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Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
Fragmentation and Redemption is first of all about bodies and the relationship of part to whole in the high Middle Ages, a period in which the overcoming of partition and putrefaction was the very image of paradise. It is also a study of gender, that is, a study of how sex roles and possibilities are conceptualized by both men and women, even though asymmetric power relationships and men’s greater access to knowledge have informed the cultural construction of categories such as “male” and “female,” “heretic” and “saint.” Finally, these essays are about the creativity of women’s voices and women’s bodies.
Bynum discusses how some women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burden of fertility, yet made female fertility a powerful symbol; how some used Christian dichotomies of male / female and powerful / weak to facilitate their own imitatio Christi , yet undercut these dichotomies by subsuming them into humanitas . Medieval women spoke little of inequality and little of gender, yet there is a profound connection between their symbols and communities and the twentieth-century determination to speak of gender and “study women.”
Bynum discusses how some women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burden of fertility, yet made female fertility a powerful symbol; how some used Christian dichotomies of male / female and powerful / weak to facilitate their own imitatio Christi , yet undercut these dichotomies by subsuming them into humanitas . Medieval women spoke little of inequality and little of gender, yet there is a profound connection between their symbols and communities and the twentieth-century determination to speak of gender and “study women.”
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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About the author
Caroline Walker Bynum
27 books76 followersCaroline Walker Bynum is Professor emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and University Professor emerita at Columbia University in the City of New York. She studies the religious ideas and practices of the European Middle Ages from late antiquity to the sixteenth century.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 18, 2014
"Let him who does not know how to astonish go work in the stables!" - Giambattista Marino (1569–1628)
This collection of essays centering on female mysticism looks at the issue of whether the sacred is to be found within our bodies. Many have tried to memorialize the sacred through their own sacrifice, as represented in art (Emily Dickinson and Van Gogh come to mind). But then there's a question of whether there's something specifically sacred about femaleness, in it a religious response to life when put to extremes. It is pointed out that male hagiographers (in the late Middle Ages) viewed female sanctity as peculiarly somatic. This raises a question the scholar is not prepared to answer: who or what should people really be worshiping if this were true, the spirit of Christ (through imitatio Christi) or the mystics of the body (through the same)? Women mystics were valued for the idea that "you have to physically suffer to legitimate one's own sanctity." Without sanctity human dignity has no place to lodge. Simone Weil, as of late, took this idea seriously. Anyone can take suffering to extremes to reach mystical insight, but though many Christians imitate Christ, no one would ever confuse a follower for the real thing. Women mystics are "more human" in this way, and thus we identify with them more for reasons of equality, even though few of us would ever do what they did for insights into the secrets of the universe - they had much going up against them.
Bynum is at her best interpreting imagery and symbols through psychology,
Women writers did not associate mothering so exclusively with nurturing and affectivity, nor did they use 'mother' and 'father' as paired and contradictory descriptions... To Gertrude of Helfta, Christ's fatherhood includes loving, cuddling, feeding from his breast and teaching the baby soul its letters; Christ's motherhood includes protecting the soul during a storm at sea, clothing it with fine dresses, punishing it, denying it jewels and ornaments, refusing it affection so that it learns patience, and frightening it with ugly faces or masks. Not only are characteristics we would call affective and merciful, on the one hand, judgmental and authoritarian, on the other, distributed randomly between father and mother, but the sets are not usually discussed together or as complements to each other.
Sounds like it might be, but this isn't yet another hapless attempt by a scholar to gender-bender our literature. It raises interesting questions classical Greek poets wrote about often, about ecstasies found when we reach out to our other gender within. The literary critic Barbara Johnson, of Bynum's generation, essayed on this territory in intriguing ways regarding poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The problem is, as with so much contemporary life, if you are without religion (a spirited way of bringing cohesion to the cosmos), what is the purpose of studying symbols if they cannot be put to use in a unified system of thought? You end up with provocative thoughts, but all under arbitrary rule. Our fetish for the fragmentary in early 21st century life strikes me as bizarre. It does Bynum too, but unlike Johnson who had an ability to write at poetic and philosophic levels while doing cultural criticism, the aims are narrower, the scholarship much less exciting.
