Books, bodies, and belief : awkward technologies of protection in late medieval England

Price, Kierri Natasha Margaret (2024) Books, bodies, and belief : awkward technologies of protection in late medieval England. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis investigates how protection was articulated, understood, and accessed in late medieval England. Focusing on manuscripts, artefacts, and processes primarily in the period 1350-1600, this study explores various ‘technologies of protection’: birth girdles, arma Christi manuscripts, medical miscellanies, shrine accounts, votive offerings, proxy pilgrims, holy measurements, vierges ouvrantes, folding shrines, Eucharistic host containers, and more. In drawing together these seemingly-distinct examples, a common thread is exposed. These technologies operated within a transactional system of effort and reward, and as such positioned protection as attainable only in exchange for confronting some form of challenge. This ‘awkwardness’ was variously construed. Intellectual, physical, financial, logistical, spiritual, and emotional challenges were all potential paths towards receiving benefit, whether in isolation or combination with others. Different kinds of awkwardness were codified, often within the same object or process, offering a paradoxically accessible spectrum of awkwardness that gave people flexibility in determining their appropriate degree of difficulty. Materiality and physicality are at the heart of this thesis. The items and processes discussed here are intimately connected with bodies, both those of supplicants and those of the holy figures from whom they sought assistance. Protective technologies never guaranteed divine intervention, but their requirement of a process of activation gave people agency in disempowering situations. This study interrogates the need for interactive engagement in these protective technologies, revealing the inherent transactionality that underpinned medieval strategies for protection, and demonstrating the prioritisation of effort over achievement: the awkward exertion of effort was viewed as more valuable than the attainment of a particular state. This thesis argues that medieval protective technologies were necessarily awkward, for it was only by undergoing difficulty that meaningful benefit could be attained.

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