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The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (STUDIES IN THE VISUAL CULTURES OF THE MIDDLE AGES) - Hardcover
Synopsis
This book introduces readers to the texts and imagery of the Dance of Death, a subject that first emerged in western European art and literature in the late medieval era. Depicting a long procession of representatives of different classes and ages, seized by prancing skeletons, the Dance eloquently communicated the message of the inevitability of death and the futility of human ambition. The image was frequently accompanied by verses, written in the vernacular, which comprised a dialogue between Death and its victims. The volume inquires into the theological, socio-historic, literary, and artistic contexts of the Dance of Death, exploring it as a site of interaction between text, image, and beholder. The first part of the book outlines the structures of visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death images. The second part proposes different modes of viewing for four particular Dance of Death paintings, each of which-shaped by its artist, patron, local context, and local audience-offered the beholder an active, kinesthetic experience necessarily predicated on movement.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Elina Gertsman is assistant professor at the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.
Review
Meticulously researched, convincingly argued, and lucidly written throughout, Elina Gertsman's study of the Dance of Death is not just the most comprehensive examination to date of a European image-type long regarded as emblematic for a late medieval world in transition. Just as the danse macabre was a space where temporalities collided and comingled, Gertsman's daring exploration reminds us of what's possible when scholarly rigor conjoins with a truly interdisciplinary perspective and a kinesthetic sensibility. Among its virtues the book unfolds a "poetics of mortality"; from within the processes of seeing, and in so doing generates valuable insights into the paradoxical limits Death imposes on all representation. Medievalists across the disciplines will welcome the book enthusiastically and read it carefully as a model of analytical sophistication. At a time when the terms performance, reception, and spectacle groan under the weight of proliferating misapplications, Gertsman makes good on the promises of recent theory by framing the Dance as a quintessentially public art -- one that demanded to be seen and experienced actively, bodily, in real time, by its audiences. If the skeletons of past scholarship on the danse macabre were to return and confront this vibrant new book with the admonition, "What you are we once were, and what we are you shall become!"; they would truly be flattering themselves. --Mitchell B. Merback, The Johns Hopkins University
Elina Gertsman has produced a genuinely interdisciplinary study of a fascinating subject. An impressive strength of this book arises from the author s wide-ranging expertise and excellent ability to analyze the Dance of Death poems in their original languages. In considering this extensive body of work, Gertsman keeps her focus on ideas, on analysis, and on cultural function and relevance. A gifted and sensitive interpreter of textual as well as visual material, Gertsman employs vivid, expressive, lively language to produce an engaging study informed by a sophisticated theoretical apparatus. --Pamela Sheingorn, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Elina Gertsman has produced a genuinely interdisciplinary study of a fascinating subject. An impressive strength of this book arises from the author s wide-ranging expertise and excellent ability to analyze the Dance of Death poems in their original languages. In considering this extensive body of work, Gertsman keeps her focus on ideas, on analysis, and on cultural function and relevance. A gifted and sensitive interpreter of textual as well as visual material, Gertsman employs vivid, expressive, lively language to produce an engaging study informed by a sophisticated theoretical apparatus. --Pamela Sheingorn, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Elina Gertsman has produced a genuinely interdisciplinary study of a fascinating subject. An impressive strength of this book arises from the author s wide-ranging expertise and excellent ability to analyze the Dance of Death poems in their original languages. In considering this extensive body of work, Gertsman keeps her focus on ideas, on analysis, and on cultural function and relevance. A gifted and sensitive interpreter of textual as well as visual material, Gertsman employs vivid, expressive, lively language to produce an engaging study informed by a sophisticated theoretical apparatus. --Pamela Sheingorn, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBrepols Publishers
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 250353063X
- ISBN 13 9782503530635
- BindingHardcover
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages356
- Rating
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