The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0754660109 ISBN 13: 9780754660101

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

Borrowing its title from Madeline Harrison Caviness's influential work on the modes of seeing articulated by the twelfth-century cleric Richard of Saint Victor, this interdisciplinary collection brings together the work of thirty scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Each author has contributed an original article that engages with ideas formulated in Caviness's wide-ranging scholarship. The historiographic introduction discusses themes in Caviness's publications and their importance for art historical and medieval studies today. The book's thematic matrix groups together essays concerned with: The Material Object, Documentary Reconstruction, Post-Disciplinary Approaches, Multiple Readings, Gender and Reception, Performativity, Text and Image, Collecting and Consumption, and Politics and Ideology. The contributors include curators, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. Their subjects range from medieval stained glass to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, the Sachsenspiegel, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Many foreground issues of gender, reception, and textuality, which have permeated Caviness's scholarship. Some also present approaches to sites that have been the subject of important studies by Caviness, including Canterbury, Chartres, Reims, Saint-Denis, Sens, and Troyes. The volume offers a broad range of methodological approaches to key topics in the study of medieval imagery and thus highlights the vitality of the field today.

About this title

About the Author

Evelyn Staudinger Lane is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA, USA.

Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art History, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Ellen M. Shortell is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Critical Studies, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, USA.

Review

'This is one of the most important books about medieval art to be published in recent years and will be of great value to stained glass historians. Produced as a festschrift in honour of the CVMA author, Professor Madeline Harrison Caviness, it consists of thirty original essays which apart from discussing stained glass, also cover many of Madeline's other interests, such as gender studies and how art has been collected and why. The editors deserve immense credit for overseeing such a large and varied book and making its ideas available to a wider audience. It is almost certainly likely to become a standard reference book for students of stained glass...' Vidimus 'In this volume, the editors Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Ellen M. Shortell have created not only a spectacular and entirely fitting tribute to the broad and extensive research of Madeline Harrison Caviness, but also a work that will surely become a standard reference book for scholars and students in the field of medieval art history.' The Medieval Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0754660109
• ISBN 13: 9780754660101
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 610
• Editor: Lane Evelyn Staudinger, Pastan Elizabeth Carson, Shortell Ellen M.