Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication

✍ Scribed by M. Hageman, M. Mostert (eds.)

• Publisher: Brepols Publishers
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 558
• Series: Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 8
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Relations between images and texts have benefited from an increase in scholarly attention. In medieval studies, art historians, historians, codicologists, philologists and others have applied their methods to the study of illuminated manuscripts and other works of art. These studies have shifted from a concern about the contents of the messages contained in the artefacts (e.g. in iconography) to an interest in the ways in which they were communicated to their intended audiences. The perception of texts and images, their reception by contemporaries and by later generations have become topics in their own right. According to some, medieval images may be ‘read’. According to others, the perception of images is fundamentally different from that of texts. The analysis of individual manuscripts and works of art remains the basis for any consideration of their transmission and uses. The interactions between non-verbal and verbal forms of communication, more in particular the relations between visual symbols other than writing and the recording of speech in writing, are important for the evaluation of both images and texts.

✦ Table of Contents

Reading Images and Texts: Some Preliminary Observations Instead of an Introduction, p. 1
Marco Mostert

Corporeal Texts, Spiritual Paintings, and the Mind’s Eye, p. 9
Herbert L. Kessler

Was Art Really the “Book of the Illiterate”?, p. 63
Lawrence G. Duggan

Reflections on “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?”, p. 109
Lawrence G. Duggan

Paradise and Pentecost, p. 121
Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel

Changing Perceptions of the Visual in the Middle Ages: Hucbald of St. Amand’s Carolingian Rewriting of Prudentius, p. 161
William J. Diebold

Oral Tradition in Visual Art: The Romanesque Theodoric, p. 177
Michael Curschmann

Perceptions of the History of the Church in the Early Middle Ages, p. 207
Rosamond McKitterick

Saintly Images: Visions of Saints in Hagiographical Texts, p. 221
Wolfert S. van Egmond

Pictor Iconiam Litterarum: Rituals as Visual Elements in Early Medieval Ruler Portraits in Word and Image, p. 239
Mariëlle Hageman

Paulinus of Nola and the Image Within the Image, p. 261
Giselle de Nie

Meditations on a Christmas Card: Strategies of Empathy in a Fourteenth-Century Liturgical Illumination, p. 291
Karl F. Morrison

The Wall Paintings in the Campanile of the Church of S. Nicola in Lanciano (c. 1300-1400): Reading an Unknown Legend of the Cross in the Abruzzi, p. 311
Barbara Baert

Cum ipso sunt in hac nativitate congeniti: Dove, Throne and City in the Arch Mosaics of Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome (432-440), p. 367
Caecilia Davis-Weyer

Les Peintures de la Crypte de Tavant: Etat de la Question et Perspectives de Recherche, p. 395
Eric Palazzo

La Piété Princière dans l’Image et dans la Parole: Le Pavement Orné de Wiślica (Petite Pologne) de la Deuxième Moitié du xiie Siècle, p. 425
Anna Adamska

The Ambiguity of Eros: An Image of the Antique God of Love in a Christian Encyclopaedia, p. 445
Esther Mulders

Ottonian Tituli in Liturgical Books, p. 457
Henry Mayr-Harting

Texte et Image dans le Manuscrit de Madrid de la Chronique de Skylitzès, p. 477
Michel Kaplan

‘Reading’ Images and Texts in the Bibles moralisées: Images as Exegesis and the Exegesis of Images, p. 495
John Lowden

Les Images de la Porte Romane comme un Livre Ouvert à l’Entrée de l’Église, p. 527
Xavier Barral i Altet

Plates, p. 545