ABSTRACT
In chapter 2 I examined the multivalent, condensed and ambiguat-ing symbol of Christ’s body as a forum for cultural conflict across a range of texts and social practices. I argued, in opposition both to clerical fantasy and to functionalist anthropology, that this body was not a unified or a unifying symbol. In examining Christ’s body as an image of social ordering, I showed how the embodiment of Christ and the ‘passion imagery’ of the late Middle Ages entails and occasions a debate about the relations of sacred and social power. Among the terms of that debate, as I briefly noted in chapter 2, was an elaboration, unprecedented outside monastic or clerical circles, of Christ’s body as a vocabulary for self-modelling, for the production of social identity. The ‘dyverse imaginaciouns of Crystes lyf which formed the late medieval imitatio Christi, forge a language of subjectivity to which Christ’s body is axiomatic. In the literature which tutored and formed its audience in the image of Christ, his ‘mixed life’ became an image for theirs.
