Thieves of Time: The Usurer and the Prostitute in Jacques de Vitry's Exempla (original) (raw)
Related papers
Liturgies are multisensory reconstructions of narratives. Enacted in highly structured architectural spaces, supported by visual representations, by sounds, smell, touch, and movement, medieval liturgies created and sustained a repertoire of narratives, reframing identities and social meanings. These multimodal forms of social communication tap into powerful structuring processes in human cognition, redefining the boundaries between self and other and reorganizing the hierarchy of values. Participatory multimodal enactments of narrative dramas, defining new goals, obstacles, resources, and strategies, communicate a collective vision that not only informs, but transforms. The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars studying individual and collective identity formation within texts, material culture, and performative liturgies in the middle ages with researchers from cognitive science and visual communication to build a new integrated framework for understanding social change and the multimodal communicative tools developed to foster such change. We ask, how did the liturgy change people? What were the underlying principles for its design? What can we learn about the cognitive and cultural processes involved in social change from liturgical practices and its underlying theories?
New Research on Old Chant, 2018
In personal conversations with Andrew Hughes and Michel Huglo, I received apparently contradictory analyses of the state of contemporary chant scholarship: according to Hughes, many musicologists did not utilize computers effectively enough in their research, while according to Huglo, many musicologists relied too heavily on computer-based research while neglecting the study of history. While not attempting to speak on behalf of Hughes or Huglo or to fully adjudicate their claims, in this presentation I will reflect on the prospects and limitations of computer-based liturgical and musicological research. As a concrete example, I will give special focus to my own experiments using plagiarism detection software to study the reception of liturgical texts by Thomas Aquinas, describing the potential usefulness of the approach while also analyzing the potential pitfalls of utilizing the results of this method without an adequate grasp of the historical context of Aquinas's corpus.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2020
boundaries as well, such as those of page and section, she argues that the interaction of texts and visual elements create an imagined community who "must collectively invent and imagine movement between and beyond its borders, and drink from the River Lethe to forget its historical conflicts" (157). "Image and Illusion in Francis Quarles's Emblems and Pamphlets" attends to a "visual rhetoric of duplication" (170), which she argues works to inculcate an "ethos of visual vigilance" (181), pointing to how, paradoxically, Emblemes ultimately avails itself of the very optical processes for which it expresses misgivings. The second part extends the argument into his political pamphlets, which mingle commentary of negative visual processes, such as folly induced by imagination, with that of judgment borne of observation. Finally, in chapter 5, Reid shifts her attention from characters on the page to the stage, making the case that in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, "performance, like reading, necessitated a collective, though fragile, construction of what was seen that operated through modes of refraction and alteration" (197). Reid concludes by bringing her findings to bear on current discussions of new media, proposing a model for visual reading that eschews "immaculate perception" (230) by acknowledging the complexities of mediated vision. The holistic approach Reid takes is just one of this book's contributions, allowing her to address the literary text, the illustration, decoration, and other bibliographic features in one fell swoop. Though she attends especially to illustration and text, she also considers elements often regarded as purely decorative, showing that they also help to articulate the ambivalence toward vision that she traces. One drawback to this approach, however, is that it assumes more of a single controlling agency who oversaw the book's design than was probably the case. Though Reid acknowledges the various agencies involved in the design and compilation of early modern books, and focuses instead on the "potential co-creation of meaning between the visual interfaces of this text and the reader" (115), some readers may be troubled by the category of intention. Overall, however, Reading by Design is a valuable contribution to a growing body of scholarship that challenges oversimplifications of early print cultures.
The Shepherd's Song: Metaliteracy & Theatricality in French & Italian Pastoral. (Ph.D. Dissertation)
From its inception, pastoral literature has maintained a theatrical quality and an artificiality that not only resonate the escapist nature of the mode but underscore the metaliterary awareness of the author. A popular mode of writing in antiquity and the middle ages, pastoral reached its apex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with works like Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Tasso’s Aminta, and Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée. This study seeks to examine and elucidate the performative qualities of the pastoral imagination in Italian and French literature during its most popular period of expression, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Selecting representative works including the pastourelles of Jehan Erart and Guiraut Riquier, the two vernacular pastoral works of Boccaccio, Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Tasso’s Aminta, and D’Urfé’s Astrée, I offer a comparative analysis of pastoral vernacular literature in France and Italy from the medieval period through the seventeenth century. Additionally, I examine the relationship between the theatricality of the works and their setting. Arcadia serves as a space of freedom of expression for the author. I posit that the pastoral realm of Arcadia is directly inspired not by the Greek mountainous region but by the Italian peninsula, thus facilitating the transposition of Arcadia into the author’s own geographical area. A secondary concern is the motif of death and loss in the pastoral as a repeated commonplace within the mode. Each of these factors contributes to an understanding of the implicit contract that the author endeavors to forge with the reader, exhorting the latter to be active in the reading process.
On the lower walls of the Upper Church at Assissi there is a series of frescoes (1297-1300) by Giotto that celebrate the life of St Francis as recounted in Bonaventure’s life of the saint (from which excerpts are found beneath each fresco). One of these frescoes, The Crib at Greccio, shows an unusual view of the exposed carpentry on the verso of the cross fixed above the doorway of the solid tramezzo screen that divides the chorus from the nave. The lecture explores the issue of whether the purpose of this view strangely occluded cross is to interrupt the customary focus of the devout on the mass that takes place on the frontal side of the cross on the other side of the screen. Would this increase the emotional impact of the miraculous vision associated with St Francis’s unprecedented nativity play (that other mass) taking place in the chorus with priest, the saint himself, monks and leading citizens of the city? What is the significance of displacing the scene from its humble hill town setting at Greccio to this new setting in the wealthy Franciscan church pictured in the fresco? Does this deviation from the Bonaventure’s text increase the prestige of the order without destroying the spontaneity of the event? Does it constitute a precedent for liturgy with fresh and moving ideological connotations? Finally, is the setting of the nativity drama in the chorus a ‘front region’ masquerading as a ‘back region’ (in Irving Goffmann’s terms) providing worshippers in the actual church with an especially privileged and emotional identification with the events taking place within the fictional church? Contrasts will be made with Duccio’s double-sided Maestà at Siena, and innovative use will be made of the theories of indeterminacy attributed to the ‘wrong’ sides of things by philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Luc Ferry and Jan Patocka.