The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance

by Elina Gertsman

Elina Gertsman's multifaceted study introduces readers to the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death, an extraordinary subject that first emerged in western European art and literature in the late medieval era. Conceived from the start as an inherently public image, simultaneously intensely personal and widely accessible, the medieval Dance of Death proclaimed the inevitability of death and declared the futility of human ambition. Gertsman inquires into the theological, socio-historic, literary, and artistic contexts of the Dance of Death, exploring it as a site of interaction between text, image, and beholder. Pulling together a wide variety of sources and drawing attention to those images that have slipped through the cracks of the art historical canon, Gertsman examines the visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death, and proposes different modes of viewing for several paintings, each of which invited the beholder to participate in an active, kinesthetic experience.

356 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

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

Reviews

[Sarah Frisbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of her earlier books; great take on a fascinating subject; a little repetitive. Equal parts art history, textual history, and theatre.

[Mills College Library]

760.0446 G384 2010