Christ's Body

At the very heart of Christian doctrine and late medieval practice stood the image of the crucified Christ. Sarah Beckwith examines the social meaning of this image across a range of significant devotional English texts, using insights from anthropology and cultural studies. She argues that the image of the crucified Christ acted as a place where the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the individual and the collective, were played out. The late medieval obsession with the contours of "Christ's Body" functioned to challenge and transform social and political relations.