1. Sarah Beckwith, Christ's Body. Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval
Writings (London, 1993), p. 46.
2. Hans Belting, The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages (New York,
1990); Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley, 1987) and
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval
Religion (New York, 1991); Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth Century
Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984); James Marrow, Passion Iconography
in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, 1979);
Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-century
Devotional Painting (Abo, 1965); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late
Medieval Culture (Cambridge, England, 199l); Gertrude Schiller, Iconography of Christian
Art, 2 vols., vol. 1, The Passion of Christ (London, 1972);
page
12
Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford,
1968).
3. Marrow, Passion Iconography, passim, and Woolf, English Religious
Lyric, chapters 2 and 6.
4. Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 303.
5. Woolf, English Religious Lyric, p. 24; Marrow, Passion
Iconography, for example pp .8, 9, 204; Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 90.
6. See Kathleen Biddick, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,"
Speculum 68 (1993), 389-4l8.
7. This identification pervades Bynum's work; for example, Holy Feast, pp.
294, 246, 252, 255, 263, 264, 274.
8. Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 26, 296, 294.
9. Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 193, 191, 93: see chapters 3-5; references to
Bynum's work hereafter in text, see note l for full references.
10. For examples of clear statements about medieval misogyny, Holy Feast,
pp. 22-23, 86, 261-63; Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 195.
11. For relevant commentary on Bynum's deployment of the term "woman," see
Biddick, "Genders, Bodies, Borders," pp. 39l-97, 399-400.
12. Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 208, 275; Fragmentation and
Redemption, p. 195.
13. The quotation is from Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 206 (see pp.
205-22); and in Holy Feast, see pp. 268-79, 178, chapter 9 and plates 4, 12, l8, 19 and
especially 25-30. Biddick's, "Genders, Bodies, Borders" includes important criticism of Bynum's
uses of visual materials.
14. On Bynum's essentializing of medieval "women" see Biddick, "Gender, Bodies,
Borders," p. 397.
15. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 199-200.
16. See Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 4l6, note 35.
17. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London,
1985), p. 138: this quotation was used by Beckwith in an important essay that greatly influenced
my reflections here: "A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,"
chapter 3 in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (New
York, 1986), p. 4l.
18. Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 189, 208; see similarly, pp. 218, 220-22 and
chapters 6 and 7.
19. Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985), p. 143.
20. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London, 1988), p. 91: see chapter 3.
21. Marrow, Passion Iconography, p. 44.
22. I quote from the Douai-Rheims translation of the Latin vulgate, Holy Bible
(London, 1964). For similar descriptions of Jesus's practice see: Mark 1:14-15, 32-33, 40-42;
Matthew 9:35; Luke 4:16-22. The teaching and extended parables do nothing to shift this focus
on preaching, love, mercy, forgiveness and renunciation of power, qualities that have nothing to
do with the ecstatic self-inflicted wounds and self-tortures that pervade Bynum's pages.
page 13
23. For a characteristic commentary on Matthew 23, see English Wycliffite
Sermons, Volume 3, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford, 1990), pp. 88-91; and especially Wyclif's own
"Exposicio" printed in Johannis Wyclif: Opera Minora, ed. J. Loserth (London, 1913), pp.
313-53.
24. M.J. Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus
(New York, 1984), p. 8l.
25. Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics, chapters 4, 5, and 9; on food and
its symbolism see also J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish
Peasant (Edinburgh, 199l), pp. 341-44, 360-67.
26. E. Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (New York,
1990), p. 794: here see too E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New
York, 1979), pp. 179-87.
27. Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 303.
28. Bynum's works are replete with eucharistic miracles, but see too Rubin,
Corpus Christi and S. Beckwith, "Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the
Sacramental Body," chapter 3 in Culture and History 1350-l600, ed. David Aers (Hemel
Hempstead, 1992).
29. Schillebeeckx, Christ, p. 699.
30. Schillebeeckx, Christ, p. 700.
31. Schillebeeckx, Jesus in our Western Culture (London, 1987), p. 19.
32. Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 95.
33. Beckwith, Christ's Body, p. 72.
34. See respectively, Bell, Holy Anorexia, p. 143, and The Book of
Margery Kempe, ed. H.E. Allen and S. Meech (London, 1940), p. 68; see similarly Kempe,
Book, pp. 70 and 140.
35. Kempe, Book, p. 37; see David Aers, Community, Gender and
Individual Identity ... 1360-1430 (London, 1988), pp. 108-16.
36. Beckwith, Christ's Body, p. 72.
37.Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428-31, ed. N.P. Tanner
(London, 1977): references to pages in this edition follow in the text.
38. Asked by John Wardon's son why he had struck the cross with the fagothook,
John Burrell replied that even if he'd struck it more fiercely and with a sharper weapon, that cross
would never bleed (p. 76). He seems to be contrasting his action with the church's punishment of
the living images of God (for example, Margery Baxter, Tanner, p. 44). At the same time he is
suggesting that the church has, in effect, produced such devotional images to reify and control the
humanity of Christ through the cross as institutional icon, a reification his action, symbolically
undoes.
39. "Et prefata Margeria dixit, 'vide,' et tunc extendebat brachia sua in longum,
dicens isti iurate, 'hec est vera crux Christi, et istam crucem tu debes et potes videre et adorare
omni die hic in domo tua propria." She goes on to comment on the vanity of going to church to
adore, or pray to, images or dead crosses.
40. Beckwith, Christ's Body, p. 72: on the forms in which the hunting and
burning of "heretics" was legitimized, particularly in De heretico comburendo
page 14
(1401) and the Leicester Parliament of 1416, see the following: M.
Aston, Lollards and Reformers (London, 1984), chapter 1; Anne Hudson, The
Premature Reformation. Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), pp. 144-68,
174-80; P. McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV. The Burning of John
Badby (Woodbridge, 1987); J. Catto, "Religious change under Henry V," pp. 97-117 in
Henry V, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford, 1985); Lee Patterson, "Making Identities in Fifteenth-century England: Henry V and John Lydgate," pp. 69-107 in New Historical Literary
Study, ed. J. N. Cox and L.J. Reynolds (Princeton, 1993); Beckwith, Christ's Body,
chapters 2-4.
41.Heresy Trials, p. 142; for similar examples see pp. 49, 52, 60-61, 67, 81;
on the role of women see Aston, Lollards and Reformers, chapter 2; C. Cross, "Great
Reasoners in Scripture: The Activities of Women Lollards 1380-1530," pp. 359-80 in
Medieval Women, ed. D. Baker (Oxford, 1978); A. Blamires, Woman Defamed and
Woman Defended (Oxford, 1992), pp. 250-60 (translations around the trial of Walter Brut,
139l-1393); and A. Blamires and C.W. Marx, "Woman Not to Preach: A Disputation in British
Library MS Harley 31," Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (1993), 34-63.
42. The quotation from Foucault is taken from "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in
The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rainbow (New York, 1984), pp. 76-100, quotation from p.
76.
43.Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher's Handbook, ed. and
trans. S. Wenzel (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1989), p. 213.
