Salvation, Damnation, and the Wounded (Corporate) Body of Christ in Late Medieval Culture

In the late Middle Ages, the image of Christ crucified, as Sarah Beckwith demonstrates in Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings, transmitted and produced in believers complex meanings and effects. For this reason, according to Beckwith, it is best examined “as a symbol […] rather than as a theological concept or a trope.” The literary and religious historian must “ask how such an image makes meaning for its practitioners and interlocutors,” recognizing all the while that the meanings produced will be multiple, complex, and at times conflicting. Yet these meanings are of crucial importance to our understanding of late medieval figurations of society, of the individual, and of their relation to each other, given “the centrality of the image of Christ’s body to the political construction of a Christian culture imagined as a unity” but in reality fractured by divisions.