Portraits and Poses

The complex relation between gender and the representation of intellectual authority has deep roots in European history. Portraits and Poses adopts a historical approach to shed new light on this topical subject. It addresses various modes and strategies by which learned women (authors, scientists, jurists, midwifes, painters, and others) sought to negotiate and legitimise their authority at the dawn of modern science in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (1600–1800). This volume explores the transnational dimensions of intellectual networks in France, Italy, Britain, the German states and the Low Countries. Drawing on a wide range of case studies from different spheres of professionalisation, it examines both individual and collective constructions of female intellectual authority through word and image. In its innovative combination of an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this volume contributes to the growing literature on women and intellectual authority in the Early Modern Era and outlines contours for future research.

Word and Image. Polish Medieval and Renaissance Religious Writings in the European Context

The article presents the Polish religious writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as an expression of correspondence between the word and image. It also demonstrates the impact of European graphics, including Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, upon Polish religious works of the period (such as the works by Pseudo-Bonaventura in his rendering of Baltazar Opec’s Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta and Jan Sandecki’s Historie biblijne or Rozmyślania dominikańskie. The article also emphasizes that it was Dürer who paved the way for the book illustration, thus turning woodcuts into an art form in their own right. The fifteenth century was a watershed in book culture. As new illustration techniques at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encouraged the growth of illustrated printed books, the codex became obsolete.

Material evidence? Re-approaching elite women’s seals and charters in late medieval Scotland

Medieval Scottish women’s seals remain largely unexplored compared to the scholarship on seals and sealing practice elsewhere in medieval Britain. This article has two chief aims. First, it seeks to demonstrate the insufficiencies of the 19th- and 20th-century Scottish seal catalogues as a mediated record of material evidence and the use of them as comprehensive and go-to reference texts within current research on late medieval Scotland. This includes a discussion of the ways in which medieval seals survive as original impressions, casts and illustrations and how these different types of evidence can be used in the construction and reconstruction of the seal’s and charter’s context. Second, this paper will explore the materiality and interconnectedness of seals and the charters to which they are attached. A reading of these two objects together emphasises the legal function of the seal and shows its distinctive purpose as a representational object. While the seal was used in con-texts beyond the basic writ charter, it remained a legally functional and (auto)biographical object, and, as such, the relationship between seal and charter informs meaning in representational identities expressed in both. The article will apply this approach to several examples of seals belonging to 14th- and 15th-century Scottish countesses. Evidence reviewed this way provides new insight into Scottish women’s sealing practice and female use of heraldic device. The deficiencies of assuming women’s design to be formulaic or that their seals can be usefully interpreted in isolation from the charters to which they were attached will be highlighted. The interconnectedness of word and image conveyed personal links and elite ambitions, and promoted noble lineage within the legal context of charter production.

Coda

The larger intersection between word and image, as a way of presenting English identity and especially the countryside, is demonstrated in the films of Humphrey Jennings and the engravings of F. L. Griggs, both suggesting an ideal under threat, first by change, then by coming war. Some government publications offer a final address to the idea of a lost Eden. Edwin Lutyens’ Thiepval memorial, a series of intersecting arches to contain over 70 000 names of the missing, balances the Cenotaph in using words to dominate idea and form. Elsewhere, words and images collapse into each other, as in H. G.Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through. The final concern is with what is revealed by the kinds of verbal and visual works discussed throughout the book: a series of glimpses into a society revolving around the home and an imagined countryside, with a mixture of sincerity and vulnerability.

Book, Image, and Social Presence

In the early 1920s, the literary editor Sidney Clark wrote about English classic texts as moral guides for new readers. In 1932, Q. D. Leavis bemoaned the growth of popular fiction as simple escape. More positive overall was the growth of books as constructions of word and image, not just through illustrations but in all aspects of design, layout and increasingly through pictorial dust jackets in books of all kinds. Design of covers and binding revealed much about contents, with the Left Book Club and its rival Right Book Club the most extreme, declaring their content and political stance. In new homes, books became a way of presenting the owners’ tastes to visitors; the design of Penguin Books in particular made purchasing easier and cheaper, and also offered books of many kinds, identifiable by colour-coded covers, to new readers.

Fundamentals and dominants of poetics by N.S. Leskov

In the presented article formative foundations and dominants of mnemonic poetics of N.S. Leskov were identified and formulated (based on the research of scientists of recent years). The main ones are considered. As part of the interaction of word and image, the correspondence of verbal and visible, the question was raised about the nature of the image among Leskov — intensely icon-painting, about the dialectics of classical and art-historical ecfrasis; the picture dominates the genre of the novel (in particular, “Bypassed” (1965)), the icon — in small genres (for example, “situation story”). Dialogue as a constructive principle in Leskov’s prose inherits the methods and techniques of philosophy dating back to the experiments of Socrates’ selfconsciousness (469–399 BC) and G.S. Skovorody (1722–1794). These features of the text in turn determine the functions of a word that problematizes specific moral concepts and moves the reader to his own ethical choice. Leskov’s artistic reception is simultaneously turned to legend and is innovative. The text of the Russian classical writer is always located on the border of archaic and modern. This feature of Leskov’s prose is clearly demonstrated by the creative history of the literary and artistic game “Flea” (1924–1931), the text-source of which is the story “Left” (1881). Established — memory, experience, tradition underlie the poetic system of the classic writer.

Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas---not least the idea of the power of visual art---across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, 1920s-mid-60s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, narrative and visual composition shifted in both cases toward acknowledging the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates and preoccupations are part of the story told here.