Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces

Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture

by Elina Gertsman (Editor), Jill Stevenson (Editor)

This aptly-named book brings all manner of boundary-crossing into one provocative, material space in which we can view the riches of state-of-the-art scholarship on medieval and early modern visual culture. Gail McMurray Gibson, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Humanities, Davidson College

The essays in this collection explore the thresholds between the visual and verbal, the sensory and performative, the literal and metaphorical, the social and epistemological that shaped the cultural matrix of the Middle Ages. The contributors' interrelated interests in patronage, word-image relationships, reception theory, gender studies, close visual and textual analysis, and performance criticism make for a valuable interdisciplinary mix that highlights the importance of studying medieval material culture in its many manifestations and valences. The book benefits from the ambitious cross-disciplinary explorations and engagements with contemporary theory undertaken in the field of medieval studies in recent decades, especially those by Pamela Sheingorn, to whom the volume is dedicated.

Jill Stevenson is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, Marymount Manhattan College; Elina Gertsman is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art, Case Western Reserve University.

Richard K. Emmerson, Kathryn A. Smith, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Marilynn Desmond, Adelaide Bennett, Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Diane Wolfthal, Corine Schleif, Rachel Dressler, Glenn Burger, Robert L. A. Clark, Jenna Soleo-Shanks, Glenn Ehrstine, Colum Hourihane

Table of Contents

Publications of Pamela Sheingorn
Limning the Field - Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson
On the Threshold of the Last Negotiating Image and Word in the Apocalypse of Jean de Berry - Richard K Emmerson
The Monk Who Crucified Himself - Kathryn A. Smith
The Lumere as lais and its Pictorial Evidence from British Library MS Royal 15 D II - Lucy Freeman Sandler
Reading and Visuality in Stephen Scrope's Translatio of Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea - Marilynn Desmond
Making Literate Lay Women Text and Image in French and Flemish Books of Hours, 1220-1320 - Adelaide Bennett
Women and the Italian Renaissance Illuminated Manuscript - J J G Alexander
The Sexuality of the Medieval Comb - Diane Wolfthal
Kneeling on the Donors Negotiating Realms Betwixt and Between - Corine Schleif
Sculptural Representation and Spatial Appropriation in a Medieval Chantry Chapel - Rachel Dressler
In the Merchant's Bedchamber - Glenn Burger
Liminality and Literary Texts par personnages in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture - Robert L. A. Clark
From Stage to Siena's Caleffo dell'Assunta , Spectacular Machines, and the Promotion of Civic Power - Jenna Soleo-Shanks
Passion Spectatorship Between Private and Public Devotion - Glenn Ehrstine
Afterword. Pamela An Appreciation - Colum Hourihane
Bibliography

406 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2012

About the author

Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.

Professor Gertsman specializes in Gothic and late medieval art. Her research interests include issues of memory and perception; uncanny animation of inanimate objects; medieval image theory; performance/performativity; multi-sensory reception processes; late medieval macabre; materiality and somaticism; and medieval concepts of emotion and affectivity. Many of these topics are explored in the broad range of graduate and undergraduate courses she teaches at CWRU.

Prof. Gertsman is the author of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (2010) and Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (2015). The Dance of Death, which was awarded the Medieval Academy of America subvention and the Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the International Center for Medieval Art, won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America for the best first book in medieval studies in 2014. Worlds Within was awarded the Millard Meiss Publication Grant and the Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the ICMA. Prof. Gertsman is the editor of Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (2008) and Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (2011), and co-editor of Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces (2012). Most recently, she guest-edited an issue of the journal Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (published by Penn State Press), titled “Animating Medieval Art.”

Prof. Gertsman’s articles have appeared in many peer-reviewed collections and journals such as Gesta, Studies in Iconography, and Art History. A recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kress Foundation, she was recently awarded a year-long fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to pursue work on her third monograph. She currently serves on the board of directors of the International Center for Medieval Art.

Prof. Gertsman is working on several new projects including the monograph on emptiness in late medieval art, tentatively titled Figuring Absence; a focus exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art co-curated with Stephen Fliegel; and the book co-authored with Barbara Rosenwein, The Middle Ages in 50 Objects.

To learn more about Prof. Gertsman’s scholarship, please visit https://case.academia.edu/ElinaGertsman