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.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"This will be a widely read book that addresses an integral (and under-thought) aspect of late medieval culture and its complex traffic in images. The book should be of interest to all involved in the visual and verbal culture of the late Middle Ages. It is original and innovative."—Sarah Beckwith, Duke University
About the Author
Sarah Stanbury is Associate Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Seeing the Gawain-Poet and coeditor, with Linda Lomperis, of Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
(learn more)
First Sentence:
ONE OF THE MOST STARTLING SURVIVALS of English gothic architecture is the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
medieval piety, medieval art, early modern studies, voir dit, vernacular theology, sect vocabulary, reformist polemic, image debate, naked text, donor images, litel clergeon, idea behind the image, devotional images, devotional objects, devotional imagery, religious tales, eucharistic wafer, affective piety Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, Prioress's Tale, Oxford University Press, Chaucer Review, East Anglia, Man of Sorrows, England's Iconoclasts, Clerk's Tale, Clarendon Press, University of Chicago Press, Cornell University Press, Sarah Beckwith, Theater of Devotion, Walter Hilton, Yale University Press, New Haven, Age of Chaucer, Norwich Cathedral, Medieval Institute Publications, Painted Table, Nicholas Watson, Pennsylvania State University Press, David Aers Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
ONE OF THE MOST STARTLING SURVIVALS of English gothic architecture is the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
medieval piety, medieval art, early modern studies, voir dit, vernacular theology, sect vocabulary, reformist polemic, image debate, naked text, donor images, litel clergeon, idea behind the image, devotional images, devotional objects, devotional imagery, religious tales, eucharistic wafer, affective piety Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, Prioress's Tale, Oxford University Press, Chaucer Review, East Anglia, Man of Sorrows, England's Iconoclasts, Clerk's Tale, Clarendon Press, University of Chicago Press, Cornell University Press, Sarah Beckwith, Theater of Devotion, Walter Hilton, Yale University Press, New Haven, Age of Chaucer, Norwich Cathedral, Medieval Institute Publications, Painted Table, Nicholas Watson, Pennsylvania State University Press, David Aers Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
