The blood of Christ in the later Middle Ages (1).

Bynum, Caroline Walker

In one of our earliest descriptions of meditation on the crucifix, Aelred of Rievaulx (d.1166) described the body on the cross, pierced by the soldier's lance, as food and urged the female recluses for whom he wrote not only to contemplate it but also to eat it in gladness: "Hasten, linger not, eat the honeycomb with your honey, drink your wine with your milk. The blood is changed into wine to inebriate you, the water into milk to nourish you." (2) Marsha Dutton, who has written so movingly of Cistercian piety, speaks of this as a eucharistic interpretation of the literal, physical reality of the crucifixion and points to the parallel with Berengar of Tours' oath at the synod of Rome in 1079: "The bread and wine which are placed on the altar ... are changed substantially into the true and proper vivifying body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord and after the consecration there are the true body of Christ which was born of the virgin ... and the true blood of Christ which flowed from his side ... in their real nature and true substance." (3)

Dutton's interpretation of Aelred's meditation as eucharistic is the standard one. Indeed scholars have become accustomed to seeing eucharistic references in medieval devotional literature wherever eating and drinking, bread and wine, body and blood, occur. (4) Some work in literary studies has been inclined to take eucharistic change as the semiotics of early modern Europe. (In a book recently published on the "new historicism," eucharist becomes a way of thinking about everything.) (5) And some art historians have used the rise of ocular communion or Augenkommunion (the idea that one receives the eucharist by viewing the consecrated host) as their central evidence for the visuality of late medieval culture. (6) Recent work seems to find the eucharist everywhere.

But, if we turn again to the passage in question, we notice something odd. Aelred does not say that wine changes to blood; he says that blood changes to wine. The substantial change effected here is of the blood from Christ's heart into the inebriating wine of the chalice. Moreover, no change is mentioned for body at all. "Eat your honeycomb," writes Aelred, "drink your wine with milk." But we are not told that the flesh becomes food, only that the water and blood from the side become milk and wine. And in the following passage, the recluse is urged to enter into the body through the side wound and to drink there the precious blood, carrying Jesus to his tomb and gathering up "the drops of ... blood as they fall one by one." We find, then, in Aelred's meditation, three unexpected emphases: first, a stress on blood more than on body; second, a description of substantial change (blood to wine) that reverses that of the eucharist (wine to blood); and third, an image of division not unity--that is, a stress not on grains pulled together into bread or grapes gathered into bunches but on blood that spills into drops or fragments, that pulls away from body.

There is, in other words, in this imagery, an asymmetry between the body and blood that may at first escape our attention. To Aelred and his Cistercian contemporaries, indeed in twelfth-century piety generally, the food of Christ, whether honeycomb or bread, is food and overwhelmingly an image of union and community, of members like grains of wheat gathered into Ecclesia. (7) But the blood is blood, changed into wine to hide the horror of sacrifice, (8) a complex image of violence and division as well as of cleansing, fertility, and spiritual arousal, even ecstasy. Whatever the stress in technical scholastic discussions on the parallelism of body and blood, what we find in devotional literature, ritual, and iconography is asymmetry, even competition. In this paper I want to make two points concerning this asymmetry. First, I want to relate the importance of blood piety to a factor that has been neglected in English-language scholarship: the existence of a noneucharistic blood tradition in Europe. (9) Second, I want to explore the asymmetry between the body and blood symbols themselves.

I. EUCHARISTIC BACKGROUND

There are many reasons for this disjunction or asymmetry between body and blood, and some lie in liturgical and theological developments concerning the eucharist itself. Work done over the past fifty years has revealed to us the complicated process by which university theologians and preachers attempted to focus the attention of the faithful on the host. (10) As the cup was withdrawn from the laity, ostensibly for disciplinary reasons (the fear of spillage), the doctrine of concomitance was employed to explain that the whole Christ (totus Christus) was present in each of the two elements and in every fragment. (11) Moreover, despite the legal requirement of at least yearly communion (actual partaking of the eucharistic elements), reception with the eyes at the moment of consecration or elevation (so-called ocular or spiritual communion) became for many the focal point of eucharistic devotion. The liturgy increasingly emphasized host or body over blood: the feast of Corpus Christi developed much earlier than that of the Holy Blood and was much more popular; elevation of the cup at mass never attained the ritual importance of the elevation of the host; miracles of the chalice were far less frequent than host miracles. (12) Nonetheless, blood frenzy continuously threatened to break out. As I have discussed elsewhere, mystics (especially women mystics), who were denied access to the cup at mass, repeatedly experienced both the flooding of ecstasy through their limbs and the taste of the wafer in their mouths as blood. (13) Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), for example, found blood in her mouth or pouring from it, although what she received was the host. (14) The priest John of Alverna (d. 1322), while celebrating, saw the crucified Christ bleeding into a chalice; when the apparition faded, it was replaced by the form of bread. (15) A nun of Unterlinden, upon receiving the sacrament, "totally dissolved in the love of her beloved [and] suddenly, in a miraculous manner, perceived distinctly that the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom she had received, flowed down like an impetuous rushing river through all parts of her body, reaching the most intimate parts of her soul." (16) Although the nun would have received a wafer, she experienced it as waves of blood.

Symbolically speaking then, blood made body accessible, but it also breached, threatened, and accused. The host, paraded through the streets in the new feast of Corpus Christi or lifted up at the altar in its round white wholeness, became increasingly the symbol of a church menaced by Jews, infidels, and heretics; in miracle story after miracle story, it dripped miraculous blood not only to demonstrate the doctrine of real presence to those of faltering belief but also to accuse those who violated community or mores--women who conjured with it, Jews who desecrated it, heretics who denied its reality as the flesh of God. (17) When George Cartar, a thresher from Sawtry examined for heresy in 1525, saw a vision of the wafer with a rim or band around it to hold in the blood, he expressed graphically what lurks behind much medieval devotion: the profound asymmetry between, on the one hand, bread-body, nourishment and container, unity and community, and, on the other, blood--inebriation, encounter, violation, sacrifice, reproach. (18)

II. BLOOD RELICS

Body/blood asymmetry is then profoundly eucharistic. But the reasons for the asymmetry lie beyond eucharist as well. There is an obvious element we have tended to overlook because of our recent concentration on eucharistic devotion--that is, a second blood tradition in medieval Europe, the devotion to the blood relics of Christ. The first point I wish to make in this essay, then, is that the two traditions, that of blood relic and that of eucharistic blood, influenced each other profoundly, crossing and recrossing in the course of the Middle Ages. Theological discussions of concomitance inflected discussions of blood relic, providing a defense against skeptical objections to its historicity; (19) eucharistic practices influenced its cult, so much so that we find, by the late-thirteenth century, a sort of quasi-eucharistic rite of drinking the blood of the relic (rather like the use of the ablutions cup after Mass). (20) Similarly, traditions concerning the collecting and revering of Christ's blood as relic undergirded and encouraged the stress in eucharistic devotion on blood as sacrifice, violation and access--pulled the eucharist, so to speak, away from Last Supper and toward crucifixion. (21) Some of the rather puzzling devotional asymmetry I mentioned earlier has roots in the fact that there were in the European tradition, to put it simply, two bloods and one body. (22)

And the bloods could compete. (23) In a poem composed for the abbey of Fecamp just at the time Aelred was writing his meditation on the crucifix, pilgrims were urged to behold the relic of precious blood "not as you do in the sacrament" but just as it flowed from the Savior's side when he died for us. (24) A modern historian comments that this passage "demonstrates beyond a doubt that belief in the bodily relics of Christ was a form of eucharistic piety." (25) Almost the opposite seems, however, to have been the case. For the two devotions implicitly competed with as well as complemented each other; and the Fecamp poet, who says quite clearly "not this but this," evokes a blood not veiled by species but in its original form, vermillion and living ("en sa fourme proprement vermel"), as it broke forth from the cross to save the world.

To make clear the complex relationship between eucharist and blood relics, I wish to sketch the history of these relics and then to examine a little-known thirteenth-century polemical treatise by one Gerhard of Cologne that demonstrates the ways in which the theology of the blood of Christ competed with, absorbed, and influenced eucharistic theology and imagery. (26)

Our earliest reference to a relic of the blood Christ shed at the Passion may be in a letter from Braulio of Saragossa about 649, which expressed concern that such veneration might overshadow the mass. Blood relics proliferated in the west in the Carolingian period not long before theologians such as Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus began to discuss the Eucharist. Holy blood was supposedly discovered at Mantua in 804 in Charlemagne's presence. Its fate is unknown, but another vial, found in the mid-eleventh century, became the center of an important cult and was later claimed to be the source of the famous relic at the German cloister of Weingarten near Ravensburg. The oldest surviving western blood relic is probably the cross at Reichenau, supposedly acquired in 925 from the countess Swanahild, who had received it from a follower of Charlemagne. (27) Blood relics then streamed into Europe, especially central and northwestern Germany, after the First Crusaded. (28) Fecamp claimed a blood relic in 1120; Bruges only a little later. (29) In 1247, Henry III of England acquired holy blood for Westminster--blood that the bishop of Norwich praised as elevating the claims of the English king above those of the French (since Louis had only a relic of the true cross and "the cross is ... holy ... on account of the more holy shedding of Christ's blood made upon it, not the blood-shedding holy on account of the cross"). (30) Indeed relics often expressed the sort of political maneuvering we find in Henry III's gift to Westminster. In 1283, for example, Rudolf of Hapsburg acquired for the Premonstratensian cloister of Weissenau a relic of the holy blood that allegedly went back to Mary Magdalene and was clearly intended to compete with the relic of its close neighbor Weingarten supposedly collected by Longinus. (31)

Not all blood relics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were, however, derived in the same way. Some, for example the highly disputed bleeding hosts of Wilsnack, came from violated hosts or spilled chalices. (These are the hosts--suspected at the time to be fraudulent--that Margery Kempe journeyed so far from home to see.) (32) And blood could come as well from miraculous or desecrated images--crucifixes, altar paintings, and so on. In 1147-49, for example, the cathedral at Basel acquired a relic, brought from Beirut, that supposedly went back to a cross, carved by Nicodemus and violated by Jews, out of which flowed blood that was collected in ampules and greatly revered. (33)

Although modern accounts strain to differentiate blood miracles from blood relics and to sort out three distinct sources of the blood revered in late medieval cult, (34) it is clear that adherents often cared little on which traditions the relics drew. We do not know, for example, what kind of blood the relic revered at Cloister Wienhausen was, despite the convent's pride in it, indulgences connected to it, and stories in the surviving chronicle of the miracles it worked. (35) The source was not important to the nuns: Christ's blood was Christ's blood.

