Medieval Blood Bettina Bildhauer This is the first sustained study over a wide range of discourses of one of the crucial elements of medieval imaginations of the world: blood. It takes a theoretically informed approach to the subject and is thus the first to propose that blood shapes the body as a distinct identity. The author shows that by taking blood and bodies seriously, we gain significant new insights into medieval culture. The author's central thesis is that blood affirms the body as one of the major tenets of medieval thought and identity. 'The body' is not a given, enclosed, unified entity, always already different from the mind and from its surroundings. The concept of such an enclosed body is instead produced by various strategies of which several use blood. Presenting material from a wide range of medical, religious, legal and courtly texts, predominantly from late medieval Germany, this book argues that blood was ascribed a huge value in establishing the truth in discourses about issues as diverse as Christ's body, sexuality, authorship and murder. It also shows how prohibitions of bloodshed and of other contact with blood work to uphold the model of a bounded body, while the bodies of women, Jews and monsters were defined as bleeding and as endangering integral bodies. Furthermore, it investigates how social bodies were imagined as analogous to, and in various ways composed of, individual bodies, and held together as well as undermined by blood. This book will appeal to scholars and students who are interested in the history of the body across a wide range of disciplines: German Studies, literature, medieval history, history of religion, history of medicine and gender studies. Dr. Bettina Bildhauer is Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. She co-edited The Monstrous Middle Ages (University of Wales Press) and has published widely on medieval themes.