Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture) - Softcover

Camille, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0948462280 ISBN 13: 9780948462283

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2004

Synopsis

What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished.

Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Camille was Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.

Review:

In vigorous prose and 86 astonishing illustrations, Camille demonstrates how 'Gothic marginal art flourished from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century by virtue of the absolute hegemony of the system it sought to subvert'--for 'premodern societies used ritualized disruption to reinstate social norms rather than resist them'...In this fine book how exhilarating it is to see our ancestors giggling and roaring in vulgar delight in the comforting shadows of their sacred texts and sanctuaries. (Richard Locke Wall Street Journal)

A witty and original account of a fascinating subject. Medieval manuscripts, buildings and sculpture abound with subversive, erotic or scatological marginalia. Why are they there? Do they undermine dogma or just provide light relief? Camille gives some closely-observed and convincing answers. (Chris Savage King New Statesman and Society)

[A] sprightly and suggestive study. (Richard Eder Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Michael Camille offers us a book that distracts and instructs us simultaneously, in part because images are given as much play as texts. Camille's pages teem with ideas that, like medieval hybrids, are protean in their inventiveness. Rather than condemning the margins of medieval art, Camille celebrates them in animated, even exuberant prose, arguing in the process that their often overlooked representations pose as many problems as the center that more often has riveted our attention. (Jeffrey F. Hamburger Art Bulletin)

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0948462280
• ISBN 13: 9780948462283
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176