3
Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers
Notions as to how medieval objects and buildings functioned for their first users, and how they looked to their first viewers, have expanded very rapidly in recent decades. Much art history followed literary criticism in a shift of focus from the planning and creation of a work – including its pictorial and textual sources – to the processes of constructing meanings and assigning values through reader/viewer responses.1 This paradigm shift has been broadly defined as “the transformation of the history of art into a history of images.”2 The central tenet is that “the meaning of a work of literature [or art], rather than inhering statically in the text [or image] itself or being recoverable from the author’s [or artist’s] intentions, is produced dynamically through the interaction between text [or image] and reader (or viewer).”3 We might think of this as a move from interrogation of all that lay “behind” the creation of the work, including any sources believed by earlier scholars to fix meanings in it, to a consideration of the varied readings that have arisen from viewing positions in front of the work after its completion, during its display or use. Art historians have predictably developed historical models that go further than literary reader-response criticism in attempting to (re)construct medieval readings.4 Thus the paradigm continues to be central to our field even though the theoretical debates go back to the 1980s.
Either mode of interrogation, whether of the circumstances leading to production, or of the “after-life” of the image, can be virtually infinite. Sources can extend back to classical antiquity; influences can be long lasting, while viewers have continued to provide different responses up to our own time. I will endeavor to restrict “reception” here to responses by the generation or two that viewed the work in its original cultural and spatial context. When reader/viewer responses are traced down to the present time they constitute a reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte), and this branch of inquiry has claimed the term “reception theory.”5 Art historians have learned to examine their own biases by attention to historiography and reception history, and such perceptions are needed to historicize our understanding of reader/viewer response. Thus, even in this discussion of medieval reception, it is necessary to consider how, for instance, the mid-twelfth-century writings on art by the Cistercian Abbot of Clairvaux and the Benedictine Abbot Suger of St Denis have been mediated through such influential modern scholars of iconography as Emile Mâle and Erwin Panofsky.6 As Arthur Watson and Peter Kidson have pointed out, they exaggerated Suger’s creative role, the “originality” of his projects, and therefore the influence of St Denis elsewhere.7 The power of Suger’s textualization of the St Denis projects, the availability of this text to modern scholars, and the allure of having a name that could displace anonymity, must have contributed to these easily repeated claims. However, stepping aside from such debates about primacy and attribution, it is possible to find new ways to read both the texts and the visual objects associated with them, from the perspective of their medieval reception. Broadly speaking, there are two avenues of approach to reception: As medieval historians we can weigh modern notions of decoding visual symbols according to semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and so on, along with medieval theories of signs, personae, and optics. And we can attempt to contextualize the medieval experience of a work of art by constructing an individual viewer (for instance the young queen who owned it), or a group that might have had a shared experience of the work.
What kinds of sources exist to indicate how medieval viewers reacted to visual objects? Functions that have been proposed for works of art range from providing spontaneous pleasure, altered consciousness, instruction, to even salutary terror. Yet clear and specific documents charting the immediate reception of a particular work of art by a medieval audience are very uncommon, at least before the late fourteenth century. There was nothing comparable to our modernist discourse of judicial criticism, largely because works did not circulate as commercial production. Praise of a new enterprise tended to be couched in generalities like variety, or well-worn topoi, such as the one claiming the richest materials, and even more superior craftsmanship. T. A. Heslop brought together a variety of such comments, as well as some of the negative criticism detailed below, noting the “ambivalence and contradictions inherent in medieval attitudes.”8 Since 1935 Ananda Coomaraswamy, Edgar de Bruyne, Meyer Schapiro, and most recently Umberto Eco are among scholars who have drawn on such texts to formulate some notion of medieval aesthetics.9 Schapiro claimed “a conscious taste of the spectators for the beauty of workmanship, materials, and artistic devices, apart from the religious meanings.”10 He posited medieval viewers of different stations and classes, some of whom had much in common with a modern secular audience. In his eagerness to claim a delight in non-religious motifs, Schapiro almost overlooked the cultural distance that separates a medieval audience from us. Eco, on the other hand, was determined to historicize medieval viewers, but depended on a surprisingly traditional array of theological and philosophical texts to posit top-down changing values. His account is historically grounded yet utterly impersonal, since he makes no attempt to substantiate pleasurable responses in a particular medieval audience.11
One of the best indications we have of an appreciative audience is imitation, so works themselves have been viewed as contributions to critical discourse. Yet the motivation for copying may not have been aesthetic. Richard Krautheimer long ago noted that the many buildings that medieval viewers claimed as imitations of the Holy Sepulcher vary so much in composition that he raised the question whether the form of the original had much importance in itself (as some modernists have assumed), or whether the essential similarity was numerical (twelve columns; eight sides, etc.) or conceptual (hexagonal and round, both being central-planned).12 Accounts by travelers proved to be useful in plotting reception because their descriptions were as “inaccurate” as the built copies.
