Medieval Blood. By Bettina Bildhauer

Bloodthirsty monsters, blood-shedding knights and mystics drinking the blood of Christ, people the courtly and devotional literature of the Middle Ages. Yet the fascination with blood also pervades the medical and legal discourses. Medieval Blood provides a sustained examination of the importance of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Pfeiffer, Kerstin (Author)
Format: Electronic Review
Language:English
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Published: Oxford University Press 2006
In: Literature and theology
Year: 2006, Volume: 20, Issue: 4, Pages: 475-477
Review of:Medieval blood (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2006) (Pfeiffer, Kerstin)
Further subjects:B Book review
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
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Summary:Bloodthirsty monsters, blood-shedding knights and mystics drinking the blood of Christ, people the courtly and devotional literature of the Middle Ages. Yet the fascination with blood also pervades the medical and legal discourses. Medieval Blood provides a sustained examination of the importance of blood in the medieval imagination. Drawing on a wide variety of late medieval sources, predominantly from Germany, it argues that ‘blood served to confirm a view of the body as a bounded entity’ (1) and thus helped to define and shape both individual as well as collective bodies. Blood provided physical proof of a body's existence and contours it conceptually through being surrounded by taboos and establishing social links between individuals and larger groups.
ISSN:1477-4623
Contains:Enthalten in: Literature and theology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frl048