Christian Materiality

In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects -- among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers -- allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounter with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian…