Authority of the Word : Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700

This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Like texts, images partook of rhetorical forms and hermeneutic functions – typological, paraphrastic, parabolic, among others – based largely in illustrative traditions of biblical commentary. If the specific relation between biblical texts and images exemplified the range of possible relations between texts and images more generally, it also operated in tandem with other discursive paradigms – scribal, humanistic, antiquarian, historical, and literary, to name but a few – for the connection, complementary or otherwise, between verbal and visual media. The Authority of the Word discusses the ways in which the mutual form and function, manner and meaning of texts and images were conceived and deployed in early modern Europe.

Contributors include James Clifton, John R. Decker, Maarten Delbeke, Wim François, Jan L. de Jong, Catherine Levesque, Andrew Morrall, Birgit Ulrike Münch, Carolyn Muessig, Bart Ramakers, Kathryn Rudy, Els Stronks, Achim Timmermann, Anita Traninger, Peter van der Coelen, Geert Warnar, and Michel Weemans.

Celeste Brusati is Professor of the History of Art and Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has published on the relations between visual and literary discourses on art in the early modern Netherlands, particularly in still life, self-imagery, perspective, and trompe l’oeil, and on the artists Samuel van Hoogstraten, Pieter Saenredam, and Johannes Vermeer.
Karl Enenkel is Professor of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature at the University of Münster, Germany, and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He has published on international Humanism, the reception of Classical Antiquity, the history of ideas, literary genres and emblem studies.
Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artists Otto van Veen and Hendrick Goltzius.