This interdisciplinary collection of essays, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, medical history, and literature, examines how the intimately familiar language of the body served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Its individual contributors demonstrate the myriad ways in which rethinking the human body was one way to approach rethinking the social, political, and religious realities of the world from the Middle Ages until the early modern period.

"The new research presented in this thoughtful collection of essays significantly furthers our understanding of bodily fluids and corporeality in the premodern world." —Katie Barclay, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Adelaide

<div>Chapter 1: Introduction: Bodies, Fluidity, and Change, Michael D. Barbezat and Anne M. Scott</div><div>PART 1: Transformative and Manipulative Tears </div><div>Chapter 2: Where Did Marjorie Kempe Cry?, Anthony Bale</div><div>Chapter 3: Elusive Tears: Lamentation and Impassivity in fifteenth-Century Passion Iconography, Hugh Hudson</div><div>Chapter 4: Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance and Gender at the Sixteenth-Century French Court, Susan Broomhall</div><div>PART 2: Identities in Blood</div><div>Chapter 5: Piers Plowman and the Blood of Brotherhood, Anne M. Scott</div><div>Chapter 6: Performative Asceticism and Exemplary Effluvia: Blood, Tears and Rapture in Fourteenth-Century German Dominican Literature, Samuel Baudinette</div><div>Chapter 7: “Bloody Business:” Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, Karin Sellberg</div><div>PART 3: Bodies and blood in life death and resurrection</div><div>Chapter 8: Saintly Blood: Absence, Presence and the alter Christus, Diana Hiller</div><div>Chapter 9: The treatment of the body in Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, Helen Gramotnev</div><div>Chapter 10: Augustine on the Flesh of the Resurrection Body in the De fide et symbolo: Origen, Manicheanism, and Augustine’s Developing Thought Regarding Human Physical Perfection, Michael D. Barbezat</div><div>Select bibliography</div>