"Am I my body?"
(Master of the Ursula Legend, The Burial of Ursula and Her Companions/Meister der Ursula-Legende und Werkstatt: Begräbnis der Heiligen Ursula und ihrer Gefährten und Gefährtinnen, um 1492 – 1496.
The caption to this painting on p. 277 reads: "The story of Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions, martyred for the faith, was extremely popular in the high Middle Ages, especially in the area of Cologne, where supposed relics of the women were dug up with great frequency. This picture of the burial of Ursula illustrates the medieval concern with reassembling bodies for burial. The carefully collected body fragments, with their neatly rounded edges, already look a good deal like the reliquaries in which they will be preserved.")
A look at baby Jesus's penis as depicted in countless European paintings (a symbol, after all) can be helpful or silly in an historicist approach,
It is far from clear, however, that artists emphasized Christ's penis 'as a sign of his sexuality and therefore his humanity'. Moreover, there is both iconographic and textual evidence for the argument that late medieval people sometimes saw the body of Christ as female. There is thus better evidence for the assertion that the late Middle Ages found gender reversal at the heart of Christian art and Christian worship than there is for the thesis that Renaissance artists emphasized the sexuality of Jesus. If we as modern people find (scholar Leo) Steinberg's argument more titillating and Steinberg's illustrations more fascinating than those I will consider now, this may suggest merely that there is a modern tendency to find sex more interesting than feeding, suffering or salvation. It may also suggest that, pace Huizinga, twentieth-century readers and viewers are far more literal-minded in interpreting symbols than were the artists, exegetes and devotional writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
I do think she makes a good point about our literal-mindedness, judging by the awful state of poetry criticism nowadays (not to mention those who write it). Bynum is not just a medievalist proud of being one but admits she's a product of the 1960s as well. She tells us that she started off rebellious; she kept the following Paris wall-slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 on her bulletin board for inspiration: “Toute vue des choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse” (“Every view of things that is not strange [i.e., bizarre or foreign] is false”). But like that generation she has become conservative in the sense that she responds only to her colleagues. Much of these essays, unfortunately, are battles among the professionals, not a hard look taken at what women mystics were truly after.
______________________________
You can read a Presidential Address Bynum gave to the American Historical Association about the nature of Wonder at the link:
http://www.historians.org/about-aha-a...
Medieval philosophers and theologians emphasized wonder as a first step toward knowledge; we, in our postmodern anxiety, tend rather to emphasize how hard it is to know. Medieval devotional and hagiographical writers stressed wonder as the opposite of imitation or possession; we are aware that any response involves some appropriation. Medieval travelers and collectors of marvels argued that awe and dread are situated, perspectival; we share this perception and give credit to feminism and postcolonial theory for it, but we suspect that such awareness shatters the possibility of writing any coherent account of the world... Nonetheless, I would argue, we write the best history when the specificity, the novelty, the awe-fulness, of what our sources render up bowls us over with its complexity and its significance. Our research is better when we move only cautiously to understanding, when fear that we may appropriate the “other” leads us not so much to writing about ourselves and our fears as to crafting our stories with attentive, wondering care. At our best, it is the “strange view of things” for which we strive—
This collection of essays centering on female mysticism looks at the issue of whether the sacred is to be found within our bodies. Many have tried to memorialize the sacred through their own sacrifice, as represented in art (Emily Dickinson and Van Gogh come to mind). But then there's a question of whether there's something specifically sacred about femaleness, in it a religious response to life when put to extremes. It is pointed out that male hagiographers (in the late Middle Ages) viewed female sanctity as peculiarly somatic. This raises a question the scholar is not prepared to answer: who or what should people really be worshiping if this were true, the spirit of Christ (through imitatio Christi) or the mystics of the body (through the same)? Women mystics were valued for the idea that "you have to physically suffer to legitimate one's own sanctity." Without sanctity human dignity has no place to lodge. Simone Weil, as of late, took this idea seriously. Anyone can take suffering to extremes to reach mystical insight, but though many Christians imitate Christ, no one would ever confuse a follower for the real thing. Women mystics are "more human" in this way, and thus we identify with them more for reasons of equality, even though few of us would ever do what they did for insights into the secrets of the universe - they had much going up against them.