The tendency to build ever more resplendent churches in northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has an element of competition attested to in the works themselves. Suger’s contemporary, Abbot Odo of St Remi in Reims, redecorated his Carolingian choir, including tomb effigies of ancient rulers.13 Then, within twenty years of the completion of the choir that engulfed the Carolingian crypt of St Denis in 1144, Abbot Peter of Celle rebuilt the choir of St Remi as an even more sumptuous entity. If these churchmen competed over a suitable enclosure for royal tombs, their competition over the prestigious cults of two apostles to France, St Denis and St Remigius, was more commonplace. Gervase, writing toward the end of the century, of the destroyed choir of Canterbury Cathedral that had been “gloriously completed” by 1124 under Prior Conrad, apologized for giving the impression that he was interested in “the mere arrangement of stones,” and assured his readers that his principal concern was the suitable placement of the relics of the saints.14 In those terms, buildings that look as different as the great Byzantinizing church of San Marco in Venice and the Romanesque pilgrim church of Santiago in Compostela may have had a dialogic relationship, as rival houses for apostolic relics. This assumption is supported by Suger, who wished his altar furnishings in St Denis to rival those of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, though he must have known they would not look alike; he concentrates on their costliness, but says nothing of outdoing the Western pilgrim churches by employing the new rib vaulting and supplying the portals with column statues.15
However, we cannot assign higher truth-value to the text than to the effort invested in the new components of the building; the contrast demonstrates the rhetorical and political aspects of Suger’s writing project. Gervase’s text has also been submitted to scrutiny, revealing its justificatory and even post-factum nature; the rhetorical purpose of Gervase’s praise of the various phases of the building becomes clearer with the late dating (c.1199) argued by Carol Davidson Cragoe.16 Thus such texts can be seen as vehicles for the manipulation of viewers’ reception, rather than truthful accounts of the motivation for a building campaign.
What of negative reactions? These usually stemmed from a long-standing Christian anxiety about icons, images, and idols, as well as about the expenditure of money on church decorations when it might be given to the poor.17 The best-known verbal attack on “art” from the High Middle Ages is the famous Apologia of St Bernard.18 Even without it, we could assume that the unadorned Cistercian enclaves satisfied very different communities from those of the great Benedictine abbey churches and the cathedrals. Indeed the disagreement was not about some fundamental notion of the role of images in the spiritual life of Christians (such as brought about Protestant iconoclasms), but a clear distinction drawn by both sides between different groups that we would now call “viewing communities”; St Bernard stated this clearly when he wrote: “For certainly bishops have one kind of business, and monks another. We know that since they [the bishops] are responsible for both the wise and the foolish, they stimulate the devotion of a carnal people with material ornaments because they cannot do so with spiritual ones.”19 He firmly believed that lavish and attractive “decorations” were not necessary for churchmen as aids to contemplation or to understanding scripture, but there is a note of disdain in Bernard’s characterization of the laity.
Another aspect that emerges from the occasional verbal attacks on new building programs, as well as from the silences in Suger’s text, is that novelty and inventiveness had no currency per se in a world that regarded departures from accepted wisdom as heretical.20 In this critical climate it is all the more likely that texts such as Suger’s, that praise new works and their patrons, should be regarded as self-justificatory rhetoric.21 Barbara Abou-el-Haj has cast doubt on the “cult of carts” which was said to have motivated ordinary lay people to pull the carts of building materials to sites such as Chartres Cathedral in order to honor the Virgin. She sees this often-repeated topos as part of “an expanding rhetorical curve in the clergy’s accounts.”22 We are thus confronted with the irony that sharper attention to textual sources in order to tease out medieval viewer responses has led to greater skepticism as to the authority of texts. If we apply ideology critique equally to texts and works of art, both are seen to have contributed to the construction and maintenance of social differences, an approach that has been clearly charted by Jonathan Alexander.23 We have to conclude that the silent lay people of the period between 1140 and 1240 were neither as devoid of spirituality as St Bernard feared, nor as totally committed to the cult of the Virgin as Bishop Hugh of Rouen claimed.
The clearest indication of disapprobation is iconoclasm, but it was severely punished as heresy prior to the Reformation and thus quite rare. One of the charges against the Templars who were burned early in the fourteenth century is that they defiled the cross.24 As with the later Lollards and Hussites, we are plunged into issues concerning devotion that verged on latria (worship) on one hand, and a profound skepticism about mere carvings on the other.25 Sarah Stanbury uses the desecration and burning of a wooden statue of St Katherine by alleged Lollards, as described in Henry Knighton’s Chronicle of 1337–96, to elucidate these tensions, and notes a new source of anxiety, the beginnings of a market for such costly objects.26 Eamon Duffy has shown how dynamic were the relationships between people of various ranks, and the cross or crucifixion: they prayed to it in private and in churches for miracles, they bowed before it, they used Christ’s sufferings to come to terms with their own, and were often buried with it.27 This quintessential Christian icon was so revered that disrespect for it was punished by burning the iconoclast, but in this exchange the crosses were eventually stripped from the churches and burned by the Protestants, as pointed out by Margaret Aston.28
