A classic of medieval studies, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 traces ideas of death and resurrection in early and medieval Christianity. Caroline Walker Bynum explores problems of the body and identity in devotional and theological literature, suggesting that medieval attitudes toward the body still shape modern notions of the individual. This expanded edition includes her 1995 article “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” which takes a broader perspective on the book’s themes. It also includes a new introduction that explores the context in which the book and article were written, as well as why the Middle Ages matter for how we think about the body and life after death today.

Examining those periods between the late second and fourteenth centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western conceptions of death and resurrection, she suggests that the attitudes toward the body emerging from these discussions still undergird our modern conceptions of personal identity and the individual.

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. 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 through such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounters 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 Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond the cultural study of "the body"--a field she helped to establish--Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.

Bynum argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, and religious life. As cult object, blood provided a focus of theological debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a central symbol in popular devotion.

This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idea of saga realism, and opens up new avenues in saga research.

In this volume, Augustine M. Reisenauer, O.P. provides a comprehensive study of Augustine's theology of the resurrection, the human return from death to life. Contextualizing Augustine within the early Church and the intellectual and religious cultures of the late Roman Empire,he interrogates the development of Augustine's thoughts on the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ, the spiritual resurrection of the soul in time, and the fleshly resurrection of the body at the end of time. Augustine offers profound insights into issues of personal and communal identity, human continuity and transformation, historical and eschatological events, and the God of the resurrection. He also elaborates a biblical paradigm that acknowledges how the resurrected Christ offers an intrinsic participation in his paschal mystery to the souls and bodies of the rest of humanity. Proposing fresh ideas regarding a central topic in Christian theology, Reisenauer's, study also reveals Augustine's defenses of the resurrection against its pagan, philosophical and heretical opponents.

This is the first reader to gather primary sources from influential theorists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in one place, presenting the wide-ranging and nuanced theoretical debates occurring in the field of religious studies. Each chapter focuses on a major theorist and contains: · an introduction contextualizing their key ideas · one or two selections representative of the theorist's innovative methodological approach(es) · discussion questions to extend and deepen reader engagement Divided in three sections, the first part includes foundational comparative debates: · Mary Douglas's articulation of purity and impurity · Phyllis Trible's methods of reading sacred texts · Wendy Doniger's comparative mythology · Catherine Bell's reimagining of religious and secular ritual The second part focuses on methodological particularity: · Alice Walker's use of narrative · Charles Long's critique of Eurocentricism · Caroline Walker Bynum's emphasis on gender and materiality The third section focuses on expanding boundaries: · Gloria Anzaldúa's work on borders and languages · Judith Butler's critique of gender and sex norms · Saba Mahmood's expansion on the critique of colonialism's secularizing demands Reflecting the cultural turn and extending the existing canon, this is the anthology instructors have been waiting for. For further detail on the theorists discussed, please consult Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods, edited by Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister.