Bynum Walker Quotes

Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Scholars Press. Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. University of California Press. ________. Jesus as Mother. University of California Press. Camporesi, Piero. The Anatomy of the Senses. Cambridge Polity Press. ________. Bread of Dreams. Cambridge Polity Press. ________. The Incorruptible Flesh. Cambridge University Press. Cardono, Girolamo. “The Book of My Life.” New York Review of Books, 2002. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. Clarendon Press. Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions 1500–1700. Princeton Paperbacks.

And why not—whatever despair we may feel concerning resurrection and reassemblage—find comic relief in the human determination to assert wholeness in the face of inevitable decay and fragmentation?

The very implausibility of the restoration of pared down fingernails and amputated limbs at the end of time underlines, for me, the despicableness of human beings who, in fact, torture and mutilate their fellow human beings. Yet, the implausible, even risible doctrine of the resurrection of the body asserts that—if there is such a thing as redemption—it must redeem our experience of enduring and even inflicting such acts. If there is meaning to the history we tell and the corruption (both moral and physical) we suffer, surely it is in (as well as in spite of) fragmentation. Bodily resurrection at the end of time is, in a technical sense, a comic—that is, a contrived and brave—happy ending.

Thus, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the emphasis of hymn, sermon, and story was less on the bread of heaven than on flesh (i.e., meat) and blood. To eat God was to take into one's self the suffering flesh on the cross. To eat God was imitatio crucis. That which one ate was the physicality of the God-man. If the flesh was sweet as well as bitter, that was because all our humanness, including our fleshliness, was redeemed in the fact of the Incarnation. If the agony was also ecstasy, it was because our very hunger is union with Christ's limitless suffering, which is also limitless love.

To patristic poets and theologians, the food on the altar had suggested that Christ himself came as bread to hungry humankind or that he "digested" Christians, binding them to him as his body—i.e., the church. Hunger meant human vulnerability, which God comforted with food, or it meant human self-control, adopted in an effort to keep God's commandments. In the sermon and song, theology and story, of the high Middle Ages, however, the food on the altar was the God who became man; it was bleeding and broken flesh. Hunger was unquenchable desire; it was suffering. To eat God, therefore, was finally to become suffering flesh with his suffering flesh; it was to imitate the cross.