Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe (epub)

Description

In a set of independent but inter-related essays, Caroline Bynum considers some examples of such holy things, among them beds for the baby Jesus, the headdresses of medieval nuns, and the footprints of Christ carried home from the Holy Land by pilgrims in patterns cut to their shape or their measurement in lengths of string. Building on and going beyond her well-received work on the history of materiality, Bynum makes two arguments, one substantive, the other methodological. First, she demonstrates that the objects themselves communicate a paradox of dissimilar similitude―that is, that in their very details they both image the glory of heaven and make clear that that heaven is beyond any representation in earthly things.