The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England
The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England

Author: Sarah Stanbury

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-07-10

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1512808296

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Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches. In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists. For Chaucer, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, the image debate provides an urgent language for exploring the demands of a material devotional culture—though these writers by no means agree on the ethics of those demands. The chronicler Henry Knighton invoked a statue of St. Katherine to illustrate a lurid story about image-breaking Lollards. Later John Capgrave wrote a long Katherine legend that comments, through the drama of a saint in action, on the powers and uses of religious images. As Stanbury contends, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and troubled by its "culture of the spectacle," whether this spectacle took the form of a newly made queen in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale or of the animate Christ in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable. In picturing images and icons, these texts were responding to reformist controversies as well as to the social and economic demands of things themselves, the provocative objects that made up the fabric of ritual life.

A New Companion to Chaucer
A New Companion to Chaucer

Author: Peter Brown

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-06-10

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 1118902254

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The extensively revised and expanded version of the acclaimed Companion to Chaucer An essential text for both established scholars and those seeking to expand their knowledge of Chaucer studies, A New Companion to Chaucer is an authoritative and up-to-date survey of Chaucer scholarship. Rigorous yet accessible, this book helps readers to identify current debates, recognize historical and literary context, and to understand how particular concepts and theories affect the interpretation of Chaucer’s texts. Chaucer specialists from around the globe offer contributions that range from updates of long-standing scholarship on biography, language, women, and social structures, to original research in new areas such as ideology, the afterlife, patronage, and sexuality. In presenting conflicting perspectives and ideological differences, this stimulating volume encourages readers to explore additional paths of inquiry and engage in lively and informed debate. Each chapter of the Companion, organized by issues and themes, balances textual analysis and cultural context by grounding the reader in existing scholarship. Key issues from specific passages are discussed with an annotated bibliography provided for reference and further reading. Compiled with all students of Chaucer in mind, this important volume: Presents contributions from both established and emerging specialists Explores the circumstances in which Chaucer wrote, such as the political and religious issues of his time Includes numerous close readings of selected poems Provides points of entry to a wide range of approaches to Chaucer’s works Incorporates original research, fresh perspectives, and updated additions to Chaucer scholarship A New Companion to Chaucer is a valuable and enduring resource for scholars, teachers, and students of medieval literature and medieval studies, as well as the general reader interested in interpretations and historical contexts of Chaucer’s writings.

Depositions
Depositions

Author: Amy Knight Powell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-10-04

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1935408208

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From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt’s “Buried Cube,” Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down. Foretelling their own depositions, as well as their re-elevations in contexts far from those in which they were made, the images studied in this book reveal themselves to be untimely — no truer to their first appearance than to their later reappearances. In Depositions, Amy Knight Powell makes the case that late medieval paintings and ritual reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross not only picture the deposition of Christ (the imago Dei) but also allegorize the deposition of the image as such and, in so doing, prefigure the lowering of “dead images” during the Protestant Reformation. Late medieval pre-figurations of Reformation iconoclasm anticipate, in turn, the repeated “deaths” of art since the advent of photography: that is the premise of the vignettes devoted to twentieth-century works of art that conclude each chapter of this book. In these vignettes, images that once stood in late medieval churches now find themselves among works of art from the more recent past with which they share certain formal characteristics. These surreal encounters compel us to reckon with affinities between images from different times and places. Turning on its head the pejorative (art-historical) use of the term pseudomorphosis — formal resemblance where there is no similarity of artistic intent — Powell explores what happens to our understanding of historically and conceptually distant works of art when they look alike.

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture
The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

Author: Laura Varnam

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1526121824

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This book presents an exciting new approach to the medieval church by examining the role of literary texts, visual decorations, ritual performance and lived experience in the production of sanctity. The meaning of the church was intensely debated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book explores what was at stake not only for the church’s sanctity but for the identity of the parish community as a result. Focusing on pastoral material used to teach the laity, it shows how the church’s status as a sacred space at the heart of the congregation was dangerously – but profitably – dependent on lay practice. The sacred and profane were inextricably linked and, paradoxically, the church is shown to thrive on the sacrilegious challenge of lay misbehaviour and sin.

