About the Author:
Jessica Goethals, Valerie McGuire, and Gaoheng Zhang are currently completing PhDs in Italian Studies at New York University and share mutual research interests in Italian Humanism, visual and material culture, and contemporary theory. 'The essays are interdisciplinary and touch upon many themes that lie outside my own field of specialization. I was therefore surprised and pleased to find them not only original and instructive, but also inviting and accessible to the non-specialist. Although they range far with respect to chronology and theoretical suppositions, they are coherently united in their concern for the functioning of the image in the conservation, revision or critique of socio-political power in their respective cultural contexts. I will mention three essays, representing three different fields, as striking examples of disparate images used to consolidate, reconstruct or overthrow the dominant powers of their times. Kathryn Falzareno's essay, 'Mother's Milk and Deborah's Sword,' is a close reading of Shakespeare's portrayal of Joan of Arc in Henry VI. It is a close analysis of the paradoxical status of Joan, Saint of the French, strumpet for the English, Christian warrior maiden, contrasting with Deborah in the Ancient Testament. The dominant and totally unexpected image which brings together the contradictions embodied by Joan are the breasts, the source of nurture in the figure of Mary, but an encumbrance for the mythological amazons who removed one breast to facilitate their use of the bow. Ljubica Ilic's 'Echo and Narcissus: Labyrinths of the Self,' is an elegant reading of 'echo music,' the apparently impossible 'translation' of the Ovidian story into music and opera. Ovid's story represents the nymph Echo as the auditory equivalent of Narcissus' reflection -- echoing sound as reflecting light. Ovid's echo myth undoubtedly influenced opera by Jacopo Peri (during the time of the Medici) and then, Monteverdi in the musical setting of 'Orfeo.' Finally, Elissa Auerbach's 'Taking Mary's Pulse: Cartesianism and Modernity in Rembrandt's 'Death of the Virgin' ' is a brilliant commentary on the Dutch painter's rendering of an ancient theme, the 'dormition' of the Virgin, but at the center of the painting is the figure of a physician taking the pulse of her limp hand. The intrusion of this 'scientific' element in the ancient iconography of the event of Mary's death is the unmistakeable sign of the wave of modernity that swept over the Netherlands with the popularity of Cartesian philosophy and science.' John Freccero, Professor of Italian and Comp. Lit., NYU
Review:
Power and Image in Early Modern Europe is a collection of interdisciplinary conference proceedings, all of whose contributors are ambitious graduate students with broad interests in critical theory and practice...this ambitious little volume is well worth scanning for the innovative approaches that so many of its contributors have to offer. --Catherine Gimelli Martin, University of Wisconsin in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XLI, No. 3, 2010
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