In three loving encounters between humans and nonhumans, this article explores different approaches to material love in medieval Europe. Beginning with an English bishop who attempted to eat the bone relic of Saint Mary Magdalene, it first considers how a series of medieval thinkers imagined God's love as mediated primarily through the consumption of matter. Further, it shows how the medieval commercialization of relics enabled a subversive, quasi-mystical counter tradition that located loving experiences within the unmediated physicality, or thingness, of Christian artifacts themselves. Moving next to Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226), the article explores a curious case of self-negating devotion to fire. While contextualizing the saint's love against a background of scholastic materialism and ecstatic mysticism, it explores how fire gained a unique onto-theological status as the material essence of both love and the heavens in the 1200s. Finally, turning to love for animals, the analysis explores the astonishing care shown to falcons by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d.1250). While surveying a series of trends in medieval ways of loving creatures, the article stresses how the emperor's radical empathy for beasts allowed him temporarily to surrender his sovereignty, melding the interest of king and bird. Just like the mystical theology that underpinned much of medieval devotion, it argues, these three loving encounters were all essentially structured as self-annihilating journeys into a “oneness” with the material landscape. Considering the ongoing threads of this forgotten type of self-erasing love, these medieval encounters can have intriguing implications for debates in the environmental humanities today.

在人类与非人类之间的三场爱情相遇中，本文探讨了中世纪欧洲物质爱情的不同方法。从一位试图吃掉圣玛丽抹大拉的遗骨的英国主教开始，它首先考虑了一系列中世纪思想家如何想象上帝的爱主要通过消耗物质来调节。此外，它展示了中世纪文物的商业化如何促成了一种颠覆性的、准神秘的反传统，将爱的体验置于基督教文物本身的无中介的物质性或事物性中。移到阿西西的圣方济各 (d.1226) 旁边，这篇文章探讨了一个奇怪的例子，即自我否定对火的奉献。在将圣人之爱置于经院唯物主义和狂喜神秘主义背景下的同时，它探讨了火是如何在 1200 年代作为爱和天堂的物质本质获得独特的本体神学地位的。最后，分析转向对动物的热爱，探讨了神圣罗马帝国皇帝腓特烈二世（卒于 1250 年）对猎鹰的惊人关怀。在考察了中世纪爱生物的一系列趋势时，文章强调了皇帝对野兽的激进同情如何让他暂时放弃了他的主权，融合了国王和鸟类的利益。就像支撑中世纪大部分信仰的神秘神学一样，它认为，这三个爱的相遇本质上都是自我毁灭的旅程，与物质景观“合一”。考虑到这种被遗忘的自我抹去的爱的持续线索，