Holy Matter

Sara Ritchey’s book ranges from the abbeys of the twelfth-century Rhineland, and the Franciscans in Italy, to the Carthusians of the early fifteenth century. The common threads linking these examples are, in Ritchey’s assessment, the much-neglected ‘medieval doctrine of the re-creation of the world’ and, as a facet of this, the importance of trees. Re-creation in this interpretation happened at the moment of Christ’s incarnation or crucifixion and enabled a rich variety of instructive, meditational and incarnational possibilities (p. 2). The initial order of creation was marred by the Fall, but its re-creation transformed and redeemed material nature as ‘holy matter’ and offered the religious the possibility of discerning the divine or re-enacting the incarnate Christ’s fusion of spirit and matter. The historiographical significance of this approach, as Ritchey notes, is that it could revise Bynum’s emphasis in Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1988; rev. ante , cv [1990], 429–31) on women’s spiritual ascent being achieved by associating their base, weak body with that of the incarnate Christ. For Ritchey, the accent on the body becomes an over-emphasised aspect of the redeemed material world. A similar casualty, in terms of predominance, could be the interpretative emphasis on female affective piety and compassion, which is also related to the gendered body

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