The library of scholarship on blood and tears in premodern, particularly Renaissance, Europe is growing rapidly, and Anne M. Scott and Michael David Barbezat's edited collection is a dynamic overview of topics relating to blood and tears in the late medieval and early modern periods. These interdisciplinary essays mainly discuss English and Italian contexts, but also venture into Germany, the Netherlands, and North Africa. Overall, the volume ties its contents together through the theme of bodily transformation, following the influential work of Caroline Walker Bynum. The nine authors collected here explore how the body and its fluids act as “vehicle[s] through which to rethink the world and its orderings” (3), as well as the possible limits of such transformations.
Part 1 explores “Transformative and Manipulative Tears.” Its three essays share an insightful focus on the cultural meanings of tears, as reflected through gender and sociopolitical rhetoric. Anthony Bale studies the rhetorical geography of Margery Kempe's weeping by mapping every place she wept in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Susan Broomhall shows the way that Catherine's tears make the male bodies of her political rivals “permeable to female fluid” (70), shaping men's decisions and thereby changing the course of history. Hugh Hudson's essay on “elusive tears” (31) in fifteenth-century Italian stonework might seem an outlier at first, as Hudson explores not the presence but the lack of tears; nonetheless, his explorations of the cultural ambivalence and gendered expectations surrounding men's weeping are persuasive, and tie the section together nicely.
Part 2, “Identities in Blood,” investigates the role of blood as a “maker and shaper of identity outside familiar categories of race and heredity” (4). Anne M. Scott argues convincingly that moral solidarity and mutual aid in Piers Plowman derive their significance from humanity's material connection with Christ's holy blood. Samuel Baudinette explores the Dominican theme of self-reformation through pain and suffering, which in German Dominican women's writing is sometimes made visible in blood and tears. Completing the section, Karin Sellberg's excellent analysis of early modern anatomists’ adaptations of Galenic medicine links the bodies of Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear to the political bodies they govern.
Part 3, “Bodies and Blood in Life, Death, and Resurrection,” considers the transformations of bodies made possible by pain and death, particularly how these transformations relate to religious themes. Diana Hiller shows Christological parallels for Saints Sebastian, Francis, and Peter Martyr through imagery of blood. Helen Gramotnev juxtaposes Rembrandt's painting of a bloodless, clean cadaver (Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp) to bloodier images of butchery elsewhere in Dutch art. Michael David Barbezat's essay on Saint Augustine is removed from the book's other subjects in geography (North Africa) and time period (354–430 CE); however, Augustine's theological explorations of the resurrected body extend far beyond his own milieu and provide a thoughtful coda to the rest of the book.
The editors’ focus on blood and tears is understandable, given that these are two of the most ubiquitous bodily fluids in medieval art and culture. Hopefully, this collection will inspire future scholars to explore other bodily fluids (apart from blood and tears): premodern breast milk, bile, saliva, sweat, etc., need to be studied in much greater detail. This book paves the way for such inquiries. The medieval body was in many ways considered “essentially an enclosed container of fluids” (Bildhauer, Medieval Blood [2006], 23). More sustained attention to the material presence and agency of bodily fluids might have enriched this collection; a few essays focus more on related themes (transformation, dryness, suffering) than on bodily fluids themselves.
The volume's strengths lie in its ability to cover a large amount of disciplinary ground in a relatively short collection, as well as its insightful investigations into embodiment and identity in premodern Europe. Its thematic undercurrents of gender, transformation, and the rhetoric of blood and tears, as well as the wide variety of scholars and disciplines represented in the contents, will make this a useful collection for historians of art, literature, and culture; theologians; and curious students.