During the High Middle Ages occasional censorship of images was accompanied by a decree of the church. Michael Camille has pointed to the Y-shaped cross and to the “Vierge Ouvrante” with the Trinity inside her as instances of unacceptable representations.29 The former may have been of the type mentioned as having produced a frenzy of popular devotion in a village near London in 1306, such that the churchmen decided to hide it away. This is a very interesting case, showing that the Church struggled to maintain control over the use and form of images. In the fifteenth century Jean Gerson criticized the opening Virgin statues for a theological error that made it appear as though Mary gave birth to God the Father and the Holy Spirit as well as Christ. In 1502 a bishop declared a painting of Joachim and Anna kissing when she greeted him at the Golden Gate to be heretical, because it lent support to popular belief held that the kiss, rather than a miracle, made her pregnant with the Virgin Mary.30
Prudishness was on the increase during the later Middle Ages. Despite a considerable tolerance of – even liking for – scatology in texts and representations, there are instances of bowdlerism such as the erasure of genitalia that may be expressions of fear or disgust on the part of some medieval viewer.31 Such actions hint at a gulf between the Western theological position on images that did not allow them, as mere signs, any power in themselves, and popular beliefs that attributed magic-working powers to them as if they were the referent. There is a growing literature on the power of images that invited destructive as well as devotional acts.32 The institutionalization of ritual curses directed at relics when they failed to answer people’s prayers was revealed by Patrick Geary, and the discovery aided our understanding of the process of embellishing reliquaries in order to empower the relics.33
In fact, the attitudes to the material objects made for the cult of saints have received much attention.34 Ilene Forsyth’s book on portable wooden sculptures of the Virgin and Child was a precursor. Although she does not emphasize reception, her chapter on “Function” cites medieval texts to indicate their occasional use as reliquaries, and their roles in devotional practices, religious processions, and secular rituals.35 The reliquary statue of St Foi that resided in her church in Conques has become a paradigmatic case-study, and the literature on it also indicates how such interest can change the canon (fig. 3-1). St Foi stubbornly resisted any focus on a moment of creation, since she is a composite work, an assemblage built up on a Roman core with accretions of gemstones throughout the Middle Ages that constitute a material record of reception. Her archaeology has now been firmly established by Jean Taralon.36 But it is in the area of reception that the most impressive work has been done. In a series of articles and books, Pamela Sheingorn and Kathleen Ashley have elucidated the role played by this reliquary statue in local ritual and belief systems, as indicated in her life and miracle book.37 Bernard of Angers, who wrote the first two books of the miracles some time after 1010, explained in a letter to Bishop Fulbert of Chartres – which serves as a preface – that he went to Conques full of skepticism “partly because it seemed to be the common people who promulgated these miracles and partly because they were regarded as new and unusual.”38 He also feared that statues such as hers were idols worthy of Jupiter or Mars.39 The texts in the Book of Sainte Foi give innumerable insights into the powers that people believed were invested in the relics and their precious encasing, and reveal the strength of belief in the necessity of its presence for cures, and even for civil transactions. The case has now passed into at least one introductory textbook.40
FIGURE 3-1 Reliquary statue of St Foi (St Faith), ninth/tenth century, with additions. Conques Abbey, treasury. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Medieval imagery has been a constant source of puzzlement and revelation to modern scholars, but it is only recently that there has been much focus on the ways in which the original devotees actually understood it. Decoding a work of art implies an encoding. Traditional iconography assumed that the two processes inevitably mirrored each other, as if meanings were fixed in the object. Deconstruction assumed they would not, and that each decoding brings new meanings. But to what extent did the iconographic conventions of medieval art ensure a degree of common response among an informed community of viewers? We cannot make the assumption that the silences surrounding reception in the High Middle Ages indicate some sort of transparency that merely allowed works to speak for themselves. A sculpture of the Virgin and Child may have been widely recognized as Mary and Jesus, but for some viewers a knowledge of Latin texts would add layered theological meanings, of a kind that have been elucidated by Adolf Katzenellenbogen for the Marian programs of Chartres Cathedral.41 A widespread tradition of twelfth-century exegesis constructed four levels of meaning for sacred symbols.42 In this case, a highly educated person of the time could distinguish an immediate physical signification (the historical Mary and Jesus), an allegorical one (she is the Seat of Wisdom that had been associated with King Solomon), a moral or tropological level (she is the lifegiving Church), and an association with eternal salvation such as that she will be crowned by Christ in heaven and mediate his judgment at the end of time.43 Thus about the time modern semioticians were arguing for the multivalence of the sign, medievalists were positing multivalence based on medieval theories of reading.
