Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna

by Elina Gertsman

In Worlds Within, Elina Gertsman investigates the Shrine Madonnas, or Vierges ouvrantes--sculptures that conceal within their bodies complex carved and/or painted iconographies. The Shrine Madonna emerged in Europe at the end of the 1200s and reached a peak of popularity during the following three centuries. Gertsman argues that the appearance of these objects--predicated as they are on the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation--points to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex, performative ways in which audiences were expected to engage with devotional images, both in public and in private. Worlds Within considers these fascinating sculptures in terms of the rhetoric of secrecy, the discourse of containment, and the tropes of unveiling. Gertsman demonstrates how the statues were associated with the processes of seeing and memory-making and how they functioned as instruments of revelatory knowledge and spiritual reformation in the context of late medieval European culture.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2015

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