"In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects—among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers—allegedly erupted into life, weeping, bleeding, even walking about. Such phenomena posed a challenge to Christians, who, on the one hand sought ever more frequent encounters with miraculous matter and, on the other hand, turned toward an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion. By the fifteenth century, these aspirations, accompanied by new anxieties and concerns, were at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented to both church authorities and faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. Bynum also provides an analysis of the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages. She argues that devotional objects called attention to their own materiality in sophisticated ways that help to explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Understanding the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum’s study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond the cultural study of “the body”—a field she was crucial in establishing—Bynum exposes how Western attitudes toward the person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Christian materiality is a major contribution to the study and theory of religious practice and of the agency of objects."