Blood Beliefs in Early Modern Europe (original) (raw)
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The Reception of Classical Constructions of Blood in Medieval and Early Modern Martyrologies
Bodily Fluids in Antiquity, 2021
Chapter published in Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard, and Laurence Totelin (eds.), Bodily Fluids in Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). This is a draft copy of the (full) accepted manuscript. For the final, publisher-produced and paginated copy, please see: https://www.routledge.com/Bodily-Fluids-in-Antiquity/Bradley-Leonard-Totelin/p/book/9781138343726 'The blood of his dear saints (like good seed) never falleth in vain to the ground' wrote John Foxe (1583), England's most famous Early Modern martyrologist. Why was Foxe so preoccupied with martyrs' blood, and where did the imagery of blood as seed come from? The answer can be found primarily within the Classical heritage upon which Early Modern Christianity was built. This chapter first examines how the Bible and early Church constructed blood, especially martyrs' blood. It then considers the reception of these constructions in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, exploring the striking variations in how elements of this heritage were accepted, rejected, adapted, and deployed by different models of Western Christianity. It analyses how Early Modern confessions drew upon both Classical and early Church conceptions of bodily fluids, as each confession sought to present itself as the true heir of apostolic and patristic Christianity. Through focusing on the specific case study of martyrs' blood, this chapter will contributes to the wider argument that, from the Classical to the Early Modern periods (and beyond), bodily fluids lay at the very heart both of religion and of believers' perceptions of the body. I suggest that later eras shared with the Classical period a prevalent assumption that bodily fluids, especially blood, expressed and carried key facets of the character of the individual who embodied them (namely their holiness, in regards to martyrs' blood). Blood was viewed as a unique medium between the inner body and outer world, particularly during and after death, and could thus extend the boundaries of an individual's body and its characteristics far beyond the limits of their skin.
Chapter One. The Historical Context Of Purity-Of-Blood Discrimination (1391–1547)
The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews , 2010
Th e history of Jesuits of Jewish ancestry in the sixteenth century mirrors the earlier converso history in fi ft eenth-century Spain that we have traced in Chapter One: from the initial acceptance of "New Christians" and the rise of their infl uence and power to the consequent deep resentment of "Old Christians," who had made increasing eff orts to curb and possibly eliminate the converso presence fi rst in the civil and then ecclesiastical institutions. Escaping from the persecuting civil society, a signifi cant number of conversos had fi lled ecclesiastical ranks in Spain during the fi ft eenth century. 1 By the mid-sixteenth century, however, a number of Iberian church communities had closed their doors to them, especially the Order of the Jeronymites, which was characterized by its converso pro-Erasmist and alumbrado openness. Consequently, many conversos, who were rejected or feared that they would be discriminated against, found at least a temporary haven in the Society of Jesus, a new appealing religious order 2 that initially objected to lineage discrimination and whose spirituality in some aspects seemed akin to the Iberian movements of Erasmists and alumbrados, which had attracted many conversos. 3 Additionally, the Jesuits opened many new remote frontiers for missionary activities that oft en became to conversos and/or their superiors a veiled opportunity to avoid intolerance at home.
The Jew, the Blood and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Folklore, 2008
The reality of the blood libel legend and accusations of ritual murder against Jews in medieval and early modern times has been widely discredited by scholars. They demonstrate instead the processes by which the exclusion of a perceived ethnical and religious enemy strengthened the communal identity of European society at that time. The aim of this paper is to look
Reformation and Renaissance Review, 2008
Fifteenth-century Christian piety in northern Europe was awash in blood. Devotional art and literature represented the crucified Christ exuding great globules of bright, fresh blood from his wounded hands and feet, or showering onlookers with a living flood from his pierced side. Mystics sucked at these wounds like infants at their mothers' breast, or awoke from raptured bliss to find themselves drenched in the healing flow. Eucharistie hosts spurted living blood to protest maltreatment at the hands of unbelievers-usually Jews-and pilgrims travelled from far and wide to gaze on the holy relics, at once accusation of, and pardon for, sin. To modern eyes, this late medieval obsession with the sanguis Christi has often appeared macabre-even parodie, with its breathless credulity and Monty Python-csque jets of red liquid. Yet, according Carolyn Walker Bynum, blood lies at the very heart of Christian faith and practice in the 'long fifteenth century'.
Acta Histriae, 2017
The paper analyses blood feud as a legal custom of the system of conflict resolution in Inner Austria during the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the early modern period. Based on legal customs, statutory law, and early modern criminal law the analysis is applied to a case of blood (homicide) settlement in Upper Carniola (Gorenjska) in the 17th century. Two things in particular emerge: the long survival of this legal custom and the tendency of blood feud for peace. Both put Inner Austria in these matters firmly within the broader European legal context. http://zdjp.si/en/ Errata: - statutory law instead of common law on pp. 153, 155–156, 158, 162, 167.