However, keeping in mind the example “Virgin and Child,” postmodern scholars have been concerned with a different kind of multivalence, arising from resonances that may be specific to various medieval viewing communities. Contextual art history provided a major step toward the exploration of medieval audiences, as in Linda Seidel’s pioneering article on the view canons might have taken of a sculpted figure of Salome.44 In studying the medieval cult of the Virgin, Marina Warner took into consideration the ways in which its ideology would inflect the lives of real women.45 She suggested that the unique status of Mary, as virgin and mother, could serve neither ordinary mothers nor ordinary nuns as a role model. And in the eyes of men, the Virgin Mary represented an ideal unattainable by real women who were thus always seen to fall short. On the other hand, I have suggested that there were other learned – as opposed to learnèd – responses to this serenely seated female figure with an infant on her lap: To a pregnant or recently birthed mother approaching a portal such as the one on the west façade of Chartres Cathedral, the Virgin’s seated position with knees wide apart could connote safe and painless birthing.46 Such responses cannot be proven by texts concerning the Virgin Mary (although of course she was prayed to for fertility and safe birthing), but they can be supported from images of birthing and by non-theological discourses such as that of gynecology. Construction of a woman’s viewing position has also informed Kathleen Nolan’s study of the mothers whose grief is vividly depicted in the scene of the massacre of the innocents; in this case they may be supposed to have provided a model for performative identification, at the same time covertly condemning women in the community who heartlessly committed infanticide.47
Yet another dimension has been added to French Gothic portal sculpture and stained glass by studies of the liturgy, especially the ordinaries or processionals.48 Analyses such as those by Margot Fassler serve to situate these works at Chartres in a performative space, where cyclic rituals animate them on a temporary basis, much as the later altarpieces were successively opened and closed during the liturgical year.49 This hermeneutic posits meanings that are constructed in specific viewing contexts. The works were interactive with their audience, a function that is more easily grasped in relation to the smaller pieces that were taken from the sacristy only during the feasts of the Church. One such example, once in the treasury of St Denis, is the elaborate enameled base whose Old Testament scenes were completed by New Testament antitypes when the processional cross was placed in it.50 Yet for liturgical objects, it has to be remembered how elitist the user-group was, restricted in fact to the priesthood, with a viewing community of those in close proximity to the altar. The eyes of the laity were diverted from the High Altar that was used for daily mass by choir screens that divulged little of the mystery. The objects most gloated over by Abbot Suger were seen by very few, just as his text justifying the expenditures on them was scarcely read in the Middle Ages. Konrad Hoffmann long ago suggested that the famous stained-glass windows that gave “new light” to his choir were so esoteric that their primary function may have been for learned contemplation by the monastic community that had the possibility of studying the Latin verses painted in them.51 Some of these inscriptions reiterated the sung text that they knew from the liturgy, and one window seems to have been moved up from the crypt in the thirteenth century so that it could be included in processions (fig. 3-2).52
FIGURE 3-2 The Apotheosis of St Benedict, c.1144, from the Abbey Church of St Denis; the scroll is inscribed with a verse from his mass. Paris: Musée national du moyen âge – thermes et hôtel de Cluny. Photo: Réunion des musées nationaux/ Art Resource, NY.
Yet stained glass was such a monumental and brilliant medium that it could resonate on a less learned level for a wider audience. Vast Gothic windows lent themselves to elaborate narratives that seldom had any text for identification of the events. Wolfgang Kemp used the term “sermo corporeus” to invoke the materiality of stained glass as a medium for preaching.53 In a sermon written in about the mid-thirteenth-century, Cardinal Eudes de Châteauroux recalled that as a child a layman explained to him the misfortunes of the man saved by the Good Samaritan, as represented in a window.54 Kemp explored a wide range of visual signs that made it possible to “read” such a window without recourse to a text. My own study of biblical windows, notably those that expand on the story of Joseph in Egypt, goes in the same direction.55 Michael Camille made another major contribution to this question by considering the different attitudes and experience of illiterate and literate people in the presence of art.56 Even those who could not read might be impressed by inscriptions, yet he argues that the largely illiterate audiences of the High Middle Ages believed pictures more readily than writings, and respected books as objects.
Several scholars have raised another very significant problem of alterity: Is our visual perception the same as that of medieval people? A propos Abbot Suger’s St Denis, both Meredith Lillich and John Gage pointed out that the blue glass extolled in Suger’s text would have been regarded by a learned audience as next to black; Lillich ingeniously suggests it was a conscious reference to the version of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s treatise that was probably known in St Denis, which posited Divine Darkness as the necessary corollary of Divine Light.57 Suger’s use of the term clarus for light/bright in relation to his windows has also been re-evaluated in the context of medieval theories of transparency.58 Yet modern notions of the wavelength of different colors, complimentary colors, and the impact of reduced light or distance on hue, have also been deemed relevant to the perception of medieval stained glass.59 We are not yet in a position to resolve the contradiction between the learned belief that blue was the darkest color in some absolute sense and Purkinje’s empirical finding that a shift occurred in reduced light whereby blue appears brighter than red.60 Is it possible that theological truth overrode optical events that we take to be scientifically true? The discussion has shifted from optics to visuality, such that Michel Pastoureau recently referred to color perception as a “complex cultural construct.”61
There may have been other fundamental differences that framed medieval perceptions of images, as indicated in the range of essays in a recent collection published by Robert Nelson.62 Camille pointed out that medieval visuality assumed an impact on the viewer much stronger than the mere perception of form and color; through extramission, the viewer risked being enthralled or fascinated, which had almost as threatening connotations as being bewitched, or even of becoming like the object of view.63 Suzannah Biernoff has written the first history of medieval sight and vision (as distinct from optics) that takes alterity fully into account, coining the term “carnal vision.”64 I have adapteds gaze theory to medieval frameworks, even though it originated with Laura Mulvey’s application of Freudian precepts to gendered viewing in the context of modern cinema.65 It provided rich ground to look at hegemonic viewing situations in the High Middle Ages, and to understand some of the fears surrounding sight(s).