Bynum is at her best interpreting imagery and symbols through psychology,
Women writers did not associate mothering so exclusively with nurturing and affectivity, nor did they use 'mother' and 'father' as paired and contradictory descriptions... To Gertrude of Helfta, Christ's fatherhood includes loving, cuddling, feeding from his breast and teaching the baby soul its letters; Christ's motherhood includes protecting the soul during a storm at sea, clothing it with fine dresses, punishing it, denying it jewels and ornaments, refusing it affection so that it learns patience, and frightening it with ugly faces or masks. Not only are characteristics we would call affective and merciful, on the one hand, judgmental and authoritarian, on the other, distributed randomly between father and mother, but the sets are not usually discussed together or as complements to each other.
Sounds like it might be, but this isn't yet another hapless attempt by a scholar to gender-bender our literature. It raises interesting questions classical Greek poets wrote about often, about ecstasies found when we reach out to our other gender within. The literary critic Barbara Johnson, of Bynum's generation, essayed on this territory in intriguing ways regarding poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The problem is, as with so much contemporary life, if you are without religion (a spirited way of bringing cohesion to the cosmos), what is the purpose of studying symbols if they cannot be put to use in a unified system of thought? You end up with provocative thoughts, but all under arbitrary rule. Our fetish for the fragmentary in early 21st century life strikes me as bizarre. It does Bynum too, but unlike Johnson who had an ability to write at poetic and philosophic levels while doing cultural criticism, the aims are narrower, the scholarship much less exciting.
"Am I my body?"
(Master of the Ursula Legend, The Burial of Ursula and Her Companions/Meister der Ursula-Legende und Werkstatt: Begräbnis der Heiligen Ursula und ihrer Gefährten und Gefährtinnen, um 1492 – 1496.
The caption to this painting on p. 277 reads: "The story of Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions, martyred for the faith, was extremely popular in the high Middle Ages, especially in the area of Cologne, where supposed relics of the women were dug up with great frequency. This picture of the burial of Ursula illustrates the medieval concern with reassembling bodies for burial. The carefully collected body fragments, with their neatly rounded edges, already look a good deal like the reliquaries in which they will be preserved.")
A look at baby Jesus's penis as depicted in countless European paintings (a symbol, after all) can be helpful or silly in an historicist approach,
It is far from clear, however, that artists emphasized Christ's penis 'as a sign of his sexuality and therefore his humanity'. Moreover, there is both iconographic and textual evidence for the argument that late medieval people sometimes saw the body of Christ as female. There is thus better evidence for the assertion that the late Middle Ages found gender reversal at the heart of Christian art and Christian worship than there is for the thesis that Renaissance artists emphasized the sexuality of Jesus. If we as modern people find (scholar Leo) Steinberg's argument more titillating and Steinberg's illustrations more fascinating than those I will consider now, this may suggest merely that there is a modern tendency to find sex more interesting than feeding, suffering or salvation. It may also suggest that, pace Huizinga, twentieth-century readers and viewers are far more literal-minded in interpreting symbols than were the artists, exegetes and devotional writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
I do think she makes a good point about our literal-mindedness, judging by the awful state of poetry criticism nowadays (not to mention those who write it). Bynum is not just a medievalist proud of being one but admits she's a product of the 1960s as well. She tells us that she started off rebellious; she kept the following Paris wall-slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 on her bulletin board for inspiration: “Toute vue des choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse” (“Every view of things that is not strange [i.e., bizarre or foreign] is false”). But like that generation she has become conservative in the sense that she responds only to her colleagues. Much of these essays, unfortunately, are battles among the professionals, not a hard look taken at what women mystics were truly after.
