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The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness book cover

1st Edition

The Four Modes of Seeing Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness

Edited By Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Ellen M. Shortell Copyright 2009
    610 Pages
    by Routledge

    610 Pages
    by Routledge

    Borrowing its title from Madeline Harrison Caviness's influential work on the modes of seeing articulated by the twelfth-century cleric Richard of Saint Victor, this interdisciplinary collection brings together the work of thirty scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Each author has contributed an original article that engages with ideas formulated in Caviness's wide-ranging scholarship. The historiographic introduction discusses themes in Caviness's publications and their importance for art historical and medieval studies today. The book's thematic matrix groups together essays concerned with: The Material Object, Documentary Reconstruction, Post-Disciplinary Approaches, Multiple Readings, Gender and Reception, Performativity, Text and Image, Collecting and Consumption, and Politics and Ideology. The contributors include curators, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. Their subjects range from medieval stained glass to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, the Sachsenspiegel, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Many foreground issues of gender, reception, and textuality, which have permeated Caviness's scholarship. Some also present approaches to sites that have been the subject of important studies by Caviness, including Canterbury, Chartres, Reims, Saint-Denis, Sens, and Troyes. The volume offers a broad range of methodological approaches to key topics in the study of medieval imagery and thus highlights the vitality of the field today.

    Contents: Introduction. Part 1: The Material Object: The glazing of Siena Cathedral's fenestra rotunda magna: preliminary observations from a production standpoint, Renée K. Burnam; Holding hands in the Virgin Chapel at Beauvais Cathedral, Michael W. Cothren; The Asseburg-Hedwig glass re-emerges, Timothy Husband; Material meaning: stained glass and the questions of authenticity, reception, workshop practice, and aesthetics, Virginia Chieffo Raguin. Part 2: Documentary Reconstruction: Prior Wibert's fountain houses: service and symbolism at Christ Church, Canterbury, Peter J. Fergusson; Sir William Horne and his 'scowred' window at Snailwell, Cambridgeshire, Richard Marks; Learning from Muskau: the Throne of Solomon window from the Carmelite Church at Boppard and its donation by Jakob von Sierck, Archbishop of Trier (1439-1456), Rüdiger Becksmann; Images lost/texts found: the original glazing program at Notre-Dame of Noyon, Evelyn Staudinger Lane. Part 3: Post-Disciplinary Approaches: Stained glass and architecture at Saint-Remi of Reims and at Braine: distinct or complementary disciplines?, Anne Prache; The integrated cathedral: thoughts on 'holism' and Gothic architecture, Paul Crossley; The sacred topography of Chartres Cathedral: the reliquary chasse of the Virgin in the liturgical choir and stained-glass decoration, Claudine Lautier; Frames of vision: architecture and stained glass at Clermont Cathedral, Michael T. Davis; 'The widows' money' and artistic integration in the axial chapel at Saint-Quentin, Ellen M. Shortell. Part 4: Multiple Readings: The center portal on the West façade at Reims: axes of meaning, Dorothy Gillerman; Seeing and understanding narrative and thematic method in the stained glass of the choir of Königsfelden ca. 1330-1340, Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz; Modes of seeing Margaret of Antioch at Fornovo di Taro, Elizabeth C. Parker; Archbishops named and unnamed in the stained glass of Reims, Meredith Parsons Lillich. Part 5: Gender & Rec

    Biography

    Evelyn Staudinger Lane is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA, USA.

    Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art History, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.

    Ellen M. Shortell is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Critical Studies, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, USA.

    ’This is one of the most important books about medieval art to be published in recent years and will be of great value to stained glass historians. Produced as a festschrift in honour of the CVMA author, Professor Madeline Harrison Caviness, it consists of thirty original essays which apart from discussing stained glass, also cover many of Madeline’s other interests, such as gender studies and how art has been collected and why. The editors deserve immense credit for overseeing such a large and varied book and making its ideas available to a wider audience. It is almost certainly likely to become a standard reference book for students of stained glass...’ Vidimus

    ’In this volume, the editors Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Ellen M. Shortell have created not only a spectacular and entirely fitting tribute to the broad and extensive research of Madeline Harrison Caviness, but also a work that will surely become a standard reference book for scholars and students in the field of medieval art history.’ The Medieval Review

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