A mnemonic function for images is more intuitive to a present-day audience, since we are familiar with it in our textbooks. Mary Carruthers’s extensive work on medieval textual practices, and the attention she paid to images in books, was paralleled by art historians such as Suzanne Lewis, who pursued the question in relation to visual recall.66 Yet it has been more popular to see images as aids to devotion. Hans Belting, Nigel Morgan, and Jeffrey Hamburger are among those who have consistently used late medieval texts to elucidate this practice.67 Hamburger has studied the use of images in the “pastoral care” of nuns (cura monialium) as evoked by the writings of a Dominican, Henry Suso. He is at pains to identify the different communities who would have had access to this text (orally or otherwise), and to indicate its value for nuns.68 His study of the medieval reception history of a Byzantine icon, as recounted in the Liber miraculorum of Unterlinden is even more clearly focused.69 In a more recent article he reexamined the use of two images from Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias by Joannis Tauler, whose sermon was preached to Dominican nuns in Cologne in 1339.70 Tauler’s text leaves little doubt about the expectation that such visionary images, even 150 years after their making, could lead the viewer’s mind away from worldly things to higher truths, and to a higher state of consciousness. Suger had made the same claim for his precious, jeweled furnishings 200 years earlier, but the concept is elaborated by Tauler.71
A disadvantage of this approach is that it once more emphasizes the orthodox religious aspect of medieval visual culture, and privileges texts over images – as Mâle’s generation had done. This logocentrism is exacerbated when there is a gender distinction between the (male) author of an oral guide and the (female) audience for the image; we should not assume that this was a one-way channel for ideas.72 The example of Tauler suggests the extent to which these preachers garnered inspiration from the writings and pictures produced by saintly women “mystics,” so they, as much as the women, deserve to be analyzed as a viewing community.
Postmodern readings allow for reactions to “devotional images” that medieval and modern discourses have suppressed. Examined against the dominant culture, they may be viewed as pornographic, erotic, sadoerotic, abject, or masochistic. The humorous has often been added for marginalia. One example of such divergent readings must suffice here, though it is part of a larger enterprise to “queer” the Middle Ages: Whereas Morgan and Hamburger insist on the gaping side wound of Christ as only-a-bleeding-wound, Karma Lochrie and I have associated it with a life-giving vulva, especially when it is isolated from his body (fig. 3-3).73 Even though Hamburger allows a sexual attraction between Catherine of Siena adoring a bloodied Christ on the cross, his phrasings as “a nubile woman passionately devoted to Christ” vigorously suppresses the possibility of a homosexual attraction; but when she sucks the side wound, he can “imagine why reformers seem to have preferred that most manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Vita remained without illustrations” (fig. 3-4).74 Lochrie’s reading of texts and images plausibly argues “an open mesh of polysemy”; a Franciscan treatise known as the Stimulus Amoris refers to the union (copulo) of mouth and wound, queering the reading. Once more, a pioneering contextual study by Ilene Forsyth had opened up the question of homosexual desire in the monasteries.75
FIGURE 3-3 Christ’s side wound and instruments of the Passion, Psalter, and Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, probably before 1349. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 69.86, fol. 331r. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
FIGURE 3-4 St Catherine sucking Christ’s side wound, Raymund of Capua, Life of St Catherine of Siena, fifteenth century. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS All. 34, f. 43v. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
One other category of medieval art cannot be left out, because its multivalence and openness has made it one of the most contested: Images in the margins, whether of manuscript pages, embroideries, portals, stained-glass windows, ivories, or choir stalls. These motifs were not always in the service of a text, but the debate as to whether or not they had higher meanings for their audience was engaged in the nineteenth century.76 Some modern exegetes claimed the margins as a zone for dialogic laughter, unconscious doodles, or pagan survivals. Recent trends epitomize the available models for constructing medieval reception: universal, community-based, or individual. It is the latter that I want to emphasize in closing.
In an article on the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux published in 1993 I presented a construction of an individual pubescent girl’s reading of the images in the book given to her around the time of her marriage to a much older king in 1324.77 Jonathan Culler’s notion of “reading as a woman” had usefully suggested that resisting readings are not easily produced (or subjective), but are the result of a conscious act of constructing oneself as a reader.78 However, his project was suspect since it risked essentializing “women” as a monolithic community. Hence my aim was to “imagine” the impact of this imagery on Jeanne at the age of 14, given her background and education, and the specific context of the Capetian court at the time. That the laughter we had all so long enjoyed at the exploits of hybrid creatures in the margins could be displaced by fear and revulsion was not at first popular. Yet the model has proved useful in other case-studies, such as Anne Rudloff Stanton’s work on the Psalter of Isabelle (Jeanne’s sister-in-law).79 Several scholars’ findings extend convincingly to the choices of religious subjects, that operated like exempla in sermons, as Lilian Randall long ago argued.80 Yet if we posit a confessor as designer and mediator of the work, have we come full circle to regard reception by the owner as the mirror of intention? What distinguishes current notions of reception is a willingness to allow for shifting and contrary readings, and to speculate about subversive elements.81
1 Reader-response criticism, or affective stylistics, originated in Rezeptionsästhetik in the early 1960s Konstanz school. Its early history has been outlined by Paul de Man in the introduction to the translation of one of the works most concerned with history, Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, pp. vii–xxix. Jauss’s chapter “Art History and Pragmatic History” appeals for “a history of art that is to be based on the historical functions of production, communication, and reception, and is to take part in the process of continuous mediation of past and present art” (p. 62).
2 “Introduction,” to Bryson et al., Visual Culture, p. xvii.
3 Malina, “Reader-Response Criticism,” and Rabinowitz, “Reader-Response Theory” give very clear synopses of various approaches to the construction of meaning. For my purposes, “texts” as discussed by literary critics are interchangeable with “images.”
4 Bennett, ed., Readers and Reading, pp. 4, 6–15, has outlined the directions taken by textual critics in the 1990s, when many did problematize the notion of a universal reader by positing responses by contemporary groups, such as women, and to some degree by historical audiences. This anthology contains a useful list of “Key Concepts” (pp. 235–40), and suggestions for “Further Reading” (pp. 241–53). See also Malina, “Reader-Response Criticism.”
5 Malina, “Reader-Response Criticism,” p. 338. A fuller account of the German contributions to the field of reception history and theory is given by Geert Lernout, “Reception Theory,” in Groden and Kreiswirth, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide, pp. 610–11.
6 Mâle, L’Art religieux, pp. 168–70, 174–5. Suger, De Administratione 27, pp. 46–8, commentary pp. 164–5. In order to ground this theoretical discussion, I will refer a range of interpretive strategies to this example of North European art.
7 Watson, “Suger and the First Tree of Jesse,” pp. 77–82; Kidson, “Panofsky, Suger and St Denis.”
8 Heslop, “Attitudes to the Visual Arts.”
9 Coomaraswamy, “Medieval Aesthetic”; de Bruyne, 
tudes d’esth
tique Mdivale, esp. II, pp. 69–107.
10 Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude,” p. 2.
11 Eco, Art and Beauty. This is despite his wish to separate aesthetic theories from “the realities of the age” (p. 1).
12 Krautheimer, “Introduction to an Iconography.”
13 Caviness, Sumptuous Arts, pp. 23–6, 36–7.
14 Gervase, “History of the Burning.” Interestingly, his translator finds it necessary to apologize for this viewpoint (p. xiii), but does not challenge Gervase’s view – one suspects not only as a gesture to historicity but also because the contemporary High Anglican movement in Britain valued hagiography.
15 Suger, De Administratione 33, p. 64. [On pilgrimage art, see chapter 28 by Gerson in this volume (ed.).]
16 Cragoe, “Reading and Rereading Gervase.”
17 Characteristic arguments are included in Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, pp. 149–77; and Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art, pp. 37–49.
18 Rudolph, The Things of Greater Importance, pp. 10–12, 232–87 (Latin and English).
19 Ibid., pp. 10, 278–81.
20 Critical comments on the new constructional style, by Alexander Neckham and Peter the Chanter who would have been in Paris when Notre-Dame was being rebuilt, are given in translation by Frisch, Gothic Art, pp. 30–3.
21 [On patronage, see chapter 9 by Caskey in this volume (ed.).]
22 Frisch, Gothic Art, p. 25; cf. Abou-el-Haj, “Artistic Integration,” p. 221.
23 Alexander, “Art History.”
24 Caviness, “Iconoclasm and Iconophobia,” p. 100, with sources.
25 Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art, esp. pp. 13–42 for disputes concerning the Lollards.
26 Sarah Stanbury, “The Vivacity of Images,” pp. 131–50.
27 Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix,” pp. 21–5.
28 Aston, “Iconoclasm in England,” p. 183.
29 Camille, Gothic Idol, pp. 231–2. Heslop, “Attitudes to the Visual Arts,” p. 26, has more details about the problematic crucifix.
30 Molanus, De historia SS, p. 393.
31 Camille, “Obscenity under Erasure”; Caviness, “Obscenity and Alterity.”
32 Freedberg, The Power of Images; Caviness, “Iconoclasm and Iconophobia,” pp. 99–100.
33 Geary, “Humiliation of Saints.”
34 See for instance the articles in Gesta 36 (1997), with bibliography.
35 Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, pp. 31–60.
36 Taralon, “La Majesté d’or.”
37 Ashley and Sheingorn, Writing Faith; “Sainte Foy on the Loose”; “An Unsentimental View”; Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy.
38 Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, p. 39.
39 Ibid., p. 77.
40 Diebold, “Brother, What Do You Think?” pp. 139–48.
41 Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs, pp. 9–12, 15, 56–67, 95–102. [For more on Gothic sculpture in general and the sculpture of Chartres Cathedral in particular, see chapter 19 by Büchsel in this volume (ed.).]
42 Caviness, Art in the Medieval West, p. xxx, chs. 2 and 3. [For more on art and exegesis, see chapter 8 by Hughes in this volume (ed.).]
43 Although I know of no single text that provides all these readings, each one is repeated in different contexts, often in anthems and hymns to Mary.
44 Seidel, “Salome and the Canons.”
45 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, esp. part 5.
46 Caviness, Visualizing Women, p. 8, figs. 5–7.
47 Nolan, “Ploratus et Ululatus.”
48 Sauerländer, “Reliquien, Altäre und Portale”; Caviness, “Stained Glass Windows.” [On sculptural programs and stained glass, see chapters 21 and 26 by Pastan and Boerner respectively in this volume (ed.).]
49 Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History”; “Mary’s Nativity.” Pioneering work on the functions and settings of altarpieces was done by van Os, Sienese Altarpieces 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function, I: 1215–1344; II: 1344–1460.
