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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Format: | Electronic Review |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
Oxford University Press
2006
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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)
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Further subjects: | B
Book review
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Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
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. |
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ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frl048 |