Indeed, in this conflation of types of blood, we see one of the most sinister aspects of blood-cult. Whether Christ himself, the consecrated host, or a devotional object, the victim is increasingly in the years around 1300 seen as violated by Jews. (36) It is important to note that such stories involve not the relatively rare charges of ritual murder but the quite frequent charge (sometimes also directed against Christian women and criminals) that an effort at magical manipulation became a kind of crucifixion of Christ in the host, patterned in some cases on the iconographic theme of the arma Christi (the instruments of Christ's torture). Whatever the source--Christ's own body pierced at Golgotha, images that exude bloody effluvia, or hosts and corporales that display bloody spots or figures--the blood was preserved in containers for repeated viewing, and even where not associated with any tale of violation, tended to be accompanied by a litany of reproaches and accusations.

If those who flocked to ecstatic viewing of such objects, like some of those who propagated their cult, cared little about distinguishing one type of blood from another, theologians did care, and indeed often to the point of rejecting some blood sources entirely. Christ's bodily relics especially raised questions. About 1200, Innocent III in his treatise on the eucharist simply mentioned without deciding: "And it can be asked whether Christ, rising from the dead, took back that blood which he poured out on the cross. For if a hair of your head shall not perish (Luke 21.18), how much more will that blood not perish which was of the truth of [human] nature?" Many theologians, however, rejected entirely the idea that any bodily relic of Christ remained on earth after the ascension. (37)

In the course of the thirteenth century, queries about Christ's blood were raised in discussions of visions, eucharist, resurrection, the nature of the hypostatic union, and relics. According to Matthew Paris, Grosseteste defended veneration of the heart's blood from Christ's right side. (38) Aquinas argued, in contrast, that the red and living blood of the heart shed at death was part of Christ's core human nature (as opposed to material, such as fingernails, sloughed off in growth). It thus remained united with his divinity during the triduum (the period between crucifixion and resurrection) and rose again with him from the dead. (39) "The Word of God never laid down what he assumed in assuming our nature," argued Aquinas; hence any blood venerated contemporaneously must come from abused images. (40) It was easier for Franciscans, who held to the idea of a plurality of forms, to think that the body in death maintained identity through the forma corporeitatis and that blood spilled outside it could remain on earth to whip up the devotion of the faithful. In contrast, those Dominicans who later followed Thomas in holding the unicity of form felt compelled to maintain that all elements of the body in the triduum were held together only by connection to the Logos. Hence no particle could escape.

The doubts of theologians sometimes reached other blood sources. As is well known, stories of eucharistic visions proliferated in the thirteenth century and were used, often by preachers and occasionally by university theologians, to support the doctrine of the real presence. (41) But Dominicans were in general suspicious of such visions and went to great lengths to argue that such miracles were owing to a deep spiritual impact on the beholder, not to a change in the host. (42) If in transubstantiation only substance changed, then the accidents of Christ's body could not be seen on the altar. (43) Even the abstruse thirteenth- and fourteenth-century debates about transubstantiation versus annihilation in eucharistic change have at their core a concern not just to support real presence but also to keep a whole Christ (totus Christus) on the altar at the moment of consecration--a concern, in other words, to protect Christ from any suggestion of change or fragmentation. (44)

Indeed historians have often underestimated the opposition of theologians to the wonderhosts and blood relics of the later Middle Ages. For example, when Heinrich Tocke, a University trained theologian and member of the Council of Basel, attacked the bleeding hosts of Wilsnack in the 1440s, he first raised questions about the visual evidence in the monstrance but moved quickly to the deeper theological issues. Tocke wrote: "I was there [July 12, 1443] and held it [the wonderhost] in my hand and examined it. I saw three tiny host pieces that were already so to speak fragile and decayed but were certainly not red or red-like. What should we think then of the blood? And even if it were red, it would not follow that the red was blood, and even if it were blood, it would not follow that it was the blood of Christ ... to be venerated as foolish people have been doing for sixty years." (45) In 1451, the papal legate Nicholas of Cusa went further.

 We have heard from many reliable men and also have ourselves seen how the
 faithful stream to many places in the area of our legation to worship the
 precious blood of the Lord that they believe is present in a transformed
 red host.... The clergy ... permit this worship out of greed for
 revenue.... [But] it is pernicious ... and we cannot permit it without
 damage to God. For our catholic faith teaches us that the glorified body of
 Christ has glorified blood completely un-seeable in glorified veins. In
 order to remove every opportunity for the deception of simple folk, we
 therefore order that ... the clergy ... should no longer promulgate such
 miracles. (46)

In late-fifteenth-century Wurzburg, a tractate on "the perils of the eucharist" maintained: "It is a periculum to the host if the figure of flesh or a child or any other thing appears in it." Such an appearance is a miracle for the viewer, but for the sacrament, there is "no change." The priest should therefore consume such a host immediately if an individual claim is made; if, however, many people profess to see it, the priest should repeat the consecration with new hosts, and the miraculous one should be hidden from view so that every opportunity for a crowd to gather is avoided. (47)

Debates over visions, eucharistic change, the status of Christ's blood in triduum and resurrection, and over blood relics outlasted the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, popes Nicolas V, Pius II, and Paul II halted some of the debate by permitting (even encouraging) veneration of blood relics without pronouncing on their source. (48) Nicolas V indeed implied in a sermon the Thomistic position that the blood came from desecrated images. (49) Thus, in the late Middle Ages, the church permitted veneration of blood relics and wonderhosts and the increasingly frenetic passion-spirituality connected to it. Nonetheless, the phenomena were hedged about, first, by a refusal to pronounce on their ontological status and a prohibition of further debate on the subject, second, by the requirement that freshly consecrated hosts be displayed alongside all wonderhosts to obviate any danger of idolatry, (50) and third, by a tendency to keep the physical objects hidden, even their containers being only rarely available to the laity. (51) For all the popular enthusiasm for blood hosts and relics, theologians struggled to pull a spirituality focused on crucifixion and sacrifice back toward wholeness and resurrection, away from blood and back toward host, body, Ecclesia.

As increasing demands for the chalice indicate, the efforts of clerical authorities to limit blood cult were understood as an assertion of clerical control, a move against the people's access. (52) To some theologians and prelates, Christ was to be encountered most powerfully in his unseen eucharistic presence at mass. The real blood was, as Nicholas of Cusa stressed, "completely un-seeable in glorified veins." Access for laity should be via the host at mass, either taken reverently from the hands of priests or viewed from afar at the moment of elevation. Body and blood were seen only through--that is, behind or beyond--the species on the altar. And blood was doubly veiled, for the laity received it only by concomitance, in the round white wafer of the body of Christ. Nevertheless, many Christians, supported by clergy (including bishops, friars, and even popes), cried out for a more physical, a more labile and multivalent, presence. "Blood of Christ, save me!" They journeyed across Europe to sites such as Wilsnack, Weingarten, Orvieto, and Andechs, seeking the holy blood whose fluid, scintillating redness carried overtones both of violation (and hence vengeance against enemies) and of breach (hence access to the very heart of God). Whatever they saw in the vials and monstrances held out to them, they revered it as sanguis Christi offered pro nobis on Calvary.

III. GERHARD OF COLOGNE

As this brief overview suggests, the relationship of blood veneration to eucharistic devotion in the high Middle Ages was complex and highly problematic. In order to demonstrate this further, I turn to the Tractatus de sacratissimo sanguine domini, composed in 1280 by Gerhard (called Saxo), a Dominican from Cologne. The treatise, which has recently been published by Klaus Berg, was composed at the request of abbot Hermann of Weingarten to defend the monastery's blood relic against skepticism, both theological and historical. (53)

Gerhard's treatise is neither morally nor aesthetically attractive. (His recent editor writes of him with quite astonishing dislike.) (54) It is anti-Semitic, polemical, and somewhat incoherent. It is also a striking example of how complex the competition between blood veneration and eucharistic piety was, for it attacks "pseudo-philosophers" (almost certainly Gerhard's fellow Dominicans Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great), while nonetheless using principles drawn from eucharistic theology to defend blood relics, and it argues, explicitly and in an apocalyptic context, for passion- and blood-piety as popular practices. It thus undercuts any argument for a united Dominican front in these matters and makes it quite clear how oversimple are generalizations about blood veneration as a form of eucharistic devotion.

