Holy Motherhood: gender, dynasty, and visual culture in the later Middle Ages ELIZABETH L'ESTRANGE

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities of cinema and the visual culture of medieval dreams, dealing in turn with the following themes: (i) media and mediation; (ii) projection and premonition; (iii) virtual spatiality; and (iv) automata and other animated objects. The wide swath of medieval literary dream texts, with their mobile perspectives, sensory plentitude, and gnostic mission, resonate with the cinematic in the structuring of the gaze. Investigating the codes of medieval culture provides us with an unusually rich episteme for thinking about how the dreamscapes of the Middle Ages evoke media dispositifs. Opening up these thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining objects, spaces, sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary cinematic and digital landscapes are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing. Whether stoking religious fear and veneration or providing sensual pleasure as in Le Roman de la Rose, the dreamworlds of the Middle Ages have bequeathed us a number of an extraordinarily rich creative works that are the imaginative building blocks of media worlds-in-the-making, as speculative in many ways as current discourses around new media.

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Visions and ruins

10.7228/manchester/9781526125934.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Joshua Davies

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Cultural Production ◽

Cultural Memory ◽

Social Identities ◽

Subject Formation ◽

Medieval Period ◽

The Past ◽

A Site ◽

The Middle Ages

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.

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Abstraction and ineffability in the visual cultural central middle ages and intersubjective apophatic imagination: a first approximation

Revista Palabra y Razón ◽

10.29035/pyr.20.113 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 113-141

Author(s):

Daniel González Erices

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Eleventh Century ◽

Religious Images ◽

Divine Essence ◽

First Approximation ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

Pseudo Dionysius

Abstract and quasi-abstract motifs were widely used in the religious images of the central Middle Ages. In many cases, these were certainly not simple ornamental devices but, on the contrary, they functioned as cognitively challenging semiotic devices affected by complex theological ideas. As this article will suggest, the miniatures discussed here — produced in the Byzantine, Insular, Carolingian, and Ottonian contexts — were created in accordance with apophatic spirituality, using nonfigurative representation to emphasise God’s ineffability. Thus, visual culture from the late seventh to the early eleventh century established an intricate transregional network in which iconic and symbolic contents were communicated rhizomatically. This phenomenon will be described here as the intersubjective apophatic imagination. The aim of this notion is to reflect the influence of important authors, whether closely or distantly associated with the via negativa, such as Pseudo Dionysius Areopagita, Kosmas Indikopleustes, Bede, and Ioannes Scotus Eriugena. Taking these elements into account, the article will argue that the aesthetic and semantic singularities of the images in question would have sought to avoid the presentification of meaning as a way of capturing the incomprehensibility of the divine essence.

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