Medieval Bodies by Medieval Bodies. Life Death & Art in the Middle Ages

Author:Medieval Bodies. Life, Death & Art in the Middle Ages [Retail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

49. The miraculous Bleeding Host of Dijon, painted onto an empty page in a Book of Hours made around 1475 in Poitiers, France. The image shows a thin Eucharistic wafer embossed with the raised image of Christ and speckled with the miraculous blood.

Examples of this phenomenon in modern times provide a more predictable explanation for the bloody tendencies of these bygone objects. One such blood wafer, observed in Utah in 2015, proved on closer investigation not to be bleeding but blooming microscopic red mould on its surface. In an Athens suburb in 2001 a painted icon of the Virgin and Child also appeared to bleed miraculously, attracting much media hype, but upon testing its ‘blood’ was revealed to be nothing more than cherry juice. These modern hoaxes are useful, not because they reveal some sort of scientific truth that we can impose onto the past, but because they remind us that although observant medieval peoples attached great importance to bleeding things, they did not necessarily accept such happenings without scepticism. Faked relics and miracles were exposed often in the Middle Ages – the stuff, for example, of Chaucer’s untrustworthy, lank-haired Pardoner – and the Church was careful to evaluate systematically any such claim. Panels of officials undertook close investigations of the sites of miraculous events, interviewing eyewitnesses and testing spiritual proofs before declaring something like a bleeding wafer authentic. And the laity themselves were also highly capable of observing the distinction between blood fact and blood fiction. The fragments of a surviving Anglo-Norman religious play re-enacting the life of Christ known as La Seinte Resureccion, ‘The Holy Resurrection’, noted that the dramatic impact of its narrative could be enhanced in performance through a bleeding prop. Contemporary stage directions written alongside the original text advise that, at the moment in the story when Longinus drives his lance into Christ’s side, a large on-stage wooden sculpture of Jesus should be stabbed, inside of which would be hidden an inflated bladder of animal blood that, when pierced, would make the statuette appear to bleed authentically. Such inventive deception would have been impressive to medieval audiences, certainly reminding them of truly inexplicable holy occurrences like the bleeding wafers of Wilsnack. But they knew perfectly well that this was no miracle, just clever stagecraft.

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