Medieval Devotion and Miraculous Bones

Medieval Devotion and Miraculous Bleeding Bones 1

Walters Art Gallery

An illustration from Ogier Benigne's book of hours

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By Peter Monaghan

As the precursor of today's West, the West of the Middle Ages might seem readily knowable. Not so, says Caroline Walker Bynum.

Better to think of the Middle Ages as rather like a foreign country.

Yes, the concepts that undergird life today descend from that broad expanse of time, but recreating the past on the basis of the present is ill advised, says the scholar, a professor of medieval European history at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J.

Over the