Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion.

In this collection of essays written and rewritten over the course of a decade, Caroline Bynum invites us to enjoy history in the comic mode. The subject of the title essay "Fragmentation and Redemption" is of the utmost seriousness, as one would expect of the material base for any good comic text. The other essays, concerned vaguely in one way or another with questions of gender, are equally weighty. At the moment of final judgment and redemption, Christian doctrine tells us, we shall be restored to our physical fullness, which is why even martyrs whose bodies have been hacked to pieces and thrown to the dogs need not be concerned: every limb shall be restored to its proper socket.

But what of toenails clipped willingly away, hair and beard kept in trim, and the circumcised foreskin of Jesus himself? Shall we be restored as babes, as vigorous youths, in the midst of pregnancy, or in our dotage. Such issues troubled medieval theologians of great repute, and these scholars did not even have to consider such complex modern twists as organ donors and recipients, bearers of pacemakers, and minds kept sane only with lithium. The multitude of medievalists who listened attentively to Bynum's breakfast lecture at the 1988 Kalamazoo meeting and could not with certainty attribute their indigestion to the sausages or the foreskins now have a chance to ponder the comic mode of history in a more leisurely fashion.

In team-teaching an undergraduate course on historical understandings of death in Europe and Japan, I always ask my students, a large number of whom seem to believe in physical resurrection in heaven, how old they will be in heaven and whether they will be with their first or last husband/wife. The discomfort caused by this line of questioning is instant, and increases visibly as I present some of the more perplexing conundrums found in Bynum's comic history. We usually get to this matter around spring break, and many students return from Easter dinner to tell me with a glowing sense of triumph how they displayed all that college knowledge to their parents and other relatives. I guarantee that everyone who reads the essay on "Fragmentation and Redemption" carefully will add a dozen or more memorable tidbits to their lecture notes.

St. Victor wondered whether resurrected people would be able to open and close their eyes; Honorius and others questioned whether we would be clothed and if we would retain our various skin hues. Since, according to the gospel of Luke, the resurrected Christ ate boiled fish and honeycomb with his disciples, would we also partake of food and if so, how would the digestive mechanisms function? Would the human flesh eaten by cannibals return to its original source, or would it remain somewhere in the body of the final consumer? In the middle of this otherwise wonderful essay Bynum drifts away from these fruitful and very medieval lines of inquiry into a discussion of equally bizarre modern concerns. Whether she means only to show that scholastic theologians were no more weird than present science fiction writers or that the problem of physical identity is fundamental in all cultures, the excursion into the twentieth century is distracting and unconvincing. Above all, it undermines a central argument in all of Bynum's writing and teaching: medieval society (or any society for that matter) has a particular history firmly rooted in time and place, a history that must be understood primarily on its own logical and symbolic terms, not in relation to the values and problematics of different epochs and peoples. Such misguided presentism leads, for example to the following assertion:

It is clear both that questions of survival and identity are not, even today, solved, and that they can be solved only through the sort of specific body puzzles medieval theologians delighted in raising. (297)

I am not so utopian as to believe that questions of survival and identity can ever be "solved," whatever that means, but certainly there is little reason to believe that the understandings reached in any culture will actually depend on medieval European body puzzles.

Fortunately, the essay has a lot to say even leaving aside the modern foray and its implications. Bynum reminds us to return to Peter Lombard's Sentences (especially distinctions 43-49 of book four) to find the key questions raised in a logical medieval way, one derived principally from Augustine among the early fathers and one that remained influential for the next two centuries. While little in the Sentences is really new, the overall emphasis on the corporeal experience of the resurrected body marks it as a distinctly twelfth-century work, and supports Bynum's conclusion that the period between 1100 and 1320 witnessed for explicit historical reasons a heightened concern with the question of "how far material continuity is necessary for identity" (254). Nor was this debate an obscure matter for scholastic theologians; rather, religious, legal, and medical practices related to life, death, burial, and redemption all underwent reexamination and change during this period. Bynum is at her most powerful and persuasive exactly when she discards modern relevance as irrelevant and concentrates on interconnections within a coherent, now dead, society. Then it is that the ambiguities, even the comic, emerge in all their richness: the cult of relics, with its chopping and distributing of body parts, coexisting with renewed concern for proper burial and comfort for the corpse; torturers permitted to squeeze and stretch the victim but not to cut or divide; surgeons in disrepute because they must sever the flesh. A theological solution, indeed several of them, existed to escape the contradictions but none proved satisfactory because the essential conundrum was emotional, not logical.

I have concentrated on the "Fragmentation and Redemption" essay because it is more recent and perhaps less widely known than the other pieces. Still, you get all seven essays for the price of one, a matter of importance if one is considering using the collection for teaching purposes. Three of the six may not stand too well on their own: one is a critique of Victor Turner's theory of liminality; another a commentary on Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch; and the third a reply to Leo Steinberg (of "Sexuality" of Christ fame). All are eminently fair and expectedly insightful, but I just feel unsure about how students would respond who were not also directly familiar with the works Bynum is reviewing and using as a springboard for her own ideas. The other three essays range widely and deeply on issues of the female body, the female intellect, mysticism, the eucharist, and religious practice. Personally, I prefer the full treatment in Holy Feast & Holy Fast but if time, money, and overall reading load do not allow, then any one of these essays certainly would provide students with a rich introduction to the world of medieval women's religiosity.

Finally, the index is useful and the illustrations are fabulous. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY