Description
Book SynopsisLittle remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches.
In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists. For Chaucer, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, the image debate provides an urgent language for exploring the demands of a material devotional culture—though these writers by no means agree on the ethics of those demands. The chronicler Henry Knighton invoked a statue of St. Katherine to illustrate a lurid story
Trade Review
"This will be a widely read book that addresses an integral (and under-thought) aspect of late medieval culture and its complex traffic in images. The book should be of interest to all involved in the visual and verbal culture of the late Middle Ages. It is original and innovative." * Sarah Beckwith, Duke University *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Premodern Fetishes
FETISH, IDOL, ICON
Chapter 1. Knighton's Lollards, Capgrave's Katherine, and Walter Hilton's "Merk Ymage"
Chapter 2. The Despenser Retable and 1381
CHAUCER'S SENTIMENTAL POETIC
Chapter 3. Chaucer and Images
Chapter 4. Translating Griselda
Chapter 5. The Clergeon's Tongue
MOVING PICTURES
Chapter 6. Nicholas Love's Mirror: Dead Images and the Life of Christ
Chapter 7. Arts of Self-Patronage in The Book of Margery Kempe
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