Gerhard's treatise falls into five parts: praise of the precious blood, a defense against critics, an account of its history from Longinus to the reception at Weingarten, a call for pilgrimage to the Weingarten relic, and a short confirmation of the abbey's friendship with Mantua, from which the blood came. Gerhard begins by arguing that Christ has left believers both Testaments, the Jews themselves (spared by the church to serve as an eternal reminder of Christ's suffering), the sacrament of the altar, and the instruments that took his life (cross, nails, lance, and thorns). Yet despite all these signs, some Christians remain lazy, complacent, numb, even in the last days Gerhard fervently believes are upon them. So Christ, "who knew all beforehand," has left his blood itself that those sleeping "may come again to love" through "the sight of blood drops before their eyes." (55) We can thus be like Doubting Thomas, "who came to belief later than the others and had to touch the scars;" but we are more than Thomas, for he felt only wounds whereas we "see the blood itself, rose-colored and shining red." There are, says Gerhard, "pseudo-philosophers," followers of Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Hippocrates, who argue that Christ could not have risen whole (integrum) while leaving behind rose-colored and living blood (the blood of his core human nature--veritas humanae naturae). Yet we know Christ's blood was shed in circumcision and on the Mount of Olives, and the apostles sobbed over the cross as if they saw there true blood. Hence Christ rose entire, yet left behind his blood on earth to inflame us with his suffering. For "just as he could make his subtle and glorified body touchable and visible to his disciples, so he could not do without one and the same blood in heaven and yet left it behind as a comfort for his believers here on earth. Cannot one and the same all-powerful Savior in one and the same moment be changed into the sacrament in the hands of a thousand priests, really here present and undivided, and yet not be absent there [in heaven]?" (56)

Complex theological arguments worked out to justify the integritas of Christ in resurrection and in eucharist are here used to bolster the claims of relic against eucharist. If by concomitance, all Christ is in every particle, then (argues Gerhard) Christ's blood can be totally in heaven and yet present both in the eucharist and in relic. If Christ's body after the resurrection was so glorified and subtle that it could go through doors and yet was touch-able by Thomas the Doubter, so his blood can be glorified (almost immaterial) in heaven and yet palpable drops (see-able, touch-able and even drink-able) here on earth. In Gerhard's account, the visual piety (Schaufrommigkeit) so emphasized recently by scholars as a characteristic of eucharistic devotion is turned against eucharist: yes, the sacrament can be received by the eyes, but it is under a veil, whereas the throbbing, shimmering, living blood is see-able without a covering. (57) Subtle arguments about subtilitas and wholeness are all very well for pseudo-philosophers, says Gerhard, but Christ is himself a doctor who appeals directly to ordinary hearts. Gerhard thus aligns himself not only with the monks of Weingarten who commissioned his treatise but also with popular piety and against his fellow Dominicans.

Around these anti-intellectual uses of quite learned arguments (not always very fairly deployed) floods a plethora of images for the holy blood. It is dew, seed, and fertility; it is cleansing water, life itself, quencher of thirst, and intoxication; it is a spark or flashpoint (scintilla), from which a frenzy of guilt, love, and longing can be ignited. It is suffering, torture, and bloodshed--a sacrifice offered for salvation yet an indictment of those who made such sacrifice necessary. Hence it is accusation as well as violation. It accuses the Jews who (in Gerhard's view) killed Christ, but it also charges the Christians of Gerhard's own day with being the "new Jews," who kill Christ again by their lethargy and neglect. In contrast to many other theologians, Gerhard's word of choice for the relic he defends is cruor (bloodshed) not sanguis.

At the end of the treatise, in a passage reminiscent of Aelred's depiction of the crucifixion, Gerhard suddenly shifts to blood as wine. The imagery undoubtedly reflects the ritual known as "blood-drinking" (that is, imbibing of wine that had been poured over the reliquary or into which the relic had been dipped--a ritual we know was practiced at Weingarten). (58) Gerhard writes:

 You, the true vineyard [that is, Weingarten], surpassing all others, [are]
 where the health-bringing wine out of the side of the Lord makes believers
 intoxicated with the wonderful drunkenness of which the Psalmist speaks....
 You, fertile and fecund vineyard, [are] planted by God.... So that you are
 made fertile, God has let his mild rain flow out of the highest clouds, his
 flesh, which never bore sin. But so that you may become drunk with the
 juice of the grape, the same Christ has poured out his totally pure blood
 from the winecellar of his flesh; and the Lord wanted this intoxicating
 wine, this fructifying rain, this soul-cleansing water to be drunk and
 stored up in his most glorious vineyard [Weingarten]. (59)

But blood as wine comes in Gerhard's treatise almost as an afterthought, following blood as dew and water, fructifying and cleansing; blood as fire, inflaming and inebriating; blood as reproach, accusing Jews and Christians of violating Christ. There is eucharistic imagery here, it is true. But this eucharistic imagery (like the eucharistic practice of blood-drinking) is appropriated to characterize and defend the relic by which it is, in Gerhard's piety, partly eclipsed. (60)

To Gerhard, therefore, as to Aelred, the soldier's lance opened Christ's side to provide for us pure blood, which then became wine. "The blood is changed into wine to inebriate you," wrote Aelred. And a hundred and thirty years later, Gerhard echoes: "[T]he health-bringing wine out of the side of the Lord makes believers intoxicated.... Christ has poured out his totally pure blood from the winecellar of his flesh ... that you may become drunk with the juice of the grape." To Aelred and Gerhard, blood is prior--historically, logically, figuratively, devotionally. Blood as eucharist, blood as relic, blood as inflamer of memories and of com-passio with the suffering Christ, but, initially and preeminently, visually and insistently, blood!

There are many factors that help us account for the power and horror of what some have called blood mysticism in late medieval piety. I am not able to treat them all here. But Gerhard's treatise and the history of blood relics generally help us to understand that we may have read language of eating and drinking, body and blood, as too narrowly or exclusively eucharistic in the later Middle Ages. It is true that liturgy and theology struggled in certain ways to make the host central to practice and devotion. But blood continued to break out--leaping from hosts, walls, crucifixes--accusing, even scapegoating, those who did not believe correctly. For all the theological pressure to keep blood on the altar and to emphasize the host as symbol of community and salvation, there were always theologians--such as Gerhard--who composed polemics elevating blood over eucharist. The way in which blood seems in these cases to overwhelm body was magnified by the dual traditions that fed into blood piety--that is, by the fact that blood was crucial not only to a eucharistic spirituality centered on ritual transformation but also to a relic cult based in physical continuity. Established and justified, in one case, by words of consecration and in the other, by physical transmission and historical filiation, the two bloods were both, as Peter Dinzelbacher has elegantly put it, "real presences." (61) In a sense then, Christ as blood was available in two modes, each of which gave access to God through the matter of his creation but each of which recalled horror and torment--bloodshedding--as well.

IV. THE ASYMMETRY OF SYMBOLS

The asymmetry of body and blood is, however, rooted in something deeper than the historical traditions of blood relic and eucharist, and this is the second point I wish to underline in my essay. From the eleventh century, blood took on, so to speak, a life of its own. Blood visions and blood devotions proliferated, flowing free of any anchoring to eucharist or relic. In 1010 Ademar of Chabannes saw a great crucifix "high against the southern sky ... as if planted in the heavens" and on it hung the crucified one "the color of fire and deep blood." (62) In ca. 1060, the reformer Peter Damian, contemplating alone in his cell, saw Christ "pierced with nails, hanging on the cross" and wrote, in what may be the first example of such visionary drinking: "with my mouth I eagerly tried to catch the dripping blood." (63) In the late twelfth century, an English monk from Evesham abbey was found as if lifeless on Good Friday with "the balls of his eyes and his nose wet with blood." Once recovered, the monk recounted to his brothers a vision of the cross.

 While I was kneeling before the image and was kissing it on the mouth and
 eyes, I felt some drops falling gently on my forehead. When I removed my
 fingers, I discovered from their color that it was blood. I also saw blood
 flowing from the side of the image on the cross, as it does from the veins
 of a living man when he is cut for blood-letting. I do not know how many
 drops I caught in my hand as they fell. With the blood I devoutly anointed
 my eyes, ears and nostrils. Afterward--if I sinned in this I do not
 know--in my zeal I swallowed one drop of it, but the rest, which I caught
 in my hand, I was determined to keep.

Following this encounter, the monk traveled in vision through the places of punishment, graphically described, and thence to the places of glory. But even in the midst of glory, there was blood. "The tongue cannot reveal nor human weakness worthily describe what we saw as we went on.... In the middle of endless thousands of blessed spirits who stood round, ... the pious redeemer of the human race appeared. It was as if he were hanging on the cross with his whole body bloody from scourgings, insulted by spitting, crowned with thorns, with nails driven into him, pierced with the lance; while streams of blood flowed over his hands and feet, and blood and water dropped from his holy side!" (64)

Scholars have usually been content simply to label these devotions blood mysticism and to see them as part of the emergence, in the eleventh century, of so-called affective piety. I cannot tackle here the question of the origins of such piety. (65) But if we ask not about affective mysticism or blood mysticism generally but rather about the particular asymmetry with which I concern myself in this paper, we find a clue in the nature of the symbols themselves. As anthropologists tell us, "natural symbols" carry with them denotations and connotations brought from their biological origins. (66) In other words, symbols are multivalent but not infinitely so. (67) Body--in some basic physiological sense container and identity, constituted by edges and boundaries, intricately connected to growth and decay, to taking in through eating and therefore to food--tends to be a symbol of community and of self. Blood is, both physiologically and symbolically, more complex and labile because finally contradictory. Blood is life and death. It is sanguis and cruor, for Latin shares with other Indo-European languages a distinction between inside blood (in some sense, life) and outside blood or bloodshed. Hence the contradiction between bloods is embedded in language as well as in physiology. (68) To speak in this way is not of course to say that either physiology or language causes sensibility or symbols; symbols are employed by agents who bring their own sensibilities and ideologies to them. But it is to argue that symbols themselves are not totally constructed nor are they totally construct-able.

