Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse - Hardcover

Lewis, Suzanne

9780521479202: Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521479207 ISBN 13: 9780521479202

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Reading Images focuses on the multi-layered relationships between the textual image and its reader-viewer in the Apocalypse manuscripts produced in England during the thirteenth century, a period of profound changes in the social and cultural fabric. The exponential expansion in the production and dissemination of illuminated manuscripts that occurred at this time provided a critical, cultural mechanism for the creation of new technologies of the self. As the Apocalypse narrative was visualized in pictures, it became a powerful paradigm within which problematic contemporary experiences such as anti-Judaism, the later Crusades, and expectations of the world's end could be defined. Reading Images explores the kinds of contemporary mythologies that constitute ideology, a realm in which visual representation becomes an agent rather than a reflector of social change.

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Book Description:

Reading Images focuses on the multi-layered relationships between the textual image and its reader-viewer in the Apocalypse manuscripts produced in England during the thirteenth century. Reader-viewers cultivated the art of memory and contemporary theories of vision, which invested images with the power to promote memory and offer spiritual sustenance.

Review:

"Reading Images is a work of creative primary scholarship that offers a fundamental symbolic semantics to the interpretation of the images of the Apocalypse in the private act of reading....Lewis's work offers a fresh interpretation not only of the multifaceted interpenetration of text and image in its cultural context but more fundamentally as the cultural configuration of the upper class, thirteenth-century self." World Trade

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