Playing God: Testing, Modeling, and Imitating Blood Miracles in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2017
Imitating Blood Miracles in Eighteenth-Century Europe francesco paolo de ceglia summary: In the late Middle Ages, rumors began to spread throughout Europe regarding blood miracles associated with the relics of martyrs. Centuries-old blood, pulverized or solidified and black in color, was said to return to its original bright red color, or else to liquefy or bubble under certain circumstances or on certain dates in the liturgical calendar. With the Reformation, in Protestant countries most of these relics were either destroyed or forgotten. In Catholic countries, on the contrary, blood miracles multiplied, reaching a peak between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconstructs the debate that sprang up in eighteenth-century Europe over the blood of Saint Januarius and the attempts made to disprove its miraculous properties, often not in written works, but by staging highly theatrical demonstrations. It examines the way in which, with phenomena as complex as miracles, the activities of testing alleged facts, creating elucidative models, and staging imitations intertwined over the centuries, often overlapping and becoming confused.
Blood, Sweat and Tears
This article studies the different meanings of blood, focusing on the Early Modern period in which the unravelling of its secrets worked not only at a medical level, but also in relationship to philosophy and religion. My points of departure are the works of two sixteenth-century medical authors, the Dutchman Levinus Lemnius and the Italian Andrea Cesalpino. It is claimed that they were much more interested in physiology than in anatomy, and that only in that context can we fully appreciate the value of blood. Inspired by recent work on the role of blood in religious history, such as Caroline Walker Bynum's Wonderful Blood, I present blood as a substance that, due to its immense value, tended to lose its materiality and took on spiritual aspects, which made devotional interpretations inevitable. By exposing its non-corporeal aspects, the association with God, especially with the Holy Spirit and its terrestrial emanation, becomes evident. No matter how much they exploited not only Aristotle, but also Galen, the arguments of both Lemnius and Cesalpino had at their centre a spiritualisation of blood. In his extensive regimina, the more traditional Levinus Lemnius emphasised the spiritus vitalis that determined the quality of blood. At its most refined stage, it approached the spiritus universalis, and almost converged with the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the Aristotelian Cesalpino placed the heart and the spiritualised human fuel, blood, again and again at the centre, bringing everything back to its origin, God: the deus rotator.
The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies
The Spanish term limpieza de sangre and its Portuguese equivalent limpeza de sangue began as a legal designation of religious identity attributed to the supposed purity or impurity of one's blood. Instituted via local statutes beginning in the mid 1400s in Spain and a century later in Portugal, the pureza laws were propagated widely by the end of the sixteenth century in the whole of the Peninsula. 1 Local regulations on limpieza-limpeza prohibited recent converts to Christianity and eventually their descendants from holding select offi ces in government, the Church, guilds, schools, and universities. To qualify for these positions, proof of lineage free from Muslim and Jewish relatives even in generations past was required. With these entrance demands developed an inquisitional process for accessing and certifying a supposedly physical verity that ended in a set of documents called blood purity proofs, as well as a generalized social preoccupation with lineage.
'For the Blood is the Life: Blood, Disease and the Vampire Myth in the Early Modern period
Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reports of strange East European practices were brought back to England from returning soldiers and travelers. These reports told of the macabre practice of exhuming dead corpses and driving wooden stakes through their body in order to prevent the dead returning to consume the blood of the living. These ‘undead’ beings came to be known in the West as vampires. Folkloric accounts bear witness to these ‘vampires’ being discovered gorged and bloated, with dried blood encrusted around the mouth, having drained the life force from the living. And yet, advances in medical science showed that it was the body’s natural decomposition process that caused this appearance, as the body swelled through internal gases caused by the decaying process. One contemporary autopsy account from 1717 by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort describes a suspected vampire from the Greek island of Mykonos being cut open and the make-shift surgeon searching through the entrails whilst looking for the heart. This vampire had, allegedly, been haunting the local people and existing in a state of suspended life by consuming their blood. Another such report comes from 1727 when Johann Flückinger, an Austrian army surgeon, wrote of a Serbian case where ‘the body had moved to one side in its grave, its jaws were open, and blood was trickling from its mouth’. The use of blood as a life-bringer was nothing new, and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the use of ‘corpse medicine’, that is mixing human remains, mummia and human blood, was prevalent in combating diseases such as epilepsy. This blood was most prominent if it were from ‘the cadaver of a reddish man…whole, fresh without blemish, of around 24 years of age…dead of a violent death’. Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon John Banister and the chemist Robert Boyle were but two high profile advocates of the use of corpse medicine. Men such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Dom Augustine Calmet all had something to say on the subject, and several treatises were compiled on the topic. In 1765, the Gazzette des Gazettes, issued a public challenge to the scientific world to prove conclusively one way or the other as to whether vampires actually existed, such was the fascination at the time. This paper explores that fascination, and how the role of blood played such an integral role in Early Modern perceptions of the vampire-being, and questions why some parts of society chose to believe the superstitious reasons, even in the wake of advancing medical explanations.