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Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic,
internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally
charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and
linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the
place of tears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural
discourses, providing a key resource for scholars interested in
exploring medieval notions of emotion, gesture, and sensory
experience in a variety of cultural contexts. Gertsman brings
together essays that establish a series of conversations with one
another, foregrounding essential questions about the different ways
that crying was seen, heard, perceived, expressed, and transmitted
throughout the Middle Ages. In acknowledging the porous nature of
visual and verbal evidence, this collection foregrounds the
necessity to read language, image, and experience together in order
to envision the complex notions of medieval crying.
Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic,
internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally
charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and
linguistic performances. The essays in this interdisciplinary book
consider the role of weeping in medieval visual, theological, and
literary discourses, and examine it in relation to viewership,
gender, piety, transmission, and social, visual, and linguistic
performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the place of
tears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural discourses,
providing a key resource for scholars interested in exploring
medieval notions of emotion, gesture, and sensory experience in a
variety of cultural contexts. Gertsman brings together essays that
establish a series of conversations with one another, foregrounding
essential questions about the different ways that crying was seen,
heard, perceived, expressed, and transmitted throughout the Middle
Ages. In acknowledging the porous nature of visual and verbal
evidence, this collection foregrounds the necessity to read
language, image, and experience together in order to envision the
complex notions of medieval crying.
Taking a fresh look at the interconnections between medieval
images, texts, theater, and practices of viewing, reading and
listening, this explicitly interdisciplinary volume explores
various manifestations of performance and meanings of
performativity in the Middle Ages. The contributors - from their
various perspectives as scholars of art history, religion, history,
literary studies, theater studies, music and dance - combine their
resources to reassess the complexity of expressions and definitions
of medieval performance in a variety of different media. Among the
topics considered are interconnections between ritual and theater;
dynamics of performative readings of illuminated manuscripts,
buildings and sculptures; linguistic performances of identity;
performative models of medieval spirituality; social and political
spectacles encoded in ceremonies; junctures between spatial
configurations of the medieval stage and mnemonic practices used
for meditation; performances of late medieval music that raise
questions about the issues of historicity, authenticity, and
historical correctness in performance; and tensions inherent in the
very notion of a medieval dance performance.
An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in
medieval texts, art, and architecture. This interdisciplinary
collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and
place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern
reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a
wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the
visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance,
historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well
as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East
and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume
addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in
the construction of individual and collective identities in
religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces
(mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean);
empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem,
and Reval); and courts, castles and the architectureof
subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world.
They explore human movement in space and the construction of time
and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as
nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional
relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives
that we can use today in our negotiations with the past. Julian
Weiss is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Studies,
Sarah Salih Senior Lecturer in English, at King's College London.
Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita,
Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie
Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Rasanen, Geoff
Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones,
Matthew Francis
The Cleveland Museum of Art's medieval table fountain, c. 1320-40,
is the only version of its kind to have survived in its complete
form from the Middle Ages. A superb example of French Gothic
goldsmithing, it is an exquisite metalwork structure and a unique
example of courtly taste and princely fashion, which was designed
not for any religious purpose but purely as an indulgence. Its
uncertain provenance has added to its charm. This focus volume
reassesses this extraordinary piece in the context of other similar
luxury objects, analysing specifically the fountain's history,
functionality, materials, and style.
The extraordinary array of images included in this volume reveals
the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material
objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book
casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture
illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four
topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral;
Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each
section is organized chronologically, and every object is
accompanied by a penetrating essay that focuses on its visual and
cultural significance within the wider context in which the object
was made and used. Spot maps add yet another way to visualize and
consider the significance of the objects and the history that they
reveal. Lavishly illustrated, this is an appealing and original
guide to the cultural history of the Middle Ages.
Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art
Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers
believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to
modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the
fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive
feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina
Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with
the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages
emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex
conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics,
piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of
nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly
inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture,
from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to
figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of
conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will
find its primary audience with students and scholars of art,
religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be
particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and
cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later
Middle Ages.
Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and
suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in
the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the
faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function
because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected-and therefore
cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about
perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on
theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does
medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it
enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore
these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes:
medieval abstraction as the untethering of the image from what it
purports to represent; abstraction as a vehicle for signification;
and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the
concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of
perspectives-formal, semiotic, iconographic, material,
phenomenological, epistemological.
In Worlds Within, Elina Gertsman investigates the Shrine Madonnas,
or Vierges ouvrantes—sculptures that conceal within their bodies
complex carved and/or painted iconographies. The Shrine Madonna
emerged in Europe at the end of the 1200s and reached a peak of
popularity during the following three centuries. Gertsman argues
that the appearance of these objects—predicated as they are on
the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation—points
to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex,
performative ways in which audiences were expected to engage with
devotional images, both in public and in private. Worlds Within
considers these fascinating sculptures in terms of the rhetoric of
secrecy, the discourse of containment, and the tropes of unveiling.
Gertsman demonstrates how the statues were associated with the
processes of seeing and memory-making and how they functioned as
instruments of revelatory knowledge and spiritual reformation in
the context of late medieval European culture.
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