The Body behind the Altar: The Transgression of Space and the Transformation of the Body in the Life and Revelations of Agnes Blannbekin (original) (raw)
Related papers
Audience and Spatial Experience in the Nuns' Church at Clonmacnoise.
Different Visions
Within the ruins of the so-called Nuns' Church, a twelfth-century building associated with the monastic complex of Clonmacnoise (Co. Offaly, Ireland), a weather-beaten acrobatic figure is incorporated into the sculptural decoration of the structure's interior arch (Figures 1-2). Located on the seventh voussoir of the third arch sandwiched between two chevrons, this figure's bulbous head and long, splayed legs emphasize the display of her genitals to the viewer. Such a figure might not seem so unusual when considered as one example of the many acrobatic or erotic sculptures that exist on contemporaneous churches across Europe. However, this figure's location -on an interior arch, and in a space for women -warrants further consideration.
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History, 2014
After decades of neglect, sacred space has become a popular field of research in the past few years. In the course of a spatial turn in the humanities, historians have started to study space, including the interior of churches, as constituted by action within it. 1 At the same time, the collaboration with art historians has brought the decoration of churches and their transformations during the early modern period to the attention of historians who, thanks to another turn, had only recently become receptive to images as objects of study. 2 As a result, traditional notions of a destruction of the sanctity of space during the Reformation on the one hand and the restoration or preservation of sacred space in the Counter-Reformation on the other have been called into question. 3 In particular, recent studies have uncovered the complexity of Lutheran conceptions of sacred space, encompassing processes of both secularization and sacralization, which manifested themselves in the preservation of medieval works of art, in the installation of new images in Lutheran * I wish to thank Renate Dürr, Fabian Fechner, Susanne Junk, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Herman Roodenburg, and the ARG's anonymous reader for their helpful comments and Laura Melkonian for her proofreading as a native speaker.
This dissertation provides the first full-scale musicological study of Stuttgart 95, a thirteenth-century song book, formerly thought to be from the abbey of Weingarten. Upon further examination, it is clear that rather than a single unified corpus of Latin songs, the musical portions are composed of three separate layers. Furthermore, I argue that these layers were best understood as separate entities. This delineation between writing campaigns indicates that the original musical project likely constitutes a mostly intact collection, with only one or two folios missing from the beginning of the codex. Moreover, the song repertoire in the first layer is partially comprised of addenda entered into other Engelberg liturgical manuscripts, mainly at the close of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, shortly before the manufacture of Stuttgart 95. I focus, in particular, on the first layer of its musical corpora, arguing that the earliest stratum in this composite manuscript points to the double cloister of Engelberg as a likely provenance. As a collection of addenda, it demonstrates that musicians in Engelberg actively collected pieces that addressed Mary, the community’s patrona. I first discuss the consistent use of majuscule and rubrication to visually highlight the name of Mary amidst its surrounding text. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Mary along with each of these additional saints had liturgical ties to the double house of Engelberg; Mary was the monastery’s patrona, and the additional figures were either especially venerated at Engelberg or were the namesakes for dedicated altars or chapels in joint community’s churches. Furthermore, I contend that the music of Stuttgart 95 reflects a tradition of ‘decorating’ Mary’s name aurally by musical means, as in the case of melismatic migrating refrains used as either concluding elements or interpolations in antiphons and sequences. Finally, I assert that liturgy is a reflection of institutional identity, and that it served as a gendered discourse that affirmed the relationship between men and women religious of Engelberg.
Voices from altarpieces: Making sense of the sacred
Human Affairs, 2018
The article is a cultural-philosophical response to Ivan Gerát's Legendary Scenes and his art history interpretation of the function of Slovak hagiographic pictorial art of the Late Middle Ages. The thrust is on paintings of Christian ethical extremism, reflected in the principle of imitatio Christi. It led to the deaths of martyrs and saints in the name of the Faith. The preponderance of brutal scenes involving the tortured human body in this period art is examined in detail and it is suggested that these portrayals are disincentives that put off the mass culture beholder. The contextualist art history method employed in Gerát's book is gradually explored, along with its potential to transform the uninterested postmodern beholder into an intelligent beholder and art tourist. Attention is paid to the educational and national branding aspects of Legendary Scenes.