Sara Ritchey. Holy Matter

Sara Ritchey explains that her project “began as a sustained meditation on a specific, pervasive image in medieval Christian art and prayer—trees” (p. viii). These trees, pictures of plants or the cross in manuscripts, become in this book the starting point for an imaginative twist to the current “materiality turn” in medieval studies. The tree as leitmotif appears across texts and well-selected illustrations of genealogical and symbolic trees. Moving beyond old-school material culture and its focus on objects, Ritchey explores how a range of nuns, monks, and friars responded to the materiality of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, and how this event recreated the world. In Ritchey's words: “A God that entered matter, died in order to promise the salvation of matter, and continually reentered matter in the celebration of his promise was a God that could be discovered in matter, in holy matter” (p. 23). The Mirror of Virgins (c. 1140) and the writings of St. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), St. Clare of Assisi (d. 1253), Ubertino of Casale (d. c. 1329), and Marguerite d'Oingt (d. 1310) provide most of the evidence Ritchey uses to argue how the Incarnation recreated the world (not “Nature,” a word she eschews). This recreation means many things here, but basically how some women and a few men understood the Incarnation as altering the materiality of this world in ways enabling adepts, in prayer and meditation, to perceive God more clearly in his creation. “Recreation” cascades into many other “re”-words to explain what happened to the world, variously “refashioned,” “reenacted,” “restored,” “recapitulated,” or “recalibrated.” These concepts help to clarify Ritchey's ingenious arguments, though “reborn” or “regeneration” remains the most common alternative to “recreation” as possible consequences of the Incarnation. It may be useful to remember that and ask what exactly was incarnated, and to what end?

Aesthetics · Art · Christianity · Incarnation · Literature · Materiality (auditing) · Meditation · Prayer · Theology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies