During the later Middle Ages people became increasingly obsessed with vision, visual analogies and the possibility of visual error. In this book Dallas Denery addresses the question of what medieval men and women thought it meant to see themselves and others in relation to the world and to God. Exploring the writings of Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Peter Aureol and Nicholas of Autrecourt in light of an assortment of popular religious guides for preachers, confessors and penitents, including Peter of Limoges' Treatise on the Moral Eye, he illustrates how the question preoccupied medieval men and women on both an intellectual and practical level. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary examination of the interplay between religious life, perspectivist optics and theology. Denery presents significant new insights into the medieval psyche and conception of the self, ensuring that this book will appeal to historians of medieval science and those of medieval religious life and theology.

During the later Middle Ages people became increasingly obsessed with vision, visual analogies and the possibility of visual error. In this book Dallas Denery addresses the question of what medieval men and women thought it meant to see themselves and others in relation to the world and to God. Exploring the writings of Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Peter Aureol and Nicholas of Autrecourt in light of an assortment of popular religious guides for preachers, confessors and penitents, including Peter of Limoges' Treatise on the Moral Eye, he illustrates how the question preoccupied medieval men and women on both an intellectual and practical level. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary examination of the interplay between religious life, perspectivist optics and theology. Denery presents significant new insights into the medieval psyche and conception of the self, ensuring that this book will appeal to historians of medieval science and those of medieval religious life and theology.

This book investigates the 'owner portrait' in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated pre-existing representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.

Engaging with the imaginative, nonreligious response to Gothic sculpture in German-speaking lands and tracing high and late medieval notions of the ?living statue? and the simulacrum in religious, lay, and travel literature, this study explores the subjective and intuitive potential inherent in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sculpture. It addresses a range of works, from the oeuvre of the so-called Naumburg Master through Freiburg-im-Breisgau to the imperial art of Vienna and Prague. As living simulacra, the sculptures offer themselves to the imaginative horizons of their viewers as factual presences that substitute for the real. In perceiving Gothic sculpture as a conscious alternative to the sacred imago, the book offers a new understanding of the function, production, and use of three-dimensional images in late medieval Germany. By blurring the boundaries between viewers and works of art, between the imaginary and the real, the sculptures invite the speculations of their viewers and in this way produce an unstable meaning, perpetually mutable and alive. The book constitutes the first art-historical attempt to theorize the idiosyncratic character of German Gothic sculpture - much of which has never been fully documented - and provides the first English-language survey of the historiography of these works.

Oxbow says: This fascinating study of how people understood and used their senses in the late medieval period draws on evidence from a range of literary texts, documents and records, as well as material culture and architectural sources.

Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.

An examination of the ways in which late medieval lyric poetry can be seen to engage with contemporary medical theory. This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d'Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoraltheory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that according to the theories of love that predominated in the late medieval West foreclosed the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets' circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy. Julie Singer is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.