phenomena posed a challenge to Christians. On the one hand  they sought ever more frequent encounters with miraculous matter and  on the other hand  they turned toward an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion. By the fifteenth century  these aspirations  accompanied by new anxieties and concerns  were at the heart of religious practice and polemic.  In Christian Materiality  Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves  discusses the problems they posed to both church authorities and to the ordinary faithful  and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. Bynum also provides a deep analysis of the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages.  Her argument is without precedent: religious art  in this context and time period  called attention to its own materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility toward them on the part of iconoclasts. Understanding the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Christian culture as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world  Bynums study suggests a new understanding of the background to sixteenth-century reformations  both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond a cultural study of the body  a field she was crucial in establishing  Bynum exposes how Western attitudes toward the body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Christian Materiality is a major contribution to the study and theory of material culture and religious practice.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45529571065909,"sku":"ByrdShop_1935408100","price":252.08,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781935408109.jpg?v=1780938055","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/christian-materiality-an-essay-on-religion-in-late-medieval-europe-9781935408109","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}