Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 700–1600

Jutta Eming, Kathryn Starkey, Jutta Eming, Kathryn Starkey

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783111358659
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110743081
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The eleven chapters in this international volume draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to focus our attention on medieval and early modern things (ca. 700–1600). The range of things includes actual objects (the Altenburg Crucifixion, a copy of Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi, a pilgrim's letter), imagined objects (a prayed cloak for the Virgin Mary), and narrative objects in texts (the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Ordene de Chevalerie, Hartmann von Aue's Erec, Heinrich of Neustadt's Apollonius of Tyre, Luís de Camões's Os Lusíadas, and the vita of Saint Guthlac). Each in its own way, the papers consider how things do what they do in texts and art, often foregrounding the intersection between the material and the immaterial by exploring such questions as how things act, how they express power, and how texts and images represent them. Medieval and early modern things are repeatedly shown to be more than symbolic or passive, they are agentive and determinative in both their intra- and extradiegetic worlds. The things that are addressed in this volume are varied and are embedded, or entangled, in different contexts and societies, and yet they share a concerted engagement in human life.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Introduction: The Materiality and Immateriality of Things
• 1 Intermedial Practice, Multisensory Perception: Lorenzo Monaco and the lavorii di mano around 1400
• 2 Transporting the Holy City: Hans Tucher’s Letter from Jerusalem as Medium and Material Object
• 3 Producing Spiritual Concreteness: Prayed Coats for Mary in the German Late Middle Ages
• 4 How to Make a Knight: Reading Objects in the Ordene de chevalerie
• 5 Of Blades and Bodies: Material Objects in the Alliterative Morte Arthure
• 6 Barrow Agency: Reading Landscape in Felix’s Vita Guthlaci
• 7 The Things Narrative Is Made Of: A Latourian Reading of the Description of Enite’s Horse in Hartmann of Aue’s Erec
• 8 Community of Things: On the Constitution of the Ideal Kingdom of Crisa in Heinrich von Neustadt’s Apollonius von Tyrland
• 9 Printing Things: Materiality and Immateriality in Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus
• 10 Seeing Like God: Envisioning History in Sixteenth-Century Iberia
• List of Abbreviations
• Contributor Biographies
• Color Plates