ABSTRACT
The violence of late medieval life and late medieval piety has been much commented on recently. The specific literary and artistic ways in which treatments of the side wound both occlude and emphasize violence. Over the past two decades, art historians and literary scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the side wound and to the often associated devotion to the instruments of Christ's passion, the arma Christi. The legend of Longinus as known in the Middle Ages was a conflation of the biblical story of the centurion who testified to Christ's divinity and converted and that of the soldier who, according to only one Gospel account. Other spiritual writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Grosseteste, Bonaventure, Ludolf the Carthusian and Gabriel Biel all stress Christ's total exsanguinations. For all the emphasis in medieval piety on Jesus suffering, spiritual writers find many complex ways of deflecting the implication that God is dead.
