Miraculous Vegetable crucifixes of the German Late Middle Ages

Abstract: The article introduces a category of carved crucifixes that miraculously arose out of local German trees and plants in the late medieval period. It reveals the clever ways that, through the artworks that reincarnate many key episodes of the saintly cross's biography, the church was able to lay claim to the ebbs and flows of the natural world, its vicissitudes and miraculous phenomena. Infused with the mystical qualities of the True Cross itself, the artworks in the article express themselves through a register beyond the symbolic—one that reveals how through the material of wood the church attempted to account for the agency of the non-human natural world and how trees, plants, and their roots and stumps, conversely, became ensconced in liturgical practice, too.