Image And Devotion In Late Medieval England

This neglected but hugely important aspect of the visual culture of medieval England will appeal to anyone interested in the Middle Ages.

By the late Middle Ages, manifestations of Marian devotion had become multifaceted and covered all aspects of religious, private and personal life. Mary becomes a universal presence that accompanies the faithful on pilgrimage, in dreams, as holy visions, and as pictorial representations in church space and domestic interiors. The first part of the volume traces the development of Marian iconography in sculpture, panel paintings, and objects, such as seals, with particular emphasis on Italy, Slovenia and the Hungarian Kingdom. The second section traces the use of Marian devotion in relation to space, be that a country or territory, a monastery or church or personal space, and explores the use of space in shaping new liturgical practices, new Marian feasts and performances, and the bodily performance of ritual objects.

Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.

This book investigates the 'owner portrait' in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated pre-existing representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.

This book capitalizes on brilliant recent work on sixteenth-century iconoclasm to extend the study of images, both their making and their breaking, into an earlier period and wider discursive territories. Pressures towards iconoclasm are powerfully registered in fourteenth and fifteenth-century writings, both heterodox and orthodox, just as the use of images is central to the practice of both politics and religion. The governance of images turns out, indeed, to be central to governance itself. It is also of critical concern in any moment of historical change, when new cultural forms must incorporate or destroy the images of the old order. The iconoclast redescribes images as pure matter, objects of idolatry worthy only of the hammer. Issues of historical memory, no less than of social ethics, are, then, inherent to the making, love, and destruction of images. These issues are the consistent concern of the essays of this volume, essays commissioned from a range of outstanding late medievalists in a variety of disciplines: literature, art history, Biblical studies, and intellectual history.

The interdisciplinary volume Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion, with chapters that extend the temporality of objects and buildings beyond the Middle Ages.

Medieval churchmen typically defended religious art as a form of "book" to teach the unlettered laity their faith, but in late medieval England, Lollard accusations of idolatry stimulated renewed debate over image worship. Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages places this dispute within the context of the religious beliefs and devotional practices of lay people, showing how they used and responded to holy images in their parish churches, at shrines, and in prayer books. Far more than substitutes for texts, holy images presented a junction of the material and spiritual, offering an increasingly literate laity access to the supernatural through the visual power of "beholding."

Middle English devotional compilations – consisting of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute new and unified devotional texts – have often been approached as complex collections of source texts that need to be linked with their originals. This book argues that the study of compilations should move beyond the disentanglement of their sources. It approaches compiling as a literary activity and an active way of shaping the medieval text, with the aim to nuance scholarly discussion about compiling by putting greater emphasis on the literary instead of the technical aspects of compiling activity. In addition to describing the additions, omissions and other types of adaptations that compilers made to their source texts, Middle English Devotional Compilations highlights the nature and function of compiling activity in late medieval England, and examines three major but understudied Middle English devotional compilations in depth: The Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.