Going back through patristic writing and the New Testament to the Hebrew Scriptures, blood was life and the seat of life. Blood was thus equated with spirit. (69) Throughout medieval devotional writing, the body/blood contrast was used explicitly to symbolize the opposition body/soul. (70) Moreover blood was life-giving; it was fertile, (71) curative, (72) and intoxicating. (73) Small wonder then that medieval clergy came to forbid the wild desire of certain mystics for the chalice. Small wonder too that reformers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, whatever their technical theologies of eucharistic presence, saw the administering of the cup to the laity as an audacious act of rebellion against the old order and a claim of immediate access to God. (74)

But blood was also cruor: death, discord, suffering, horror, division. It was escape from body and destruction of body; it breached body. It was the drops, bits, fragments, of which Aelred and Gerhard so insistently speak. Throughout medieval miracle collections stream stories of bits of hair, walls, utensils--as well as, of course, the host itself--that bleed in order to display insults and accuse perpetrators. (75) Christian sin itself was represented as bodily transgression, bloodshedding--for example, in the late medieval devotional image known as the Feiertagschristus, which depicts peasants and peasant implements bloodying Christ by disobeying the Third Commandment. (76) However horrifying it is, it is (alas!) not surprising that blood relics--and hosts (bodies) breached by blood--were associated not only with relatively innocent competition among religious houses, cities, and monachies but also with pogroms and crusades, the slaughtering of Jews, and the persecution of heretics. (77)

V. AN EXAMPLE FROM ICONOGRAPHY

It is this blood--complex symbolically and historically--that pours out in late medieval art and devotion, threatening body by breaching but also, by this same breaching, offering access. I turn for a final illustration to the familiar but exceedingly complex iconography of the so-called Mass of St. Gregory, the earliest examples of which appear about 1400. (78) [See Figures 1 and 2.] Often said to go back to a story in Paul the Deacon's Life of Gregory, in which a woman is convinced of the real presence by the apparition of a bloody finger in place of bread, the motif may, in fact, have nothing to do with early accounts of Gregory except insofar as they emphasize his devotion to the eucharist and his efficacy at gaining release for souls in the period of purgation after death. (79) Whatever its origins (and they may well have been, as Endres argued long ago, visual--that is, the impetus may have come from a cult object to which indulgences were attached), (80) the depiction, from quite early on, combines three distinct elements. The first and most common is an apparition to the pope of the Schmerzensmann (the suffering Christ) among the instruments of his torture (the so-called arma Christi)--a form in which the mass itself is little emphasized (and indeed the chalice sometimes lies on its side, indicating that the moment is not that of the consecration). (81) The second (closer to the story of Paul the Deacon but not referring to it) shows Christ present at mass, either bleeding into the chalice (82) or appearing at the elevation of the host. (83) The third adds explicitly a connection to the salvation of poor souls in purgatory, either through an inscription that offers an indulgence to adherents praying before the image (84) or through actual depiction of the poor souls saved by the mass. (85)

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

Once again then in these final images we see the point I have been making throughout this essay. Blood--spilled and sacrificial--was both closely connected to eucharist and yet had a devotional life of its own as stimulator of guilt and penitence, frenzy and love. Official theology, pious preaching, and private devotion often held it to, and within, the rim of the eucharist, as it is held in this wing from a Lubeck altarpiece attributed to Wilm Dedeke. [figure 1] Here the large white host almost covers the Schmerzensmann. The wounds are hidden behind a circle whose rim seems to hold in the blood, as George Cartar's almost contemporaneous vision suggested. (86) The doctrine of concomitance is made visual; every fragment is whole; body contains blood. In such depiction, blood is included only as part of the body from which it flows; it is, like body, a means of incorporation into the community, Ecclesia, which forms that body.

But even in the Mass of St. Gregory, blood escaped. It flowed in the Mass, and outside it as well. And it leapt away from the host as well as leading to it. (87) For example, this wing from the St. Anne altar of the Wiesenkirche in Soest, 1473, combines the elements of the Gregorymass I have carefully sorted out--vision, eucharistic celebration, and purgatory--and yet does more. [figure 2] What we see here before an astonished Gregory is the blood leaping not only from chalice to pope but also from chalice to graveyard where the poor souls who receive it appear to rise from the dead under its saving power. The impact of this Gregorymass is completely different from that of the almost contemporary painting attributed to Dedeke. It is not clear whether mass is being said. The pope wears his tiara; (88) the paten is empty; there is no host on the altar linen. Blood takes on a life and direction, an energy, of its own. Although iconographically the Gregorymass was by definition connected to altar and celebrant (it is Gregory who makes it a Gregorymass), this version seems to pull the blood directly from Christ to penitent souls at least as insistently as the very different Dedeke version lifts souls toward heaven through the host consecrated by the celebrant. In the Dedeke mass, the roundness of the elevated host echoes the roundnesses of the naked bodies (both shoulders and buttocks) that rise and gesture toward a Christ's body that is subsumed in the host. Movement is inward and upward. In the image from Soest, the patterned floor (an exercise in perspective) carries our eyes not to pope or chalice but to the side wound itself; yet the sharp lines of blood then pull away not only from wound but even from chalice and toward the little angular figures in the churchyard. Our eyes go toward Christ, and then away, toward the souls who need salvation. The movement is inward, then outward; the picture splinters to our right. Blood saves, but it spills out in order to do so. (89)

VI. CONCLUSION

A full exploration of blood piety would necessitate a discussion of almost every aspect of medieval devotion and medieval life. My intention here has not been to give a complete history of blood relics and blood mysticism but rather to point to the remarkable asymmetry of body and blood historians have been inclined to label simply and cursorily "eucharistic." Hence I have argued that body and blood were different kinds of symbols and that blood was doubly dual: twofold historically as eucharist and relic, twofold symbolically as sanguis and cruor, life and death.

More could be said. But even the material I have explored here suggests three modifications of received wisdom. First, any generalization that sees in medieval blood imagery echoes of eucharistic devotion must take into account the complex ways in which blood-cult departed from and competed with eucharist. As the monks of Weingarten who commissioned Gerhard's treatise or the pilgrims to Fecamp argued, relic and vision might offer more immediate access than did the (withheld) communion cup. Not every reference to blood, to drinking and eating, to the wound in Christ's side, to sacrifice, was an evocation of the eucharist. (90) Even the Soest Gregorymass is, upon close examination, perhaps not a mass at all but rather the spilling of Christ's sacrificial blood to redeem souls from purgatorial suffering.

Second, any generalization that tends to associate relic (and physical contact) with early medieval piety, spiritual communion and visuality with the later Middle Ages, must take into account late medieval blood veneration. And such veneration was not only a piety of vision and visuality--of "desire to see the host," as a famous study puts it. (91) The pilgrims who flocked to blood shrines and wonderhosts touched reliquaries and climbed through holes in tombs, kissed images of wounds, and drank wine poured over blood relics. Late medieval piety was a piety of drinking and touching as well as seeing. (92)

Third, any interpretation that sees desire for the chalice as clamor for access or stresses blood as life must also take into account the dark side of blood mysticism. For blood was cruor as well as sanguis; it was a symbol of violation as well as fertility, of torture as well as birth. And in its proclaiming of violation, it accused both self and other. The Man of Sorrows who appeared to St. Gregory was a symbol of resurrection as well as of torment; his sacrifice saved. But the blood that springs into the churchyard to save the poor souls depicted on the Soest altarwing also accused the Jewish faces that clustered around in the conventional arma Christi. And, as Gerhard of Cologne wrote, Christians are the new Jews. Their sins daily kill God. Medieval blood devotion was a piety of horror, accusation, and self-accusation as well as of encounter with God.

(1.) I worked on this paper in the spring of 2000 when I was Aby Warburg Visiting Professor at the Warburg Haus in Hamburg; I am grateful to the staff there for assistance. An earlier version was given as a talk at the New England Medieval Conference at Yale University in October, 2000. For helpful comments, I thank my host, Paul Freedman, and the conference participants, especially Frederick Paxton. Portions of sections 3-5 appeared in different form in German as "Das Blut und die Korper Christi im spaten Mittelalter: Eine Asymmetrie," Vortrage aus dem Warburg-Haus 5 (2001): 75-119. I am grateful to Guenther Roth, Dorothea von Mucke, and two anonymous readers for Church History for many valuable suggestions.

(2.) Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, c. 31, in Aelred, Opera omnia, vol. 1, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, Corpus christianorum: continuatio medievalis 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 671; trans. M. P. Macpherson, "Rule of Life for a Recluse," in The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx 1: Treatises and Pastoral Prayer, Cistercian Fathers Series 2 (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 90. And see Marsha Dutton, "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: The Eucharistic Spirituality of the Cistercian Fathers," in Erudition at God's Service, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 11 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 9, and Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 122-24.

(3.) Dutton, "Eat, Drink and Be Merry," 29, n. 28, quoting Berengar from Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, c. 1080-c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 37.

(4.) On the eucharist, see Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist; David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74.3 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1984); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Charles Caspers, Gerard Lukken, and Gerard Rouwhorst, eds., Bread of Heaven: Customs and Practices Surrounding Holy Communion: Essays in the History of Liturgy and Culture (Kampen, Netherlands: Kok Pharos, 1995); and Andre Haquin, ed., Fete-Dieu (1246-1996) 1. Actes du Colloque de Liege, 12-14 Septembre 1996, Universite catholique de Louvain: Publications de l'Institut d'Etudes Medievales (Louvain-la-Neuve: College Erasme, 1999).

