Spilled blood

Against political/nationalist interpretations of the Hussite movement, Bynum argues that the central motif of the Hussites was direct access to blood. Two thoughts: First, this is still a central demand of the early Reformation, a point that Bynum touches on but doesn’t develop.

Second, she notes that the stress is on the blood separated from the body. They could get blood (according to the scholastic theory of concomitance – the whole Christ is contained in every particle of the host) with the wafer, but they wanted separated blood, drops of blood, spilled blood. Late medieval piety and even theology gave specific attention to the significance of the blood of Jesus as distinct from his body.

Blood was associated with suffering love, but with much more: “A sign of death, [blood] breaks way from the body, whhich it breaches and transgresses. In contrast to body – symbol, since the patristic period, of ingathering and community – blood erupts across boundaries. Whereas body encloses, blood separates from. In the process, it violates, although its release can also cure and cleanse. Whether cleansing or threatening, however, shed blood is a body part. It breaks away from the body. We do well to remember that the blood in question in fifteenth-century theological disputations and at cult sites was globules, particles, or fragments. What polemicists debated at Braunschweig, Wilsnack, or Mairenfleiss was particulae . It was bits in reliquaries . . . or spots on hosts. What friars fought over at Rome was whether the drops of blood shed at the crucifixion remained united to divinity.”

This is intriguing in part because in standard histories of eucharistic debate the focus is almost entirely on the connection of body and body, with the blood often ignored. Eucharistic history seems to be written on the assumption of the theory of concomitance. This emphasis, probably, is due to the separation of history of doctrine from social history and the history of piety. Nicolas of Cusa’s writings on blood are addressing blood devotion rather than eucharistic dogma, and so rarely figure into a history of eucharistic theology. With the work of Miri Rubin and others, Bynum’s book (along with her earlier Holy Feast and Holy Fast ) helps lay the ground for a richer, more accurate account of the history of the eucharist.