Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces

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