Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Nothing (Philosophy) in art --- Emptiness (Philosophy) in art --- Absence in art --- Manuscripts, Medieval --- Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval --- 091.31 --- 091.14.001 --- 091.14.001 Codices--Structuur --- Codices--Structuur --- 091.31 Verluchte handschriften --- Verluchte handschriften --- Painting, Medieval --- Medieval manuscripts --- Manuscripts --- Aesthetics --- Manuscripts. Epigraphy. Paleography --- anno 500-1499

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventionsmade through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'.The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books inmedieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display areunderstood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.

Books --- Manuscripts, Medieval --- Criticism, Textual --- Phenomenology and literature --- 091.14.001 --- 091:028 --- 091.31 "04/14" --- 091.31 "04/14" Verluchte handschriften--Middeleeuwen --- Verluchte handschriften--Middeleeuwen --- 091:028 Handschriftenkunde. Handschriftencatalogi-:-Lezen. Lectuur --- Handschriftenkunde. Handschriftencatalogi-:-Lezen. Lectuur --- 091.14.001 Codices--Structuur --- Codices--Structuur --- Literature --- Epic poetry, Greek Criticism, Textual --- Medieval manuscripts --- Manuscripts --- History --- Philosophy --- Book history --- anno 500-1499 --- Manuscripts, Medieval. --- Manuscrits médiévaux. --- Livres --- Criticism, Textual. --- Critique textuelle. --- Phenomenology and literature. --- Phénoménologie et littérature. --- Histoire