Blood was everywhere in the medieval and early modern period: in butchers' shops, on battlefields and in barber surgeons' basins, but also in every single human body. Law, medicine and the Church attempted to regulate and control its flow. It was also ubiquitous as a concept rather than just as a material substance: in political, economic, philosophical, medical and theological thought and in literature, blood was used as a metaphor for everything from money to wine to poetry. This splendid collection, edited, researched, written and produced to the highest possible standard, richly demonstrates the importance of blood across the conventional boundaries between different disciplines and between medieval and early modern culture. While there is now a fair amount of research on either medieval or early modern blood separately, the deep institutional divides between medieval and modern studies have obscured the historical continuities. William Harvey's discovery of blood circulation in the 1640s, whose less than radical implications for political thought are carefully teased out by Margaret Healy in this volume, is still too often postulated as a watershed moment for conceptions of blood. This collection rightly starts from the premise that new perspectives can be gained from periodising historical time differently, in this case focusing on the shared views and uses of blood from 1400 to 1700.
The editors, Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, cleverly identify for this period five core aspects of blood that they use to structure the book: circulation, wounds, corruption, blood as proof and blood as both sign and substance. Their brief introduction eloquently explains these five aspects: the idea of circulation, while coming to prominence with Harvey, was already present in medieval conceptions of the social body, as circulating in the body of Christ or the body politic. Wounds, as Decamp and Lander Johnson write, were often interpreted not just as material but also ontological ruptures, posing the question where "the self ends and the world begins" (5). A crucial feature of blood was its corruptibility: purifying blood after contamination and balancing its constituents was an aim across many different discourses and practices from medicine to Christian doctrine. Blood, "normally hidden within the body", "demands attention and explanation" when outside the body, and was used as evidentiary proof in a variety of contexts (8). Finally, blood was both a material substance and a signifier, and the relation between the two was paradigmatically discussed in relation to the Eucharistic wine that was also Christ's blood, a debate whose sophistication spread far beyond this doctrine.
These five central aspects and the related observations will be familiar to those who have engaged with the rich existing scholarship on blood, such as Caroline Walker Bynum's Wonderful Blood (2007), Peggy McCracken's The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero (2003), Piero Camporesi's Juice of Life (1995), or my own Medieval Blood (2006). Some of the existing publications explicitly span the medieval and modern periods and various disciplines, for example, Gil Anidjar's Blood (2014), Catrien Santing and Jetze Touber's collection Blood – Symbol – Liquid (2012, not mentioned in the otherwise rich bibliography here) or James Bradburne's catalogue Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology (2001).
While most of these works are duly acknowledged in Blood Matters, contributors often repeat and confirm rather than engage with and advance their findings. Perhaps unavoidably in the case of such an ambitious framing, most of the essays do not quite stretch to the editors' wide-reaching aspirations, but remain within either "medieval" or "early modern" frames of reference without questioning the divide, and cite literature on their primary texts and topics rather than on blood more broadly.
The biggest research contribution of this collection, then, comes not so much from rethinking blood, but from finding it in new places: in alchemical, pedagogical and psychological writing, in calendars and the wine business as well as in the material culture of stage props and medical instruments as well as in a range of canonical literary texts. The individual essays--every single one of them rigorously researched and beautifully written--provide riveting examples of the unexpected significance attached to material blood, and of equally surprising metaphorical uses. They support, synthesize, amplify and modify existing hypotheses on blood, and add a wealth of knowledge to their individual areas. In terms of topics, there is a good spread of disciplines, dominated by English, with four out of sixteen chapters on Shakespearean plays alone, but also including history, Italian and comparative literature, art history and history of science; though for no clear reason, none of the chapters deals with literature and culture beyond what is now Europe and beyond Christian communities. For this book, and the conference that provided its starting point as part of a larger research project, the editors have assembled a good range of voices in terms of career stage, gender and national context (with most contributors being based in Britain and the US, but one each in Switzerland, Italy and Norway).
Gabriella Zuccolin and Helen King devote a chapter to the importance of nosebleeds in medical writings of the ancient, medieval and early modern periods, which has received very little recent scholarly attention. They rightly identify nosebleeds as the third form of spontaneous bleeding that emits superfluous blood, in addition to menstruation and haemorrhoids, that required gender-specific treatment. Further original research comes from Eleanor Decamp, who has pieced together evidence from a wide variety of sources to trace what happened to the blood shed in one of the most common forms of medical treatment, namely phlebotomy. She focusses on barber-surgeon's bowls used in London, and on this background is able to present a new perspective on Titus Andronicus. Frances E. Dolan's enjoyable chapter provides a wealth of information about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English wine production, unearthing a considerable body of literature that argued that England should produce its own wine in order to become independent of foreign imports. These texts frequently relied on drawing links between wine and blood to argue that this self-containment would improve of economic and individual health.
Dolly Jørgensen has identified bloody images of pig slaughter as ubiquitous in late medieval calendars, and teases out their Christian and anti-Semitic connotations as well as giving fascinating glimpses into historical butchery practices. Tara Nummedal provides rich new evidence for and convincing interpretations of the use of menstrual blood in early modern alchemy both as a physical ingredient and as a concept embodying generation. Ben Parsons has combed through medieval pedagogical texts to show how teachers attempted to entice blood to flow to the right places in the body in order to enhance learning and concentration, very much in keeping with the medical theories of the time.
In chapters on literature, Heather Webbs shows how blood articulates the boundaries of a person in Dante and Catherine of Siena; and Joe Moschenka reads the motif of screaming bleeding trees as a meta-literary trope in Virgil, Spenser, Dante and others showing the violence and rupture inherent in adaptation and poetic practice. Lesel Dawson teases out the psychological assumptions underlying the idea that a corpse begins to bleed in the presence of the murdered, which was prevalent in early modern literature as well as in legal practice; and Helen Barr provides a spirited reading of the fifteenth-century text Canterbury Interlude as a containing an episode that provides a queer version on Thomas Becket's blood.
In further Shakespearean chapters, Katherine A. Craik analyses blood as a marker of class in 2 Henry IV and Henry V, and Bonnie Lander Johnson interprets Juliet as having "greensickness" and corrupted blood in Romeo and Juliet. The chapter on the logistics of using blood and bloodstains in early modern theatrical productions by Hester Lees-Jeffries finds great complements both in Patricia Parker's essay on Innogen's bloody cloth as proof in Cymbeline, and in Elisabeth Dutton's chapter on bloody props used as anti-Semitic proof in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and Macbeth. Dutton's is one of the few chapters that explicitly investigates the continuities between the "medieval" and the "early modern" period, here in stagecraft.
As expected for a University of Pennsylvania Press publication under the editorship of Jerry Singerman, this book is at the highest level of intellectual as well as material quality. It is also a good read, and warmly recommended to scholars in the many areas it investigates. Blood does matter to all of them.