(5.) Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

(6.) On visuality or "Schaufrommigkeit," see Uwe Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen: Vision, Kunst, Realitat: Katalog und Fuhrer zu einer Ausstellung im Schnutgen-Museum der Stadt Koln (Cologne: Wienand, 1982), esp. 37; Robert Scribner, "Vom Sakralbild zur sinnlichen Schau," in Klaus Schreiner and Norbert Schnitzler, eds., Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen: Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Korpers im spaten Mittelalter und der fruhen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 1992), 309-336; Anton Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult zwischen Antike und Aufklarung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 256-77; Judith Oliver, "Image et devotion: le role de l'art dans l'institution de la Fete-Dieu," in Haquin, ed., Fete-Dieu, 153-72; and Bruno Reudenbach, "Der Altar als Bildort: Das Flugelretabel und die liturgische Inszenierung des Kirchenjahres," in Goldgrund und Himmelslicht: Die Kunst des Mittelalters in Hamburg (Hamburg: Stiftung Denkmalpflege: Dolling und Galitz, 1999), 26-33. For intelligent caveats about this, see Paul Binski, "The English Parish Church and Its Art in the Later Middle Ages: A Review of the Problem," Studies in Iconography 20 (1999): 1-25, esp. 13-14, who agrees with me about recent overemphasis on the eucharist.

On the rise of spiritual communion, see Jules Corblet, Histoire dogmatique, liturgique et archeologique du sacrement de l'eucharistie, 2 vols. (Paris: Societe Generale de Librairie Catholique, 1885-86); Edouard Dumoutet, Le Desir de voir l'hostie et les origines de la devotion au Saint-Sacrement (Paris: Beauchesne, 1926); Dumoutet, Corpus Domini: Aux sources de la piete eucharistique medievale (Paris: Beauchesne, 1942); Peter Browe, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich: Hueber, 1933); F. Baix and C. Lambot, La Devotion a la eucharistie et le VIIe centenaire de la Fete-Dieu (Gembloux: Duculot, 1964); Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 31-69; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 35-82; and Charles Caspers, "The Western Church During the Late Middle Ages: Augenkommunion or Popular Mysticism?," in Bread of Heaven, ed. Caspers et al., 83-98.

(7.) Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist, sees the ecclesiological interpretation of the eucharist as dominant from about the middle of the twelfth century on. For an example of the eucharistic elements as symbols of the pious gathered into one church, see Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in Joannem, bk. 6, sect. 206, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina, 221 vols. (Paris; Migne, 1841-64) [hereafter PL] vol. 169, cols. 468-69 and 483D-484A. Macy tends, however, to underestimate the element of sacrifice, which remained crucial in eucharistic devotion and theology; see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 129-44 and 184-204, and P. J. Fitzpatrick, "On Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Middle Ages," in Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology, ed. S.W. Sykes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129-56.

(8.) As Dutton points out, the argument that the eucharist should be veiled because of its horror was traditional and went back to Ambrose; see Dutton, "Eat, Drink and B Merry," 9-10. See also Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist, 28-51, 72 and 108; Pelikan, Growth of Medieval Theology, 199; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 91 n. 56; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 290-91; and Klaus Berg, "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln fiber das kostbarste Blut Christi aus dem Jahre 1280," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten 1094-1994: Festschrift zum Heilig-Blut-Jubilaum am 12. Marz 1994, ed. Norbert Kruse and Hans Ulrich Rudolf, 3 vols. (Sigmaringen: Thorbeke, 1994), vol. 1, 442, 449-50. As Roger Bacon, The Opus maius of Roger Bacon, tr. Robert Belle Burke, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), vol. 2, 822, expressed it: "[If the body and blood were visible,] we could not sustain it from horror and loathing. For the human heart could not endure to masticate and devour raw and living flesh and to drink fresh blood. And therefore the infinite goodness of God is shown in veiling this sacrament."

(9.) Since I wrote this paper, an excellent full-length study of the blood relic at Westminster has appeared: Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Vincent's study focuses on why the relic at Westminster did not give rise to a cult. Although it attempts to put the English phenomenon in a European context, it has little about blood cult in Germany, in which I have been particularly interested in this paper.

(10.) See n. 6 above.

(11.) James J. Megivern, Concomitance and Communion: A Study in Eucharistic Doctrine and Practice, Studia Friburgensia, n.s. 33 (Fribourg, Switzerland: University Press, 1963). As Megivern points out, the old argument that the doctrine of concomitance was developed to justify the withdrawal of the cup is untenable. The roots of the idea are in early medieval efforts to refute the notion that receiving communion divides Christ into pieces.

(12.) Peter Browe, Die Eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters, Breslauer Studien zur historischen Theologie, NF 4 (Breslau: Muller und Seiffert, 1938); Corblet, Histoire dogmatique, vol. 1, 447-515; Caroline Walker Bynum, "Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century," Women's Studies 11 (1984): 179-214; Hans Ulrich Rudolf, "Die Heilig-Blut-Verehrung im Uberblick: Von den Anfangen bis zum Ende der Klosterzeit (1094-1803)" in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 3-51, esp. 6-7; Walter Kasper, "Der bleibende Gehalt der Heilig-Blut-Verehrung aus theologischer Sicht," in ibid., vol. 1, 382.

(13.) See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Reginald Gregoire, "Sang," Dictionnaire de spiritualite, ascetique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viller et al., vol. 14 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1990), cols. 324-33; Rubin, Corpus Christi, especially chapters 2 and 5; Peter Dinzelbacher, "Das Blut Christi in der Religiositat des Mittelalters," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 415-434; and Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, "La devotion au sang du Christ chez les femmes medievales: des mystiques aux laiques (XIIIe-XVIe siecle)," in Le Sang au moyen age: Actes du quatrieme colloque international de Montpellier, Universite Paul Valery (27-29 novembre 1997), ed. Marcel Faure (Montpellier: Universite Paul Valery, 1999), 405-13. Dinzelbacher maintains that the substitution of blood for communion wine in visions was fairly infrequent ("Das Blut Christi," 425).

(14.) Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 177; on Catherine's blood mysticism generally, see ibid., 174-79, and Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, "`Die Braut auf dem Bett von Blut und Feuer': Zur Bluttheologie der Caterina von Siena (1347-1380)," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 494-500.

(15.) Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 399, n. 49. See also ibid., 62, n. 128, for Mechtild of Hackeborn (d. ca. 1298) who received Christ's heart "in the form of a cup" containing "the drink of life" at "the hour of communion." On the blood mysticism (with strong eucharistic overtones) of the Helfta nuns generally, see Bynum, Jesus as Mother, chapter 5.

(16.) "Les `Vitae Sororum' d'Unterlinden. Edition critique du Manuscrit 508 de la Bibliotheque de Colmar," ed. Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age 5 (1930): 352-53; discussed in Otto Langer, Mystische Erfahrung und spirituelle Theologie: zu Meister Eckharts Auseinandersetzung mit der Frauenfrommigkeit seiner Zeit (Munich: Artemis, 1987), 135, and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary (New York: Zone, 1998), 413. The early-fourteenth-century Rhenish devotional drawing of St. Bernard and a nun at the foot of the cross, to which Jeffrey Hamburger has drawn our attention, shows such inundation. The fact that the nun's hands are over the gushing flood may suggest that the adherent is still at some distance from immersion-union, but it may also suggest that access to the Christ of blood and suffering is through touch, grasping, physical encounter. See Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), plate 1. There is, in this period, a strong devotional emphasis on touching as well as seeing the precious blood--an emphasis found especially in the references (both visual and textual) to Thomas putting his hand into Christ's side and touching his heart; see Horst Appuhn, "Sankt Thomas," Kunst in Hessen und am Mittelrhein 5 (1966): 7-10, and "Der Auferstandene und das Heilige Blut zu Wienhausen: Uber Kult und Kunst im spaten Mittelalter," Niederdeutsche Beitrage zur Kunstgeschichte 1 (1961): 90-94.

(17.) See the works cited in n. 77 below. For a number of examples of objects that accuse and threaten by bleeding, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 329 nn. 135 and 138. Medieval writers occasionally understood unworthy reception as itself killing Christ; see, for example, Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, c. 50, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner, 8 vols., Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, 21 (London: Longman, 1861-91; Kraus reprint, 1964-66), vol. 2, 139. I owe this reference to an anonymous reader for Church History.

(18.) Edward Peacock, "Extracts from Lincoln Episcopal Visitations in the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries," Archaeologia: or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity 48 (London: The Society of Antiquaries, 1885), 251-53, and see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 344-45.

(19.) For two examples, see n. 56 below.

(20.) Wine or water was poured over the relic and drunk; see Rainer Jensch, "Die Weingartenet Heilig-Blut- und Stiffertradition: Ein Bilderkreis klosterlicher Selbstdarstellung" (Diss. Phil., Tubingen, 1996), 23-24, and Adalbert Nagel, "Das Heilige Blut Christi," in Festschrift zur 900-Feier des Klosters: 1056-1956 (Weingarten, 1956), 201-03. Edmund Rich of Abingdon (d. 1240), archbishop of Canterbury, washed the wounds of a crucifix with wine and then drank it; see Louis Gougaud, Devotions et pratiques ascetiques du moyen age (Paris: Desclee, de Brouwer, 1925), 77-78. On the general relationship between eucharist and relic, see Godefridus J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Mutual Relationship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).

(21.) There are, however, a few Holy Blood altars that relate the blood closely to the Last Supper; see Barbara Welzel, Abendmahlsaltare vor der Reformation (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1991), 24, 26, and 116-31. It is important to note that such depictions of the Last Supper are usually of the moment of Judas's betrayal, not of the consecration.

