Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond by Caroline Walker Bynum (review)

REVIEWS 200 the Roman conquest of England. I feel Buccola does not venture to say what these religious implications are because Shakespeare’s stance on religion is too indefinite to pin down, but she makes the connection between Catholicism and fairy lore that complicates these ambiguities. In the last chapter, Buccola takes on the second Helena of her study: Helena from All’s Well that Ends Well. Buccola first shows how attitudes towards fairy belief and witchcraft waned into the mid-seventeenth century. She shows that practitioners of witchcraft, and those who were thought to consort with fairies, were often legally persecuted and sometimes sentenced to death in the late 1500s, but by the time of the Interregnum such acts were considered innocuous offences. Buccola also discusses how Paraclesian medicinal practices—which aimed to cure ailments with medicines specific to an illnesses rather than attempting to balance the four humors with herbal treatment—came into prominence in the late Renaissance whereas they were looked down upon in the mid to late 1500s. Within this historical context, Buccola not only argues how Helena has fairy or witchlike qualities, but how her character prefigures such historical events. She also argues that by reading the character of Helena with a fairy context in mind, many of the problems previous critics have faced with regard to her are resolved. Buccola makes it a point to tell the reader her study is not concerned with the existence of fairies, but rather how fairy lore was a point of departure for playwrights who wished to question the gender, moral and social norms of their day. She concludes her study by encouraging scholars to take the fairy approach to other problematic texts and characters in order illuminate misunderstandings regarding early modern literature and society. The ultimate result of the book is a more complete portrait of the female characters in the plays in question, as well as a more complete understanding of early modern culture in general. SOS BAGRAMYAN, English, University of Toronto Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007) xviii + 402 pp., ill. This ambitious and thorough book by Caroline Walker Bynum had particular resonance with this reviewer. I can still clearly recall the tremendous soteriological concerns I had as a second-grader: every Sunday the priest would tell us that whosoever drinks this cup and eats this bread shall have life everlasting. It sounded like a pretty good deal, and not all that taxing. Whenever I tried to get to the chalice—which was only offered to the laity twice a year—I’d be turned away with a dirty look from the Eucharistic minister. Until I was finally tall enough not to undergo the liturgical equivalent of carding, I lived with not a little fear for the fate of my eternal soul. Imagine my shock, then, when working at the university chapel years later, being told to leave any extra bread or wine out for the birds! (The chaplain’s quick retort was that St. Francis would have approved.) Bynum begins this book by telling the story of the fourth most popular pilgrimage destination of the late Middle Ages: Wilsnack, a small market town in northern Germany that was home to a blood relic. After a disastrous fire REVIEWS 201 destroyed the church at the end of the fourteenth century, three hosts were found in the ashes, each with a red spot of blood in the middle. Thousands of pilgrims soon rushed to see the miracle-working blood; just as quickly theologians in the new universities of Germany and Bohemia began pointedly questioning what was really there. The ensuing controversy begins Bynum’s detailed and thorough analysis of the frenzied fifteenth-century interest in Christ’s blood (in host miracles, as a relic, and in the Eucharist). Chapters 2 and 3 look at the development of blood cults in northern Germany . By and large, the trend she unearths is the transition from blood relics (primarily before the fourteenth century) to miracle hosts (in the fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries) to abused hosts and anti-Semitic desecration libels (most prominent late...

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