The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Stanbury, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812240383 ISBN 13: 9780812240382

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Little 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 about image-breaking Lollards. Later John Capgrave wrote a long Katherine legend that comments, through the drama of a saint in action, on the powers and uses of religious images. As Stanbury contends, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and troubled by its "culture of the spectacle," whether this spectacle took the form of a newly made queen in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale or of the animate Christ in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable. In picturing images and icons, these texts were responding to reformist controversies as well as to the social and economic demands of things themselves, the provocative objects that made up the fabric of ritual life.

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Sarah Stanbury is Monsignor Murray Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Seeing the Gawain-Poet and coeditor, with Linda Lomperis, of Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Introduction: Premodern Fetishes

One of the most startling survivals of English gothic architecture is the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral. Begun in 1321 and completed in 1349, the chapel is an undivided, open structure measuring 100 feet long by over 40 feet wide, the widest span of any English church, with vaulting soaring to 60 feet (fig. 1). It seems, on first sight, cavernous. The sense of emptiness may derive partly from the effect of light; except for a few painted fragments on the south wall, the five perpendicular windows on each side are unglazed, as are the great east and west windows. It also may come from the absence of color. Walls, ceiling and floor are almost entirely unpainted gray limestone and marble (fig. 2). Yet the sense of starkness comes through most dramatically by the absence of images. Even though a circuit of elaborately carved canopied niches runs around the walls beneath the windows, all of them are empty; and although you can see figures, as in the spandrels above, the heads of virtually all them have been cut off. All of the 147 statues of Mary and other saints have had their heads knocked off in a purging inspired by Reformation iconoclasm—carried out, so one story goes, in the late 1530s by Thomas Cromwell's men, who rode through the chapel on horses, smashing the glass with their pikes and lopping off the heads of images with their swords, leaving the chapel a gallery of the headless (fig. 3). To call the Lady Chapel a gothic survival is in fact a misnomer, since its architectural attitude today, a kind of grand simplicity, owes far more to Reformation image-breakers than to the fourteenth-century craftsmen who designed its space and decorated its interior.

Reflecting on the dramatic iconoclasm that transformed this space in The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O'Connell also pictures Ely's chapel as a point of departure for, in his case, a study in tensions of the visual in early modern theater. What made its sculptures and its glass painting so abhorrent to sensibilities in the 1540s that they had to be defaced? My first visit, in the mid-90s, to this haunting survival made me wonder what was lost: What would the Ely Lady Chapel have looked like in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Inference from contemporary iconography and from the surviving program indicates a particularly concerted, spare-no-expense, effort for the spectacular effect. Niches were filled with images of saints and bishops, while a narrative life and miracles of the Virgin circulated in the spandrels above. The carving, as Nicola Coldstream observes, was exceptional for its grace and detailing. Paint was used for vivid and dramatic effect. Surviving stained glass fragments suggest that all the glass would have been painted. The interior as a whole, which a nineteenth-century architectural historian described as "one of the grandest specimen of medieval architecture," was decorated in "figures of roses, lilies, and crosses, painted in prominent colours on a ground of whitewash."

Little of this remains; and indeed, only a small percentage of the devotional material culture of pre-Reformation England as a whole is still extant today. Many of the objects we can see today exist in mutilated form, like the Seven Sacraments Font in Norwich Cathedral (fig. 4). Ely's Lady Chapel is a fascinating memorial in the history of the object, testimony to the vital linkages in late medieval and Reformation England of "art" with patronage, power, and ethical passions. The century and a half preceding the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officers were ordered to remove images from their churches, saw a dramatic efflorescence in devotional art of all kinds, not only in England but also across Europe. Historians have amply documented this dramatic proliferation. Images of the saints offer just one example. Eamon Duffy, who has written extensively on the vitality of fifteenth-century lay worship, remarks on the "luxuriant flourishing of the devotion to the saints" as manifested in the long inventories of images and painted pictures that could be found in most fifteenth-century parishes. As Richard Marks has recently noted, the flourishing of saints' images in the fifteenth century reflected a transformation in their cultic use from distanced iconic objects to personalized intercessionary agents. Proliferating on chantry altars and on murals covering parish walls, saints' images transformed the nave, the single public space of the parish church, from unadorned aisle to gallery. Saints, newly personalized, also came to face the parish congregation on painted screens separating the chancel from the nave. An early fifteenth-century innovation, screens painted with images of the saints and holy family multiplied in "dazzling array" throughout English parishes, as Paul Binski says. Saints also appeared on painted wooden panels, a new portable kind of devotional object, and as wood and alabaster carvings, either free-standing or in bas relief. In addition to images of saints, paintings and statues of Christ's life and Passion, of the Trinity, of bishops and lay and even of clerical donors also proliferated throughout churches and cathedrals in late medieval England. As Michael Camille comments, late medieval Europe saw an "image-explosion" that profoundly altered the relationship between viewers and devotional objects: "Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle did not suddenly come about in the twentieth century; its roots lay in the multiplication of image investment, in altars, statues, paintings, and windows that cluttered the medieval church."

The chapters in this book, spanning the period from the 1380s to the mid-1400s, examine the dynamic image culture of late medieval England through the responses of its textual commentators. Through a reading of literary texts—and in one case, an altarpiece—I explore how the representation of devotional images in those texts engages with performances staged by what we might think of as the premier vehicle of the medieval media: the church, with its daily performances of sacred ritual in spaces visually illustrated with its founding narratives by statues in wood and alabaster, stained glass, embroidery, and panel and wall painting. As these writings and objects demonstrate, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and even troubled by its "culture of the spectacle," whether spectacle took the form of a newly-made queen as in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, or of representation of Christ's life and death, as we see in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable and in Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Life of Christ.

Although visual evidence of England's image-culture has been largely destroyed or moved to museums, testimony to a world of powerfully animate devotional forms survives in the rhetoric of affective piety. The desire to see, expressed so insistently in late medieval religious lyrics and dream vision poetry, might even have been voiced, in part, as a response to a culture of images and their strategic deployment in liturgical spectacle. A striking and recurring feature of the representation of visual experience in late medieval England is the expression of desire—at times profoundly erotic, at other times deeply spiritual—such that we may describe the drive to see as one of the great passions and great myths structuring medieval representation. The desire to see fuels some of the most important prose and poetry of the late Middle Ages, shaping the language of desire in lyrics of the Passion, with their repeated calls to look on the suffering Christ; structuring the trajectories of desire in dream visions such as Pearl; offering a set of terms for meditation in the Showings of Julian of Norwich; grounding the narrative of religious instruction in Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; and offering...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812240383
• ISBN 13: 9780812240382
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 290
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande