ABSTRACT
A couple of years ago in Critical Inquiry, Caroline Bynum began an article by asking what appeared to be a relatively straightforward question: ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body?’ Her question was directed at the plethora of recent texts devoted to the body and produced by the discourses of feminism, new historicism, gender studies, the history, sociology and philosophy of medicine and the natural and social sciences, and historians of the body. In fact, Bynum suggests, the body may well be the wrong topic for them altogether. In part against this recent enthusiasm for the body, and in a refusal to contribute further to these discussions of the body which rarely go beyond matters of gender, medicine and sexuality rather than, for instance, eschatology or soteriology, Bynum turns to history. But she doesn't so much discuss, as one might expect, the historical parallels between the modern and the middle ages, as she contributes to an understanding of how the relationship of figures to contexts in different historical moments can contribute to a better understanding of the situated historical specificities and singularities of a body.
