Blood, Sweat, Tears & Beyond: Precious Bodily Fluids in the Late Middle Ages
An International Conference at SAIMS (St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies)
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Saturday, April 21 2012
Bodily fluids usually belong neatly contained in the body. When they leak out, they often accompany strong emotions. These emotions surrounded the blood, sweat and tears of Christ’s Passion, as well as the blood shed at saints’ martyrdoms generally. Stories of body fluids also accompany the loving and tender emotions of the Virgin Mary, who not only suckled her son (as a sign of her compassion/nurturing), but also famously baptised St Bernard with her own breast milk, thereby allaying his doubt of her reality. Saints often left fluids behind: Christ himself drenched the whole of the Holy Land with his bloody footsteps, and even the place where Mary washed Jesus’ diapers was a stop along the pilgrimage route. Bodily fluids were also conduits of empathy: while Mary Magdalene, Peter, David, and others shed tears of penitence, devotees in turn shed tears in imitation of them. Some fluids were collected in vials and others were mopped up with textiles and enshrined as relics, thereby mediating between filthy stain and sacred trace.
Recent scholarship, including Wonderful Blood by Caroline Bynum, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine by Martha Bayless, as well as further studies on material Christianity, have brought attention to these substances. Fluids had a particular property unlike that of other relics: they could wash over the faithful. This conference will bring together new scholarship from some leading medievalists from North America, the Continent, and the UK, who will discuss topics such as the faithful who bathed in the blood fountain, animated sculptures that leaked blood as a spectacle, debates around excrement and other emissions, pilgrims who visited the Virgin’s breast milk, and votaries who demonstrated their compassion by crying over their prayer books or deposited their bodily secretions as they kissed and licked images.
Confirmed speakers include:
- Thomas Lentes, ‘Rains of Blood and Rains of Crosses. Sign Reading and a Crisis of Interpretation around 1500
- Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Fragile containers: Blood and the body in late medieval culture’
- Marlene Hennessy, ‘Blood Abstraction: London, British Library, MS Egerton 1821’
- Kimberley-Joy Knight, ‘Droplets of Heaven: Tear Relics in the Thirteenth Century’
- Beate Fricke, title TBA
- Martha Bayless, ‘The devil is a bodily fluid’
Please note that registration is free and student bursaries are available.
For more details please visit the conference website: http://www-ah.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/BloodSweatTearsandBeyond/