(22.) The devotion to Christ's foreskin was, in a sense, a body-devotion parallel to the devotion to blood relics. But it was far rarer. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 377 n. 135. Charroux provides an example of devotion to parallel bodily relics of foreskin and blood from the circumcision: see X. Barbier de Montault, Oeuvres completes, vol. 7: Rome, part 5.2 (Paris: Vives, 1893), 528.

(23.) Dinzelbacher, "Das Blut Christi," 415.

(24.) "Non pas comment u Sacrement/Mes en sa fourme proprement/Vermel comment il le sengna/Quant pour nous mort soufrir dengna." In Oskari Kajava, ed., Etudes sur deux poemes francais relatifs a l'abbaye de Fecamp (Helsinki: Societe de Litterature Finnoise, 1928), 95.

(25.) Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), 48. The competition is all the more interesting in light of the fact that the cult at Fecamp appears to have originated in a eucharistic miracle that was later re-figured as a blood relic; see Vincent, Holy Blood, 57-58.

(26.) On blood relics generally, see Barbier de Montault, Oeuvres completes, vol. 7, 524-37; Johannes Heuser, "`Heilig-Blut' in Kult und Brauchtum des deutschen Kulturraumes. Ein Beitrag zur religiosen Volkskunde" (Diss. Phil., Bonn, 1948); Nagel, "Das Heilige Blut Christi," 197-98; Sumption, Pilgrimage, 44-49 and 312; Thomas Stump and Otto Gillen, "Heilig-Blut," in Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunst-Geschichte, ed. Otto Schmitt, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Alfred Druckenmuller, 1948) [hereafter RDK], cols. 947-58; R. Haubst, "Blut Christi," R. Bauerreiss, "Bluthostien," A. Winklhofer, "Blutwunder," in Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, ed. Josef Hofer and Karl Rahner, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Freiburg: Herder, 1958) [hereafter LTK], cols. 544-49; and Vincent, Holy Blood, 31-81 (see 51-52 n. 76 for more bibliography).

(27.) On Braulio, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 107-8 n. 179. On the early cult, see Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blut- und Stiftertradition," 20-25, 30-31; Nagel, "Das Heilige Blut," 188-229; Rudolf, "Die Heilig-Blut-Verehrung im Uberblick;" Helmut Binder, "Das Heilige Blut der Reichenau," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 337-47, and Lukas Weichenrieder, "Das Heilige Blut von Mantua," in ibid., 331-36.

(28.) Stump and Gillen, "Heilig-Blut," cols. 947-58; Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blutund Stiftertradition," 31.

(29.) Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre a la fin du Moyen-Age (Paris: Plon, 1963), 259-67. Although obtained with enthusiasm in 1150, the relic apparently did not receive regular processions until the beginning of the fourteenth century, which saw an explosion of miracles and devotional practices relating to it.

(30.) Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, vols. 4 and 5, ed. Henry Richards Luard, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 57 (London: Longman, 1877-80), vol. 4, 640-44, and vol. 5, 29, 48, and 195; M. E. Roberts, "The Relic of the Holy Blood and the Iconography of the Thirteenth-Century North Transept Portal of Westminster Abbey," in England in the Thirteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1986), 129-42, esp. 138-39; and now Vincent, Holy Blood.

(31.) Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blut- und Stiftertradition," 43-47; Nagel, "Das Heilige Blut," 197; and Binder, "Das Heilige Blut in Weissenau," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 348-58. Note that this is just at the time of Gerhard's treatise. Rudolf was also patron of Weingarten.

(32.) The Book of Margery Kempe: The Text from the Unique MS. Owned by Colonel W. Butler-Bowdon, ed. S. B. Meech with H. E. Allen, Early English Text Society 212 (London: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1961), 232-35. On the Wilsnack hosts, see Browe, Die Wunder, 166-71; Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blut- und Stiftertradition," 37-39; Hartmut Boockmann, "Der Streit um das Wilsnacker Blut: zur Situation des deutschen Klerus in der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts," Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung 9 (1982): 385-408; Charles Zika, "Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany," Past and Present 118 (1988): 25-64; and Hartmut Kuhne, "`Ich ging durch Feuer und Wasser....' Bemerkungen zur Wilnacker Heilig-Blut-Legende," in Gerlinde Strohmaier-Wiederanders, ed., Theologie und Kultur: Geschichten einer Wechselbeziehung: Festschrift zum einhundertfunfzigjahrigen Bestehen des Lehrstuhls fur Christliche Archaologie und Kirchliche Kunst an der Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin (Halle: Andre Gursky, 1999), 51-84. On frauds generally, see Frantisek Graus, "Falschungen im Gewand der Frommigkeit," in Falschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munchen, 16.-19. September 1986, 5 vols. (Hannover: Hahn, 1988), vol. 5, 261-80. It is significant that the goal of pilgrimage at Wilsnack was known at the time as the "blood of Christ," although the objects revered were wonderhosts.

(33.) Stump and Gillen, "Heilig-Blut," col. 956, figure 7; M.-D. Chenu, "Sang du Christ," in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and E. Amann, vol. 14 (Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1939), col. 1094-97; Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blut- und Stiftertradition," 31. In the fifteenth century, Nicolas V (wrongly) attributed the story to a sermon of Athanasius cited at II Nicaea (787). In the eleventh century, Siegebert of Gembloux tells the miracle of Beirut under the year 765, and it was often celebrated in the high Middle Ages; the Roman martyrology mentions it for November 9.

(34.) See, for example, the articles from LTK cited in n. 26 above, which strain to divide the surviving stories into categories according to the source of the blood.

(35.) The seventeenth-century chronicle from Wienhausen, which draws on earlier traditions, has been edited by Horst Appuhn, Chronik des Klosters Wienhausen (Celle: Bomann-Archio, 1956); the blood miracles are on 140-42. We have records of several fourteenthcentury donations to maintain an eternal light before the holy blood; see Appuhn, "Der Auferstandene und das Heilige Blut," 98. Contemporary accounts from Rothenburg ob der Tauber also show some confusion about the source of the blood relic there. And see n. 25 above on Fecamp.

(36.) Romuald Bauerreiss, Pie Jesu: Das Schmerzensmann-Bild und sein Einfluss auf die mittelalterliche Frommigkeit (Munich: Karl Widmann, 1931); see also n. 17 above and n. 77 below.

(37.) Innocent III, De sacro altaris mysterio, bk 4, c. 30, PL 217, col. 876D-877B. Almost a hundred years earlier, Guibert of Nogent had raised objections to relics of Christ's milk, teeth, and foreskin; see Klaus Guth, Guibert von Nogent und die hochmittelalterliche Kritik an der Reliquienverehrung, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-Ordens und seiner Zweige, Supplement 21 (Augsburg: Winfried, 1970).

(38.) Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, vol. 4, 643, and vol. 6 (reprint 1964), 138-44; see also Roberts, "Relic of the Holy Blood," 141. Franciscans generally took this position; see Chenu, "Sang du Christ." And on the entire controversy, see Vincent, Holy Blood, 82-117.

(39.) For a thorough discussion of the concept of the "truth [or core] of human nature" in twelfth- and thirteenth-century theology, see Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

(40.) Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt III, quaestio 54, art. 3, in S. Thomae Aquinatis opera omnia, ed. Robert Busa, 7 vols. (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstadt: Friedrich Frommann, 1980), vol. 2, 853-54; Quaestiones quodlibetales, Quodl. 5, quaestio 3, art. 1, in ibid., vol. 3, 466.

(41.) See, for example, the numerous eucharistic miracles in Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. J. Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne: Heberle, 1851), esp. distinctio 9, and Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica. And see n. 12 above.

(42.) See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt III, quaestio 76, art. 8, in Opera omnia, ed. Busa, vol. 2, 896; In Quattuor libros sententiarum, bk 4, distinctio 10, quaestio 1, art. 4b, in Opera omnia, ed. Busa, vol. 1, 473-74; and Berg, "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln," 436 and 441-44. For a detailed discussion of the theology of the "real presence" in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and of the concern to avoid too literalist an interpretation, see Hans Jorissen, Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehre bis zum Beginn der Hochscholastik (Munster: Aschendorf, 1965). On eucharistic theology generally, see also James F. McCue, "The Doctrine of Transubstantiation from Berengar through the Council of Trent," Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968): 385-430; Edith Dudley Sylla, "Autonomous and Handmaiden Science: St. Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham on the Physics of the Eucharist," in John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, eds., The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science and Theology in the Middle Ages--September 1973, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (Boston: D. Reidel, 1974), 349-91; Stock, Implications of Literacy, 241-325; Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion; Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist; Macy, "The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45.1 (1994): 11-41, reprinted in Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1999), 81-120; and "Reception of the Eucharist According to the Theologians: A Case of Diversity in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," in ibid., 36-58.

(43.) Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt III, quaestio 77, art. 1, and quaestio 80, art. 4 ad 4, in Opera omnia, ed. Busa, vol. 1, 896-97, 905. Gabriel Biel used the distinction between substance and accidents to argue that communion with the eyes reached only the accidents of bread, whereas those who eat consume species and the vere contentum as well; see Andre Goossens, "Resonances eucharistiques a la fin du moyen age," in Haquin, ed., Fete-Dieu, 173-91, esp. 177. See also Yrjo Him, The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church (Boston: Macmillan, 1912), 124-25, 135-36.

(44.) Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion; Jorissen, Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehre; and n. 42 above. The decision on the part of certain theologians (especially Dominicans) for trans-substantiation rather than con-substantiation or annihilation was undergirded by their desire to adhere to a truly Aristotelian theory of substantial change and to adhere as well to the Boethian notion that something common must connect the two poles in a relationship of change. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone, 2001), 197-98, nn. 6 and 7, and "Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century," in The Mind's Eye: Art and Theology in the Middle Ages, Proceedings of a Conference Held at Princeton University, October, 2001, ed. Anne-Marie Bouche and Jeffrey Hamburger, to appear.

