This exceptionally readable book describes how medieval men and women perceived their world, and how their vision of it colored their ideas about natural and supernatural occurrences and their attitudes about land and property, government, the role of women, crime, lawlessness, andoutlaws.
One of the most common ways of setting the arts in parallel, at least from the literary side, is through the popular rhetorical device of ekphrasis. The original meaning of this term is simply an extended and detailed, lively description, but it has been used most commonly in reference to painting or sculpture. In this lively collection of essays, Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse offer a major contribution to the study of text-image relationships in medieval Europe. Resisting any rigid definition of ekphrasis, The Art of Vision is committed to reclaiming medieval ekphrasis, which has not only been criticized for its supposed aesthetic narcissism but has also frequently been depicted as belonging to an epoch when the distinctions between word and image were far less rigidly drawn. Examples studied range from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries and include texts written in Medieval Latin, Medieval French, Middle English, Middle Scots, Middle High German, and Early Modern English. The essays in this volume highlight precisely the entanglements that ekphrasis suggests and/or rejects: not merely of word and image, but also of sign and thing, stasis and mobility, medieval and (early) modern, absence and presence, the rhetorical and the visual, thinking and feeling, knowledge and desire, and many more. The Art of Vision furthers our understanding of the complexities of medieval ekphrasis while also complicating later understandings of this device. As such, it offers a more diverse account of medieval ekphrasis than previous studies of medieval text-image relationships, which have normally focused on a single country, language, or even manuscript.
Troubled Vision is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the interface between gender, sexuality and vision in medieval culture. The volume represents an exciting array of scholarship dealing with visual and textual cultures from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth centuries. Bringing together a range of theoretical approaches that address the troubling effects of vision on medieval texts and images, the book mediates between medieval and modern constructions of gender and sexuality. Troubled Vision focuses thematically on four central themes: Desire, looking, representation and reading. Topics include the gender of the gaze, the visibility of queer desires, troubled representations of gender and sexuality, spectacle and reader response, and the visual troubling of modern critical categories.
Focuses on one of the most attractive features of late medieval manuscript illumination: the portrait of the book owner at prayer within the pages of her prayer-book.
Over the last two decades the historiography of medieval art has been defined by two seemingly contradictory trends: a focus on questions of visuality, and more recently an emphasis on materiality. The latter, which has encouraged multi-sensorial approaches to medieval art, has come to be perceived as a counterpoint to the study of visuality as defined in ocularcentric terms. Bringing together specialists from different areas of art history, this book grapples with this dialectic and poses new avenues for reconciling these two opposing tendencies. The essays in this volume demonstrate the necessity of returning to questions of visuality, taking into account the insights gained from the 'material turn'. They highlight conceptions of vision that attribute a haptic quality to the act of seeing and draw on bodily perception to shed new light on visuality in the Middle Ages.
In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.
This book breaks new ground by bringing postmodern writings on vision and embodiment into dialogue with medieval texts and images: an interdisciplinary strategy that illuminates and complicates both cultures. This is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in the history and theory of visuality, and it is essential reading for scholars of art, science or spirituality in the medieval period.
During the later Middle Ages, new optical theories were introduced that located the power of sight not in the seeing subject, but in the passive object of vision. This shift had a powerful impact not only on medieval science but also on theories of knowledge, and this changing relationship of vision and knowledge was a crucial element in late medieval religious devotion. In Seeing through the Veil, Suzanne Conklin Akbari examines several late medieval allegories in the context of contemporary paradigm shifts in scientific and philosophical theories of vision. After a survey on the genre of allegory and an overview of medieval optical theories, Akbari delves into more detailed studies of several medieval literary works, including the Roman de la Rose, Dante's Vita Nuova, Convivio, and Commedia, and Chaucer's dream visions and Canterbury Tales. The final chapter, 'Division and Darkness, ' centres on the legacy of allegory in the fifteenth century. Offering a new interdisciplinary, synthetic approach to late medieval intellectual history and to major works within the medieval literary canon, Seeing through the Veil will be an essential resource to the study of medieval literature and culture, as well as philosophy, history of art, and history of science.
Visions were highly popular in the late Middle Ages, whether preached as vivid stories from the pulpit, illuminated in saint-filled manuscripts, or experienced during the breathless anticipation of a Mass or eerie darkness of a Yorkshire graveyard. This volume is the first to map out the wide range of vision types in late medieval English lay piety. Analyzing 1000 visionary accounts gathered from sermon and exempla collections, religious devotional works, saints’ legends, and lay stories, it explores five central dynamics of spirituality that visions shaped and sustained: Transactions of Satisfaction (visits to and from purgatory and hell), Reciprocated Devotion (visitations of the saints), Spiritual Warfare (attacks by demons), Supra-Sacramental Sight (Mass and Passion sightings), and Mediated Revelation (prophetic visions).