Visual Culture And The German Middle Ages

This multidisciplinary collection of essays draws on various theoretical approaches to explore the highly visual nature of the Middle Ages and expose new facets of old texts and artifacts. The term "visual culture" has been used in recent years to refer to modern media theory, film, modern art and other contemporary representational forms and functions. But this interest in visuality is not only a modern phenomenon. Discourses on visual processes pervade the works of medieval theologians, scholastics, and secular poets alike. The Middle Ages was a highly visual period in which images, objects, and performance played a dominant communicative and representative role in both secular and religious areas of society. The essays in this volume, which present various perspectives on medieval visual culture, provide a critical historical basis for the study of visuality and visual processes.

Challenging the concept that visual culture is predominately a product of the modern era, the 11 essays presented here by Starkey (U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US) and Wenzel (Humboldt U., Germany) explore the visual culture of medieval Germany, encompassing images, objects, and performance, and including descriptive textual passages. The authors approach their topics from a variety of perspectives, addressing such issues as the intersection between the verbal and the visual in the textual redaction of illustrated manuscripts, manuscript variation in the transmission of the courtly epic as reflective of different coexisting oral texts, the visual nature of courtly culture as depicted in literary texts, religious plays and visions as the result of desire for the enactment of the hidden meaning of the Scriptures, and the development of religious texts in the context of changing information technology. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Kathryn Starkey is assistant professor at the University of North Carolina.

Horst Wenzel is professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin.