CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
Invited speakers
Agency, Beauty and Late-Medieval Sculpture
One of the central aims of this conference is to offer an historically grounded analysis of the agency of objects. In my paper, I will explore the extent to which this project is possible by drawing on the way in which the same issue has been dealt with from the perspective of recent phenomenologies of the art work. With this in mind, I will be addressing the question of agency by looking at how the work of art ‘works’ in a reciprocal and dynamic way with the beholder. I will examine to what extent this reciprocal relationship between subject and object can be historicised. Are media-specific ways of ‘acting’ or ‘working’ trans-historical and their realisation in a specific context a selective expression of what is always potentially present? Or should the model governing the available possibilities also be understood as historically specific in its own right? Having explored these questions, I will then turn to consider a late medieval model of ‘beauty’ as an active quality akin to a voice, and how the phenomenology of prayer as a reciprocal ‘calling out’ may provide one way of integrating a modern conception of agency with a medieval view of subject-object interaction. In conclusion, I will attempt to suggest how this mixed model might be used to address some examples of late medieval sculpture and its environment.
The Bible between Material Book and Immaterial Word
Traditional research of the Bible in the sixteenth century has largely focused upon text and paratext, scrutinizing their content, in order to establish the place of a particular Bible edition within an increasingly confessionalized landscape. Recent theories, however, on the ‘Bible as an object’ have raised the question of how ‘objective’ features of Bibles were also agents of a certain confessional character and even inform us about intended readers and actual users. In this regard, the paper will first give attention to particular features such as format, lay-out, typefaces, images and other pictorial elements that translators and publishers choose for their Bible editions in order to give it a particular (confessional) character and with a view to a certain audience. Attention is moreover paid to users’ traces to determine whether a book had been intensively used: pages well-thumbed at the edges, irregular edges to the text-block or, only occasionally, small holes in the book caused by the reading at candlelight and even books containing food stains. This approach will also take into consideration readers’ marks, such as data of provenance and ownership, numbering of pages or foliation (not-content related), as well as annotations (content-related), and even pages and images that the reader or user added. This paper will examine how this triangle relationship between content, objective aspects of Bible editions, and traces of appropriation determined the (confessional) character of a certain edition and may also inform us about intended groups of readers as well as its actual use. It is the aim of this paper to present a theoretical framework of the study of the Bible as a material book (as mediator of the immaterial Word), illustrated through several examples of Bible editions and copies, in the awareness, however, that a complete view will require the examination of a broader, determined set of copies.
Phantoms of Emptiness: the Agency of (No)thing
This paper enquires into the agency of empty spaces that haunt late medieval manuscripts. In exploring the concept of emptiness as a locus of the unrepresentable, I will look at several fourteenth-century French codices that play with the displacement of the visible into the domain of the intellectual. Blankness becomes agentic in demanding performative participation from the viewer, and requiring that the beholder's vision, memory, and imagination are activated in an act of generative heuristics.
Miraculous Images
Images associated with miraculous activity in the early modern period have attracted growing attention in recent years and they raise the issue of agency in an acute form. They are artefacts which are treated in ways analogous to human agents and are apparently regarded as having the capacity to enact change in the world. Belief in this capacity can be taken as a historical datum, but is it possible to go beyond this observation and productively to explore the role assigned to these images? Whose agency do they embody and how might we understand the agency to be exercised? Rather than isolate such images in a separate and extraordinary category, I propose that they must be seen as embedded in networks of mundane activity and as continuous with other elements of visual and material culture.
Touching Skin. How Medieval Users Rubbed, Kissed, Inscribed, Splashed, Begrimed, and Pricked their Manuscripts
Nearly all medieval manuscripts were written on parchment, a material made from animal skin that endures even for centuries of hard use. But it does not do so unchanged. Parchment bears the marks of users, who inadvertently rub dirt and oil into the blank areas, revealing their ‘tracks’. It also records a different kind of touching: smearing, often directed and purposeful, that resulted from the various ritualistic activities that people carried out with their books. They touched some images—especially those depicting Jesus, Mary and saints—out of veneration, and they attacked others—including devils, Jews, Muslims, cross-dressers, and evildoers—out of hate.
I argue that the spaces of public readings, including the altar where the mass took place, the court where romances and other texts were performed, the cloister, the school, and the civic hall, were all places where authority figures not only read from books, but interacted with the images in them. Often their goal was simply to dramatise their performances, but audiences observed not only the contents of the text but new ways of handling the books themselves. They then took these ideas and applied them to new rituals and book types. For example, images of Christ, originally for missals where they were kissed by priests, were used in civic oath books to lend gravitas to swearing-in ceremonies. For the priest, the kiss confirms Christ’s presence in the book, which is the ‘word become flesh’. Secular users copied this ritual in their own prayer books to demonstrate the fervour of their piety, which was indexed by the degree to which they had destroyed their images out of love.
Just as love might be demonstrated by kissing, an inverse ritual developed to express loathing. Lectors at court, whose job was to entertain and edify members of the nobility, enlivened their renditions and demonstrated their own moral stance by rubbing out image of devils that rocked ships and caused lust. Besides the morals, audience members internalised new ways of handling their books. Furthermore, teachers and others rubbed out ‘obscene’ images, thereby demonstrating their moral stance through the indelible act of mutilation. Private book owners followed suit, similarly rubbing out devils and tormentors of Jesus, thereby disempowering the wicked. Both venerating and attacking images demonstrate the power people had invested in them.
As McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message. Parchment reveals its owner’s devotion, habits, and morality. It transmits authority in a culture steeped in a religion of the book. Grounding my work empirically in numerous examples in and theoretical models from phenomenology, media studies, art history, anthropology, and the history of theatre and performance, I plan to write a readable, highly-illustrated study in the history of the medieval book that will also speak to our current transition toward ever-more physically intertwined digital media.