Christ's Body

At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice was the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of key devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies.The image of the crucified Christ, she argues, acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The medieval obsession with the contours of Christ's body functi