50 Suger, De Administratione 32, p. 58.
51 Hoffmann, “Suger’s ‘Anagogisches Fenster’.”
52 Caviness, “Stained Glass Windows,” pp. 135–9.
53 Kemp, Sermo Corporeus; translated as Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass.
54 Kemp, Narratives, pp. 71–2. [For more on narrative, see chapter 4 by Lewis in this volume (ed.).]
55 Caviness, “Biblical Stories in Windows.”
56 Camille, “Seeing and Reading”; “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page.”
57 Lillich, “Monastic Stained Glass”; Gage, “Gothic Glass.”
58 Vasiliu, “Le Mot et le Verre.”
59 Frodl-kraft, “Farbsprache”; Johnson, Radiance of Chartres, pp. 16–24.
60 Caviness, “Stained Glass Windows,” p. 140.
61 Gage, “Colour in History”; Pastoureau, Blue, p. 7. [On vision, see chapter 2 by Hahn in this volume (ed.).]
62 Nelson, ed., Visuality, notably the pieces by Nelson, Hahn, and Camille.
63 Camille, Gothic Idol, pp. 23–4; Huët, “Living Images.” A pioneer in the understanding of extramission as an optical theory was Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics, esp. ch. 4.
64 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment.
65 Caviness, Visualizing Women, with extensive bibliographies.
66 Carruthers, Book of Memory, notably ch. 7, “Memory and the Book,” pp. 221–57. See also Carruthers, The Craft of Thought; Lewis, Reading Images, pp. 242–59.
67 Belting, “In Search of Christ’s Body,” esp. pp. 377–490. Belting’s earlier pioneering work, much of it addressing the function of icons in the West, cannot be dealt with adequately here. See Belting, The Image and Its Public.
68 Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 198–278.
69 Ibid., pp. 279–315.
70 Hamburger, “Various Writings of Humanity.”
71 Suger, De Administratione 33, pp. 60–2.
72 [On medieval art and gender, see chapter 6 by Kurmann-Schwarz in this volume (ed.).]
73 Morgan, “Longinus and the Wounded Heart”; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 140–3, fig. 2.22; Caviness, Visualizing Women, pp. 158–62, fig. 74; Lochrie, “Mystical Acts,” fig. 9.2.
74 Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 460–4, figs. 9.20, 9.22, Pl. V.
75 Forsyth, “The Ganymede Capital at Vézelay.”
76 An overview of this literature, up to the present time, is available in my e-book: Caviness, Reframing Medieval Art, ch. 3, sect. “The Shivaree of the Margins.” [For more on the marginal, see chapter 13 by Kendrick in this volume (ed.).]
77 Caviness, “Patron or Matron.”
78 Culler, On Deconstruction, pp. 43–64. See Malina, “Reader-Response Criticism,” with bibliography.
79 Stanton, “The Psalter of Isabelle”; Jones and Alexander, “The Annunciation to the Shepherdess.”
80 Randall, “Exempla as a Source of Gothic Marginal Illumination.”
81 For example: Camille, “Play, Piety and Perversity.”
Barbara Abou-el-Haj, “Artistic Integration inside the Cathedral Precinct: Social Consensus Outside?” in Virginia Raguin, Kathryn Brush, and Peter Draper, eds., Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings (Toronto, 1995), pp. 214–35.
Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “Art History, Literary History, and the Study of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997), pp. 51–66.
Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (Chicago, 1999).
——, “Sainte Foy on the Loose, or, the Possibilities of Procession,” in Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, eds., Moving Subjects. Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga., 2001), pp. 53–67.
——, “An Unsentimental View of Ritual in the Middle Ages or, Sainte Foy Was No Snow White,” Journal of Ritual Studies 6:1 (Winter 1992), pp. 63–85.
Margaret Aston, “Iconoclasm in England: Rites of Destruction by Fire,” in Bob Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 1990).
Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, 1990).
——, “In Search of Christ’s Body. Image or Imprint?” In Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996 (Bologna, 1998), p. 340.
Andrew Bennett, ed., Readers and Reading (London, 1995).
Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2002).
Nicolas Bock, Sible de Blaauw, Christophe Luitpold Frommel, and Herbert Kessler, eds., Kunst und Liturgie im Mittelalter, vol. 33, supplement, Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana (Munich, 2000).
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith P. F. Moxey, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover, NH, 1993).
Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, Cambridge New Art History and Criticism (New York, 1989).
——, “Obscenity under Erasure: Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” in Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed., Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden, 1998), pp. 139–54.
——, “Play, Piety and Perversity in Medieval Marginal Manuscript Illumination,” in Katrin Kröll and Hugo Steger, eds., Mein ganzer Körper ist Gesicht: Groteske Darstellungen in der Europäischen Kunst und Literatur des Mittelalters (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1994), pp. 171–92.
——, “Seeing and Reading: Some Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8 (1985), pp. 26–49.
——, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible Moralisée,” Word & Image 5:1 (1989), pp. 111–30.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. Alastair Minnis, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, UK, 1990).
——, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 34 (Cambridge, UK, 1998).
Madeline H. Caviness, Art in the Medieval West and Its Audience, Variorum Collected Studies 718 (Aldershot, UK, 2001).
——, “Biblical Stories in Windows: Were They Bibles for the Poor?” In B. S. Levy, ed., The Bible in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, 1992), pp. 103–47.
——, “Iconoclasm and Iconophobia: Four Historical Case Studies,” Diogenes 50:199 (2003), pp. 99–114.
——, “Obscenity and Alterity: Images That Shock and Offend Us/Them, Now/Then?” In Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed., Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden, 1998).
——, “Patron or Matron: A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum (1993), pp. 333–62.
——, Reframing Medieval Art: Difference, Margins, Boundaries (Medford, 2001), <http://Nils.Lib.Tufts.Edu/Caviness>.
