Visions was born out of interviews Alexandre Leupin had with Francis X. Pavy, a significant painter of Southern culture with a career spanning five decades. This three-part book begins with a general introduction situating Pavy in the history of painting, and underscoring his radical authenticity and originality, as well as a universality paradoxically stemming from his deep regional connection. The second part reproduces Leupin and Pavy's interviews over the years, where Pavy's artistic beginnings, his technique, his vision, and the origins of his creations are discussed. In the third section, entitled Pavicons, Pavy presents the sources of his artistic inspiration and the recurrent themes that run through his body of work through a large sample of his iconographic elements.

Focusing on the Incarnation -- the only dogma original to Christianity, in which God becomes man and history -- this book offers a wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated investigation of the relationship between Christian discourse and literature from Roman antiquity to the fourteenth century through a look at texts by Cicero, Quintilian, Martianus Capella, Tertullian, Saint Augustine, Alain of Lille, Guillaume de Machaut, and others.

Alexandre Leupin asks if it is possible to go beyond the dialectics of the Incarnated God and the Devil without harking back to the beautiful but partially obsolete truths of paganism and sophistry. Employing a method inspired by psychoanalysis, Leupin repudiates the sophistry and relativism of postmodern theory while calling into question old commonplaces that have been invalidated by modernity. He does so by attending to the larger and deeper structures hidden within the discourses of theology, rhetoric, literature, and psychoanalysis. The result is an innovative perspective on the Middle Ages, an original and promising view of the problems of Western literature in relation to theology and rhetoric.