The aim of this collection of essays is to bring together new comparative research studies on the place and role of the Bible in early modern Europe. It focuses on lay readings of the Bible, interrogating established historical, social, and confessional paradigms. It highlights the ongoing process of negotiation between the faithful congregation and ecclesiastical institutions, in both Protestant and Catholic countries. It shows how, even in the latter, where biblical translations were eventually forbidden, the laity drew upon the Bible as a source of ethical, cultural, and spiritual inspiration, contributing to the evolution of central aspects of modernity. Interpreting the Bible could indeed be a means of feeding critical perspectives and independent thought and behavior. Contributors: Erminia Ardissino, Xavier Bisaro, Élise Boillet, Gordon Campbell, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Sabrina Corbellini, François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, Max Engammare, Wim François, Ignacio J. García Pinilla, Stefano Gattei, Margriet Hoogvliet, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, and Concetta Pennuto.
This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.
In Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, Andrea Pearson charts the moralization of human bodies in late medieval and early modern visual culture, through paintings by Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, devotional prints and illustrated books, and the celebrated enclosed gardens of Mechelen among other works. Drawing on new archival evidence and innovative visual analysis to reframe familiar religious discourses, she demonstrates that depicted topographies advanced and sometimes resisted bodily critiques expressed in scripture, conduct literature, and even legislation. Governing many of these redemptive greenscapes were the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, archetypes of purity whose spiritual authority was impossible to ignore, yet whose mysteries posed innumerable moral challenges. The study reveals that bodily status was the fundamental problem of human salvation, in which artists, patrons, and viewers alike had an interpretive stake.
This book provides an integral, readable account of changing attitudes toward pain in late medieval Europe. Since pain itself cannot be known, the book looks at pain by chronicling what people wrote about it, and what they did with and about that.
Published in 2005: At a time when the church sought to control and constrain lay access to vernacular and paramystical texts, the author’s translation, sanctioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, met a pressing need for religious guidance among lay people. It became one of the most copied works of the fifteenth century.
Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.