This book explores the multiple resonances and representations of the Arma Christi, the 'instruments of the Passion,' in medieval and early modern culture. From the weapons used to torment and sacrifice the body of Christ sprang a reliquary tradition that produced active and contemplative devotional practices, complex literary narratives, intense lyric poems, striking visual images, and innovative architecture. The verbal and visual representations that accrued from these holiest of relics, and the practices they in turn inspired, are relevant to a wide variety of critical fields and theoretical approaches. This collection capitalizes on recent work on these most central of medieval 'objects,' and produces, through its interdisciplinary and intergenerational scholarly collaboration, a fresh view of the multiple intersections of the spiritual and the material in the Middle Ages. It also includes a new edition of the English Arma Christi poem known as 'O Vernicle' from previously unpublished manuscripts.

Contents: Introduction: Arma Christi: the material culture of the Passion, Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny Brown; The Arma Christi before the Arma Christi: rhetorics of the Passion in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Mary Agnes Edsall; Figure and ground: Elene's nails, Cynewulf's runes, and Hrabanus Maurus's painted poems, Seeta Chaganti; Mapping virtual pilgrimage in an early 15th-century Arma Christi roll, Richard G. Newhauser and Arthur J. Russell; The footprints of Christ as Arma Christi: the evidence of Morgan B.54, Ann Eljenholm Nichols; The Arma Christi and the ethics of reckoning, Martha Rust; Memorial technai, St Thomas the Twin, and British Library MS Additional 22029, Ann W. Astell; Arma Christi as landscape in Hieronymus Bosch's Saint Christopher Carrying the Christ Child, Suzanne Verderber; Liturgy and Michelangelo's Last Judgment: reframing the Arma Christi, Lee Palmer Wandel; The Arma Christi in medieval and early modern Ireland, Salvador Ryan; Early modern afterlives of the Arma Christi, Shannon Gayk; O Vernicle: a critical edition, Ann Eljenholm Nichols; Index.