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14 - Iconoclasm and the Epigraphic Image
- Edited by Daniel G. Donoghue, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Sebastian Sobecki, University of Toronto, Nicholas Watson, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 05 March 2024, pp 259-274
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Summary
The chancel screen of Binham Priory has figured in twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic literature as a perfect embodiment of the Reformation's iconoclastic effacement of Image with Word. Where the image of the Risen Christ now emerges from beneath the inscribed words (figure 1), the screen has inspired a more implicit historiographic reading, the pentimento a kind of perfect allegory for its own scholarship, for the intellectual resurrection of that enduring pre-Reformation past. However what makes the screen's expression of sixteenth-century epigraphic culture so suggestive is not so much the superimposition of image with word, but the replacement of one kind of image with another: the epigraphic image. Understanding the screen's inscription as an iconoclastic image, an image that attacks but can't escape its own visuality, prompts a reading of the text as itself a kind of historiography: iconoclasm as an historiographical battle of “cultural rupture” that is ultimately unwinnable.
The distinctive materiality of the Binham screen has made it the subject of frequent references by historians of literature, art, religion, and of both medieval and early modern history. The screen therefore has come to represent “Reformation iconoclasm” in general terms, but a detailed study of precisely what makes it so distinctive raises a specific and significant question: how do such inscriptions – as iconoclastic images – respond to what they replace? In the following discussion, I will argue that this particular object can serve, first, as the basis for a theory of the iconoclastic inscription; and second, as a model for its interpretive practice.
In this object, the Binham screen, the rejected image remains underneath. In other instances of iconoclastic epigraphy, the superseded image may not literally be present but is nevertheless in some sense still there. The artists of the later, epigraphic paintings on the Binham screen could not at that point see the earlier ones: they were painting words against a white ground. It is simply an accident of history and chemistry that the painted letters have often protected the under-layer of white from flaking, such that in places the words appear directly against the superseded figures. So what appears to us now is, in fact, a modern image: an anachronism. But conceptually, perhaps it is the opposite of an anachronism: a rare modern visual manifestation of early modern visuality.
7 - The Past of the Past: Historical Distance and the Medieval Image
- Edited by Wendy Scase, Laura Ashe, Philip Knox, Kellie Robertson
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- Book:
- New Medieval Literatures 21
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 13 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 19 March 2021, pp 191-220
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Summary
This essay's subject is the role of visual culture in constructing both the medieval idea of antiquity and the modern idea of the Middle Ages. Historians of the early twentieth century saw the medieval image of antiquity as epoch-defining – ‘image’ in both conceptual and visual senses of the word, which in this discourse were fundamentally connected. Theirs was a profoundly influential argument, which still structures the conversation about medieval historical consciousness across many disciplinary fields of inquiry. Some very specific kinds of sources often lie at the heart of this argument: manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (e.g., Figure 7.1). Returning to the medieval textual culture at the foundation of that argument makes it possible to reconsider, historicise, and critique controlling paradigms of twentieth-century intellectual history about the classical reception, periodisation, and the relationship between the two. But returning to the manuscripts also makes apparent this flawed argument's great insight: the significance of its key sources for understanding their creators’ historical thought and conceptions of temporality.
The first part of this essay re-examines the twentieth-century paradigm's foundational argument and some of the assumptions behind it – above all, the concept of ‘historical distance’. Part II then returns to the kinds of sources on which it is based, in a detailed contextual and visual analysis of one especially significant example: a group of three medieval manuscripts of Livy's Roman history (Figures 7.2–7.6). Livy's history was ultimately read everywhere in Europe, in its transmitted, translated, revised, re-translated, redacted, and derivative forms; this work of historical literature about and from antiquity therefore played a central role in the understanding of the ancient world among those with access to learned or recreational literacy. The three manuscripts on which this discussion concentrates are all copies of the same text: Pierre Bersuire's 1350s French translation of Ab urbe condita, in its revised version of c.1370. All three manuscripts were then produced at the same time and in the same place: Paris, c.1400. Finally, all three manuscripts are illuminated in the same style by a group of closely related artists, known as the ‘Boucicaut’ illuminators.
Medieval Treaties and the Diplomatic Aesthetic
- Edited by Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Carol Symes
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- Book:
- Seals - Making and Marking Connections across the Medieval World
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 28 February 2019, pp 213-238
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THIS ESSAY BRINGS two strands of scholarship into conversation with one another: the New Diplomatic History and the study of material texts as visual culture. What follows is an examination of a significant point of contact for these two discussions: the documents of diplomacy and, more specifically, treaty ratifications in late medieval Europe. A central premise of New Diplomatic History is that it involves an understanding of diplomacy as an expanded field— in other words, there is more to diplomacy than treaties. As this analysis will suggest, there is also more to treaties themselves. Letters of procuration, articles of agreement, and treaty ratifications all have allusive and symbolic elements, and even these most canonical sources of diplomatic history belong also to cultural history. The first part of this essay will explain some of the motivations for my choice of method and sources; the second part will offer some specific illustrative examples of that method in practice. There are important precedents for discussing both diplomacy and diplomatics in structural terms, without reference to (even widely variant) political content, and the analysis in these examples draws from and seeks to expand on them.
Diplomacy and Textual Objects
This approach returns with new eyes to some of the most traditional subject matter of “Old” diplomatic history, by bringing some of the conceptual framework that inspires the expanded field of diplomacy back to the centre of that field, and by integrating that framework with the analytic practices of art history, visual culture studies, and the study of material texts. In doing so, this analysis also draws from long-standing practices of the so-called auxiliary sciences of diplomatics and palaeography, as well as some of the intellectual innovations of their recent practitioners. Scholars of diplomatics have always devoted attention to the material aspects of their documents, while palaeographical literature, by definition, concerns itself with the visual culture of letter forms, developing a specific vocabulary for their description; in both cases, the conceptual and theoretical implications of these methods are increasingly explicitly voiced.
The analysis of medieval treaty documents contributes to the themes of The Medieval Globe's special issue on a straightforwardly practical as well as a more conceptual level. Ratifications constitute clear instances of exchanged impressions in the most literal sense: through these documents, which formally conclude diplomatic negotiations, two chanceries exchange impressions of their seals of central government.