(45.) Hartmut Kuhne," `Ich ging durch Feuer und Wasser,'" 51-84; see 54 for the quotation from Tocke's Notiz.

(46.) Peter Browe, "Die eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder des Mittelalters," Romische Quartalschrift 37 (1929): 156-57 nn. 60 and 61.

(47.) Wolfgang Bruckner, "Liturgie und Legende: Zur theologischen Theorienbildung und zum historischen Verstandnis von Eucharistie-Mirakeln," Jahrbuch fur Volkskunde 19 (1996): 139-66, esp. 151.

(48.) R. Haubst, "Blut Christi," LTK, vol. 2, cols. 544-45; Walter Michel, "Blut und Blutglaube im Mittelalter," Theologische Realenzyklopadie, ed. Gerhard Krauss, Gerhard Muller et al., vol. 6 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980) [hereafter TRE], 737-38; Chenu, "Sang du Christ;" Rudolf, "Die Heilig-Blut-Verehrung im Uberblick," 13-16; Kasper, "Der bleibende Gehalt;" and Berg, "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln."

(49.) Chenu, "Sang du Christ;" Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blut- und Stiftertradition," 39-40; and Kasper, "Der bleibende Gehalt." Nicolas V's bull of August 19, 1449, permitted blood veneration; the bull Ineffabilis summi providentia Patris of August 1, 1464, forbade further discussion of the status of the blood (divided or undivided) after the Passion. In the early sixteenth century, pope Clement VII declared that the blood that was poured out did participate in the hypostatic union; see Rudolf, "Die Heilig-Blut-Verehrung im Uberblick," 16. Increasingly therefore in the Baroque period theologians came to think that anything that remained after the resurrection was not part of the hypostatic union; see Kasper, "Der bleibende Gehalt," 382. For example, in the early sixteenth century, Peter of Nivolaria defended blood cult but argued that the blood came not from the veritas humanae naturae of Christ but rather from the excess blood of humors; see Berg, "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln," 454-55.

(50.) Boockmann, "Der Streit," 391-92.

(51.) Bruckner, "Liturgie und Legende."

(52.) See n. 74 below for a Reformation image that makes clear the demand for return of blood to the laity. As both my brief account here and the large bibliography on Wilsnack (see n. 32 above) should make clear, differing opinions about blood relics, wonderhosts, and bleeding images do not fall into an elite versus popular or a clerical versus lay pattern.

(53.) On Gerhard, see Berg, "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln," 435-57. There is no evidence that he is the same person as the Gerhard of Cologne whose sermons have been edited by Ph. Strauch or the Gerhard who wrote the De medulla animae. Gerhard's Tractatus de sacratissimo sanguine domini is edited and translated into German (somewhat freely) by Berg, in "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln," 459-76. On Weingarten, see 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, ed. Kruse and Rudolf, 3 vols.

(54.) Berg, "Der Traktat des Gerhard von Koln," 453-55; on Gerhard see also Nagel, "Das Heilige Blut," 193-94.

(55.) Gerhard argues that the name "Weingarten" was prophetic; Christ knew there would be a blood relic there. See Tractatus de sacratissimo sanguine, 474.

(56.) Gerhard, Tractatus de sacratissimo sanguine, 467. Thomas of Chobham in his treatise on preaching (ca. 1210) makes similar use of the eucharistic analogy. Discussing how Christ's foreskin can both remain on earth and be resurrected, Thomas asserts: "just as by a miracle the body of Our Lord can be at one and the same time in several places, so that body can exist in several forms.... Christ's foreskin, glorified as part of his integral body, may exist in another place unglorified." Cited in Vincent, Holy Blood, 85.

(57.) See Jensch, "Die Weingartener Heilig-Blut- und Stiftertradition," 23, and Nagel, "Das Heilige Blut," 200-201. The late-thirteenth-century indulgences at Weingarten were for seeing the relic; and the crystal form of the reliquary clearly corresponded to this devotional emphasis.

(58.) See above n. 20, and Hans Ulrich Rudolf, "Heilig-Blut-Brauchtum im Uberblick," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 2, 553-74. The earliest miracles at Weingarten seem to have come from being touched by the Holy Blood reliquary or from visiting abbot Meingoz's grave or both; see Norbert Kruse, "Der Bericht von den ersten Wundern des Heiligen Bluts im Jahre 1200," in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten, vol. 1, 124-36.

(59.) Gerhard, Tractatus de sacratissimo sanguine, 474-75.

(60.) Dinzelbacher, "Das Blut Christi," 430, n. 202, quotes the parallel opinion of priest and religious at Wilsnack that their blood relic is more efficacious (efficacius) than consecrated wine.

(61.) Peter Dinzelbacher, "Die `Realprasenz' der Heiligen," in Heiligenverehrung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. P. Dinzelbauer and D. Bauer (Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 1990), 115-74. One must not, however, take the point too far; relics were also, even to simple adherents, triggers of remembrance--that is, mnemonic as well as thaumaturgic.

(62.) Ademar of Chabannes, Historia 3.46, trans, in Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 87. See below n. 65.

(63.) Peter Damian, Opusculum 19: De abdicatione episcopatus [Letter 72], c. 5, PL 145, col. 432B, trans. Owen J. Blum, The Letters of Peter Damian, 1-120, The Fathers of the Church, Mediaeval Continuation, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989-98), vol. 3, 129-30; Dinzelbacher, "Das Blut Christi," 425, n. 147, says this is the first such vision.

(64.) "The Monk of Evesham's Vision," cc. 2, 4, and 10, in Eileen Gardiner, ed., Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (New York: Italica, 1989), 198, 202-3, 214.

(65.) Both Rachel Fulton and Phyllis Jestice, from different perspectives, are at work on the origins of the devotion to the suffering Christ. See now Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: An Intellectual History of Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, forthcoming). Fulton discusses both Ademar of Chabannes and Peter Damian at length.

(66.) See, for example, Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, with new intro. (New York: Pantheon, 1982). Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), vol. 1: An Introduction, 147, describes premodern society as "a society of blood," saying blood is "a reality with a symbolic function." He stresses the symbolic importance of the precariousness of blood; it decays, spills, and so on. I pointed out the symbolic asymmetry of blood and body fifteen years ago in the first chapter of Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

There are some interesting ideas in Jean-Paul Roux, Le Sang: Mythes, symboles et realites (Paris: Fayard, 1988) but it is too general to be of much help. The essays in Le Sang au moyen age, ed. Faure, are useful on individual figures and literary texts, but the volume attempts no overview of blood piety.

(67.) Hence Miri Rubin's argument that there is no "one" eucharist (see, for example, Corpus Christi, 3-5, 11, 288, etc.) seems to me self-evident. Symbols and rituals are, of course, polyvalent and culturally constructed; they are, moreover, always viewed from a particular perspective. But this does not mean that every symbol stands for or evokes everything. The symbol itself brings something to the relationship. And it is always an empirical question into which particular patterns symbols and rituals fall.

(68.) Georges Dumezil, "Le sang dans les langues classiques," Nouvelle revue francaise d'hematologie 25 (1983): 401-4. (Interestingly enough, German does not have the distinction.)

(69.) As it is in many religions; see A. Closs, "Blut," LTK, vol. 2, cols. 537-38; Schumann, "Blut: religionsgeschichtlich," in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handworterbuch fur Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Tubingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1927), cols. 1154-56; and Kasper, "Der bleibende Gehalt," 377-80. Grosseteste (according to Matthew Paris) states this explicitly; see Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, vol. 6, 143.

(70.) For example, Alger of Liege, De sacramentis corporis et sanguinis Dominici, bk 2, c. 8, PL 180, col. 826D. For other examples, among them Peter Lombard, Rupert of Deutz, Gerald of Wales, and Peter the Chanter, see Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist, 64-70, and Dinzelbacher, "Das Blut Christi," nn. 58 and 67. Medieval authors themselves explored the connection of the physical object and its religious significance. Robert of Melun (d. 1167), for example, argued that God can change anything into anything but in fact he converts bread to flesh and wine to blood because wine has more "similitude" with blood; see Jorissen, Die Entfaltung der Transsubstantiationslehre, 27-28.

(71.) In the later Middle Ages, the blood was sometime carried in procession around newly sown fields to protect crops and increase fertility; see Rudolf, "Die Heilig-Blut-Verehrung im Uberblick," 16. And on women's blood as food to fetus and suckling, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), 181-238.

(72.) Hans Wissmann, Otto Bocher, and Walter Michel, "Blut ...," TRE, vol. 6, 727-38; and Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion, 1999), 97-98. Note the prominence of blood as healing in the story of Longinus. See also R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 9, 143-51.

(73.) For the power of cannibalistic images, see Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 319, n. 75, 412, n. 77; and Schumann, "Blut: religionsgeschichtlich," cols. 1154-56. For the motif of blood-eating in popular piety, see Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales, FF Communications 204 (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 1969), number 761.

(74.) See the woodcut from 1530 in Leopold Kretzenbacher, Bild-Gedanken der spatmittelalterlichen Hl. Blut-Mystik und ihr Fortleben in mittel- und sudosteuropaischen Volksuberlieferungen (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 89, figure 10. Here Martin Luther and Jan Hus give the Lord's Supper under both species in front of an altar with a huge grape vine curling around a chalice or basin that contains the crucified Christ als Blutquell.

