Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity
Cornell University Press, 2014
A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices—including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance—reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God's embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God’s incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world—its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves—as a locus for divine encounter.
Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world’s re-creation—their notion of the world’s re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God’s presence and promise of salvation.
Reviews:
"Ritchey's attention to the spiritual theme of God’s infusion into, and hence redemption of, creation will be an important counter both to those who see the period as characterized by concentration on suffering and sacrifice and to those who emphasize discipline, even abuse, of the physical human body in its ascetic practice."―Caroline Walker Bynum, Common Knowledge
"A major finding of this book is that if we accompany some medieval people on their spiritual journeys and think seriously about prayer and meditation as historical sources, as they affect the material world and are in turn influenced by it, we can follow these writers as they interact with the natural world. Ritchey has entered a contested and amply studied field (“medieval spirituality”) and found there a space for a distinctive voice and fresh insights. This is a medieval history book in the best sense: it encompasses northern and southern Eu- rope, over three centuries of experience." -- Steven Epstein, American Historical Review
"Ritchey’s stimulating book offers a rather different account of the power, vitality, and importance of matter and of matter’s relation to spirit than scholars have often assumed. In the end, one could say that this book participates in the same process that it so persuasively and elegantly outlines: train- ing its own readers’ imaginations to see both medieval religious writing and the created world with new eyes and raising fresh questions about what we can apprehend in nature and in the texts that represent it." -- Shannon Gayk, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultues
"Luminous and richly layered... Holy Matter examines an array of textual, visual, and liturgical media from late medieval Christian religious communities to reveal shifting attitudes about the capacity of the material world to bear divinity." -- Robert Glenn Davis, Journal of Religion
"This original and learned book... is a thought-provoking complement to our understanding of late medieval spirituality and materiality." Susan Kramer, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
"Ritchey's detailed analyses of multiple perceptions of the phenomenal world, from Alheit of Trochau's literal tree-hugging to the Carthusian cloister's proxy wilderness, and her rich exploration of devotional responses to the material world, make this book a valuable contribution to the continuing efforts in medieval studies to discern how matter was understood and experienced in the Middle Ages." Anne F. Harris, The Medieval Review
"In this spirited study of the imaginative theology of the Middle Ages, Sara Ritchey calls attention to late medieval developments in the ancient doctrine of re-creation―developments that led religious men and women to train themselves in faith to see the things of the natural world differently. Reclaimed, reordered, and sanctified by God through the Incarnation and the tree of Christ's cross, local flora and fauna thus appeared to their eyes not merely as signs of the Creator and proof of his existence but also as sacraments of the divine presence. Recovering this spiritual hermeneutic through a focus on arboreal imagery, Ritchey offers a refreshing corrective to the commonplace view of medieval spirituality as anxiously distrustful of the physical senses and of material things."―Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame, author of Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages
Cornell University Press, 2014
A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices—including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance—reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God's embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God’s incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world—its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves—as a locus for divine encounter.
Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world’s re-creation—their notion of the world’s re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God’s presence and promise of salvation.
Reviews:
"Ritchey's attention to the spiritual theme of God’s infusion into, and hence redemption of, creation will be an important counter both to those who see the period as characterized by concentration on suffering and sacrifice and to those who emphasize discipline, even abuse, of the physical human body in its ascetic practice."―Caroline Walker Bynum, Common Knowledge
"A major finding of this book is that if we accompany some medieval people on their spiritual journeys and think seriously about prayer and meditation as historical sources, as they affect the material world and are in turn influenced by it, we can follow these writers as they interact with the natural world. Ritchey has entered a contested and amply studied field (“medieval spirituality”) and found there a space for a distinctive voice and fresh insights. This is a medieval history book in the best sense: it encompasses northern and southern Eu- rope, over three centuries of experience." -- Steven Epstein, American Historical Review
"Ritchey’s stimulating book offers a rather different account of the power, vitality, and importance of matter and of matter’s relation to spirit than scholars have often assumed. In the end, one could say that this book participates in the same process that it so persuasively and elegantly outlines: train- ing its own readers’ imaginations to see both medieval religious writing and the created world with new eyes and raising fresh questions about what we can apprehend in nature and in the texts that represent it." -- Shannon Gayk, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultues
"Luminous and richly layered... Holy Matter examines an array of textual, visual, and liturgical media from late medieval Christian religious communities to reveal shifting attitudes about the capacity of the material world to bear divinity." -- Robert Glenn Davis, Journal of Religion
"This original and learned book... is a thought-provoking complement to our understanding of late medieval spirituality and materiality." Susan Kramer, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
"Ritchey's detailed analyses of multiple perceptions of the phenomenal world, from Alheit of Trochau's literal tree-hugging to the Carthusian cloister's proxy wilderness, and her rich exploration of devotional responses to the material world, make this book a valuable contribution to the continuing efforts in medieval studies to discern how matter was understood and experienced in the Middle Ages." Anne F. Harris, The Medieval Review
"In this spirited study of the imaginative theology of the Middle Ages, Sara Ritchey calls attention to late medieval developments in the ancient doctrine of re-creation―developments that led religious men and women to train themselves in faith to see the things of the natural world differently. Reclaimed, reordered, and sanctified by God through the Incarnation and the tree of Christ's cross, local flora and fauna thus appeared to their eyes not merely as signs of the Creator and proof of his existence but also as sacraments of the divine presence. Recovering this spiritual hermeneutic through a focus on arboreal imagery, Ritchey offers a refreshing corrective to the commonplace view of medieval spirituality as anxiously distrustful of the physical senses and of material things."―Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame, author of Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages