Blood serves an excellent indicator of a nexus of late medieval and early modern Cultural Change, in which matter and meaning seems to have segregated progressively. As the harmony of body and spirit succumbed under the strain of competing world views, blood lost its unity as an embodied sign, a semiotic substance. The wordplays that impose themselves with such ease in this area of research attest to the enduring permeability of the material and the spiritual when it comes to blood. This volume brings together papers presented at a workshop entitled 'Blood-Symbol-Liquid', held in Groningen on 23-24 March 2006. The organizers were keen to put the shifting composition of the material and symbolic components of blood in a broad chronological and thematic perspective, forcing the contributors to merge their respective disciplinary approaches stemming from literary history, art history and the history of religion, medicine and science.