(75.) For objects that accuse by bleeding, see n. 17 above, and see also Peter Browe, "Die Eucharistie als Zaubermittel im Mittelalter," Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 20 (1930): 134-54. On the theme of horror cruoris, see n. 8 above.

(76.) Robert Wildhaber, "Feiertagschristus," in RDK, vol. 7, cols. 1002-1010. See also Rudolf Berliner, "Arma Christi," Munchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 3rd ser., vol. 6 (1955): 68, who sees the motif more broadly as "Christ attacked by the sins of the world," and Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972), 51-54, who gives examples of the theme in devotional literature.

(77.) See Bauerreiss, Pie Jesu; Browe, "Die Eucharistie als Zaubermittel;" Lionel Rothkrug, "Popular Religion and Holy Shrines: Their Influence on the Origins of the German Reformation and Their Role in German Cultural Development," in Religion and the People, 800-1700, ed. J. Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 20-86, esp. 27-8; F. Lotter, "Hostienfrevelvorwurf und Blutwunderfalschung bei den Judenverfolgungen von 1298 (`Rintfleisch') und 1336-1338 (`Armleder')," in Falschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munchen, 16.-19. September 1986, 5 vols. (Hannover: Hahn, 1988), vol. 5, 533-84; Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder; Rainer Erb, ed., Die Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden (Berlin: Metropol, 1993), especially Friedrich Lotter, "Innocens Virgo et Martyr: Thomas von Monmouth und die Verbreitung der Ritualmordlegende im Hochmittelalter," 25-72; Diane Wood, ed., Christianity and Judaism: Papers Read at the 1991 Summer Meeting and the 1992 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History 29 (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell, 1992); J. M. Minty, "Judengasse to Christian Quarter: The Phenomenon of the Converted Synagogue in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Holy Roman Empire," in Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400-1800, eds. R. Scribner and T. Johnson (New York: St. Martin's, 1996), 58-86; John McCulloh, "Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth," Speculum 72.3 (1997): 698-740; Robert C. Stacey, "From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ," Jewish History 12.1 (1998): 11-28; and Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). Blood can, of course, have denotations and connotations of community, especially in a family or racial sense, as the rhetoric of National Socialism makes clear; see Kasper, "Der bleibende Gehalt," 378. I have discussed these issues in "Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety," Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 30 (Spring, 2002): 3-36.

(78.) The earliest example (ca. 1400) seems to come from St. Georg, in Razuns (Graubunden), Switzerland, although some consider this a precursor or a parallel tradition; see Berliner, "Arma Christi," plate 18 on 68. According to Marianne Lorenz, "Die Gregoriusmesse: Entstehung und Ikonographie" (Diss., Masch.-Schr., Innsbruck, 1956), the earliest example is a relief in the parish church of Munnerstadt (1428). On the Gregorymass generally see Herbert Thurston, "The Mass of St. Gregory," The Month 112 (1908): 303-319; J. A. Endres, "Die Darstellung der Gregoriusmesse im Mittelalter," Zeitschrift fur christliche Kunst 30.11-12 (1917): 146-56; Louis Reau, Iconographie de l'art chretien, vol. 3, pt 2 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958), 609-15; Comte J. de Borchgrave d'Altena, "La Messe de saint Gregoire: Etude iconographique," Musees royaux des beaux-arts: Bulletin; Bulletin Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten 8 (1959): 3-34; Carlo Bertelli, "The Image of Pity in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme," in Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine, eds., Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London: Phaidon, 1967), 40-55; Colin Eisler, "The Golden Christ of Cortona and the Man of Sorrows in Italy," The Art Bulletin 51.2 (June, 1969): 107-118, 233-246; Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, especially 16-54; Brigitte d'Hainaut-Zveny, "Les messes de saint Gregoire dans les retables des Pays-Bas. Mise en perspective historique d'une image polemique, dogmatique et utilitariste," Bulletin: Musees royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Bruxelles 41-42 (1992-93): 35-61; and Flora Lewis, "Rewarding Devotion: Indulgences and the Promotion of Images," in Diana Wood, ed., The Church and the Arts, Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell, 1992), 179-94. Thomas Lentes and the Art History Research Group at Munster are preparing an extensive catalogue of Gregorymass iconography. I discuss the iconography in Bynum, "Seeing and Seeing Beyond."

(79.) To say that the image does not originate as an illustration of Paul the Deacon does not of course mean that there is no connection of Gregory to eucharistic devotion in early literature. There is much in Gregory's own writing about the mass, and the devotion to the arma Christi and the Schrnerzensmann was early associated with Gregory's feast day. See Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 16-22.

(80.) See the classic article by Endres, "Die Darstellung der Gregoriusmesse"; also Carlo Bertelli, "The Image of Pity in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme;" and Wesftehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 18-22.

(81.) See, for example, the Gregorymass by the Meister des Augustineraltars or his workshop, from about 1490, in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nurnberg, Gm. 154; reproduced in Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 4 vols. (Gutersloh: Mohn, 1966-80), vol. 2, plate 807. For examples in which mass is not being said, see Alexander N. Nemilov, "Gedanken zur geschichtswissenschaftlichen Befragung von Bildern am Beispiel der sog. Gregorsmesse in der Ermitage," in Historische Bildkunde: Probleme--Wege--Beispiel, ed. Brigitte Tolkemitt und Rainer Wohlfeil (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1991), 126, and Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 45.

(82.) For an example see the altar panel of the Meister der Heiligen Sippe (1486), Erzbischofliches Museum, Utrecht; reproduced in Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, plate 3. According to Westfehling, Christ bleeding into the chalice is the most common form (although many examples do not show the motif); see Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 16, 24. Closer inspection reveals, however, that Christ is often not bleeding into the chalice. The blood sometimes bypasses even the standing cup (see, for example, ibid., 17, plate 5). Sometimes the chalice is covered by a corporal with the host lying in front in preparation for mass (see, for example, ibid., 40, plate 13, and James Clifton, The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150-1800 [Munich: Prestel, 1997], 133, plate 60).

(83.) For an example, see the miniature in the Book of Hours of Jean de Montauban, Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, Cod. Lat. 18026, fol. 9, from 1440-50. As Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 24, points out, we have this motif in only a few cases.

(84.) See, for example, the altar painting by an unknown middle Rhenish painter, second half of the fifteenth century (the inscription was altered in the sixteenth century), now in the Hermitage; see Nemilov, "Gedanken zur geschichtswissenschaftlichen Befragung," 123-33 and esp. plate 20. See also the fresco from the parish church in Karlstadt, about 1446; Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 27, plate 8. Indulgenced versions are probably our earliest examples; see Thurston, "The Mass of St. Gregory;" and Lewis, "Rewarding Devotion."

(85.) Mass of St. Gregory, attributed to Wilm Dedeke, about 1496; in St. Annen-Museum, Lubeck; see Brigitte Heise and Hildegard Vogeler, Die Altare des St. Annen-Museums: Erlauterung der Bildprogramme (Lubeck: Museum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte der Hansestadt Lubeck, 1993), 67-73; and Reudenbach, "Das Altar als Bildort," plate 3.

(86.) See n. 18 above.

(87.) Mass of St. Gregory, Wing of the St. Anne Altar, Wiesenkirche, Soest, about 1473; reproduced in Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol. 2, plate 806. For other examples, see Hans Georg Gmelin, Spatgotische Tafelmalerei in Niedersachsen und Bremen (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1974), 162, plate 22.8; 260, plate 67.1; 379, plate 120.2; 381, plate 121.1; 430, plate 142.3; 467, plate 153.1; and 469, plate 154.2.

(88.) It seems that, from at least the twelfth century on, the pope would have removed his tiara (as bishops today remove the mitre) during the canon of the mass. See Joseph Braun, Die liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient nach Ursprung und Entwicklung, Verwendung und Symbolik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 485-87, and on the tiara as a form of mitre, see Gerhard B. Ladner, "Der Ursprung und die mittelalterliche Entwicklung der papstlichen Tiara," in Herbert A. Cahn and Erika Simon, eds., Roland Hampe zum 70. Geburtstag am 2. Dezember 1978 dargebracht von Mitarbeitern, Schulern und Freunden, 2 vols. (Mainz: Von Zabern, 1980), vol. 1, 449-81, and vol. 2, plates 86-93. This suggests that the Soest depiction is not of the moment of consecration.

(89.) Westfehling, Die Messe Gregors des Grossen, 24, sees support of the doctrine of transubstantiation as "der eigentliche Hauptgedanke des Bildthemas;" see also 32. For an argument against this interpretation, which (in my view) overemphasizes dogma, see my "Seeing and Seeing Beyond." The basic theme of the Gregorymass is salvation, especially through blood. Such an interpretation makes more plausible the close connection of Gregorymass iconography to Reformation uses of blood imagery (which reflect, of course, a different eucharistic theology). See n. 74 above for an example.

(90.) It is worth remembering in this connection that fifteenth-century devotions to the heart and wound of Jesus sometimes relate it not to eucharist but to baptism and penance, and that the pressing out of Christ's blood (even in the image of the winepress) is often not associated with sacramental feeding at all but rather with the need to drain every drop in expiation for the sins of the world. See Ancient Devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Carthusian Monks of the XIV-XVII Centuries (London: Benziger Bros., 1895; 2nd ed., 1920), esp. 1-4, 17-28, 47-48, 61-62, and 185.

(91.) Dumoutet, Le Desir de voir l'hostie, and see above n. 6.

(92.) For a parallel point, see Jeffrey Hamburger, "Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art," in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhaltnis von mentalen und realen Bilder in der Kunst der fruhen Neuzeit, ed. Alessandro Nova and Klaus Kruger (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2000), 47-70.

Caroline Walker Bynum is University Professor at Columbia University in the City of New York.