Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West

In Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars advances the theory that charisma may be a quality of art as well as of person. Beginning with the argument that Weberian charisma of person is itself a matter of representation, this volume shows that to study charismatic art is to experiment with a theory of representation that allows for the possibility of nothing less than a breakdown between art and viewer and between art and lived experience. The volume examines charismatic works of literature, visual art, and architecture from England, Northern Europe, Italy, Ancient Greece, and Constantinople and from time periods ranging from antiquity to the beginning of the early modern period.
Contributors are Joseph Salvatore Ackley, Paul Binski, Paroma Chatterjee, Andrey Egorov, Erik Gustafson, Duncan Hardy, Stephen Jaeger, Jacqueline E. Jung, Lynsey McCulloch, Martino Rossi Monti, Gavin Richardson, and Andrew Romig.

Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is a Professor of History at New York University (NYU). Her most recent research on seals, signing practices, and imagistic scripts has appeared in a monograph When Ego was Imago. Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2011) and a co-edited volume (with Jeffrey Hamburger), Sign and Design. Script as Image in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard, 2016).
Martha Dana Rust is an associate professor of English at New York University, specializing in late-medieval English literature and manuscript culture. The author of Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (Palgrave, 2007).