Cults of the Precious Blood in the Medieval Latin West.

摘要

The importance of the human nature of Christ in Medieval Christian piety, and especially in the high Middle Ages, has long been recognized by modern scholars. In particular, Medieval Christians in the Latin West manifested a profound and wide-ranging fascination with the Blood of Christ. One of the significant features of Latin Christendom's devotion to Christ's Blood was the rise and maintenance from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century of cults centered on proper relics of the Blood, believed to have been shed by Christ during his earthly life. Interest in these relics and their cults crossed many boundaries within Latin Christendom, political, geographical, rhetorical, and theological. Narratives of the discovery and translation of these relics, cultic practices and liturgical celebrations, as well as formal theological tracts, some directly, others accidentally addressing the question of relics of the Blood, provide evidence of the encounter and interaction of the varied theologies and agendas which gave meaning to and were made meaningful by these relics and their cults. What these sources demonstrate is not a coherent and universally accepted theology of Christ's Blood and its role in the Church. Rather, even while expressing many common themes and concerns, these sources present a series of competing claims, some contradictory, about the significance of the Blood. Nevertheless, uniting all of these high Medieval treatments of the Blood was the irreducible significance of the cult itself as something which had a level of authority prior to any specific interpretation of it. In addition, for this period, the cult was unintelligible apart from the material presence of its relic. Ironically, it was the fifteenth-century attempts to resolve the conflicts about the nature of the relics and the nature of their cults which, by sundering this necessary connection between cult and relic, set the stage for the end of the cults of the Blood as they had been developed and debated in the Middle Ages.