Reading Images
Reading Images
Out of Print
Reading Images focuses on the multi-layered relationships between the textual image and its reader-viewer in the Apocalypse manuscripts produced in England during the thirteenth century, a period of profound changes in the social and cultural fabric. The exponential expansion in the production and dissemination of illuminated manuscripts that occurred at this time provided a critical, cultural mechanism for the creation of new technologies of the self. Within the framework of this newly-discernible subjectivity, Suzanne Lewis examines how reader-viewers cultivated the art of memory and contemporary theories of vision, which invested images with the power to promote memory and offer spiritual sustenance, and also to articulate and activate dominant ideological positions regarding the self, society, and the 'other'. As the Apocalypse narrative was visualised in pictures, it became a powerful paradigm within which problematic contemporary experiences such as anti-Judaism, the later Crusades, and expectations of the world's end could be defined. Reading Images explores the kinds of contemporary mythologies that constitute ideology, a realm in which visual representation becomes an agent rather than a reflector of social change.
- Accessible - brings the medieval experience of reading images within the orbit of late twentieth century understanding
- Innovative - breaks with traditional approaches to the Apocalypse manuscripts
- Subject important not only to art history but to the whole spectrum of medieval studies
Product details
February 1996Hardback
9780521479202
489 pages
260 × 212 × 31 mm
1.666kg
252 b/w illus.
Unavailable - out of print February 2017
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Apocalypsis depictus: A book of visions
- Part I. Decoding The Thirteenth-Century Apocalyptic Discourse:
- 1. Auctor et Auctoritas: St John as seer, author, preceptor, and pilgrim
- 2. Problems of archetype, genre and narrative
- 3. The narrative paradigm: a synchronic view
- Part II. Locating The Thirteenth-Century Reader InThe Book:
- 4. The ideology of the book: referencing contemporary crisis within specular structures of power
- 5. Transactional experiences encoded in the imaged text
- 6. Picturing other visions: expanding the reader's experience of the book in three appended cycles of illustration
- Epilogue: the jagged edge.