Renovating the Sacred
Renovating the Sacred

Author: Irena Tina Marie Larking

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1527551415

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The English Reformation was no bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky. Nor was it an event that was inevitable, smooth, or predictable. Rather, it was a process that had its turbulent beginnings in the late medieval period and extended through until the Restoration. This book places the emphasis not just on law makers or the major players, but also, and more importantly, on those individuals and parish communities that lived through the twists and turns of reform. It explores the unpredictable process of the English Reformation through the fabric, rituals and spaces of the parish church in the Diocese of Norwich c. 1450–1662, as recorded, through the churchwardens’ accounts and the material remains of the late medieval and early modern periods. It is through the uses and abuses of the objects, rituals, spaces of the parish church that the English Reformation became a reality in the lives of these faith communities that experienced it.

Fifteenth-Century Studies 37
Fifteenth-Century Studies 37

Author: Barbara I. Gusick

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2012-03

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 157113526X

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Annual collection on diverse aspects of the fifteenth century, emphasizing literary topics with essays on French, German, English, Gaelic, and Middle Scots. The fifteenth century defies consensus on fundamental issues; most scholars agree, however, that the period outgrew the Middle Ages, that it was a time of transition and a passage to modern times. Fifteenth-Century Studiesoffers essays on diverse aspects of the period, including liberal and fine arts, historiography, medicine, and religion. Volume 37 includes articles on René d'Anjou and authorial doubling in the Livre du Coeur d'Amour épris; tradition and innovation in popular German song poetry from Oswald von Wolkenstein to Georg Forster; the role of sacred images in Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine; milieu, John Strecche, and the Gawain-poet; Gaelic, Middle Scots, and the question of ethnicity in three Scottish flytings; William Caxton's translations of Aesop; the visualization of information in Conrad Buitzruss's compendium; and Gilles de Rais and his modern apologists. Book reviews conclude the volume. Contributors: Albrecht Classen, Nicholas Ealy, Richard Garrett, Rosanne Gasse, Janice McCoy, Jacqueline Murdock, Ben Parsons, Carolyn King Stephens, Elizabeth Wade-Sirabian. BARBARA I. GUSICK is Professor Emerita of English at Troy University, Dothan, Alabama; MATTHEW Z. HEINTZELMAN is curator of the Austria/Germany Study Center and Rare Book Cataloger at Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp
Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp

Author: Adam Sammut

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9004276386

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This book is about the Dominican church in Antwerp (today St Paul’s). It is structured around three works of art, made or procured by Peter Paul Rubens: the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary cycle (in situ), Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna (Vienna) and the Wrath of Christ high altarpiece (Lyon). Within the artist’s lifetime, the church and monastery were completely rebuilt, creating one of the most spectacular sacred spaces in Northern Europe. In this richly illustrated book, Adam Sammut reconceptualises early modern churches as theatres of political economy, advancing an original approach to cultural production in a time of war. Using methodologies at the cutting edge of the humanities, the place of St Paul’s is restored to the crux of Antwerp’s commercial, civic and religious life.

The Queen's Dumbshows
The Queen's Dumbshows

Author: Claire Sponsler

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-04-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0812245954

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No medieval writer reveals more about early English drama than John Lydgate, Claire Sponsler contends. Best known for his enormously long narrative poems The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, Lydgate also wrote numerous verses related to theatrical performances and ceremonies. This rich yet understudied body of material includes mummings for London guildsmen and sheriffs, texts for wall hangings that combined pictures and poetry, a Corpus Christi procession, and entertainments for the young Henry VI and his mother. In The Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler reclaims these writings to reveal what they have to tell us about performance practices in the late Middle Ages. Placing theatricality at the hub of fifteenth-century British culture, she rethinks what constituted drama in the period and explores the relationship between private forms of entertainment, such as household banquets, and more overtly public forms of political theater, such as royal entries and processions. She delineates the intersection of performance with other forms of representation such as feasts, pictorial displays, and tableaux, and parses the connections between the primarily visual and aural modes of performance and the reading of literary texts written on paper or parchment. In doing so, she has written a book of signal importance to scholars of medieval literature and culture, theater history, and visual studies.