——, “Stained Glass Windows in Gothic Chapels, and the Feasts of the Saints,” in Nicolas Bock, Sible de Blaauw, Christophe Luitpold Frommel, and Herbert Kessler, eds., Kunst und Liturgie im Mittelalter, vol. 33, supplement, Römisches Jahrbuch Der Bibliotheca Hertziana (Munich, 2000), pp. 135–48.
——, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine (Princeton, 1991).
——, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages. Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, 2001).
Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Medieval Aesthetic,” The Art Bulletin I (1935), pp. 31–47.
Carol Davidson Cragoe, “Reading and Rereading Gervase of Canterbury,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 154 (2001), pp. 40–53.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982).
Caecilia Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art 300–1150: Sources and Documents (Toronto, 1986).
Edgar de Bruyne, Etudes d’esthetique Médiévale (Bruges, 1946).
William J. Diebold, “Brother, What Do You Think of This Idol?” In Word and Image. An Introduction to Early Medieval Art (Boulder, 2000), pp. 139–48.
Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman eds., Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2002).
Eamon Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix and Related Images in England on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Bob Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 1990), pp. 21–35.
Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1986).
Margot Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History in the Twelfth-Century Tympana at Chartres,” Art Bulletin LXXV (1993), pp. 499–520.
——, “Mary’s Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation Circa 1000 and Its Afterlife,” Speculum 75 (2000), pp. 389–434.
Ilene H. Forsyth, “The Ganymede Capital at Vézelay,” Gesta 15 (1976), pp. 241–6.
——, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ, 1972).
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London, 1989).
Teresa G. Frisch, Gothic Art 1140–c.1450: Sources and Documents (Toronto, 1987).
E. Frodl-kraft, “Die Farbsprache der gotischen Malerei,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20/21 (1977–8), pp. 90–178.
John Gage, “Colour in History: Relative and Absolute,” Art History 1 (1978), pp. 104–9.
——, “Gothic Glass: Two Aspects of a Dionysian Aesthetic,” Art History 5 (1982), pp. 36–58.
Patrick J. Geary, “Humiliation of Saints,” in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 123–40.
Gervase, “History of the Burning and Repair of the Church of Canterbury,” in Robert Willis, ed., The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (London, 1845), p. 42.
Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1994).
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The ‘Various Writings of Humanity’: Johannes Tauler on Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber Scivias,” in Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel, eds., Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages (New York, 2005), pp. 161–205.
——, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998).
T. A. Heslop, “Attitudes to the Visual Arts: The Evidence from Written Sources,” in Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski, eds., Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (London, 1987), pp. 26–32.
Konrad Hoffmann, “Suger’s ‘Anagogisches Fenster’ in Saint-Denis,” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch (1910), pp. 57–88.
Marie-Hélène Huët, “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation,” Representations 4 (1973), pp. 73–83.
Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schiulte-Sasse. Vol. 2: Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis, 1982).
James Rosser Johnson, The Radiance of Chartres: Studies in the Early Stained Glass of the Cathedral, vol. 4, Columbia University Studies in Art History and Archaeology (London, 1964).
Leslie C. Jones and Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “The Annunciation to the Shepherdess,” Studies in Iconography 24 (2003), pp. 165–98.
Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 (Basingstoke, 2002).
Adolf Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral (New York, 1964).
Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (Cambridge, UK, and New York, 1997).
——, Sermo Corporeus: Die Erzählung mittelalterlicher Glasfenster (Munich, 1987).
Peter Kidson, “Panofsky, Suger and St Denis.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987), pp. 1–17.
Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval Architecture,” in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1942), pp. 115–50, 392–409.
Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995), esp. pp. 242–59.
Meredith Parsons Lillich, “Monastic Stained Glass: Patronage and Style,” in Timothy G. Verdon, ed., Monasticism and the Arts (Syracuse, 1984), pp. 207–54.
David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London, 1983).
Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis and London, 1977), pp. 180–200.
Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France (Paris, 1928).
Debra Malina, “Reader-Response Criticism,” in Elizabeth Kowalski-Wallace, ed., Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory (New York and London, 1997), pp. 338–9.
Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (Toronto, 1986).
J. Molanus, De historia SS. Imaginum et picturum libror quatuor (Louvain, 1771).
Nigel Morgan, “Longinus and the Wounded Heart,” in Wiener Jahrbuch Für Kunstgeschichte (Köln, Weimar, 1993/4), pp. 507–18, 817–20.
Robert S. Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000).
Kathleen Nolan, “‘Ploratus et Ululatus’: The Mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents at Chartres Cathedral,” Studies in Iconography 17 (1996), pp. 95–141.
Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function, I: 1215–1344 (Groningen, 1984); II: 1344–1460 (Groningen, 1990).
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Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Reader-Response Theory and Criticism,” in Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1994), pp. 606–9.
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Conrad Rudolph, The Things of Greater Importance: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia, 1990).
Willibald Sauerländer, “Reliquien, Altäre und Portale,” in Nicolas Bock, Sible de Blaauw, Christophe Luitpold Frommel, and Herbert Kessler, eds., Kunst und Liturgie im Mittelalter, vol. 33, supplement, Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana (Munich, 2000), pp. 121–34.
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Linda Seidel, “Salome and the Canons,” Women’s Studies 11 (1984), pp. 29–66.
Pamela Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy (Philadelphia, 1994).
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