During the later Middle Ages people became increasingly obsessed with vision, visual analogies and the possibility of visual error. In this book Dallas Denery addresses the question of what medieval men and women thought it meant to see themselves and others in relation to the world and to God. Exploring the writings of Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Peter Aureol and Nicholas of Autrecourt in light of an assortment of popular religious guides for preachers, confessors and penitents, including Peter of Limoges' Treatise on the Moral Eye, he illustrates how the question preoccupied medieval men and women on both an intellectual and practical level. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary examination of the interplay between religious life, perspectivist optics and theology. Denery presents significant new insights into the medieval psyche and conception of the self, ensuring that this book will appeal to historians of medieval science and those of medieval religious life and theology.

In Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Donna Sadler explores the manner in which worshipers responded to the carved and polychromed retables adorning the altars of their parish churches. Framed by the symbolic death of Christ re-enacted during the Mass, the historical account of the Passion on the retable situated Christ’s suffering and triumph over death in the present. The dramatic gestures, contemporary garb, and wealth of anecdotal detail on the altarpiece, invited the viewer’s absorption in the narrative. As in the Imitatio Christi, the worshiper imaginatively projected himself into the story like a child before a dollhouse. The five senses, the sculptural medium, the small scale, and the rhetoric of memory foster this immersion.

Oxbow says: This fascinating study of how people understood and used their senses in the late medieval period draws on evidence from a range of literary texts, documents and records, as well as material culture and architectural sources.

Lynn R. Huber argues that the visionary aspect of Revelation, with its use of metaphorical thinking and language, is the crux of the text's persuasive power. Emerging from a context that employs imagery to promote imperial mythologies, Revelation draws upon a long tradition of using feminine imagery as a tool of persuasion. It does so even while shaping a community identity in contrast to the dominant culture and in exclusive relationship with the Lamb. By drawing upon the work of medieval and modern visionaries, Huber answers a call to examine the way 'real' readers engage with biblical texts. Revealing how Revelation continues to persuade audiences through appeals to the visual and provocative imagery she offers a new sense of how the text metaphorical language simultaneously limits and invites new meaning, unfurling a range of interpretations.

Marking the 50th anniversary of Lewis’ death, TheIntellectual World of C. S. Lewis sees leading Christianthinker Alister McGrath offering a fresh approach to understandingthe key themes at the centre of Lewis’ theological work andintellectual development. Brings together a collection of original essays exploringimportant themes within Lewis’ work, offering new connectionsand insights into his theology Throws new light on subjects including Lewis’intellectual development, the uses of images in literature andtheology, the place of myth in modern thought, the role of theimagination in making sense of the world, the celebrated 'argumentfrom desire', and Lewis’ place as an Anglican thinker and aChristian theologian Written by Alister McGrath, one of the world’s leadingChristian thinkers and authors; this exceptional pairing of McGrathand Lewis brings together the work of two outstanding theologiansin one volume

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn, introduces a new ethical horizon distinct from, but in continuous interaction with ,conventional ethics. Spanning a great variety of media forms – from painting and photography to film, video, literature, fashion, graffiti, and installation art – this interdisciplinary collection offers a thorough reconceptualization of the relation between the aesthetics and the ethics of images and represents an innovative addition to the field of visual culture studies.

Visioning Technologies brings together a collection of texts from leading theorists to examine how architecture has been, and is, reframed and restructured by the visual and theoretical frameworks introduced by different ‘technologies of sight’ – understood to include orthographic projection, perspective drawing, telescopic devices, photography, film and computer visualization, amongst others. Each chapter deals with its own area and historical period of expertise, organized sequentially to mark out and analyse the historical evolution of how architecture has been transformed by technologically induced shifts in human perception from the 15th century until today. This book underlines the way in which architectural forms and design processes have developed historically in conjunction with the systems of sight we manufacture technologically and suggests this continues today. Paradoxically, it is premised on the argument that these technological systems tend, in their initial formulations, to obtain ever greater realism in our visualizations of the physical world.

Visions were highly popular in the late Middle Ages, whether preached as vivid stories from the pulpit, illuminated in saint-filled manuscripts, or experienced during the breathless anticipation of a Mass or eerie darkness of a Yorkshire graveyard. This volume is the first to map out the wide range of vision types in late medieval English lay piety. Analyzing 1000 visionary accounts gathered from sermon and exempla collections, religious devotional works, saints’ legends, and lay stories, it explores five central dynamics of spirituality that visions shaped and sustained: Transactions of Satisfaction (visits to and from purgatory and hell), Reciprocated Devotion (visitations of the saints), Spiritual Warfare (attacks by demons), Supra-Sacramental Sight (Mass and Passion sightings), and Mediated Revelation (prophetic visions).

The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer

This volume features essays that explore the insights of the 14th-century Parisian nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. It serves as a companion to the Latin text edition and annotated English translation of his question-commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. The contributors survey Buridan’s work both in its own historical-theoretical context and in relation to contemporary issues. The essays come in three main sections, which correspond to the three books of Buridan’s Questions. Coverage first deals with the classification of the science of the soul within the system of Aristotelian sciences, and surveys the main issues within it. The next section examines the metaphysics of the soul. It considers Buridan’s peculiar version of Aristotelian hylomorphism in dealing with the problem of what kind of entity the soul (in particular, the human soul) is, and what powers and actions it has, on the basis of which we can approach the question of its essence. The volume concludes with a look at Buridan’s doctrine of the nature and functions of the human intellect. Coverage in this section includes the problem of self-knowledge in Buridan’s theory, Buridan’s answer to the traditional medieval problem concerning the primary object of the intellect, and his unique treatment of logical problems in psychological contexts.