Caroline Walker Bynum: Holy Pieces: Attitudes Toward Parts and Wholes in Late Medieval Devotion

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Raymond F. West Memorial Lecturer

In the period between 1150 and 1550 a number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimages to places where material objects--among them paintings, statues, relics, and Eucharistic wafers--allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. In several lectures and seminars, Professor Bynum will describe the miracles themselves, discuss the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probe the basic assumptions about matter that lay behind them.