______________________________
You can read a Presidential Address Bynum gave to the American Historical Association about the nature of Wonder at the link:
http://www.historians.org/about-aha-a...
Medieval philosophers and theologians emphasized wonder as a first step toward knowledge; we, in our postmodern anxiety, tend rather to emphasize how hard it is to know. Medieval devotional and hagiographical writers stressed wonder as the opposite of imitation or possession; we are aware that any response involves some appropriation. Medieval travelers and collectors of marvels argued that awe and dread are situated, perspectival; we share this perception and give credit to feminism and postcolonial theory for it, but we suspect that such awareness shatters the possibility of writing any coherent account of the world... Nonetheless, I would argue, we write the best history when the specificity, the novelty, the awe-fulness, of what our sources render up bowls us over with its complexity and its significance. Our research is better when we move only cautiously to understanding, when fear that we may appropriate the “other” leads us not so much to writing about ourselves and our fears as to crafting our stories with attentive, wondering care. At our best, it is the “strange view of things” for which we strive—
December 17, 2023
Great collection of essays on gender, sexuality, and the (female) body in medieval Christianity. Bynum is a brilliant writer, and delivers complex ideas in a way that is exciting to read. She highlights some fundamental differences in the female experience of God:
“...women’s mysticism was more historical and incarnational--more fleshly and bodily, if you will--than ordinary Christian piety. The eucharist as body, flesh, meat, was a central focus of female religiosity."
Bynum on asceticism: “Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it--a horrible yet delicious elevation--into a means of access to the divine”
and the part that made me tear up: "Little girls who lacked loving families sometimes found a mother in Mary and a father in Saint Joseph or in God; unhappy wives found a tender and considerate bridegroom in Jesus."
Thank you Professor Stanton!
“...women’s mysticism was more historical and incarnational--more fleshly and bodily, if you will--than ordinary Christian piety. The eucharist as body, flesh, meat, was a central focus of female religiosity."
Bynum on asceticism: “Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it--a horrible yet delicious elevation--into a means of access to the divine”
and the part that made me tear up: "Little girls who lacked loving families sometimes found a mother in Mary and a father in Saint Joseph or in God; unhappy wives found a tender and considerate bridegroom in Jesus."
Thank you Professor Stanton!
July 4, 2022
A collection of essays on medieval spirituality, especially in reference to gender, bodies and the eucharist. I read this as background for understanding the mystics, so particularly appreciated chapters IV, V and VI - exploring the significance of eucharistic devotion, the nature of female imagery and the focus on the body in medieval female spirituality.
April 22, 2025
some sections felt a bit repetitive but im mostly grateful to this book for collecting so much medieval strangeness and connecting it to our present day in a way that makes us seem just as strange as they were back then
Want to read
April 7, 2023to-read
June 10, 2024
Caroline you’ve done it again
November 5, 2007
This is a very interesting book, especially for someone like me, who is fascinated by all things Medieval. Bynum especially looks at the practices of the middle ages, things like the cult of saints, the debates about the resurrection of the body, etc. What is best about her work is that she doesn't just reduce the experience of Medieval peoples to modern cliches, i.e., that they had "repressed sexuality", they "hated the body", they were completely misogynist. While she does say there is some truth to those things, she really tries to understanding what medieval people, especially women, actually experienced, and relate that to their theological and philosophical thinking. For anyone who wants to understand why purgatory was so important, or transubstantiation, and a host of "weird" concepts, this is the book.
August 27, 2008
Neato!
October 22, 2012
Skipped chapters two and three out of the seven chapters because I was reading for a class.
June 28, 2025
Last time i read this it was more of a skim, this time i did a full, in depth reading of it. so so awesome i love medieval 🫶
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews