Christian Materiality was originally a series of lectures given at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I have to imagine that those lectures were quite different in form and phrasing to this book, because the text is dense and Bynum's argument subtle and complex. This is not a book to speed through—I had to pause and re-read parts several time to be sure that I was parsing what she was saying correctly, and of course I had to have a dictionary to hand. There were several times that I wished Bynum had adopted a simpler vocabulary in points, because I think there was sometimes an air of studying too much for words of five syllables (TM Charles Bingley), which obscured what is otherwise a treatment of an interesting subject. That a text is hard work is not, of course, necessarily a mark against it, and much of what Bynum says here provides interesting food for further thought.

This book is a call to reassess the piety and religious praxis of Christians in late medieval Europe on their own terms—different from the early medieval period, but no mere precursor to the changes wrought by the Reformation. Bynum sees this period as characterised by a sharp awareness of the power of matter, but equally by the tension caused by that awareness—matter can be holy, a means of mediating between humanity and divinity (through relics, the Eucharist, Christ's body), but it can also corrupt and decay. As she puts it, "The sacred slips between animate and inanimate, bodily and heavenly, present and eternal, as if the poles were simultaneous, rather than dichotomous" (251) In other words, all matter—no matter how inanimate it may seem to the modern eyes—had the potential to undergo birth, metamorphosis and decay. The book is beautifully illustrated (though I wish it had been in colour rather than black and white!) throughout with examples of how devotional art work and theological texts dealt with that tension.

A difficult read, but a rewarding one. ( )