Mandrake Crucifixes and the Rooting of Late Medieval Spirituality

My talk explores two arboreal crucifixes that miraculously took form while buried in the earth. They both attest to anxieties around the animistic potential of vegetal matter, and threats against the sanctity of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The first, a mandrake crucifix that spawned a fourteenth-century pilgrimage cult to Rein monastery’s Straßengel church (Fig. 1), which was built atop a Slavic pagan burial ground in eastern Austria, emblematizes the need for converting Christians to entrench themselves and their dogma in the literal grounds of Slavic lands to quell dissent and assimilate matter-centric heathen faiths into the new matter-skeptical, monotheistic one. The second is a figure of the crucified Corpus Christi formed into a cabbage stem around the year 1480 (Fig. 2). It came miraculously into being after the nun gardener at the convent of Eppendorf (near Hamburg) planted a consecrated Host with the hopes of fertilizing her plants. After the radiance around a cabbage woke up her sisterhood the night thereafter, the priest dug around it and discovered the transubstantiated bread had remediated itself into the vegetable, taking on the form of just the body of Christ—highlighting the righteousness of the theological precept and bringing to light a new genre of Host Desecration narratives around nature-bound wooden art objects, which appear on the eve of the Reformation in German-speaking lands and which held fast to the doctrine of transubstantiation.