December 17, 2010 at 4:00 AM (duration 00:58)
Watch Explaining Transformation: Material Miracles and Their Theorists in the Later Middle Ages Event Streaming Online
In the period between 1150 and 1550 a number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects - among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers - allegedly erupted into life by such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Carole Walker Bynum, Professor of Western European Middle Ages at the Institute for Advanced Studies, describes the miracles themselves and probes the basic philosophical and scientific assumptions about nature and matter that lay behind them. (#17620).
