Chopped up, Grilled and Shrunken to the Size of a Hedgehog: The Bodies of Saints Between Materiality and Transcendence.

Traditionally, the bodies of saints are constantly beaten and tortured to death in the most brutal ways imaginable, only to be resurrected and to triumph over non-believers. They don’t follow the usual causalities of time, space and mortality, and can only be adequately understood in the context of a deeply religious culture. Paradoxically, medieval interpretations of the saints often show as much interest in the materiality of the body as in ways of transcending it.

In his late story Der Erwaehlte Thomas Mann wrote the parody of a saint’s life, using a well known medieval story as a model. In one of the book’s most famous chapters Mann describes the miraculous, 17-year-long survival of a saint who is chained to a stone. Living only on a strange liquid emanating from the boulder, he eventually degenerates to the size of a hedgehog. Mann’s take on the tradition of the saint’s body is pulled off with irony, yet he manages to avoid ridicule. In a sophisticated style, he even combines detailed descriptions of body functions with religious poetry. The paper will use Mann’s interpretation as a starting point for an analysis of the saints bodies, and their position somewhere between Heaven and Earth.