| |||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe by Valentin Groebner |
by Lorraine Daston
|
by Mary Beard
|
by Daniel Baraz
|
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach |
Editorial Reviews
Review
"A shocking study that demystifies the significance of suffering in late medieval society by placing representations of penitence and the Passion on a par with the political uses of brutality against the body. Iconoclastic, yet humane, Groebner's compelling essays uncover the full spectrum of acts and images that, no matter how grisly or grotesque, formed part of a semiotics of savagery that continues to inform representations of law and order and the practice of compulsion and constraint well into the modern era."
—Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University
"Timely... another worthwhile publication from Zone, which has done so much to revise our understanding of medieval bodies."
— Kerr Houston, CAA Reviews
—Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University
"Timely... another worthwhile publication from Zone, which has done so much to revise our understanding of medieval bodies."
— Kerr Houston, CAA Reviews
Product Description
Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror—formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace.
From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.
From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.
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.
› Visit Amazon's Valentin Groebner Page
› Visit Amazon's Valentin Groebner Page
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
71% buy the item featured on this page: Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages$17.90 |
 |
15% buy Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture$23.96 |
 |
11% buy Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe$25.04 |
 |
3% buy The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe $48.19 |
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 Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
 |
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta (What's this?)Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.
› See featured Amapedia.com articles
Look for Similar Items by Category
- Books > Arts & Photography > History & Criticism > Criticism
- Books > Arts & Photography > History & Criticism > Themes
- Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Ancient & Classical
- Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Medieval
- Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Renaissance
Look for Similar Items by Subject
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
